Britain: A Cautionary Tale for America

>France has roughly the same population as the U.K., but almost 50 percent more homes.

France also has four times the land area compared to the UK.

>The Economist ties Britain’s energy scarcity to its overly rapid and haphazard push for decarbonization; having banned coal, and with natural gas now extremely expensive due to the Ukraine war, the UK has been forced to rely on hideously expensive offshore wind power.

The dash for gas came about well before decarbonisation was on the agenda. It was instituted by Thatcher after the coal miners strike and because we had an abundance of it in the North Sea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas

The NHS is struggling because we have an unhealthy population. A lot of that can be put down to behaviours we have adopted from the US (poor diet, car centric lifestyles and lack of exercise).

But the wind is cheaper than gas. Yes you could argue that if we had stuck with coal that would have been cheaper than gas or wind, but the long term threat and the long term most expensive option is clear. Wind and solar gives energy independence, so we aren't reliant on a market that could be turned upside down by one country invading another.

.. 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")

Don't mean to be blunt, but when did that happen? How has a country where you can finance your burrito [1] "learned the perils of excessive financialization"?

Also, a lot of this (especially the slower recovery after 2008) reads more as the perils of being the periphery of an empire vs being the core.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/uber-techn...

> Whether you think the UK has been falling behind America economically for a decade or for two decades depends on which set of prices you use to measure living standards. If you use the two countries’ national price indices, the UK has been growing slower than the U.S. since the financial crisis of 2008; if you use PPP prices, as Paul Krugman prefers, the UK’s relative stagnation has come only since Brexit in 2016: