Are Brits set to corner the world market in pig semen?

The guardian
Let's admit it: Britain is now a developing country
We have iPads and broadband – but also oversubscribed foodbanks. Our economy is no longer zooming along unchallenged in the fast lane, but a clapped-out motor
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Aditya Chakrabortty
The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013 20.00 GM

Compare his forecasts and fossicking with our fundamental problems. Start with last week's Pisa educational yardsticks, which show British teenagers trailing their Vietnamese counterparts at science, and behind the Macanese at maths. Or look at this year's World Economic Forum (WEF) competitiveness survey of 148 countries, which ranks British roads below Chile's, and our ground-transport system worse than that of Barbados.


Gender equality? The WEF ranks us behind Nicaragua and Lesotho. Investment by business? The Economist thinks we are struggling to keep up with Mali.



Let me put it more broadly, Britain is a rich country accruing many of the stereotypical bad habits of a developing country.

"India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay."

Stop thinking of development as a process that only goes in one direction, or which affects a nation's people equally, and it becomes much easier to see how Britain is going backwards.


Sure, Britain has iPads and broadband – but it also has oversubscribed foodbanks. And the concept of the working poor that has dominated political debate since the crash is also something straight out of development textbooks.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen defined development as "the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency". Yet when it comes to social mobility, Britain now has the worst record of all advanced countries – and will soon be overtaken by the newly rich countries of east Asia.


And it's when wealth is concentrated in too few hands that the forces of law and order get used as a militia for the elite – and peaceful dissent gets stamped upon.


Otherwise, we're well set to corner the world market in pig semen. The United Kingdom of spoink.

File:325Spoink.png - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia

　さまざまな指標をあげて、衰退するイギリスを嘆きつつ、富裕層のための社会になった経済の建て直しを願っている。


日本もそこから学ばないとね。