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Britain Is a Developing Country

sambowman.co

41–50 of 238 posts

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#41

This article is missing an important part in the relationship between the developed world and the developing world which is exploitation. When companies start offshoring to the UK for cheap labor or taking its resources for pennies on the dollar we can start calling it a proper developing country.

The economics-literate are talking here.

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#42

Does the UK have anything going for it? It is very hard for me to see the UK having a better quality of life in future than they had in the past. Not being part of the EU means they will mostly be squeezed in trade negotiations. And the UK does not have any industry going for it, so sooner or later the living standards would catch up with the rest of the developing world at the middle.

The UK still has a strong military, a particularly strong Navy, plus whatever remains of their portion of North Sea oil and gas.

But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed, and now any trade deal they make will probably be under quite unfavorable terms.

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#43
post #12

What the UK has going for it is that its population speaks the technology and science lingua franca, by default.

As does most of the educated populations of rEurope and India etc - I’m an English dev working in the EU and the fact that I speak English is of no real advantage over my peers.

Yeah but the fact that you didn't have to learn English the same way they did to get to the point that you are now _was_ an advantage

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#44

Does the UK have anything going for it? It is very hard for me to see the UK having a better quality of life in future than they had in the past. Not being part of the EU means they will mostly be squeezed in trade negotiations. And the UK does not have any industry going for it, so sooner or later the living standards would catch up with the rest of the developing world at the middle.

This seems like a deeply off-the-wall take.

Why would the UKs living standards increase? Because the world continues to get richer.

Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? That's a heck of a claim. Has any country that was among the richest in the world regressed to developing nation status? This is supposed to happen on the basis of being marginally disadvantaged in trade negotiations?

Get real. This is sentiment because people are mad that the UK rejected their political beliefs. Could the UK suffer negative consequences versus the counterfactual as a result of Brexit? Sure. Is it going to regress to being the equivalent of, like, Peru? Obviously no.

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#45
> But there is one problem. There is virtually no recognition of how bad things are among British elites

Not just elites - ordinary british people too. I've been saying for 10 years that britain is falling behing the rest fo Europe.

I give real examples from my life, "In Czech republic I/anyone has access to Proton therapy and housing is better built, but in Britain protin therapy is missing (was first built last year, ex-communist CZ has it for like 20 years) and quality housing is only accessible to millionairs."

And if I am taling to a british person, there is like a 50% chance they will get offended and respond like "well then why are you here". I had similar responce on this very forum.

And when "locals" bring this up publically, they get accused of 'talking britain down'. Kind of came up in the brexit debate under 'project fear'.

I feel it will get a lot worse before people will finally get their sputnic moment and realise they are in a hole.

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#46

[flagged]

Tired of this ridiculous attitude you see everywhere on the internet, "stopped reading at X" (which may actually be near or at the end of the article), "he said X therefore I can now casually discredit everything he says", "he said something factually incorrect therefore the whole article is wrong and I don't have to engage with it". And the arrogance of it too, as if in your head it's virtuous enough to be so closed and simple minded that it's worth announcing it to the world by making such comments. Just utterly juvenile nonsense.

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#47

Does the UK have anything going for it? It is very hard for me to see the UK having a better quality of life in future than they had in the past. Not being part of the EU means they will mostly be squeezed in trade negotiations. And the UK does not have any industry going for it, so sooner or later the living standards would catch up with the rest of the developing world at the middle.

The past UK standard of living was based on pillaging the colonies, then after divestment of Empire it was briefly propped up in the 80s by North Sea oil and in the 00s by financial deregulation.

No shit we're not going to have the same standard of living as the past.

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#48
The UK has almost no natural resources. As the developing world increases their heavy industry and engineering capacity, knowledge workers from the UK will be needed less and less. The UK also did quite a bit of lending to the developing world, and there's much more competition in that marketplace now as well.

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#49

Growing up I assumed the UK was pretty rich. But then when you look at the stats, the UK is about as wealthy as Mississippi, one of the poorest states. Learning that people with college degrees in the UK make 25k GBP, and that is considered good, sure isn't that bad when GBP was worth 2x USD. But people are living in London for those salaries. The big expensive cities in the US, like NYC pay you much more to compensa…

A college degree in what? 18 years ago I started graduate life in London on £21k. I assume it's far higher these days.

Tradespeople can earn fortunes anywhere. I can recall Ireland during the 'Celtic Tiger' phase bricklayers were absolutely milking it. I actually regret I don't have a trade under my belt.

Re: Britain Is a Developing Country

#50
The comparison made between the UK and US states is one I was thinking about lately and which prompted me to make a little "compare EU countries to US states" app: https://evmar.github.io/states/

(For example, through it I discovered that Ireland's nearest twin in both land and population is South Carolina.)

Looking at the UK specifically, it's the GDP of California but with almost 2x the population, which comes out to a GDP per capita comparable to Mississippi.

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