Getting so tired of HN, every thread has these kinds of vague, ignorant, semi-political comments. Just a throwaway opinion with some unrelated quote to appear smart, not related to the posted link, nothing added to the discussion.

The Suez Crisis happened 70(!) years ago, the article is talking about where modern day UK spends its money. It's literally right there in the opening sentence, if you only bothered to open it:

>Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question - why do we seem so broke?

Aside from strictly technical topics, this community is now worse than Reddit.

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.