Mississippi is richer than the United Kingdom. Yes, the same Mississippi, the poorest state in America, where the average life expectancy for a man is 67 – 12 years younger than for men born in Britain – and infant mortality is over twice as high as in the UK. But, yes: according to official GDP figures, Mississippi is richer than Britain.
This is held up by the right as proof of our national decline. Initially floated about a decade ago, this idea has been repeated ever since, discussed in Forbes, the Mises Institute, and, most recently in June, by the Atlantic. The former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell went native and relocated to the Magnolia State, which he publicly makes the case for. So too does Chris Williamson, the influential podcaster, who says that “the UK is a great country to be poor in and a terrible country to be rich in, and America is a terrible country to be poor in and a great country to be rich in”.
Britain is poorer than it should be. Real earnings have stagnated since the financial crisis and productivity growth has collapsed. That is a national failure. But the measure doing the work here, GDP per capita, is deficient. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently set out the metric’s many problems, one being that it implies that time not spent working is worthless – which no reasonable person believes.
Measure for GDP per hour worked instead, and the picture changes completely, as America is placed alongside – rather than in front of – other Western economies. Bruenig argues that, taken together, these two metrics show that European countries – including Britain – do not choose to plough efficiency savings into yet more hours of work, but on more time off. Additionally, neither number tells you anything about the cost of living: the rent, the deductible, the petrol it takes to reach a shop that sells vegetables.
The Mississippi meme captures none of this, but it does point, nevertheless, to vital questions: what is the good life and how might we organise our societies to achieve it? I recently interviewed Adrian Wooldridge about his book Centrists of the World Unite!. It’s a paean to liberalism in theory, in which he doesn’t criticise the market, but does criticise what modern adherents say is important. And he starts with John Stuart Mill.
The 19th-century philosopher was raised by his father under a regime of rationality and calculation. From three years old he studied Greek (and later Latin and geometry), a curriculum devised by his philosopher father, and supported by his godfather, the utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham. In early adulthood he broke down. Later he would seek out poetry, beauty and human affection – things his education could not count. Wooldridge contends that the liberal centre is stuck in Mill’s childhood, obsessing over growth rates and social mobility, and, along the way, forgetting about enormously important aspects of life.
Wooldridge says: “We have too little of the good stuff but too much of the bad stuff.” Mass production can create copies and tat with dazzling efficiency and the information environment is low quality and impermanent; in other words: worse. His solution – an education in the sustained appreciation of difficult things – is unfashionable but, I think, right. A few works, absorbed properly and returned to throughout life, held as “a resource against noise and confusion”.
Here’s where I’ll take it somewhere Wooldridge might not. Finding the kind of beauty and ideas that can hold your attention for a lifetime is a noble aim – but it counts for little without ordinary relations between people and the material conditions that foster them. A decent political economy must also deliver: safe housing; weekends; equal paid parental leave so that a father is present for the irreplaceable first months of his child’s life and a woman’s career is not taxed de facto; a working day that ends in time to eat together; sick pay; a GP; good-quality food even if it isn’t the cheapest; and the rest. None of that registers as wealth for the Mississippi measure. In fact, most of it registers as cost.
I grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon but if you want to be a journalist in this country, you move to London. I’m not asking for sympathy: it’s a choice I made, and I’d make it again. Start a career or keep the place: its street, the friends, my family. Wooldridge calls this homelessness in an abstract sense. Not the absence of a roof but the absence of a feeling. Every hour I have worked in London sits inside the GDP figures. What I traded for it does not.
On this terrain, the right is winning. Conservatism has a centuries-old answer of how to live. Custom, family, nation. It is not a stupid answer. The left’s problem is that it tends to sound like a lecture, so whatever it comes up with next had better be fun. When Salvador Allende said Chile’s road to socialism would taste of red wine and empanadas, he was not only invoking tradition and abundance but also promising a good time. A politics offering nothing but discipline and improvement deserves to lose to one that offers belonging.
If wellbeing is the objective, GDP is the accounting. Yes, in Mississippi they earn more money than we do in Britain. What does it buy them? A long working week, a longer drive to a supermarket and an earlier death. A Mississippian and a Brit stand before you. Now, tell me, who is the richer?
Listen to Adrian Wooldridge in conversation with Oli Dugmore on our interview podcast The Exchange
[Further reading: The anti-AI revolt is here]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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Subscribe here to commentAll lovely aspirations. How to pay for them in a doggy dog world to borrow a phrase from Gloria in Modern Family? And if the UK is a great country to be poor in…………..