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
@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.
@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.