How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi is a great piece in the Atlantic by Idrees Kahloon full of colorful anecdotes of a nation in decline:
The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity claims than it does providing maternity care. Many Britons cannot get an appointment with a publicly funded dentist or can afford a private one; in a 2023 study, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases pulling their own teeth or fixing broken crowns.
Pay can be incredibly low: Junior doctors have just gone on strike for the fifteenth time in three years over their wages, which start at just £38,800; The average salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, during the conflicts in Iran, the Daily Mail attacked Prime Minister Keir Starmer for visiting Valencia, Spain, in what the newspaper described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.
Americans are likely to slow down, especially as Independence Day approaches and Europeans enjoy our big stadiums and central air conditioning. Look deeper, however, and the British story becomes uneasy. Does this sound familiar?
The latest plans to transform the country rest a little on High Speed 2, a high-speed railway intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its cost has tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive railway in the world. (A special building to protect a rare species of bat along a railway line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important parts of the proposed route have been cut down. The rump line—which runs from Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city, to central London—could be completed by 2040…. HS2 has been delayed for so long that the two towers that were hastily built near its terminus now look derelict and in need of demolition.
…Building infrastructure, or anything else, has become impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the most expensive (not yet built) railway in the world, Britain also has the most expensive (not yet built) nuclear power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental impact assessment is 31,401 pages long; the facility will feature a £700 million “fish disco”, which will emit underwater sounds to deter animals from their food pipes.
Upon inspection, the United States looks less like a glittering city on a hill and more like a declining Great Britain, with one or two revolutionary sectors, especially AI. The parallels are particularly evident in the regressive solutions Britain has embarked on, namely attacking immigration and trade—Brexit equals a high-tax regime. Degenerate nations, like people, tend to criticize others rather than face their own real problems. Needless to say, neither immigration nor trade explains Britain’s—or California’s—inability to build high-speed rail or other infrastructure.
It’s sad to watch the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, individual rights, and freedom of speech—a nation that once built railroads, steam engines, factories that reshaped the world—lose the power to build much of anything, or even tolerate people who speak their minds. Correspondingly, instead of dealing with our real problems—almost all of our creation—the right becomes genuinely confused by symbolic questions of the culture war like birthright citizenship, while the left nominates candidates with Marxist-Leninist sympathies. The abundance and movement of progress are some of the few shining lights. It’s not too late. But Great Britain is a warning.
