Something Weird is Happening in The UK....

Take a British payslip from 2008. Adjust it for inflation. Put it next to a payslip from the same job today. For a very large number of British workers, the two numbers are roughly the same. Not similar. The same. An entire working lifetime's worth of effort, qualifications, promotions and overtime — and the figure at the bottom buys about what it bought the year Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Resolution Foundation ran the counterfactual. Had wages kept growing at their pre-2008 rate, the average British worker would be earning around £11,000 a year more than they do. That is a thirty-seven percent gap between the pay people have and the pay the previous trend said they would have. That money is not missing because somebody took it. It was simply never created. And the comparisons are worse than the gap suggests. A typical British household is now around nine percent poorer than its French equivalent. At the bottom of the income scale, the gap is twenty-two percent. Before the financial crisis, German households were better off than British ones by about £500 a year. That gap is now roughly £4,000. So: Britain did not have a recession. Britain had a recession that never ended, and then stopped calling it one. And the weird part is not any of that.