Britain poorer than Mississippi

[BritishMississippi]

Our GDP per capita has now dipped to the level of America’s poorest state. It’s not dipped below due solely to London. We’ve been on a spiral for the last twenty years that means our children are facing not being able to find jobs and even the jobs they can find have miserable wages attached to them. AIBU that we need to engage quite seriously with how to bring the country out of this spiral in a meaningful way?

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.

We are poorer than Mississippi on median and mean income and any other economic standard of living indicator you can come up with. We do better on social indicators like HDI but that’s powered by there being enough money. We are in a 20 year slide no matter how you look at it. People are giving one word answers which is exactly what the article points to. We are seeing a rise in parties who use fear and single issues to whip up a frenzy all while the basics are ignored. Taxes are at an all time high since WW2 and yet services are falling to pieces. The NHS is no longer fit for purpose and needs a serious conversation. Most Brits still think of themselves as having a better life than people in impoverished places like Mississippi and it simply isn’t true. We need to start with a hard reality check. We are moving toward a political climate where we will end up with our own Trump.

@PansykavalierHave you been to Birmingham? Roughly 50% of all children live below the poverty line.

Yes I have been in to Birmingham.

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

@PansykavalierWe lived in the Midwest for years and also the South. I’ve been to Mississippi lots, thanks. Ignoring data is dangerous.

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.

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. 🤷‍♀️

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.

Ageing populations tend to do that.

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.

The lack of spin is debatable.

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.

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

You can’t keep comparing apples and oranges

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.

Yeah so the healthcare is one of the biggest charges for Americans, so it can’t effectively compare.

Be honest, when was the first time you heard of PPP?

Haha, nice try, but it was either in the early 00s when doing my A-level economics, or the early-mid 00s when doing my Business Finance and Economics Degree which culminated in my writing a dissertation which was an analysis of the Nationalised UK healthcare vs the Privatised US healthcare systems, and their impact on household standard of living.

It is outdated now, given that the landscape has changed significantly, and there is a much increased reliance on private healthcare in the UK, but if you would like to read it I can send you a copy. I actually think it ended up in the public domain to be honest so you could probably find it.

Sounds interesting! Puzzled then that you seemed unaware that PPP was already a measure that adjusted for differing cost of living, or gave housing as an example of something it left out. Still, I guess it was a long time ago so forgivable!

I was in the car and quickly writing a reply that was a combination of replies to other nonsense that was written by other posters…it was 20 years ago also.

Does it make you feel special to be condescending on the internet Peter?

And actually whilst you’re mansplaining at me, maybe you want to look at the limitations of PPP and the issues it actually has when measuring housing costs. Or that the things being measured in PPP in the US in comparison to the UK cannot actually be compared properly, heating costs, aircon costs, healthcare, etc…people across the uk comparing their ‘average basket’ might work, but comparing them to the US, not so much.

And, homeownership rates vary, what about housing association fees and property taxes, have you considered those, all of these things skew the comparisons when you use PPP across countries that are so different, rather than just regions in the same country.

So end of conversation, apples vs oranges, even if they are doing their best to compare it is still not perfect. Off you pop!

I'm not an economist, but it strikes me that the limitation of PPP is that it is still a thing that only measures one metric, i.e. financial cost. It doesn't look at health outcomes, mortality, education outcomes, personal and press freedom - all things where the UK scores better than the US, as does most of Europe. It seems to be the case that posters wanting to talk down Western Europe are the people who understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Fair enough. I don't think either of us think PPP is a perfect measure. I do feel you were doing a pretty good impression of not being aware of it though:

Here are some PPP numbers.
> But you need to consider different costs of living!
PPP does that, though it doesn't handle medical well, of course.
> But it doesn't handle medical well!

There are better versions of PPP but I think the broader point, which we agree on, is that there is a lot that just isn't captured at all in any version of GDP.

I'm not saying Mississippi is a better place to live than the UK. But I do think we have boiled-frog our way to being much poorer than we think we are, both relative to the US and even to much of Europe.

It comes out in lots of things. Like politicians who say "of course we can afford X, we are the sixth richest country in the world!". They never say "of course we can afford X, we are only slightly poorer than Italy!".

Or…

Sorry Boreded, I was being condescending and it was unnecessary, you aren’t an idiot like I presumed

👍

Saying ‘fair enough, but’ is such a fucking man thing to do. You made a mistake, just apologise for the bad attitude rather than making an excuse for the behaviour.

You might be right about it being a man thing. In my thousands of pub convos on political and economic things I don't think I've ever known a man stop play and ask for an apology for slightly mocking a ill-framed objection. Certainly not someone who'd led with a complaint about the "brainwashed masses". All good fun, innit.

I agree that the UK has challenges/issues. I don't think that we are dooooomed as other posters have suggested. Also as someone who's lived in or visited quite a few other countries I feel quite aware of things that are done better than we do them (the Netherlands lack of Austerity over the last 15 years is very noticeable compared to the UK) but I'm also always really happy to be back in the UK. It's.still my favourite place with a lot going for it. Not some hell hole.

I think GDP can be a very rough indicator. But the problem with people saying "politicians need to focus on raising GDP/raising PPP" is that can lead to weird decisions. As you end up chasing a target it can be counterproductive to actually improving the economy or people's lives.
It would be better for the government to focus on (eg) improving infrastructure, lowering unemployment and NEETs, education and apprenticeship opportunities etc etc. Done well probably you would then see GDP/PPP rise as a side product of an economy that was doing well.