| Note on the economics here; why don't we look at the whole picture rather than one or two countries? Clearly America should be top of this list, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no... .. no, that's Monaco. OK, so clearly we should exclude "microstates which are tax havens for billionaires" from the list. Does raise question about whether "excessive financialization of the economy" is actually bad: Monaco is entirely finance and tourism. We then have to decide whether "finance microstate doesn't count" applies to Ireland and Switzerland. Let's give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and say yes; we're trying to get to a table where USA #1 and UK #2 appears. So then we get to .. Norway? Not often held up as an economics model, more of a social model. It turns out that being a low population petro-state is also great for GDP. Let's rule those out as well, which takes care of Qatar. Finally we get to the US. We're then left with only Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, Israel (!), Austria, Germany, and Belgium above the UK in the table. So I would say the lesson is not necessarily US exceptionalism or expensive European gas (which affects half that list, and note Israel is famously almost the only non petrostate in the Middle East), but that the UK is actually doing a lot worse than we realize for idiosyncratic reasons (probably including, but not limited to, Brexit). Should we look at this table and copy whatever Ireland is doing to have twice our GDP? Would the average Brit recognize that Ireland is twice as rich as the UK? I'm not sure. (The list of problems in the article is fairly valid, but they're unable to synthetize between "everything is underfunded" + "debt is bad" => the only arithmetically possible solution, "raise taxes") |
What did you mean by that (!)?