I run an IT consultancy and often work in both commercial buildings and private residences across the UK. When it comes to the latter—trust me, the elites (and even the upper-middle class) still have an extraordinary amount of money.
What’s changed is that no one cares about the public sphere anymore. You wouldn’t believe the contrast between Britain’s crumbling high streets and the lavish interiors of some of these homes. I’ve seen marble floors, $10K TVs, $100K kitchens, $150K bathrooms. Home offices decked out with $50K worth of gear. Wine cellars, indoor spas, private gyms—you name it.
Even on the commercial side, it’s wild. It’s not uncommon to walk into a privately-owned or government-owned building and be greeted by a $5 million art piece in the lobby. Then you start looking around and adding up the costs—“they probably spent $10K just on that fancy trim around the doorframe.” Or you notice a particularly heavy door, Google it, and realize it costs $15K per door. Then you start counting the doors—there are thousands. The rabbit hole goes deep, and the amount of wealth becomes staggering. It’s just hidden in plain sight.
But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity.
So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.
I've had very similar experiences in India. Incredibly expensive, well-furnished homes surrounded by streets filled with trash. The people living in there don't even walk outside any more, it's too hot/polluted/dirty for that. They get everything delivered to them or go for work/events in their fancy car.
Are those kitchen and bathroom numbers supposed to be shockingly high? Over here you're not far off just dividing the house price by the number of rooms.
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.
Why do you go straight from upper-middle to elite? Is this something peculiar to the UK which I am missing? As a US citizen, I am used to upper-middle class lacking the purchasing power you describe (not that people don't try to compensate via borrowing) and an entire ecosystem of 'rich' that sit between the middle class and the elite.
"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.
Been several years since I was over there. What are the public spaces like?
Go back to my childhood (Australia) and a playground was a very basic slide, possibly weathered and with minimal regard for safety and no landscaping beside mown lawns. A public plaza would've been pretty austere. Now, either have quite premium fit-outs - high end playgrounds, thoughtful and professional landscaping, etc. The budgets would be huge. And there are still very premium fit-outs in many houses.
I'm wondering what should be the right way here. Taking the doorframe trim for £10K.
I see there could be like 3 options: 1) hide wealth / do not spend this money; 2) distribute to economy / i.e. pay a tradesman to curve the frame; 3) donate money to a fund or throw from a balcony to the crowd.
It doesn't seem that 1 cold be helpful to anyone. We see 2 in those examples, but it seem you imply that it's not the best way. So we have the only the 3rd option left, with donations. Is that what is considered as the best option? Is it sustainable in a long term?
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.
Wasn't there a famous Brit who declared that there is no such thing as society ? If the commons has more or less been willed out of existence, should its decay surprise ?
As much as I despise what Maggie did, this quote is regularly misused and taken out of context. Her point, which I broadly agree with, is that the idea of hiding behind some notion of "society" is flawed because what that really means is a whole collection of real people doing real things. "Society" doesn't fix things; people fix things. If anything, I take this a call to action for everyone to be far _more_ civic minded. For sure, in the interview she makes some points that I disagree with, and certainly her prescriptions I think miss subtlety, but a hypothetical debate with her based on the "society" interview would not be around the core substance of what she's trying to say.
> What’s changed is that no one cares about the public sphere anymore.
> So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.
This is not necessarily related. People don't care because the fabric of society is eroded and the essence of what makes a country and a culture is diluted to a point that it is almost non-existant. Those factors are correlated but not causally determined.
Its Selfishness... Selfishness that is encouraged, rewarded and enforced by capitalism finally takes its toll and destroys society. Everything is for the maximization of self-gain. Everything is for the individual. Despite the individual being part of the society outside.
> But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity.
Because we've been fed a narrative that there's only "one right way" to care for the external world. For example, in my city of Portland, they recently revamped the public library. Was it done to make the beautiful building up to code so that people could enjoy books for a hundred years more until the next renovation?
Oh no... that would have 'exacerbated inequality'. Instead, we removed the books, shortened the bookshelves, and got rid of seating so that homeless men would have a place to walk around drugged-out and not be found masturbating behind tall bookshelves. That was the 'one true way' of using public funds, according to those in charge. Don't disagree or you might get labeled a fascist.
We see this all around the world. Just look at the reaction to Ezra Klein's book 'Abundance'. Such obvious solutions, things we can all agree on (I consider myself a conservative and enjoyed the parts of the book I've read). But if you look at the reaction it's getting, it's the same tired rhetoric. We are not allowed to have nice things. Wanting nice things is apparently chauvinistic, racist, classist, something supremacist, some other -ist, etc.
In the meantime, anyone who has not followed the 'one true path', has basically resigned themselves, and many have become actively resentful of the system writ large.
The commons are quite variable. Around where I live in London it's quite nice. I just rode the £18.8bn liz line which in quite jolly. On the other hand out in the sticks it's often less so.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote something like below in this book Skin in the Game. It looks to me that there is a lot of inequality and unfairness hidden in the Europe.
"Consider that about ten percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top one percent and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top ten percent[1]. This is visibly not the same for the more static –but nominally more equal –Europe. For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries."
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.
I think a key part of the 'poor' feeling in day to day experience comes from councils' inability to do maintenance, things like pot holes, children's play equipment, public toilet, general upkeep on public spaces and services like libraries. In the grand scheme of things this isn't too expensive but it's been cut to the bone due to way local government funding works. This is explored in the article:
> in large part because they’re mandated to write blank cheques for social care with no support or strategy from central government. Individual cases in Central Bedfordshire are now costing up to £750,000 per year, a quarter of the entire libraries and leisure budget and an amount that is rising rapidly with no apparent ceiling. As I wrote previously, “In a single year, residential care costs for children have increased by £2,000 per child… per week,” taking the average cost for a single case from ~£200,000 to ~£300,000 per child per year, again with little explanation as to where the money is going or how this is even possible.
> Similarly, “school transport costs have increased by over 100% - from £9m to £20m - in just 4 years” - that’s driven by an unexplained rise in the number of SEND pupils eligible for support and it amounts to roughly the same as - deep breath - the transport, roads, parking, libraries, leisure, housing benefit, public protection and safety budgets combined. Central Bedfordshire Council is not an outlier here - collectively, council overspends on SEND services are set to hit £2bn in the next year, risking further bankruptcies. Again this is not about pitting children against libraries, but asking if we seriously believe we’re addressing either of these things well?
Local councils have to pay the very large bills for social care and supporting SEND children but have basically little control over how it's spent or levers to help control the bills.
Fixing this so councils can once again spend relative minor amounts of money improving the public realm could go a long way to improving day to day experience. Definitely some other large structural problems (see the huge costs of HS2) but it would provide a noticeable improvement in people's lives and potentially isn't too hard for a government willing to make some bold changes around taxation, local government funding and providing proper national strategy and funding on social care.
The unfunded mandate system for councils is extremely stupid. Local democracy has long been bad in the UK, but mandating policy centrally and then letting that destroy any connection between local taxation and local budgeting is even worse.
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.
> "In a single year, residential care costs for children have increased by £2,000 per child… per week"
and child is being looked after by barely qualified minimum wage worker (often actually paid below minimum wage if you add unpaid overtime and foreign workers not knowing the laws), meanwhile owners of care services live opulent lifestyles in places like Dubai. UK services market is not free, which is part of the problem.
To make matters worse, there's also litte evidence that the increases in spending on SEND provision have led to better outcomes.
I can't help feeling like this is a vicious cycle - the lack of community facilities is causing greater isolation, causing a rise in health needs and so on.
There's bad policy in other areas. Councils are going bankrupt due to court cases and equity laws that say any gender pay gap is the result of discrimination. Therefore they were found guilty because they are paying e.g. bin men or sewage workers more than mostly female jobs like nurses and librarians. They obviously have to do this because those jobs are dangerous and unpleasant so if you paid the same as other jobs nobody would want to do them. But the courts disagreed and now the councils have to pay huge sums out in equal pay lawsuits that they can't afford.
All this is a direct result of bad, ideological law making combined with a biased judiciary that interprets it in bad, ideological ways. Unfortunately it's the ideology Labour is in thrall too and they're in power for several years at minimum and maybe much longer if the right stays split, so the state of Britain's infrastructure will continue to sharply decline.
> general upkeep on public spaces and services like libraries
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.
>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.
For some reason Britain's migrant population is disproportionately reliant on government services. This is a common talking point in American politics, but doesn't seem a common one in English politics, but in England the data is pretty incontrivertible, whereas in America it's a bit harder to ascertain.
This is because America's alleged welfare queens are undocumented, whereas Britain's are there legally and the government actually has very good data on which groups are a net boon and which are a net draw on the economy.
I'm not a Brit and I could care less at the end of the day, but it does seem kind of bonkers to me to be importing people while your own country suffers.
Everything that provides any service or assistance to normal life has been sold off and rented back to us at enormous cost, often with many of extra financial scalping included in the systems we are forced to rely on.
And a percentage of the extracted wealth is used to push political and public narrative to incentivise the selling off more.
Local authorities are forced to sell off assets and fire direct employees, then get charged a fortune to provide basic services and child and adult social care.
And for contracts and outsourcing, the ownership of the contract itself is the thing that gives value, not providing the actual service. Creating a whole set of perverse incentives.
A council should look at a pot hole in a road as a massive opportunity. Here is a chance to provide good quality work for local people and local resources, but the opposite happens.
We have a whole layer of service retailers e.g. for electricity and gas and communications, who are not more than a spreadsheet speculating on long term prices, a call centre and a web site. Their entire business model being based on a) not messing up the spreadsheet calculation b) enough people being lazy and not renewing or switching their contract every year.
Our financial services industry has massive positive PR, seen as a net good for the country. When in reality it is focused not on basic things like providing banking and direct insurance, but in attracting our best and brightest individuals from around the country and instead of having them put their talents to something productive. Instead reward them for creating and maintaining complex systems to move wealth around, asset strip regions, hide it from tax and create a layer of gambling and financial products on top of these systems.
Everyone appears to agree that Britain is broken. The author recognizes that the issue is not a lack of taxes, but lack of care at where the money goes.
Sadly the author I think is getting distracted by specific issues. Focusing on school or social costs. Or specific large project over runs.
You need to read through a ton, but it paints a picture of a government chasing newspaper headlines. And an overall ineffective method of running a country from the top down.
How could it be that an act of parliament is being held up by local councils? Parliament's orders used to be the law of the land. Now it is but one of many.
Often treatments of British decline read as if the authors wished Britain had been fire bombed to smithereens, and benefited from the Marshel Plan. Yet this undersells the British people. They know how to build new houses. They know how to build trains. Yet Britain as a whole is still searching for that win-win. The path to fixing problems without compromises.
Meanwhile Britain's managerial and governing class is so incompetent, it is hard to imagine replacements who would perform worse.
Dominic Cummings got to be inside Number 10 and entirely blew it with Brexit and everything else. He belongs in the "discredited" pile with the Trussnomics lot.
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).
If it already hasn't been said I'd really recommend anyone interested in this topic to checkout "Gary's Economics" on YouTube.
Even if you don't agree with him (and I know many don't for various reasons..) You have to admit that he does bring a new perspective to the table and (as a layman economist) it just makes logical sense.
Regardless, the main stream economists have not been able to either predict the economy or improve it (for the general majority of people) and it seems that every western economy is following the same trajectory where
- governments are broke and pulling back on their services to the public (health care, education etc.)
- working class is broke, living pay check to paycheck barely scraping by
- middle class is shrinking and financing their lives with ever increasing amounts of debt (mortgages)
All the above then begs the question, who has all the money? Who has all the wealth?
I think he massively misses the mark. If you look at Britain’s actual problems they’re not due to a lack of tax revenue or “the rich”. People aren’t able to save because their money is spent on housing and energy - both of those are due to poor policy.
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.
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.
Classic grifter - 95% of his backstory is made up.
You can achieve far greater enlightenment by simply droping your preconceptions about rich and poor people and understanding the very basic day to day things happening around you than you will achieve listening to him.
> All the above then begs the question, who has all the money? Who has all the wealth?
The "I.T. Revolution" was supposed to bring a vast payoff from improved productivity. Did the benefits of society-wide process improvement get snarfed up by... vastly more inequality ?
I am a walker and walk around most of my city, Belfast. The affluence I encounter does not seem to match the news narrative. I am concerned that I have become hard-hearted. Alternatively, I wonder if I just see the world differently to others. I have not determined how to come to a conclusion on the matter.I have lived and worked in some of the poorest regions and housing estates of the UK. If anyone has insight I would love to hear it.
I don't live in the UK so I don't know if this is relevant, but you could possibly argue that Belfast has been in an upward trend since the end of the Troubles, and therefore it might feel different to people living there as opposed to old mining towns like Birmingham or industrial areas like Liverpool/Manchester.
Northern Ireland has done much better over the past decade IIRC, with more government spending and investment per head than the rest of the UK. I visited last year and felt the difference was immediately noticeable.
I think the pessimism of the British is part of it, and as I have said before, the British have a rosy tinted view of the rest of the world. They compare to UK to the nice bits of other developed countries that they visit on holidays and business.
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?
> To build a railway between Euston and Curzon Street in Birmingham, I need 8,276 consents from other public bodies, planning, transport, the Environment Agency or Natural England. They don’t care whether parliament did or didn’t approve building a railway.
Google suggests that line would be about 127 miles long, or about 200 kilometers. That’s one different consent form for every 25 meters of track. Mind boggling.
Readit News
What’s changed is that no one cares about the public sphere anymore. You wouldn’t believe the contrast between Britain’s crumbling high streets and the lavish interiors of some of these homes. I’ve seen marble floors, $10K TVs, $100K kitchens, $150K bathrooms. Home offices decked out with $50K worth of gear. Wine cellars, indoor spas, private gyms—you name it.
Even on the commercial side, it’s wild. It’s not uncommon to walk into a privately-owned or government-owned building and be greeted by a $5 million art piece in the lobby. Then you start looking around and adding up the costs—“they probably spent $10K just on that fancy trim around the doorframe.” Or you notice a particularly heavy door, Google it, and realize it costs $15K per door. Then you start counting the doors—there are thousands. The rabbit hole goes deep, and the amount of wealth becomes staggering. It’s just hidden in plain sight.
But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity.
So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.
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.
"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).
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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.
Go back to my childhood (Australia) and a playground was a very basic slide, possibly weathered and with minimal regard for safety and no landscaping beside mown lawns. A public plaza would've been pretty austere. Now, either have quite premium fit-outs - high end playgrounds, thoughtful and professional landscaping, etc. The budgets would be huge. And there are still very premium fit-outs in many houses.
That happened in the 80s. This is not a new sensation in England, just a worsening one.
I see there could be like 3 options: 1) hide wealth / do not spend this money; 2) distribute to economy / i.e. pay a tradesman to curve the frame; 3) donate money to a fund or throw from a balcony to the crowd.
It doesn't seem that 1 cold be helpful to anyone. We see 2 in those examples, but it seem you imply that it's not the best way. So we have the only the 3rd option left, with donations. Is that what is considered as the best option? Is it sustainable in a long term?
Whole quote here: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
> So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.
This is not necessarily related. People don't care because the fabric of society is eroded and the essence of what makes a country and a culture is diluted to a point that it is almost non-existant. Those factors are correlated but not causally determined.
Because we've been fed a narrative that there's only "one right way" to care for the external world. For example, in my city of Portland, they recently revamped the public library. Was it done to make the beautiful building up to code so that people could enjoy books for a hundred years more until the next renovation?
Oh no... that would have 'exacerbated inequality'. Instead, we removed the books, shortened the bookshelves, and got rid of seating so that homeless men would have a place to walk around drugged-out and not be found masturbating behind tall bookshelves. That was the 'one true way' of using public funds, according to those in charge. Don't disagree or you might get labeled a fascist.
We see this all around the world. Just look at the reaction to Ezra Klein's book 'Abundance'. Such obvious solutions, things we can all agree on (I consider myself a conservative and enjoyed the parts of the book I've read). But if you look at the reaction it's getting, it's the same tired rhetoric. We are not allowed to have nice things. Wanting nice things is apparently chauvinistic, racist, classist, something supremacist, some other -ist, etc.
In the meantime, anyone who has not followed the 'one true path', has basically resigned themselves, and many have become actively resentful of the system writ large.
"Consider that about ten percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top one percent and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top ten percent[1]. This is visibly not the same for the more static –but nominally more equal –Europe. For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries."
And there is more quoted here: https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...
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.
> in large part because they’re mandated to write blank cheques for social care with no support or strategy from central government. Individual cases in Central Bedfordshire are now costing up to £750,000 per year, a quarter of the entire libraries and leisure budget and an amount that is rising rapidly with no apparent ceiling. As I wrote previously, “In a single year, residential care costs for children have increased by £2,000 per child… per week,” taking the average cost for a single case from ~£200,000 to ~£300,000 per child per year, again with little explanation as to where the money is going or how this is even possible.
> Similarly, “school transport costs have increased by over 100% - from £9m to £20m - in just 4 years” - that’s driven by an unexplained rise in the number of SEND pupils eligible for support and it amounts to roughly the same as - deep breath - the transport, roads, parking, libraries, leisure, housing benefit, public protection and safety budgets combined. Central Bedfordshire Council is not an outlier here - collectively, council overspends on SEND services are set to hit £2bn in the next year, risking further bankruptcies. Again this is not about pitting children against libraries, but asking if we seriously believe we’re addressing either of these things well?
Local councils have to pay the very large bills for social care and supporting SEND children but have basically little control over how it's spent or levers to help control the bills.
Fixing this so councils can once again spend relative minor amounts of money improving the public realm could go a long way to improving day to day experience. Definitely some other large structural problems (see the huge costs of HS2) but it would provide a noticeable improvement in people's lives and potentially isn't too hard for a government willing to make some bold changes around taxation, local government funding and providing proper national strategy and funding on social care.
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.
and child is being looked after by barely qualified minimum wage worker (often actually paid below minimum wage if you add unpaid overtime and foreign workers not knowing the laws), meanwhile owners of care services live opulent lifestyles in places like Dubai. UK services market is not free, which is part of the problem.
SEND = "Special educational needs and disabilities"
I can't help feeling like this is a vicious cycle - the lack of community facilities is causing greater isolation, causing a rise in health needs and so on.
All this is a direct result of bad, ideological law making combined with a biased judiciary that interprets it in bad, ideological ways. Unfortunately it's the ideology Labour is in thrall too and they're in power for several years at minimum and maybe much longer if the right stays split, so the state of Britain's infrastructure will continue to sharply decline.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
This is because America's alleged welfare queens are undocumented, whereas Britain's are there legally and the government actually has very good data on which groups are a net boon and which are a net draw on the economy.
I'm not a Brit and I could care less at the end of the day, but it does seem kind of bonkers to me to be importing people while your own country suffers.
Local authorities are forced to sell off assets and fire direct employees, then get charged a fortune to provide basic services and child and adult social care.
And for contracts and outsourcing, the ownership of the contract itself is the thing that gives value, not providing the actual service. Creating a whole set of perverse incentives.
A council should look at a pot hole in a road as a massive opportunity. Here is a chance to provide good quality work for local people and local resources, but the opposite happens.
We have a whole layer of service retailers e.g. for electricity and gas and communications, who are not more than a spreadsheet speculating on long term prices, a call centre and a web site. Their entire business model being based on a) not messing up the spreadsheet calculation b) enough people being lazy and not renewing or switching their contract every year.
Our financial services industry has massive positive PR, seen as a net good for the country. When in reality it is focused not on basic things like providing banking and direct insurance, but in attracting our best and brightest individuals from around the country and instead of having them put their talents to something productive. Instead reward them for creating and maintaining complex systems to move wealth around, asset strip regions, hide it from tax and create a layer of gambling and financial products on top of these systems.
I could go on.
Sadly the author I think is getting distracted by specific issues. Focusing on school or social costs. Or specific large project over runs.
While I do not agree with him on many things, I think Dominic Cummings's treatment of the subject digs deeper: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/q-and-a
You need to read through a ton, but it paints a picture of a government chasing newspaper headlines. And an overall ineffective method of running a country from the top down.
How could it be that an act of parliament is being held up by local councils? Parliament's orders used to be the law of the land. Now it is but one of many.
Often treatments of British decline read as if the authors wished Britain had been fire bombed to smithereens, and benefited from the Marshel Plan. Yet this undersells the British people. They know how to build new houses. They know how to build trains. Yet Britain as a whole is still searching for that win-win. The path to fixing problems without compromises.
Meanwhile Britain's managerial and governing class is so incompetent, it is hard to imagine replacements who would perform worse.
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).
Even if you don't agree with him (and I know many don't for various reasons..) You have to admit that he does bring a new perspective to the table and (as a layman economist) it just makes logical sense.
Regardless, the main stream economists have not been able to either predict the economy or improve it (for the general majority of people) and it seems that every western economy is following the same trajectory where
All the above then begs the question, who has all the money? Who has all the wealth?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.
Stock market/trading is a kind of zero sum game. For him to gain, someone else has to lose.
However, real economy is not a zero sum game and I dont think he understands that. AFAIK never was an entrepreneur, or created a business.
He advocates for a wealth tax, ie a tax on unrealised gains.
For realised gains, we already do wealth tax and thats called capital gains tax.
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.
You can achieve far greater enlightenment by simply droping your preconceptions about rich and poor people and understanding the very basic day to day things happening around you than you will achieve listening to him.
The "I.T. Revolution" was supposed to bring a vast payoff from improved productivity. Did the benefits of society-wide process improvement get snarfed up by... vastly more inequality ?
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?
Probably seeing a lot of new/upper segment cars and well maintained houses.
Google suggests that line would be about 127 miles long, or about 200 kilometers. That’s one different consent form for every 25 meters of track. Mind boggling.
> That’s one different consent form for every 25 meters of track. Mind boggling.
I can easily imagine Sir Humphrey lecturing Bernard on why 8276 is not enough consents and why they need more of them.
Our country inherited/modeled our civil services and bureaucracy based on the British system. We know the effort it takes to get things done.