The UK is poor because they decided to financialize the economy in the 90s and stop making things. It's like canada where the GDP per capita goes down every year. I'm amazed there hasn't been a revolution.
Sure, but expanding the definition of “Canadian” to include people who were already poor is a bit different from people who were already Canadian becoming poorer.
I don't think the average migrant salary is much different from the average UK citizen salary. Then again, I also don't find the "financialisation" argument very compelling. Plus, the GDP per capita visibly does not go down every year.
According to Stats Canada, “Real GDP per capita has now declined in five of the past six quarters”, so fair to say it’s currently declining. This was news to me.
"another respected data journalist, John Burn-Murdoch, calculated that without London, the UK would be poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than even the poorest US state, Mississippi."
Yes, it's true that the UK economy is very London-centric, but the original poster was talking about the UK as a whole vs the US as a whole. (The flip side of this is that the figures would look better if you compared London to a major US city.)
None of this changes the fact that US software engineering salaries are a poor comparison to use to illustrate wealth disparities between the US and other countries, as they are an outlier.
Regardless, Americans are not five times richer than Brits by any reasonable measure. The salaries in the comparison upthread are outliers. The exact figure obviously depends on which stat you look at, but Americans are around 50% richer by most measures.
