The scary thing about 21st century Britain is the extent to which they now wallow in the never-happened fantasy of the Harry Potter universe to compensate for it. That has changed absolutely everything, not all bad to be sure.

Of course that is true but it undeniably helps. I wonder if postwar Britain watching its hegemony decline will be anything like the current decline of the US.

Yeah, like I don't think Norway or Switzerland have ever been empires, much less superpowers.

But they provide a very good standard of living for their citizens.

And "small but prosperous" is exactly what Singapore does well. The UK could learn a lot from Singapore.

There was a TV show made in the 1980s called The End of Empire [0] which is (mostly) available on YouTube. It chronicles what happened in India, Palestine, Iran, Egypt, Cyprus, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Singapore etc. and may be of interest to those musing about Britain's decline.

I learned about it from watching Coup 53 [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2WaMdGl0uw&list=PLanJEt7jLo...

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1984135

Like with every colonial power, the empire wasn't there to enrich the entire country or the average people, it was enriching the crown and wealthy business magnates involved in the trade, basically the top 1%, the rest were left to wallow in poverty and hard labor.

False. Read Oxfam's report on the topic: https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/takers-not-makers-unjust-p...

I think people are downvoting you because, on a surface level reading of your comment, it could sound to an ungenerous reader like you're saying colonialism was a good thing. I read you as making an economic argument against it, which does not preclude (and indeed complements) the moral one your downvoters are so coupled to.

It's frankly sickening that some people think the empire was an exercise in us helping the third world develop purely out of the goodness of our hearts.

Also somehow the comment above is talking exclusively about influence and power in the "world order" which is not at all what the article is about.

Power != Prosperity

I think far too much effort was spent building critical frameworks in social sciences without the lesson sticking that it is a two way street. You build the critical framework to frame specific criticisms. By doing that, you can highlight influences that may be missed in another framing.

Which isn't a bad thing. But the key there is in building frameworks. Instead, we seem to have built large portions of the public into thinking these are the only frameworks that matter. And so everything has to be tied back to them.

The cultural emphasis HN has on original commentary and not doing low-effort link posting has its costs. Sometimes an FAQ model is just a superior line of inquiry.

The most plausible models for UK decline that I've encountered come from a Youtuber named Britmonkey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aJ-57_YsQ

He talks about housing as _ongoing existential crisis_, contra widespread apathy on the subject, and about how since Thatcher, the political rule has tended to integrate the worst aspects of center-left and center-right governments.

Ezra Klein's _Abundance_ has been in the news lately, and there are some very similar arguments made there, focused on the US context.

Yeah, Founders don't post here anymore, they are busy chatting on some secret message boards and group chats the riff-raff don't have access to. This site is now for bitter tech workers and wannabes and the comments reflect it. I'm guilty of being a member of that class I admit, and I'm not doing much to elevate things but the discourse has become incredibly uninteresting as a result.

I read the article. My comment was prompted by this:

> One reason for this is that parts of the British state are fundamentally misaligned with goals like ‘improving living standards’ or ‘increasing wealth’, whether that’s through hand-wringingly incompetent procurement processes, long-term failure to invest in the infrastructure and management required to support ‘moar frontline staff!!’, acute treasury brain, or endless cohorts of committees and quangos.

> The current level of ambition, of vision, just doesn’t match up to the situation we’re in.

It’s about a failure of state capacity. The article’s entire argument hinges on why British institutions can no longer turn wealth into functioning systems. The post-imperial loss of strategic vision among British elites is not a distraction: it’s the historical foundation of the current malaise.

Suez was the moment Britain exited the world stage and never figured out what it stood for domestically in the vacuum that followed.

You can’t talk about the failure to invest, coordinate, or reform over decades without asking why the ruling class stopped trying.

> The root of the word celebrity is celebrate.

Actually, that's not quite right. The root of both "celebrate" and "celebrity" is a Latin word whose original meaning is something to do with crowdedness. Celebrity (in the older sense of "being famous") means being someone that people crowd around. The original meaning of "celebrate" was to hold a religious service, attended by crowds of people. Later "celebrity" evolved to also mean a person who has the quality of celebrity-in-the-old-sense, and "celebrate" evolved to also mean to hold some other kind of event that attracts crowds. But "celebrity" didn't ever primarily mean "person who is admired", it was always "person who attracts attention".

(It is still true that people who are famous and then not famous can find it hard to adapt to the change, of course.)

> Seems like one of the dangers of empire is that losing it, which is inevitable, leads to a hard-to-shake condition of feeling like a has-been society. It makes it hard to just be a good nation, a good place to live.

I think you are right, but I also think it afflicts the ruling class a lot more. In particular, politicians, who are power seekers by nature, feel the loss more than ordinary people do. IN their minds, not being a super power equates to declined, even if life improves for ordinary people (which it did).

England is a has-been society because 1) they are old and have more vacation. You've got less people working less hours. REAL GDP per work hour is up >50% since the early 80s - what people seem to think of as some golden era - and is more than double since the 60s, another golden era according to others - even real GDP PPP adjusted, you're still >50% since the 60s.

2) They decided they wanted to punish hard workers and productive investment and aggressively reward capitalists that "park money" in non-productive assets (like real estate).

England could easily reverse these decisions and aggressively reward hard work and investment in productive assets, open the doors to intellectuals, and the hard, smart working people and investment would come pouring in.

But, they'll never do that, because boomers.

The problem with England is the problem elsewhere. The amount your society needs to improve to let ~1% more people not work every year for ~30 years is incredible. The entire west has done it. But the benefits are going almost exclusively to the retiree class.

In the not too far future, if trends continue <50% of adults will be working with very high standards of living. This is absolutely UNHEARD of. At the same time, you'll see basically no benefit at all for the people who actually do the work.

This doesn't seem like the best way to distribute productivity gains to society, but it's the way we've chosen, and as long as old people have a say, you better bet they're gonna vote for the status quo or even bigger pension payouts in the future.