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by barry-cotter 9 days ago
> Whether or not the Brits need our advice, we need to have our own internal discussion about what’s going on over in the UK and how we can use it to inform our own choices. And although there are still a few things to admire across the pond, the UK mostly now functions as a cautionary tale for the U.S. — yes, despite Trump, and guns, and high health care costs.

> Whether you think the UK has been falling behind America economically for a decade or for two decades depends on which set of prices you use to measure living standards. If you use the two countries’ national price indices, the UK has been growing slower than the U.S. since the financial crisis of 2008; if you use PPP prices, as Paul Krugman prefers, the UK’s relative stagnation has come only since Brexit in 2016:

2 comments

>if you use PPP prices ...

it was still on the uptrend until 2020 when switching off the economy squashed all growth and not just in Britain but other major continental economies too, Germany has actually been in and out of recession multiple times since.

2016 added some turbulence to domestic politics and econ but until then our recovery from the GFC had been fast, occasionally faster than the rest of the G7.

Germany isn't doing great, but these current recessions are low grade. Nothing like mid 90s and mid 2000s, unemployment data: https://www.wsi.de/de/erwerbsarbeit-14617-arbeitslosenquoten...
> 2020 when switching off the economy squashed all growth

The exception here is the US, again. And what did they do differently? Massive QE and "helicopter money". Anti-austerity worked extremely well for growth, even if the debt went up.

Counter-cyclic fiscal policy and QE does work, absolutely, but it's likely dependent on size of economy because in most cases austerity works better...but in most cases the economies are much smaller than America's; Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Greece (since austerity was forced upon it), HK, Britain could likely've been more austere during the GFC and seen more growth.

Then again although not comparable to America's it's possible that the British economy was/is large enough to sustain even more liberal fiscal policy but given the dependence on import and that it's primarily a service economy I doubt it.

America is truly exceptional.

I thought austerity failed every time it was tried. When didn't it fail?
The examples I gave, primarily post GFC, except in the case of Greece the caveat is that although initially caused by the GFC the sovereign debt crisis marks it as distinct from the other economies listed.

HK under JJ Cowperthwaite (1961 to 1971), but more generally since then and especially pre '97.

Singapore, I'm told, from someone who lives there. I don't really follow their politics so take this with a pinch of salt appropriate for hearing things on the grapevine.
As someone who moved from the UK, to the US and back to the UK, my money goes a lot further in the UK.

I can afford to not work at all here. With health insurance, property taxes, and general outgoings per month being so much higher in the US (California, at least), there was no way I could retire early over there.

And whereas it's easy to hand-wave away "Trump, the healthcare, guns, ... " in a dismissive sentence, those things have real impact on a society and on the individuals living in that society. There's a reason [1] I moved away from the US, and will never return. Money-über-alles has its downside.

It's also worth noting (since the author brings it up) that the Mississippi comparison is pretty bogus. According to data from the Office for National Statistics and the US Census Bureau, median household wealth in Great Britain is substantially higher (around £300,000, or $403,000)[2] compared to the US ($175,000) [3] and Mississippi ($59,000). GDP and personal wealth are not the same thing.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217106

2: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...

3: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p70br...

> there was no way I could retire early over there.

It seems that the UK is becoming the new Portugal (warm retiree destination with stagnant non-retiree economy)

That seems quite a claim from one datapoint...
Ah, more of a joke on your datapoint. And the traditional British practice of retiring to more southern locations in Europe.
:)

FWIW, I retired to the coast in the NW, I have a beach on one side of the house and a park on the other. It's pretty nice :)

Even up here in the NW though, it's been too damn hot recently...