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Why does Britain feel so poor? (martinrobbins.substack.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question - why do we seem so broke?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

A few thoughts: we're not that poor, a lot of the current distribution of wealth and government spending aims are the result of neoliberal ideology first and foremost.

That said our nominal GDP growth has been harmed by neoliberal policies which have shifted the UK away from producing very much and towards playing many silly games with money. We measure how much we move abstract representations of currency around (which usually represents some probabilistic measure of value of money, which in itself is really just numbers with no intrinsic value) and go "hey, great job, we've really grown the economy!"

We saw the financial crisis in 2008 and apparently thought to ourselves "let's have some more of that".

So we're in a situation where our overseers are seeing our GDP failing to grow as it should, panicking, and implementing more of the same policies that cause that situation in the first place. The UK isn't poor yet but it will be soon. The young and the poor are the ones who are feeling the bleeding edge of this trend but it's filtering through to the middle class now as well.