Somehow, Britain is still the world's 6th largest economy per GDP.
And yet its poor are among the poorest in Europe. We really need a different way to represent economic rankings. Having a handful of the billlionairest billionaires doesn't make your country a good place to live.
@pieist gdp isn't even a good measure of average/total wealth
@almostconverge Per capita it's half that of Norway and rather less than that of Ireland
@almostconverge And Norway's a fuck of a lot better in the mean than either of them in terms of actual wealth distribution. In Norway to be average is to pretty comfortably off, which isn't true in Ireland nor remotely true in the UK.
@pieist but it's very easy to artificially inflate gdp, like if you're a tax haven, you can generate a lot of gdp without any of that money ever actually touching your country's economy
@almostconverge I forget who said it first: "economists must learn to subtract". A thing which generates economic activity isn't necessarily a thing which produces prosperity. Rather the reverse in many cases.
@pieist Median per capita income $14793 not bad relatively but 12% less than Germany but university is free in Germany - so not sure data are really comparable. UK seems more polarised to me.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country
@pieist I don't think a myopic *economic* ranking offers much insight into equity, wellbeing, sustainability and similar measures of what makes a country a good place to live. Conflating progress with economic growth is what got us into this mess in the first place, no?
@pieist short answer, no. Longer answer, not unless India & France evaporate, not unless truly vast amounts of Russian money were to flood into London, and certainly not after Celtic independences.
It’s way down the ranks on GDP per capita, only held up by excessive financialisation.