>Britain isn’t a developing country, it’s a regressing one. There's so much research on developing countries, but I find deteriorating countries more interesting. There are many countries that used to be first world, and simply are not anymore. Argentina is the classic example, South Africa is the most heated example.
The fact my dad grew up in Venezuela when it was the 4th wealthiest nation in the world per capita (granted, Europe was recovering from WW2) blows my mind. It was still top 20 by the 70s. [0] [0] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-...
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…
Argentina was 100 years ago one of the richest countries on the planet. I'm not saying that such a decline will will happen to the UK, but it is myopic to suggest that it is impossible. It's only "impossible" if we actively stop it happening.
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.
Hate to break it to you, but that's already started. I know of a number of US companies that have started hiring UK employees because you can get principal engineers for £80k. It's really hard in this country to find anyone who is willing to break that 6 digit ceiling, our regressive tax policies keep it that way.
Our class system keeps it that way too. I can imagine the idea of paying someone 6 digits fills many company owners with disgust
I agree with much of this article, but just as a counterpoint: > Americans could stop working each year on September 20th and they’d still be richer than Britons working for the whole year. ...and yet the average American almost never stops working . That car wash manager in Alabama gets three weeks of PTO per year, and probably earns every cent of their $125k -- Buc-ee's is a pretty demanding employer, I think? Of c…
> Moving here, I was surprised to see how carelessly Americans would “quit their job, take a break for a few months, figure things out.”
> Or reading about the 70s, with stories of 20-somethings leavings their jobs to go hitchhike through California.
> In France — with a 20%+ youth unemployment rate and incessant, neurotic talk about it — one does not quit their jobs to “figure things out”
> worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US) This seems very incorrect given that the UK has stricter laws around dismissal (the bar for losing your job is much higher), better minimum wage laws, more legally mandated holidays per year, paid time off for sickness, parental pay etc. - very basic things that the US doesn't have, at least not uniformly across states and industries.
Under two years of employment, which is the majority nowadays, you can essentially be fired at will. The rest is true, but a absolutely major one that is missing in the UK is unemployment benefits. If you lose your job you basically have no income at all.
Unemployment benefits exist through UC. Most people who are unemployed, in practice, also claim a number of other benefits that substantially boost your income i.e. housing benefit (so your rent is paid), ESA (another £100/week)...this has created another set of issues where lots of people have become economically inactive rather than "unemployed"...great statistically but not so great for people...but yes, the welfare state for adults who can work in the UK is unbelievably huge (£100bn/year, almost no age groups are net contributors into the tax system anymore...I believe 30-40 are the only net contributors...I don't think the level of government support for consumption has ever been so large in the UK, and few examples in other countries...possibly Nordics before their implosion in the early 90s).
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…
TFR 1.53 and falling fast: https://www.statista.com/statistics/284042/fertility-rate-in... I don't see how you propose to maintain the same level of prosperity when fewer productive workers need to support more unproductive seniors.
Allow immigration? Seems like there are tens of millions of people in the world who would be overjoyed to have a chance to move to the UK.
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.
Publishing in Science is a definitely harder if you not only have to juggle the science but also the English sentence structure.
Having lived in multiple western EU countries and in the US, and now living in the UK, I can say that it's not developing, it's regressing. It is baffling how bad everything is, from public services (8 months of average waiting time in the NHS for something as benign as a lumbar puncture) to worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US). And now they of course committed economic suicide with the Brexit. I simply…
Can you elaborate more on how the UK's workers rights are "literally worse than the US"? I would say things like statutory sick pay, mandatory holiday allowance, protection from unfair dismissal and the right to uninterrupted breaks are all pretty progressive compared to the States.
There is no worker protection for the first 2 years of your employment with a company, so you're essentially an at will employee (worse actually, you have less rights and still need to give notice).
You also have only laughable unemployment benefits (£85 per week), that don't depend on your contributions.
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 the UK going to regress to developing world status? Lexically, tats an oxymoron, if you are regressing you are clearly not developing. Empirically, living standards have been falling in UK for a decade, while developing countries are developing. Clearly, eventually they will intersect. Logically, you seem to claim that a developed economy cannot collapse no matter how badly it's mismanaged?
I think that if the UK, for example, is overthrown by/elects a Maoist government or something equally crazy, then sure, they could flush their economy down the toilet.
I don't think that "being out of the EU" is in the same category.
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…
There are thousands, tens of thousands who compete for our attention on sites like this one via their hip Substack/Medium blogs. Them’s the breaks.