What Britain needs to learn from America: Who’s laughing now? (Henry Oliver, 5/18/26, The Pursuit of Liberalism)
Indeed, in many ways, England has been left behind. When you leave London and the South East, you quickly find a standard of living that is low by international standards. A recent poll of three thousand people found that more than half of Brits thought the UK would rank as the seventh-richest state if it joined the USA.1 In reality, we would rank fifty-first, with a lower GDP per capita than any of the fifty states. London is competitive with New York, but the North East is not competitive with the American South.
But Britain is in denial: a few years ago, even the FT claimed the US was a poor country with some rich people, but as Noah Smith pointed out, “the median American earns more income than the median resident of almost any other country on the planet.” He went on to explain that Americans considered to be poor would be doing relatively well by British standards.
…someone at around the 18th percentile of income in America in 2019 — a working-class person on the edge of being considered poor — lived in a household making $21,400 a year. That’s about the same as the median income of households in Japan, and about 84% of the median income of households in the UK.
In other words, a working-class American on the edge of poverty makes as much as a middle-class person in some rich countries.
US gas prices might be over $4 a gallon at the national average this spring thanks to the war in Iran, but that is still half of what petrol costs in England thanks to high taxes. The British government is going to ban traditional dryers, which people hardly use because British electricity prices are among the highest in Europe, while Americans have relatively low-cost energy and run their dryers all the time. In London, it is normal to live with wet laundry in the house. The British who are sceptical of America like to ask, why do I need a bigger fridge? without having lived with the joy of a fridge that can actually hold enough food for a hungry family.
The standard of living in Britain has hardly improved since the financial crisis. In 1990, the GDP per capita of the USA was $44,379 and in the UK it was $32,993. By 2024 the numbers were $75,489 and $52,621. (Expressed in international dollars at 2021 prices.) The UK, in other words, is about as rich as the USA was in 1998. And the gap is widening. US GDP is 15% higher than the pre-pandemic level. UK GDP is 6% higher. The IMF predicts GDP growth of over 2% for the USA and of less than 1% for the UK. At the same time, the UK public debt is equivalent to 93.8% of GDP, and the deficit is 4% of GDP. Productivity growth stalled during the financial crisis and never recovered, averaging about 0.6% a year now, compared to 2% in the USA.
The failure to use restored self-determination as an opportunity to open borders and deregulate was catastrophic.
