Posted on 08/27/2014 11:48:58 AM PDT by Red Badger
Now and again, America puts its inequality on display to the world. We saw it after Hurricane Katrina and we have seen it again in the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. A white police offer shoots dead a black man, after having stopped him for jaywalking. Britain’s police don’t have guns, so these scenes are unthinkable to us. But American-style inequality? We have plenty of that too, we’re just better at hiding it – as I say in my Telegraph column today.
I came across a striking fact while researching this piece: if Britain were to somehow leave the EU and join the US how would we rank? The answer is that we’d be the 2nd-poorest state in the union, poorer than Missouri. Poorer than the much-maligned Kansas and Alabama. Poorer than any state other than Mississippi, and if you take out the south east we’d be poorer than that too.
I’ve been asked (on Twitter) to link to my source, but I’m afraid there’s no study to point to. It’s original research. But it’s also a fairly straightforward calculation. You take the US figures for GDP per state (here), divide it by population (here) to come up with a GDP per capita figure. Then get the equivalent figure for Britain: I used the latest Treasury figures (here) which also chime with the OECD’s (here). A version of this has been done on Wikipedia, but with one flaw: when comparing the wealth of nations, you need to look at how far money goes. This means using a measure called Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). When this is done, the league table looks like the below. I’ve put some other countries in for comparison.
It’s not surprising that America’s best-paid 10 per cent are wealthier than top 10 per cent. That fits our general idea of America: a country where the richest do best while the poorest are left to hang. The figures just don’t support this. As the below chart shows, middle-earning Americans are better-off than Brits. Even lower-income Americans, those at the bottom 20 per cent, are better-off than their British counterparts. The only group actually worse-off are the bottom 5 per cent. Here are the figures:-
In America poverty is more obvious due to White Flight, a phenomenon we just didn’t have. In the era of the motor car, the middle class (who tended to be white) worked out they could buy a lovely house in the safer suburbs and commute. The population of St Louis, where Ferguson is a neighbourhood, has halved since 1970. And back then, Ferguson was 99 per cent white. Now it’s 67 per cent black. Any Brit who has walked the streets of today’s Detroit will be stunned: this supposed city looks like a bombed-out ghost town. But 45 minutes up the I94 lies the gorgeous sprawl of Ann Arbor, and some of the loveliest spots on earth. America’s White Flight has created a visual spectacle with no equivalent in Europe. When urban trouble kicks off in America, this spectacle is there for all to see.
Britain has no space for white flight, we’re forced to live closer together. And we fool ourselves into thinking that proximity has brought cohesion. In fact, we have developed a new kind of segregation: keeping the poor cooped up in council estates, a stone’s throw from the posh parts – yet abandoning them in a welfare trap from which escape is pretty damn hard. Brits may be appalled at America’s gap in black-white life expectancy. But our Liverpool-SW1 life expectancy gap is just as big; we just don’t get upset about it. When you walk south over Westminster Bridge from the House of Commons, life expectancy drops five years.
No one beats up America better than Americans. They openly debate their inequality, conduct rigorous studies about it, argue about economics vs culture as causes. Their universities study it, with a calibre of analysis not found in Britain. Americans get so angry about educational inequality that they make films like Waiting for Superman (trailer below). And the debate is so fierce that the rest of the world looks on, and joins in lamenting America’s problems. A shame: we’d do better to get a little angrier at our own.
Lost me after that opening.
What on Earth are you talking about?
They haven’t incinerated the buildings ,Yet.
I will give the mooslim communities their due..... they recreate the countries they originate from very accurately in the Cities they have taken over.
Glad I live in the good part of Mississippi, the part where you can’t hear that RINO drivel SUPERTALK
Part of the reason I posted this is because I was raised in Mississippi until I was 14........................Northern part, southern Benton County................
Hickory Flat?
Liberals idea of flyover country comes from Hollywood:
West Virginia - Deliverance
Mississippi - Mississippi Burning
Kansas - Wizard of Oz
Georgia - Dukes of Hazard
Tennessee - Walking Tall
Alabama - My Cousin Vinny
Louisiana - The Green Mile
Texas - Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Florida - Porky’s
Any others?....................
Dat’s My HOME!.................Still have relatives there, and Potts Camp, Cornersville, etc...............
Mississippi blacks make up almost 40% of the population, the highest percentage of blacks in the U.S. It is wise to keep that in mind whenever Mississippi statistics are thrown around. There are counties here that are roughly 90% black and as FReepers might expect, all the failure and ruin that accompanies unfettered liberalism is on full display in those sad places. In contrast, my county here in northern Mississippi is quite conservative and it’s growing and thriving.
Yes and no. Yes, things tend to be smaller on the average in Britain. But my wife’s two sisters and their husbands who live in England and Scotland have very nice homes. It’s just that cars and houses are little smaller, and they’re a lot more expensive. But my in-laws live pretty good lives. They’re not lacking for things. However, even my wife wouldn’t want to live in England again. She’s likes the bigger, more wide-open U.S.A.
Income is not the same as wealth. The UK has more wealth than more states than just Mississippi.
I know several people there. I grew up in the Red Banks Holly Springs area. Small world
The Jayhawks perhaps. But not the state. The few times I drove through Kansas I was struck by its simple beauty.
My sister lives in Mississippi. For a while up in the Delta. Now down on the coast.
I generally like visiting. The pace is slower and the people are generally pretty nice.
But driving around in some of the more rural areas my daughter said to me that, for the most part, Haiti looked better than some of those areas. And my daughter has spent a few summers in Haiti with some missionary work.
That’s not the best endorsement someone could give a US state.
You should read “What’s The Matter With Kansas” by New York Slimes writer Thomas Frank. Frank grew up in Kansas and thinks it’s basically a third world country because it tends to vote for Republicans. Let’s just say Frank gets many things wrong in his book.
In 1971, I ran out of gas on a non-interstate near Meridian in the middle of the night. With me in my little Datsun station wagon were my wife and infant son.
A 25ish black guy came along and offered to drive me to the nearest gas station. Leaving my son and wife, who thought she’d never see me again, with the car I rode with the guy to his house to tell his wife where he was going.
The house was a one room log cabinish affair off of the main road a ways. We left there and drove in his Ford sedan to a gas station where I got a can of gas and in gratitude, offered to fill his car up for him. Damn, that Ford held a ton of gasoline!
Anyway, we got back to my car, put the gas in and my family and I continued our Mississippi journey, shaken but not stirred.
What part? I’m From Hickory Flat, originally.........
I drove clear across Kansas twice, on I-70, both ways.
I fell asleep at the wheel in Kansas City and woke up in Denver............
Gun crime in the UK is still a fraction of the US.
Its actually levelled out and is dropping, the worst time was the 90’s and 00’s.
And the UK does not prosecute gun owners who defend themselves. You are I assume referring to Tony Martin. The court (wrongly imo and in the opinion of many British) found that, as he had shot the burglars in the back at some distance, he exceeded the legal level of self defence allowed under UK law.
I would point out that, contrary to myth, there have been a tiny amount of such cases in the UK, and that several burglars and attackers in the UK have been legally killed, the last of note in Manchester 2012.
BTW, I am myself the victim of violent crime/burglary/assault in 2008, where I used violence in return. And got nothing but commendation from police and court. And was told by a police officer I could have legally used MORE force!.
Oh, the people seemed wonderful. I stopped somewhere this summer to fill up my motorcycle. The owner of the station said to me, “You aren’t from around here.”
I asked how he could tell. He looked at the other old black guy sitting there and laughed. He said, “well, the only time we see folks like you is when they are lost or something is on fire. And I don’t smell smoke”
They both laughed like hell.
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