Comment by dzonga
3 hours ago
London has the house prices of California and the income levels of Mississippi.
the UK is seriously broken, I always reflect on the energy generation statistics of the UK per capita
while in the US you see automated car washes, in the uk most car washes are Albanians n other immigrants etc
I spot checked some of this and from what I can find, the median salary in London is about $12k more than Mississippi, and the median house price in London is about $100k less than California.
Bear in mind that obviously the mean salary in London is going to be far higher than the median (the finance industry will skew it), while I'm not sure that's as extreme as Mississippi. Additionally median salaries reflect a lot of service jobs and similar labour. Dubai has a lower median wage than either London or Mississippi, but people don't think of it as economically broken.
Comparing California (an extremely large state that I presume has cheaper housing outside major urban areas) to a city seems a bit of a poor comparison.
I don't disagree that the UK has high energy costs.
House prices are out of wack anywhere desirable because the local income is irrelevant when non-locals are allowed to scoop up the local supply.
Real estate prices are out of whack everywhere. Even in places with no good jobs, low population density, and rapid depopulation, real estate prices are increasing exponentially. There are no market forces in play anymore.
Countries like Indonesia have banned foreigners from owning land altogether. You can apparently still own property through land-lease agreements and other arrangements, but not the land. I think they've cracked down on illegal rentals too.
House prices are only "out of wack" in areas with poor social housing programs.
Housing in Vienna is still affordable, only due to their very successful public housing programs. Public housing can be both beautiful and highly affordable if you want it to be, it's not like we don't know how to make good quality homes with lovely public amenities. It's mostly developers that want to skim on everything while selling it at the highest cost possible.
Poor system if this is the outcome: unaffordability.
Nobody will admit that the housing is overpriced, so they would have to be forced to do so.
This is terrible for normal people, and slightly bad for the investors, but only a crisis or organized government action can reset the damage done by decades of investment in already existing buildings.
The former is much more likely to happen.
There are differences, but this is oversimplified, and market is “mostly” working. You need more money in California, for transportation, for health care. The standard is bigger houses (bigger everything) in Cali. Life might be richer, in some ways more pleasant, in London (it’s not weather though), including shorter flights to many interesting places.
From my experience the ratio of savings was similar, but the ppp of course favored US for absolute numbers.
Income and wealth inequality! I don’t see a way out for the UK
Median wealth per adult in the UK is 176k. In the US it is only 124k.
Source: UBS Global Wealth Report 2025
Of course US does has a much higher mean wealth…
We're a wholly-owned subsidiary of America Inc., Minsk to Washington's Moscow.
The Vampire Squid has its tentacles in all our orifices, and we won't be free till we cut it off, or it dies of an obesity-related illness.
Not disagreeing but also I wonder how it compares to inequality in Britain before the US was a thing.
1 reply →
The UK is already close to the USA on obesity rates and catching up fast.
Meh. Everywhere has foreign investment. The economic elite of the UK owns the US as well.
[dead]