Britain Is a Developing Country

Britain is a failed state. It might be the first truly modern state to properly fail.

Many will blame Brexit, but the writing has been on the wall for decades. Most of my friends in Britain have been either biding their time for retirement, trying to go literally anywhere else, or in a deep sort of quiet depression, usually aided by alcohol. These are well to do, white collar workers.

It will be interesting to watch the country decline. Will we see the rise of extremists in Parliament? Will Parliament even matter? Will Britain become a proxy for reverse colonialism in the way that Italy has? Can the financial might of London persist, or will there be an exodus?

I travelled the world and learned a long time ago that the world, as viewed through macroeconomic lenses, is pure delusion. GDP does not correlate with actual quality of life by any stretch of the imagination. The definition of "developed" versus "developing" is purely arbitrary. Life is highly context-dependent, i.e. there are plenty of places and people in developed countries who are much worse off than some places in "developing" countries (try comparing crime + cost of living in Baltimore to Lviv). Furthermore, the religion of "economic growth at all costs" is considered harmful. Wellbeing is not measurable in dollars. Even adjusted purchasing power fails to take into account cultural expectations of ownership (say, for example, necessity of owning a car).

The US was first to deploy large-scale electrification, and settled on 110 V @ 50 Hz. Everyone who wasn't buying their equipment from the US saw some flaws and went for 230 +- 10 V @ 60 Hz. First movers often end up committing to a suboptimal first draft version.

The UK has a lot of these. The railways are notoriously expensive and inadequate because they're over a century old, and we're designed for a different society with different traffic patterns. The housing stock wasn't affected that much but The War, and many of the larger older houses were built with the assumption that they're would be servants living there too. Heavy industry was reliant on a lot of manual labour, and didn't mechanise when the opportunity arose.

The biggest problem is that democracy arose in the age of the humanities, when the sciences were idle curiosities for eccentrics. The revolutions in England - which negatively affected the rest of the archipelago - happened in the seventeenth century, too early for an urban middle class to have its say. The political establishment still has too many landowners - too much power is feels by the descendents of warlords. Most of the power is held by former members of Oxbridge debating societies, who've never had to do anything than throw ideas about. The Civil Service is run by a core of 'generalists' with humanities degrees, with subordinate groups of 'specialists' who can never rise to the top.

The same problem afflicts business: the country is run by people who are barely competent in arithmetic. US politicians are accused of insider trading and gerrymandering; British politicians don't have the skills needed to commit these crimes. Boris Johnson needed epidemiologists to explain percentages to him; the water companies have debts that are almost equal to the dividends they've paid out since privatisation.

The solution is not political, but rather economic. Many of these businesses can be undercut by the use of industry knowledge. Software startups are cheap to run if the founders have a deep understanding of the problem, can build much of the solution themselves, and know who their customers are. In manufacturing, the Midlands and the North have long histories and community cultures surrounding these industries, and are desperate for someone to bring the factories back.

Once technical people have money, the politicians can be bought. They're surprisingly cheap.

In a mathematical sense, the problem is solved. We just need to stop waiting for the lawyers and classical philologists to do technical work, and do it ourselves. We're not getting value out of our elites, so we should get better ones.

There is certainly some meat to the argument, Britain is much poorer than it could be, but I think the GDP/salary comparisons and so on are completely tainted by financial speculation and manipulation, a decade of asset price inflation etc, and do not reflect fundamentals.

All those benefits require you to have less than £6,000 saved to be eligible, essentially ensuring you are ruined before kicking in.

Not only that, they are not available to visa holders, contrarily to most first world countries.

Lastly, the amount is still laughable. In Luxembourg I would have had 80% of my salary for a year, without conditions. The UK is not a first world country at all.