It might still be better than Asia with crazy working hours, bosses that call/text you outside of work non-stop, having to attend to work gatherings, working on weekends, etc.
Not like people don't commit suicide elsewhere. UK might not be the best but it's still a lot better than some places.
If you sort this[1] graph by per-capita absolute deaths, you can see the nations ahead of the UK are pretty poor. Compared to France and Germany, the UK has about double the per-capita death rate.
Brexit makes it all only worse. Now you need to compare the UK with the poorer regions of the EU to look better. The UK itself has one extremely rich region (inner London) and a lot of medium to poor regions.
Would be interesting if everything is statistically solid if this applies to other populations. I imagine the United Kingdom to be somehow cut-throat from a career perspective, maybe I am wrong.
Are you sure? I just looked at ‘inactive’ data. [0] It was ~8.6 million at the start of 2020, and ~9.2 million at end of 2023. That doesn’t seem like a big jump, in fact zoomed out to ten years the pandemic doesn’t even really jump out at all. (Which surprises me.) There certainly doesn’t seem to be any significant change over the last 2 quarters. Unless I am reading it wrong somehow?
You’re right about GDP growth per capita being down (for something like 7 successive quarters, I heard on the radio), and that’s normally the figure considered to best represent living standards. But as you say that’s explainable by population growth, which means it doesn’t count. If it’s new babies being born then economically speaking that’s an investment in the future and clearly doesn’t count as a falling living standards. And if it’s immigration, then I would guess those new people are mostly better off than they were before (or they wouldn’t have migrated), meaning it doesn’t necessarily reflect living standards falling either for people born here or for recent immigrants.
So my armchair analysis is still that the economy is at worst stagnant, and clearly not in recession. Which is actually kind of remarkable given the feeling I get from the news over the last few years of crisis after crisis (pandemic, Ukraine, energy crisis).
I guess they're talking about GDP per capita? The UK's GDP per capita was ~$42,000 in 2019, which was lower than all the US states + DC, except for Mississippi according to [0].
It's pretty misleading to frame this as though the UK is drastically lower than any other comparable countries though. The UK's GDP per capita is similar to Canada, France, Israel, Japan. And that doesn't even get into whether GDP is actually a realistic measure of how "poor" a country's people are (c.f: Ireland, which has a much higher GDP per capita than the US, but similar material conditions to the UK).
Interestingly life expectancy in the U.K. is also down, and it may be no coincidence that both countries have increasingly high levels of inequality post crisis.
The UK does have pretty bad data about people. It may have CCTV everywhere but it apparently doesn't actually know how many people live in the country. Which means the official numbers about how the economy is doing are wrong; can't do per capita when you don't know what the capita is.
(am looking for the source where I read this, unfortunately Twitter search doesn't really work.)
And these statistics are especially shocking given that it's estimated that Britain (with very low child mortality; 5/1000 live births versus 2/1000 for Finland) is poorer than the poorest state in the US
Do you have a source for this? It seems to be difficult to get exact numbers on this, but the BBC quotes data (for the UK and for “developed European countries”, whatever that means, so not exactly for the EU, and comparing to North America instead of just the US) that seem to suggest the opposite: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562
I think one of the things that’s missing from these conversations is that whilst UK wages are far lower than the US, median wealth is actually way higher [1]. I would argue that this means that the UK is very much a country that is on a backslide, rather than a developing one. The other issue is that so much of our economy is limited to London. This would be less of a problem if we were a country like Greece where basically everyone lived in the major city, but the bulk of the population is spread throughout the rest of the UK. The UK has significant ongoing political issues that will take a long time to resolve, and it will take a long time for our relationship with the EU to return to some stable arrangement.
UK – 11.2 per 100,000 people – in 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/03/suicides-rat... & https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...). I think the UK's Office of National Statistics is a better source of information that Wikipedia.
UBI is a great idea. Unfortunately, minimum wage now usually means "in work" poverty, that's not a good thing.
edit: @0000011111, I think income inequality could certainly be a driver.
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