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.
Yes, we have noted it for decades. The blacks in the UK are educated and learn the Queen’s English, spoken properly.
Here they have their own ‘culture’, if you can call it that, and any black attempting to ‘sound white’ is ridiculed. They are doing themselves a disservice and are paying the price. It all goes back to pre-civil war era and the Reconstruction then Jim Crow times.They refuse to even try to talk like the rest of the country and will consciously make efforts to not do so....................
When I ran a company in Canada, I had black employees from Commonwealth countries (my lone South African was a white girl). It was a novelty for me, a Southerner, to hear blacks talking with British accents. It was especially nice that these folks also did not share the culture/work ethic of their American cousins.
My god. Seriously?
I live on the east side of Olive Branch, just south of Memphis, close to Marshall County. I know Hickory Flat well. Recently my brother and I have been looking at wooded land all over Benton, Marshall, and Tippah Counties (Hardeman County, TN too).
I assume the author, being a Brit, has a "tin ear" when it comes to Americanisms as well as Americans and America for that matter.
Oh yeah it has been much maligned by the liberals: What's the matter with Kansas
Boy, that's the truth. Most countries will bury their skeletons, but we shout 'em from the rooftops - and that is one of our strengths.
WOW! Is that a SAR 80 rifle? It is like NOT HAVING A RIFLE!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_military_rifles
“The L85A1 was improved in 1997 after constant complaints from the troops. The main problems were difficult maintenance and low reliability. These problems led British troops to nickname the weapon the “politician”, as, in their estimation, you could not make it work and could not fire it.”
Not true, many hunters are of modest means and background.
That would be the GB that had more Tory govts and PM’s than Labour from 1945, had the longest (Tory) party in power (18 yrs from 1979-97). And whose current govt is a Tory-led coalition with a Tory PM.
Social socialism perhaps. If such a thing exists.
Havent a clue what that means.
British Tory governments don’t impress me any more than US republican ones do when it comes to reversing socialism. Fabians have been busy replacing capitalism with socialism in Great Britain, the rest of Europe and the US for well over a century, pretty much unabated and uncontested with the notable exception of Reagan and Thatcher.
Life expectancy in Britain is actually higher than in the US
I live close to two large commercial shooting estates in the south-west of England. Their typical charges for a day's shooting (which would be called 'hunting' in the U.S.) is £30 per kill. Not excessive. In fact shooting has been growing in popularity, particularly among businessmen as an alternative to the golf course for out-of-office networking. That's one reason why shotgun and other sporting gun ownership is higher than it's ever been.
Oh. That explains it.
To me, liberals all sound like the teachers in a Charlie Brown TV special.
My Uncle who died a couple of years back had 78 acres of wooded land, the old family farm, just north of Hickory Flat. I don’t know if his widow sold it or if his son lives there now or whatever happened to it. It may be for sale, I don’t know. You could go to Hickory Flat and ask around if someone knows whatever happened to the Bradley place out on route 2 and if it was for sale................
How much for deer hunting there? $20 like it is here?
Michigan is about the size of England, and has around 700,000 hunters every year. How many there?
I met some people from England and they couldn’t believe how cheap it was to go deer hunting here. They said it cost a small fortune in England.
I wasn’t talking small game hunting, here you don’t even need a license for that on your own property.
There was a whole family from England that came here for a wedding and stayed for about 3 weeks. We had a ball, they were a lot of fun.
It’s very difficult to make meaningful direct comparisons of the kind you’re asking for, since there are such huge differences between the two countries in the patterns of land use, the quantity of uncultivated land, the populations of the various game species, competition with other recreational pursuits in the countryside, and (especially) the very different traditions in the way the various field sports have been practised in the US compared with Britain. (Even the terms ‘hunting’ and ‘shooting’ mean something quite different when used by British as compared with American sportsmen!)
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