Why does Britain feel so poor?

Must be incredibly boring to live like that!?

I'm just throwing numbers around based on my experience. In the USA, I got a full kitchen remodel done for 25k in a modest, clean, homey kitchen in a $750k home. Then I visit some high-end residences, and their kitchens look like Gordon Ramsay shows up every night to cook a private dinner. It's a stark contrast.

I was once debating between granite countertops that ranged from 5k to 10k—like it was a make-or-break decision for my budget—only to walk into a home where the owners start rambling on about how much of a pain it was to get custom wood countertops imported from Brazil, sourcing the same industrial kitchen range that michelin star cook cooks use, industrial fridge/freezer setups, marble floor tiling, and every single top-of-the-line thing in a kitchen you can possibly think of.

Considering I spent 25k on a modest kitchen with brand new top of the line Samsung appliances in a fairly large house in a "high-income" area, I’d say these folks are spending 4-5 times what I did. And honestly, my guess might be an underestimate. The elites and upper-middle class have DEEP pockets.

Likely a difference in terminology.

"Upper middle class" in the UK comprises the top 5% or so of the population. They tend to be senior professionals or business owners, are likely to be privately educated, will probably speak with a "received pronunciation" (rather than regional) accent, and have significant asset wealth.

"Upper class" is reserved for landed gentry, nobility, etc. They're people who can live off long-standing inherited wealth and don't need jobs or even education (though many still do have them, of course).

Middle class does not translate across the atlantic. Middle in the UK might be what an American calls upper. Upper class in the UK is reserved for royalty.

It's just my perspective—limited as it might be. I'm from the US, so my general view aligns with yours. However, everything shifts when I fly into a random UK town. You get these shitty streets that give off “Baltimore, might get stabbed” vibes, with infrastructure in complete shambles, and then you step into a townhouse owned by someone making about what I do—and inside, it's a mini-Saudi royal palace.

I’m no economist, but after working closely with many UK clients, I’ve noticed something: the upper-middle class here may not be flush with current cash flow, but they're sitting on a ridiculous amount of generational wealth that's been safely accumulated over the last 200 years within tight-knit family networks. In my view, the elites have both robust current cash flow and deep generational wealth, while the upper-middle class primarily relies on that generational cushion. They might not be buying Bugattis like the elites, but they're still living extremely luxurious, lavish lifestyles. Anyone without that kind of inherited wealth—unless you hit it big with a million-dollar tech idea—is stuck in the rat race, whether you're working at Starbucks or engineering at a tech firm.

The US seems a bit different. Here, there’s more opportunity to generate enough cash flow within one generation to set up the next with “generational” wealth. In the UK, it takes longer—about 3–4 generations—to build that legacy. But once a family in the UK secures this wealth, it tends to provide a relatively stable, luxurious life for the next 2–3 generations. In the US, while you might build wealth in just one generation, it can just as quickly vanish—sometimes within a single generation or even half one—due to medical debt, mismanagement, or economic swings. It takes a structured effort, clear strategy, and a strong individual family culture to preserve wealth in the US. If it’s not properly secured, that wealth ends up transferring to someone else who is setting up their own cycle of generational prosperity.

I also think the UK’s cultural and systemic setup makes it much harder for wealth to move from family networks at the top down to the working class. Over the past 10 years, globally, more wealth has shifted from the working class to the upper-middle and elite tiers. In the UK, that wealth is now entrenched at the top for the next four generations—even if the flow stops today, it’s going to stay that way for another 50 years or so. In the US, although wealth has also moved upward, there’s a genuine chance for it to “expire” at the top within 5-10 years and start cycling back down to the working class. I think this is the major difference in US economics as opposed to much of the world.

That said, who really knows what will happen given today’s global political climate? Everything’s kind of up in the air right now, and we'll have to see how it all settles over the next few years.

USA doesn't have nobility like Europe does, nobility was the original definition of upper class.

There is a vast difference between the UK and the rest of Europe, in this regard.

Full disclosure, I travel all over Europe for work and in the last 3 years, 1 of them was in the UK. The divide between the rich and poor is incredible.

Further, the only place I’ve seen so many young homeless men on the streets is in the UK. Not seen it anywhere else.

Throwing from balconies doesn't work. Pavel Durov tried it in 2012, it quickly turned into a brawl under the balcony. So the one above got bad reputation, being called out by the media for making PR stunts in bad taste, and the ones below might have even had negative ROI, if that money went to pay for medical bills.

I have no idea, but what about investing the money? (yourself into something new, or just into the stock market)

It's even worse when paired with the ability for a local authority to go bankrupt when it can't cover the bills and be forced to sell off major capital assets (e.g. buildings, sometimes of significant public interest like concerts halls, leisure centres and other community venues).

Of course the actual place continues to exist so the local authority will continue to exist in another form, this time with fewer major capital assets and they're paying rents to the people who now own them instead.

As pointed out in the article you could see this happen when something entirely out of the authorities control (e.g. spending on SEND children due to the massive increase in eligible children in Central Bedfordshire's case) causes it too.

Thank you. I'm in the UK and I've never heard this before.

Sounds like whoever receives the SEND money has a lot of political power.

> Councils are going bankrupt due to court cases and equity laws that say any gender pay gap is the result of discrimination.

Where can I read about this?

>This is also a cultural issue. In large cities, people often don't feel as being part of the community and they don't take pride in their surroundings. They put rubbish everywhere, vandalise. There is little done to change that. They see neighbour has nice flowers in the garden? Instead of admiring, they will cut them off.

I don't think this aligns with the lived-experience of most Britons. The big cities are mostly litter-free areas, and people can have well tended gardens go unmolested by neighbours.

"In large cities" is very much a sweeping generalisation. What you're describing sounds a lot like it's caused by broken window syndrome; people put rubbish everywhere because there's no good trash collection system (I know in the UK people have to pay for it, so they just dump it in nature instead. Collect it from people's doorsteps for free and fly tipping wouldn't be nearly as big an issue anymore.

Vandalism is a difficult one. But it's likely because the people doing it don't have anything better to do, no hobbies, jobs, families, responsibilities, etc. And also, broken window syndrome.

But then you look at e.g. east or southeast asia and they have things like neat closed off bus stops with heating and you're like, "Why can't we have nice things?". We're stuck with glass booths with a beam for leaning against at best. Glass so that people in there are visible and don't use it as a public toilet, uncomfortable seating so people don't use it as a hang-out or sleeping spot. But the design adapts to a problem, one which the government has little interest in fixing - or which would infringe on people's rights.

In the cities I have been to this is not my experience, at least in South America and the Nordics. The wear and tear of lots of people means you need to design things differently in well visisted areas, but there a square meter sees more people in a day than you get in a year in small villages.

Oh, look, the usual dogwhistle of "not throwing pataat op de straat".

[flagged]

It would be nice to have someone to point the finger at; SERCO? What evidence do we have?

It is absolutely untrue that this isn’t a talking point. It’s all the far right and tabloid newspapers talk about.

Nah. The push for both plans originates at least in part from elsewhere.

No, actually his plan for Brexit was the most coherent, and Truss/Kwarteng were on the right track but executed appallingly badly.

If you go for Brexit the "hard way" as the country did then your way forward to compensate and to create growth is to find new competitive advantages and there are not many options apart from going low tax low regulations.

This never happened. Truss/Kwarteng made a bad and short-lived attempt and that was it.

I am not saying Brexit was a good idea but this is one of those massive changes of course that require "going big or going home" instead of trying to keep things as they were when that's impossible, and slowly fail (it does not mean that it would necessarily succeed but at least you're going for it).

Yeah, the housing market is completely broken.

I feel more optimistic that the energy issue will be solved with a shift to nuclear and renewables.

Housing just seems so hard to fix as so many people have a vested interest in not fixing it.

The purpose of tax is not to raise money to government, but to redistribute wealth. The government prints money to cover the bill of its expenditure. If it issued no taxes, then that burden would fall on all people through inflation, affecting the poor moreso than the rich. Taxes are an issue separate from spending that allows the government to move money down from rich to poor, and in doing so offset the inflationary effects of spending. This is why tax is a solution to rent. Rent is poor people giving money to rich people, and tax allows you to reverse that flow.

Where does all the money they spend on housing & energy go.

Ding ding ding. Western governments have spent years on housing and energy policy driven by ideoogical concerns, when a technocratic approach would have been much more productive. Yes, this includes things people may not like, especially environmental or 'social justice' groups.

I think he understands that but when you have a situation where the real economy is growing only around 1% per year but rich people grow their wealth somewhere around 4-10% that can only come at someone else's expense.

In other words while the real economy might be growing as a "non-zero sum game" the growth of the elite and the rich far exceeds that and outpaces it. Net effect is that their wealth is wealth away from everyone else.

Source on his backstory being made up?

How deeply your asshole puckers at dusk when you hear a loud noise is one sign. Artists, musicians, survivors of trauma are clued into such things. Also parents with children, merchants carrying sacks of cash to the bank. You know, humans.

There's a lot of ways to get at least a surface level understanding of the general affluence of an area.

How well upkept are the buildings? Are they clean and well maintained or are they dingy and broken with overgrowth? Are there a lot of open shops around? Do people seem to be buying things? What kind of clothes are the people wearing? Does it seem like many people are homeless? How is the state of the transit (both public and private?) Do people feel the need to have bars on their windows and security stationed around to prevent theft, or do storefronts feel safe enough to even have merchandise sitting out? Are people eating in restaurants? Are those expensive or cheap restaurants? Do people seem to be comfortable spending a night out on the town, going to bars and shows or are the streets empty because people can't afford outside entertainment?

>How are you judging how affluent an area is by walking through it?

Probably seeing a lot of new/upper segment cars and well maintained houses.

This definitely sounds like you don't know anybody in that category and are judging based on a misleading media impression.

He doesn't suggest that the economy is a zero sum game, but that the distribution of that wealth matters and in our societies we're increasingly distributing wealth unevenly so that tiny minority of people increasingly control and own all the wealth, assets and means of production thus depriving other people of economic opportunities and crippling the economies.

In your example of building more, in order to a new building get erected someone owns the land, someone owns the materials, someone owns all the assets and the capital required to build. The people who invest to this will of course want to turn a profit on it.

I'm neither an economist or mathematician. But I'm smart enough to observe my surroundings. I observe that the middle class is shrinking rapidly. Wealth concentration is increasing rapidly. Income has not kept up with the price of goods. And it's increasingly difficult for working people to accumulate wealth.

Can you point me to other theories which articulate the cause of my observations?

> New wealth "creation" is a lie.

Perhaps the bigger issue is old wealth destruction. We live in a world of effectively infinite low cost electronics, clothes and food, but the things which used to be abundant are now actually quite scarce.

Housing is most obvious example here - but the costs of driving (excluding vehicle purchase), childcare, wedding, and energy are now radically higher than ever before. In these areas it feels like we've gone backwards in productivity.

I take some silicon from high-purity quartz in North Carolina. I make CPU chips out of them. Have I not created wealth? Is not the CPU chip more valuable than raw, high-purity quartz?

> New wealth "creation" is a lie.

Wealth is created by taking less valuable inputs and producing something new of greater value. For the HN crowd, that might mean using a little energy and a cheap computer to produce software that provides something even more value than the sum of its parts. Clearly you can create wealth out of "thin air".

Perhaps you mean in the net? Where new wealth is created, equal old wealth must be destroyed? But wherein that aforementioned software was additional value destroyed in order for the net wealth to remain the same?

> It only looks that way because of devaluing currency and population growth.

Not really. While we often measure wealth in currency, which is subject to fluctuations over time, wealth is not the measurement itself. In the same vein, the physical distance you currently know as a kilometre will still be the same distance even if we redefine the kilometre.

Leaving wealth to one side, do you think value creation is a lie?

> At the time GDP of the Eurozone was comparable to the US' now the US is almost twice as big

No, You're just comparing change in the EUR/USD exchange rate here. In 2007, the euro was at a high point of 1.48, and in 2024 it's at a low of 1.02. Inflation has not been higher in Europe than in the USA over that period.

If we look at GDP at purchasing power parity from 2007 to 2023 we have this:

- European Union: 31,162 → 61,217, +96% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...)

- USA: 48,050 → 82,769, +72% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...)

Which shows a slight catching-up by the European Union over the period.

1. Yes, some of them. Spent a little time in New Mexico. I've travelled through the gulf states and Alabama. Particularly outside of Albequrque and Santa Fe, the general level of deprivation in NM was quite clear.

2. I'm glad that people in the UK have access to healthcare. I'd be very happy if that went to the US. That doesn't change the raw GDP figures though.

I agree it may change the experience they have of being poor if you aren't also deprived of medical care. But here's another thing - people in the UK are less satisfied than ever with the NHS as well - it appears to be floundering.

(In answer to the below "people have always been less satisfied with the NHS" - perhaps so, but this time it's serious, they haven't been this less satisfied before - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/02/patient-sati... )