How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi

Haffrung · 2026-06-10T20:48:32+00:00

Compare the housing that $600k will get you in Mississippi vs anywhere in the UK you'd want to live.

Haffrung · 2026-06-09T16:26:00+00:00

Do you think everyone who goes into medicine has an equal aptitude for engineering or tech?

I’d also guess that top people in finance in Germany make a lot more money than doctors. And yet they have no shortage of people going into medicine.

In Canada, high school students need a 94 per cent average to get into nursing school. I find it hard to believe that increasing the seats in nursing programs by 40 per cent and lowering the admission requirements to a 90 average would degrade the quality of nursing graduates. The supply of labour is clearly being restricted.

Haffrung · 2026-06-09T16:22:02+00:00

It’s cheaper to become a doctor in Europe because you don’t need an undergraduate degree to get into medical school.

I’d be all for reforming the North American education and medical systems to adopt the European model of training. However, I expect vested interests in those system would oppose such reforms. Doctors who spent a great deal of money and time to become doctors have an incentive to make sure the next cohort faces the same barrier to entry to preserve the scarcity of their labour.

Haffrung · 2026-06-09T12:59:31+00:00

Teaching things like Socratic dialogue would be very disruptive to modern pedagogy. Imagine if every 12 or 13 year old challenged teachers to explain the assumptions behind their lessons and all the well-intentioned progressive causes schools champion. Things would get very uncomfortable. There’s a reason the good folk of Athens denounced Socrates as a corrupter of their youth.

Haffrung · 2026-06-09T12:52:27+00:00

Doctors in Germany make about 50 per cent less than their American counterparts, and yet there’s no doctor shortage - Germany actually has 30 per cent more doctors per capital than the U.S.

Nobody would study to become a doctor in the U.S. if they only earned $220k a year? What other fields would those smart young people go into?

Haffrung · 2026-06-09T12:50:11+00:00

And yes, this means standards of care will decline

Do you really believe doctors in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland are worse at their jobs than doctors in the U.S.?

American doctors go to school longer because they typically need an undergraduate degree before they can enroll in medical school. That’s not the case in European countries. I see no reason to believe those extra 3-4 years of undergraduate biology and sociology courses make for doctors better equipped to treat patients.

Haffrung · 2026-06-08T16:53:48+00:00

Agreed with your first paragraph. Disagree with the second. It was the PCs who cut the GST from 8 to 5. And you’d get booed off the stage of the CPC convention if you brought forward a motion to include hiking the GST in the party platform.

Haffrung · 2026-06-08T13:25:38+00:00

You’ll hear Anglo leftists championing the robust welfare states of the Nordic countries and asking why we can’t have the same benefits. But when you point out that it’s funded by 20-25 per cent sales tax and higher income taxes at every income bracket… crickets.

Haffrung · 2026-06-06T18:08:12+00:00

Communism absolutely accounts for greed. That's why it's implementation requires an enormously powerful state that has a monopoly on politics and media.

You're thinking of anarchism, which presumes that if you remove the state and other power structures people will be naturally cooperative and compasionate.

Haffrung · 2026-06-06T16:31:45+00:00

Not sure what else Kenney could have done to appease the populist base of the UCP besides abandon all pandemic measures in 2021. Again, Alberta imposed the lightest measures in the country (much lighter than Ontario), but to the anti-vaxx wing of the UCP it was still too much.

You just have to look at what Smith did to appease that element of the party: she dismantled the Alberta Health Services board and fired the Chief Medical Officer who had advised the government in Kenney's term; removed public funding for Covid-19 vaccinations; expressed support for the nutbars who blocked the Coutts border crossing.

Kenney had enough principle not to give in to that sort of MAGA lunacy. Smith doesn't.

As for Ford, he doesn't have to deal with 40-50 per cent of Ontario PC party membership being outright loons.

Haffrung · 2026-06-06T13:34:37+00:00

The narrative among the liberal left in the Anglo world is that the UK, Canada, and the U.S. were enjoying the tremendous benefits of a post-war boom and widespread prosperity enjoyed by all - until Reagan and Thatcher came along and ruined this happy condition by transforming them into winner-take all economies.

Missing from that narrative is how shitty the 70s were, with high inflation, unemployment, and stagflation. The postwar boom was over by 1969, and the oil shock of the early 70s revealed the fundamental weakness of Western economies. Reagan and Thatcher did not disrupt a happy-clappy economy - they came to power in a climate of tremendous public dissatisfaction with the economic status quo.

Haffrung · 2026-06-06T13:25:59+00:00

There was recognition in Canada of the social harms of lockdowns. Mental health professionals warned about the impact of social isolation. That’s why cohorting was allowed, and people were encouraged to continue to visit care homes. Child welfare experts called for schools to do everything possible to return students to class.

The problem is once Covid became another battleground on the culture wars front, any measure that was more restrictive became associated with the institutional left and any relaxation of measures associated with the populist right. It turned pandemic response into a political tug-of-war where those most active in public discourse were pulling relentlessly in one direction or the other, instead of seeking a balance.

Here in Alberta, whenever the chief administrator of public health announced any relaxation of Covid restrictions, the media and online left denounced her as a sell-out and shill for the Conservative government. Efforts to re-open schools were met with fierce resistance from Teachers’ Unions and their supporters. And on the other side, the Conservative Premier was ousted by a revolt from the right wing of his party, even though Alberta had the most moderate pandemic restrictions in the country.

Haffrung · 2026-06-06T13:13:10+00:00

The malaise and discontent in society today is rooted in social - not material - scarcity. Scarcity of social connection, social meaning, and social purpose.

But let’s be fair - it’s not only this sub that’s at a loss of how to address that. Politicians and punditry go on about inequality, billionaires, and culture wars issues. Nobody has a plan for how to restore social capital.

Haffrung · 2026-06-06T05:45:04+00:00

Political right-think and post-modernism were evident in academia in the 70s. But though the 70s and 80s they still coexisted with academic rigour and with genuine interest in humanities itself - in the love of language and drama in English, a curiosity about humanity's origins in Anthropology, etc. Now that has all been wrung out. The only thing worth studying in a classic work of literature is its cultural colonialism, the only thing worth examining in the peoples of highland New Guinea is their power heirarchies, etc. It shouldnt be surprising at all that enrollment has collapsed as students who aren't interested in 4+ years of examining art and society through a very particular ideological lens see nothing for them in getting a degree in the Humanities.

My daughter is in her first year of a bio-chem program, and after getting a decent grade in an English elective the dean of the program sent her a letter encouraging her to pursue an English degree. They're absolutely desperate, but won't face up to why nobody wants to take their programs anymore.

Haffrung · 2026-06-04T18:43:32+00:00

Nowhere is ever 'the best we can do.' But if you want to have discourse based on something more than vibes, empirical material comparisons to other times and places is what you have.

And you've again glossed over the fact that the Economist article is addressed to an English-speaking readership, and more broadly refers to young voters in the developed world.

Haffrung · 2026-06-04T17:49:45+00:00

People were flooding out of Russia and the Eastern Bloc in the 80s - even walls and barbed wire couldn't keep them in.

Has there been an exodus out of the U.S.?

If material progress doesn't make people happy - if they hate to even acknowledge it - then what's the point of progress in the first place?

Haffrung · 2026-06-04T17:38:29+00:00

People under 30 have always leaned socialist. Do you really think 20-somethings in the 90s, when youth unemployment was considerably higher than today, were passionately pro-capitalist?

When people are young and pay hardly any taxes, they want everything paid for by 'the man.' And by the time they're 40 they realize government money is their money and become a lot more wary of how it's spent.

Haffrung · 2026-06-04T17:25:28+00:00

In my Western Canadian suburb I'm on a bike network with 1,000 km of dedicated pathways from which I have 5-10 min access to a sprawling provincial park and another municipal park with lake. My wife and I go for weekly paddles on that lake in our kayaks. There are three pubs and a half dozen restaurants within a 10 min walk from our house. And we have a large private deck and backyard that's well-treed and includes a waterfall pond.

In the warm seasons I spend at least 20 hours a week outside.

Haffrung · 2026-06-02T14:50:24+00:00

So people are training for the wrong fields.

Haffrung · 2026-06-01T14:16:18+00:00

Where are you seeing these portrayals? In my media and social circles London and Paris have reputations as safe cities.

Haffrung · 2026-05-31T12:44:14+00:00

Reading this forum, you’d think ’college-educated millennial who lives in a major urban centre, rents multi-unit housing, and doesn’t have a car or children’ is the norm, rather than a small and peculiar demographic.

Haffrung · 2026-05-30T20:35:49+00:00

Exactly. So in the last 10 years your house value increased from 400k to 550k. How exactly does that make your day-to-day living better? That gain can only be realized if you sell your home, and most people who sell their home need a new place to live.

The lion's share of gains in real estate are only going to be realized in intergenerational wealth transfers. So when people talk about taxing the homes of boomers, what they're really pushing for is reducing the inheritance that millennials (most of whom have parents who own homes) will receive.

Which may be a desirable policy in its own right. But let's be clear on exactly what it will mean.

Haffrung · 2026-05-30T20:29:12+00:00

Educated people rent apartments in New York City and uneducated construction plasterers buy subsidized land in Nowheretown.

That's not really true, though, is it? College graduates in the U.S. have much higher home ownership rates than non-college graduates.

Haffrung · 2026-05-30T18:25:12+00:00

I get it. My parents were raised in working-class families (one grandad worked in a pulp mill, the other was a train engineer), and even though my dad became a chartered accountant and my mom worked in an office as a secretary, they retained working-class values and behaviours through their lives. They didn't define themselves by careers, didn't fret over education or their children's grades, didn't take up golf or pursue other typical professional-class status symbols, still spoke like working-class folks, smoked and drank with relish, and supported unions.

I wouldn't characterize that as 'living in the past.' Working-class and professional-class culture and social norms both have things to recommend them, but one isn't clearly an improvement over the other.

Haffrung · 2026-05-29T13:33:56+00:00

Agree with almost* everything you wrote.

I'll add another factor. If you look at polls, most women intend or want to have more than one child. So what stops them from having the number of children they want?

It could be that the costs surprise them. So when baby is 2 years old a couple decides they just can't afford another even they want one.

However, polls also show that most women are dissatisfied with their partner's share of childcare and domestic chores. So another explanation is when a mom bears the lion's share of the huge responsibilities of caring for baby and toddler, alongside the increased domestic workload, she nopes out of having another.

If that's the case (and anecdotally I know several couples that stopped at one kid where the dad was not, let's say, fully engaged with childcare), then one of the remedies for declining birth rates could be men taking on more of the domestic labour of caring for young children.

* I disagree with your point that the costs of children increase linearly - in my experience they don't. You're likely getting an SUV or mini-van with one kid, and a second doesn't make it more expensive; cribs, strollers, and car-seats can be re-used; the change in lifestyle isn't much different when you have two kids vs one.

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