He's about the only one of the lot of them that actually understands that the point of being in power is to change things for the better. He's done an absolutely smashing job with energy, and I'd love him to get the opportunity to do the same sort of real improvements on the rest of the economy.

On the other hand, emergency medicine through the NHS is probably just about the best you can get. I cannot sing its praises highly enough.

It's an eye-catcher, but obviously fallacious - the usual counter has been to point out the life expectancy difference of 10+ years.

Not that most people are particularly interested in nuance, smh

An even stronger case is pointing out that Japan has a lower GDP per capita than Mississippi. But walk around Japan and try to claim that it's "poorer" than even a wealthy state in the US.

> The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

As someone who has been in and out, the poverty increase in Western Europe is astonishing. Whatever metrics I will show you, will meet something like "oh yeah but metrics X doesn't mean anything", but still, 20y ago buying a car was fairly standard. Going on holidays same. Let's not talk about buying a house. Nowadays, any of the above is considered as a sign of being "privileged", while it used to be middle-class before.

> Japan made the same discovery thirty years earlier. The hikikomori phenomenon (young men, predominantly, who withdraw from social life entirely, sometimes for decades) emerged in the 1990s, after Japan’s asset bubble burst and the lifetime employment compact dissolved. The cultural commentary at the time, both Japanese and Western, framed it as a peculiarly Japanese pathology, something about shame and conformity and the pressure-cooker school system. This was wrong. It was a structural response to the closure of the productive ladder, and it has now appeared in every developed economy that has reproduced the same structural conditions.

It's worth noting that the US fertility rate is alos below replacement levels (~1.54) but the only thing that props up our population is immigration. Japan eschews immigration as a de facto ethnostate. South Korea is further along in that crisis. China will need to find a solution too.

But there are cultural reasons here too. Japanese work culture, pay relative to work, etc.

[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/jap...

[2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-sy...

Failure is always a possibility, but historically it hasn't killed the economy, it has rebalanced the economy; seeing businesses and people reduce their concentration in a specific area as they fan out into lower cost areas. Which is a rather useful function. This is why we're not all living in one giant heap somewhere in Africa.