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Socialist failure: Britain-is-poorer-than-any-US-state-yes-even-Mississippi


Free Northman Reborn

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I think one of the main points is that the UK isn't a massive welfare state. The Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are probably top. Not the UK.

The UK also had extremely poor social mobility adding on to economical divides.

Gov spend as a proportion of GDP:

UK: 45.46%

Norway: 44.31%

Sweden: 49.15%

Australia is around 35% and I'll be honest I didn't see lots of endemic poverty when I visited there, in fact it was one of the most prosperous places I've ever been to. Btw the US is around 40%.

Thats Irn Bru and chips you cretin. And its the staple of any healthy diet

Mmmmmmm grease..

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Americans work a lot more hours per year than people in those European countries though. If you count what people earn per hour of work they put in I don't think USA comes out ahead by much (if anything at all), especially not when talking about lesser paid jobs. A Mc Donalds burger flipper / store clerk/ other unskilled laborer here in Sweden makes the equivalent of 15-20 USD per hour whereas his American counterpart would probably make around the US minimum wage of 5.


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Australia is around 35% and I'll be honest I didn't see lots of endemic poverty when I visited there, in fact it was one of the most prosperous places I've ever been to. Btw the US is around 40%.

Government spend by itself isn't a great correlate with scope or extent of welfare state - Australia does actually spend a fair bit on social welfare, it's just very tightly focused on the bottom quartile, we don't go for the cradle-to-grave Scandinavian model. Also, your comparisons are overlooking relative costs - what the US does spend on public health insurance is going to outstrip pretty much every other OECD nation per capita for the simple fact that their healthcare costs twice as much.

Also for someone who was so keen on disaggregating UK income you've managed to do the reverse with Australia, with bonus anecdata. I'm guessing your stay in our sunburnt land didn't involve hanging out in say, south-western Sydney, outer suburban Tasmania or central western NSW.

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Yeah I get that, just as, I'm guessing, in the poorer parts of the UK there are areas of wealth to go along with the extreme deprivation. I was simply pointing to my own experience of visiting the UK, arriving in London and staying with friends and then going to see my wife's family in Scotland. It was as if I'd moved from a hyper capitalist uber prosperous first world western nation to an utterly hopeless remnant of Soviet communism after the wall came down. The point being these two regions were in the same country, massive welfare state and all.

Heck, you didn't have to go to Scotland to see areas with that level of deprivation. A short walk in any direction in London will take you to one, no problem.

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Americans work a lot more hours per year than people in those European countries though. If you count what people earn per hour of work they put in I don't think USA comes out ahead by much (if anything at all), especially not when talking about lesser paid jobs. A Mc Donalds burger flipper / store clerk/ other unskilled laborer here in Sweden makes the equivalent of 15-20 USD per hour whereas his American counterpart would probably make around the US minimum wage of 5.

Interesting. So, using those Macdonalds wage figures, who pays for that higher minimum wage? Is the cost absorbed into a higher price for the average Big Mac, thus transferring the cost onto the consumer? Or is the Big Mac price more or less the same as in the US, with the result that the Macdonalds franchisee is forced to make do with a lower profit margin?

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Two quick notes on that article:

- This comes up a lot, but that is not a Forbes article. The "sites" designation means that it's literally just some guy, with as much of the magazine's backing as iReport has from CNN. The magazine's imprimatur is often incorrectly associated with that content. That doesn't mean that an "article" there can't be good... but it's worth checking facts and figures (and arguments), rather than taking them at face value as you might from a reputable source of journalism.

- Please don't quote entire articles here -- quote a relevant excerpt or three, and link the rest. This is longstanding board policy. The formatting also makes it look like much of this came directly from you.

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Americans work a lot more hours per year than people in those European countries though. If you count what people earn per hour of work they put in I don't think USA comes out ahead by much (if anything at all), especially not when talking about lesser paid jobs. A Mc Donalds burger flipper / store clerk/ other unskilled laborer here in Sweden makes the equivalent of 15-20 USD per hour whereas his American counterpart would probably make around the US minimum wage of 5.

I wish I could speak a foreign language as well as you. This sentiment is exactly right. America is a poor country. Everything is ridiculously expensive for them in Europe.

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Interesting. So, using those Macdonalds wage figures, who pays for that higher minimum wage? Is the cost absorbed into a higher price for the average Big Mac, thus transferring the cost onto the consumer? Or is the Big Mac price more or less the same as in the US, with the result that the Macdonalds franchisee is forced to make do with a lower profit margin?

According this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index#mediaviewer/File:Big_Mac_index_50USD_2columns.png The Big Macs in Sweden do indeed seem to be a bit more expensive than in the USA, (5,9 vs 4,2 USD), though I don't know if that difference would cover the wage one.

I wish I could speak a foreign language as well as you. This sentiment is exactly right. America is a poor country. Everything is ridiculously expensive for them in Europe.

Thanks. I spent a year in the USA some time past though, so it's not really a fair comparison.

There certainly was a lot of poverty there, though many other areas where extremely rich. So it's more that the wealth disparity is far larger.

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There certainly was a lot of poverty there, though many other areas where extremely rich. So it's more that the wealth disparity is far larger.

Yes, which is where the socialism comes into it. America is a rich mans country but the UK is, supposedly (and in a much fairer way), for everyone.

US: You're sick. Can you afford the hospital? No. You're dead but meh, if you can't afford it that's you're own fault right. Seriously why are they still fighting Obama's health care bill?

UK: You're sick. Go to the hospital.

US: You want 5 days off work? You can have 3 days but they are unpaid.

UK: OK, you're 2 week paid holiday has been authorised.

US: You're fired, I just don't like how you look.

UK: I would like to fire you but I have to go through the disciplinary system and prove that what you did was worthy of dismissal.

Where would you really rather live? (AMERICA FUCK YEAH!)

EDIT: can someone do this the other way round, I would like to know what I am missing out on in a country as poor as the UK.

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OK, so now I have a little more time, two major points come to mind:

1. Fraser Nelson is using misleading data. He's based his conclusion solely on last year's figures. Now, what do we know about both the US and UK economies in 2013? They are in the throes of a recovery from a lengthy global recession. And what do we know about the recovery strategies employed by the US and UK governments? That the US government favoured stimulus, seen as a more 'socialist' path, while the UK government favoured the doctrinally more right-wing strategy of austerity.

So, we're being invited to conclude - for some strange reason - that it's the social policies, not the macroeconomic policies, of the two countries that explain the relative gap in their recovery from recession and thus the gap in GDP. This seems odd. It's a little like saying that a gap in life expectancy is down to tax policy, not healthcare policy: theoretically it could be, but why favour the indirect explanation over the direct one?

If you really want to show this, you need to show not just that the UK is currently poorer than the US at this particular moment in time, but that it has been persistently so over the space of, say, 20 years. Not one year.

2. I'm not sure any of this is anything more than a footnote anyway. Unless you're one of that small band of people who regard wealth as a good in itself, surely all GDP gives us is a sort of proxy for the things that do matter to people: happiness and quality of life. And on those measures, the picture is somewhat mixed. The US tends to outscore the UK on happiness and quality of life measures, but the reliable winners are the highly socialist Scandinavians and the more left-wing (than the US) Canadians and New Zealanders (though the more capitalist Aussies do well too).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/10/29/the-worlds-happiest-and-saddest-countries-2013/

http://unsdsn.org/resources/publications/world-happiness-report-2013/

http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#11111111111

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index

It's almost as if economic philosophy was not the only determinant of happiness...

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The US tends to outscore the UK on happiness and quality of life measures, but the reliable winners are the highly socialist Scandinavians and the more left-wing (than the US) Canadians and New Zealanders (though the more capitalist Aussies do well too).

"more capitalist" here must mean something like "is doing capitalism pretty well" - true - because our welfare system is in the same league with Denmark, Belgium and Sweden when it comes to bottom quintile income transfers. That said, we are at risk of heading in 'left wing' New Zealand's direction, I will admit.

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A bit misleading: There is no nationally set minimum wage, but the minimum wage is stipulated in the collective agreements.

I don't see how wage agreements made by people who voluntarily accept them can be considered minimum wage.

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The numbers themselves seem legit. It's the interpretation thereof that is problematic. On the surface, UK having lower GDP per citizen isn't that alarming or surprising.

First, as some have pointed out, averaging the GDP is highly problematic as an indicator. The standard deviation for Mississippi is going to be significantly higher than the UK. Looking at average alone without regard to the standard deviation is at best, poor use of statistics and at worst, deliberately misleading. I think it'd have been better to stratify income into quintiles and then performing the same calculations accordingly. That will give a much more accurate picture on the economic structure of the respective locales.

Second, as someone mentioned, the amount of hours worked is also a critical factor. Family leaves, sick leaves, and vacation times are all differently structured across the pond.

And finally, and more importantly, UK is not as socialistic as some of the other EU members, though it certainly is more so than the U.S. if only for the NHS. If the point of the OP is to draw conclusions about socialism, which the Worstall article didn't, by the way, then it is poorly conceived without due consideration to countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Norway. Is France and Germany relatively comparable to the UK on this?

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