The UK can go back to being the richest country in the world

The UK is "MBAs eating the world" on steroids, except they're History graduates who went to Eton. Not interested in actually creating anything or making anything. Money can be magically made by...shuffling money around. North Sea oil revenues provided a generation-long cover for this but now that's done.

Disclosure: former UK "subject".

Oh, and I forgot: allowed their country to become the "host" for Rupert Murdoch while he developed his Jedi Mind Tricks for getting folk to vote against their own interests.

The UK still has a heavily embedded caste or caste-like social circumstance. Pharma and finance have somewhat eschewed this tradition, but even those industries still have its embedded lords and ladies. Many of their smartest head to the US (or elsewhere), and Brexit has set them back decades from achieving the "richest country" status. A software engineer can double their earnings by moving to the US (if they can manage to). The owners of capital are generally not creators, and until that changes nor will their economic station.

The OP starts with a very wrong comparison; essentially comparing the London area with the American average. A proper comparison will be to compare it against the Washington or NYC metropolitan area. The numbers will be different.

Then the article presents no arguments on how the UK can achieve such a feat other than having a bit better public transport. Public transport does certainly help and it’ll increase GDP; but I highly doubt it’s the determinant in creating the richest country per capita in the world.

As for “can”, any country theoretically can become super-rich. Singapore did. Whether it will or not is another matter. The UK had particular circumstances in the 1700-1900. It does not have the same circumstances today. Lots of countries are also racing toward this goal. The UK is certainly better positioned than most countries in the world but not the best positioned out there.

“I think the UK can go back to being pretty much the richest country in the world per capita, at least as rich as the USA” said Matthew Clifford

This sounds very arrogant and wishful thinking considering the trajectory of UK in the last 20 years.

At the global stage, UK is as irrelevant as countries like Canada and Australia, but at least Canadians and Australians don’t openly claim they can be the richest country in the world.

"In 1920, North England’s economy as a whole was among the strongest in Europe and thus the world."

Exploiting and stealing always makes you rich. An empire doesn't make sense if you don't get rich with it (Also see the connection of Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution). The only problems: It's amoral stealing and exploiting others and it's not infinite, people don't want to be exploited so the empire gets more and more expensive to run.

> Can the UK go back to being the richest country in the world?

The original title is a question, not a statement.

This is how I feel actually. I live in the UK and the new government has started doing very sensible things. They are actually dealing with a lot of points made in the comments here. I look at the weakness of the 2 presidential candidates in the US, the rise of the far-right in the two European powerhouses of France and Germany, and the risk of deflation in China and I think, gosh! Maybe this is right? We are looking like the stable sensible choice, at least for now.

Maybe, we have, as a country all agreed the Brexit was terrible, and things can be done better and maybe we've handed power to the right people.

Let me start with the Eton/Posh thing, the new cabinet is not that. The new parliament is not that. 80% of the cabinet are comprehensive educated:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/05/most-state-e...

The head of health had Kidney cancer and was saved by the NHS. The head of housing grew up in a council house, the head of prisons is a well known employer of ex-prisoners, the head of science used to be the head of R&D at GSK. The list could go on. As Starmer would say, it's people with "skin in the game" having the power.

And the fact they are bringing in non-politicians to get jobs done, superb.

Specifically on the splitting of the country between north and south to do an analysis, I do think that is valid, and instructional. We have seen various countries over the last 150 years achieve high growth when they have got focused on catching up to the better countries. The US grew quickly when it was catching up to the UK after the industrial revolution, and the UK grew quickly when we were catching up after WWII. China grew quickly when it was catching up to the west. Then, once it's done, growth goes back to a normal 1-2%. Well, perhaps, the UK can have the North catch up to the south and provide the growth. I look at what Manchester was 15 years ago, what Leeds was 15 years ago, and I think, sure, that's completely do-able.

My prediction is that council taxes will be raised substantially out of necessity and the effect of this will lower house prices and reverse the 'wealth effect' which would impair peoples ability to pay that tax. The net effect is a further crushing the middle class. Lower per capita incomes, higher taxes, and a reverse wealth effect is not going to be a fun time.

Basically the government needs a lot of money and there are not many places to get it from, rich people have big houses so such wealth taxes would be more popular with the average voter - so I think they will do this out of a combination of necessity and ability. I wonder how I would find evidence in support for this belief in the data or train an algorithm to make similar predictions. I guess I'm sampling a model of my beliefs of how governments work. Reverse wealth effects have not happened in the west for a very long time so there are not many modern examples to template on - especially at a time when inflation of the money supply is an option.

Well the colonial mindset is still there, to reap benefits from the north (oil) as much as possible rather than making it self sufficient and stand up to London, Oxford and Cambridge triangle.

It has been 200 years since the industrial revolution - we know exactly what makes a society rich. Creating, or at least controlling, vast amounts of capital. Although it would be a mistake for the UK to be benchmarking itself against the rest of western Europe; much of the continent appears to be in trouble. The real question is why all the capital formation seems to have been in Asia for the last 50 years.

As for the UK, to get into such a position they're going to have to recognise that to get to this sort of state they can't have had pro-prosperity governance for decades. It takes 20-40 years for a lack of investment to start to show up in reality.

The UK was a naval empire that got to the industrial revolution earlier than most.

The high cost of labor and the abundance of coal deposits created an incentive for automation and that led to unprecedented technological innovation.

This brought an era of prosperity and also created a power asymmetry. But that power asymmetry did not make it into the 21st century.

The Suez canal crisis was officially the end of the UK as a world superpower.

The UK has strong partnerships, is a member of many important institutions like the G7, UN security council, NATO and others, but is not a world superpower anymore.

Economically it is in decline and politically is in crisis.

> The interview was in London, the central city of three English regions (London, South East, and East) that have a total population of 20 million people that together hold Europe’s most populous urban area. The economy of this “Greater South East” of England is already stronger than any sizeable country in the EU and nearly as strong as the USA.

> So why doesn’t the Greater South East feel richer than the Netherlands, Denmark, or Austria? And why don’t the people Matt speaks to there feel that they’re already living in a place as economically successful as the USA?

I mean, for starters, isn't the fact that the strongest region is lower still than the full aggregate of those other countries a really bad sign?

Their chart is 2019 GDP per capita in 2015 dollars, compare with 2019 California-alone GDP per capita in 2012 dollars: https://www.statista.com/statistics/304615/california-gdp-pe... which is still a pretty damn large and heterogenous region (roughly twice the size of the part of England they selected). 70k 2012 dollars for 2019 California, what looks like ~57k 2015 dollars for that region of 2019 England. Possibly the PPP adjustment brings that closer, but it's not exactly a cheap region.

They then talk about the worse-off parts of England... and a lot about infrastructure specifically (trains especially), but of course the train infrastructure in California is pretty awful! And train infrastructure in some of the countries lower on that list than the UK is better than California's...

So what else is going on? This doesn't seem like the right lens to look through to try to right that ship at all.

It’s been obvious for a very long time that London is a self-perpetuating black hole for money and talent in the UK, and it’s going to be tough to break that up.

What’s missing is the social analysis here - ambitious people in the UK go to London where they can make more money, and ambitious companies that want ambitious people go to London because that’s where the staff are. London and the SE don’t just fund the rest of the country, they also drain the talent and workers from those areas.

London does not have that great economy in isolation from its regions, it has it at least in part by feeding on them.

Growing the northern economy (and really anywhere outside the London dormitory belt) is also going to require finding a way to break the low-pay, low-productivity, low-expectations trap that exists across most of the British economy. And doing that will to some extent limit London’s talent pool.

It’s not a zero sum game, but also - TAANSTAFL.

Just as soon as “Step 2: ???” is worked out.

Richest in the World? Only if "World" is interpreted in the reduced sense as "Europe".

I'd like to see the UK South-East compared to e.g. Bavaria/BaWü the richest parts of Germany. Otherwise the diagram doesn't make any sense at all.

How much of London's wealth comes from infrastructure versus financial engineering leveraging The City's unique rules and sovereignty arrangements?

Simple answer: no. The economy of SE England is largely comprised of:

1. Shuffling money around 2. Socialist-level ponzi government spending 3. A combination of property flipping and high-end property overseas sales used for tax evasion

Innovation-wise, always looking for the easy wins without the hard work, unlike the US.

As a Brit and former resident, happy to have emigrated and escaped the >50% (soon to be increased) tax rates.

They should try catching up to their European neighbours first:

https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4D22AQFfh_jg66bW1A/feedsh...

So what he’s saying is that positive thinking can make it happen then? Think yourself rich ?

> Britain had been the world’s strongest major economy for over a century since Napoleon crippled the Dutch economy and Britain invented modern industry.

Yes, because they had the world's biggest navy and effectively controlled the sea route to the East. That would make anyone rich.

> And unlike in Germany where these transfers have been shrinking for decades as the East of the country grows its economy, in Britain we become ever more reliant on the Greater South East and London in particular every year.

Uhh... Outside of Leipzig (and obviously Berlin), things aren't going very well in the East of Germany. And even in Leipzig things were super shitty until property fever hit in 2017. Everybody with prospects still moves West in Germany, and the East remains relatively poor as a result (and unheard, which is why the AFD has gained a foothold here).

Know what makes countries rich (besides conquest)? Long rivers big enough to pass container ships through without locks - connecting your resources and industrial bases to your markets with super cheap transport costs. The Mississippi. The Yangtze. The Rhine.

Counter point: no it can't. Between schadenfreude from colonialism and brexit, I don't think many are invested in seeing UK succeed. If anything the opposite.

Wealth is hard to define. Monaco is wealthy but small for example. India is big but low median wealth

The coal pits of the Midlands are gone, but the descendants of the miners are still poor.

Betteridge's law of headlines honorary mention.

Edit:

I consider this being flagged as grossly unjust as the original headline has a Can ... ?

The fact of the matter is that it is absurd to think that the England (UK) can be anything be a diminishing nation.

And yet the northern muppets went and voted a Torrie government back in 2019 that took the UK out of the EU, causing a significant damage to the economy in the form of lost GDP.

Something about bicycle front wheels and sticks, under the sound of tiny violins.