Britain poorer than Mississippi

PPP is a method designed precisely to address cost of living differences. It doesn’t handle free healthcare very well, but it handles housing and differing costs of a huge basket of goods and services that make up everyday life.

And what about comparative costs of living…house prices, healthcare etc.

You can’t keep comparing apples and oranges

Sure, it's worth discussing the decline in per capita GDP and focus on solutions to improve it that also raise other quality of life markers for most people in the UK and recognises the limits of the environment.

I agree with others that GDP - while widely used - is a very limited marker for average standard of living, especially without considering wealth inequality. So is comparing incomes without expenses - going on about teachers and such are paid do much more in the US while every US teacher I know is on their knees with both their increasing life expenses and how much of what they're paid they use to pay for school supplies that aren't being properly funded paints a skewed picture. School budgets in much of the US are largely based on local property taxes and that's created a mess for decades. While UK schools are running on a shoe string and prayers, much of the US isn't even getting the shoe string. I went through US schools, there is very little there I'd want replicated in the UK.

Also, I don't see the benefit of using the US as a marker at all, it's an anomaly in so many ways that makes meaningful comparison to other countries difficult, and I definitely don't see the benefit of using Mississippi as either a marker or repeatedly insulting a state that has and still is regularly torn apart by corporate and political greed at the expense of its people. Having been to Mississippi a lot doesn't change the issues with using sources from people who largely treat states like Mississippi as a punchline. I've lived in both, I see no benefit in pitting Mississippi or any part of the US against the UK in this way that is only to tear both of them down. These comparisons don't focus people on solutions, as shown in this thread it largely leads to people pointing blame or challenging the stats. We can discuss issues with declining productivity - or challenge the concept of measuring productivity - and work on solutions without pitting different places against each other. There is no solution that benefits from this comparison, these kinds of things are distractions at best.

The lack of spin is debatable.

Thatcher instigated a load of reforms that were necessary because the country was in a shit state (maybe 10 years more of what we are doing at the moment will lead to the same).

Blair rode the back of that and rather than moderating the Thatcher reforms where necessary instead rode off the back of them. This helped contribute to the credit boom and the GFC in 2008.

The Tories were pretty much forced to implement austerity after 2008 to deal with the consequences of the credit boom. This was going OK until COVID. At which point they bunged the middle class a massive pile more money than they needed to (amongst other things) and wrecked the borrowing figures such that we can't borrow any more money.

Labour took over from the Tories on a stupid promise not to fiddle around with taxation, but to make things wonderful again. Unfortunately the also inherited the ability not to borrow any more money. So they are now stuffed. They probably need to tax wealth more and productivity (wages) less, but haven't got the guts to actually do it.

Brexit continues to be a big fat nothing burger. Looking at the stats the UK economy hasn't fared much different than other comparable economies in the G20, and it is hard to separate out the effect of COVID which has been more dominant. There are people out there that claim that if the UK hadn't left the EU we would be outperforming all the equivalent G20 economies now by a significant margin and everything would be sunny and wonderful. I remain to be convinced.

Importing a ton of people that don't add significantly to the GDP figures hasn't helped (GDP per capita is lowered if you bring in people who aren't contributing significantly to GDP). This is probably another part of the story though.

The above is largely the history of the past 40 years minus the party spin and politics.

Ageing populations tend to do that.

the "UK is poorer than Mississippi" claim has been made for at least 12 years.

We are poorer than Mississippi on median and mean income and any other economic standard of living indicator you can come up with.

OP is ignoring examples given by PP of StdofLiving indicators where UK does better than MS. I'll give another example of relative affordability, home buyer income. You need at least $83k income (£71k ) to buy a home in MS in 2025, while the typical income of first time buyers in UK was £35,900 in 2024. You could think of that difference as "twice as affordable". Median UK household income in 2025 was £36700, in MS in 2025 median household income was about $58k. You tell me in which place it's easier to have enough income to buy a home.

Looking at overall standard of living, including health and welfare provision, we are still much better off than most in Mississippi.

Our problems are for many reasons - Brexit, Covid, wars, the Tories and now a hopeless Labour government. 🤷‍♀️

UK glory days ended with WW2. It's been a downhill spiral since then. The standard of living is shocking when compared to the rest of the West. It's like we're supposed to see but not say.

Yes I have been in to Birmingham.

I’m guessing you have not been to Mississippi….

So what. have you ever been to Mississippi? The most depressing place I’ve ever been to. The disparity of income and the abject poverty in many communities is obscene.

Quality of life is way more important than GDP.

Anyway. Depressing to see so many posters with one-word explanations. Brexit. Labour. Tories. Thatcher.

Truly I think there are a few big things we could do to make things a lot better. Energy policy and costs, housing and planning reform, infrastructure, tax reform. But these are cross party things that the public often doesn’t like in practice.

Ok, so do it on a PPP basis. We still come out much lower GDP than Mississippi. Whether you look at median or mean.

UK median income on a PPP basis is about $50k, lower than Mississippi at $59k.

Missisippi does worse on other important measures of life. But on wealth/income we are just a lot lot poorer than the US and it’s not because of billionaires skewing the stats.

But aren’t any jobs by definition done by the middle (even if upper middle) or working classes? Bankers, lawyers (I assume that’s the kind of thing you have in mind) - those may be predominantly upper middle class roles, but they’re still middle class. The upper classes don’t have jobs, they have inherited wealth and property which they manage. What kind of well paid roles is it you think the middle class children of today should be aiming for?

Do people like to pretend it isn't? It's generally accepted to be a massive economy.
I think the criticisms of the US tend to be around it's homeless issues etc but I think it gets far more criticism for this than other countries with similar problems precisely because it's so rich.

The US is an incredibly rich country. People like to pretend it isn't but it is. Even the poorest states are relatively wealthy globally. Mississippi's GDP per capita exceeds that of the UK, France, Italy, Japan, and many others.

Yep all this, and scrap net zero then were sorted. Labour won't do anything though.

Another sensationalist headline not being understood by the brainwashed masses…ffs.

Cost of living varies greatly between the US and Uk so it doesn’t really work to compare gdp per capita, any more than it would work to compare the average debt per capita in the US (103k USD) with the uk (34k GBP)

GDP per capita isn’t a good way to look at a country’s standard of living and can be distorted by so many factors. For example Ireland’s GDP per capita is almost 100k per person but the average quality of life is considered roughly similar to the UK, it’s just that there are quite a lot of big companies in Ireland due to low corporation tax.

They would just move to another country. A lot of UK suppliers had to
move their companies to a European country after Brexit. The delays and taxes stopped a lot of European trade. In my job we had to change our suppliers to one based in Holland.
I remember being caught out on eBay. I bought a nice ring and had to pay 70 taxes. I never bought anything from eBay again so it had to impact smaller businesses.

Brexit has been a big part of it in terms of narrowing financial opportunity significantly. But we've been in a downward spiral for years in terms of productivity because government after government, since Thatcher, have failed to improve skills well. The only real success in skills building has been the improvements in functional literacy, with the base skill level for 80% of the population being several years higher now than it was 30 years ago. Pretty much everything else has atrophied or stayed constant - in contrast to most OECD countries.

Our education system is years behind most countries in things like making schooling compulsory to 18, keeping maths education to 18 and providing good routes into engineering. Our investment in university education has been a costly disaster indebting individuals and the country for poor returns. It stripped away the focus that ploytechnics had on producing industry ready graduates, and decimated the landscape of qualifications between A level/Btech and Bachelors, especially in engineering and other industry specific areas. And at the same time we've completely failed to maintain industry investment in training for those already employed.

We've squandered the good years we had since the Black Monday recession. So we will find it really hard to turn things around as this all takes investment over years to upskill the teaching professions so that our education and training can be properly improved.