----------- Britain Unemployment: 4.8% Population in poverty: 17%
* So according to this, their story that by more employment only ( as such) people are getting wealthier, is just not standing...and we knew it before but it's a great food for masses. Here in Australia they are feeding us this shit how we are becoming significaly wealthier and there was something like "every Australian is worth around $ 200000 and something...think housing bubble... All tho I was surprised to see (seven years ago when I came) how middle class actually had dissent standard of living and was pretty large one could tell...and I liked it a lot...Now this is still standing but is built on " legs of glass" of house equity debt of practically every single family...... It would be interesting to see same information on USA or Canada and Australia... I can remember a long long time ago when I visited western Europe few times in few years that while I haven't seen obvious poverty neither in Scandinavia or whole continental western Europe it was really visible in Britain.
For example, suppose a country spends more money on health care per capita, but has an inefficient or unfair distribution of that spending. Is that better or worse? Or, suppose a country has a low number of average working hours, but a lower per capita GDP. Is that better or worse?
It seems to me that this ongoing "France versus Britain" thing is typical internecine bickering between politicians: Chirac uses evil capitalist England for his political purposes, while Blair uses evil communist France for his political purposes. Meanwhile we've got global warming, third world starvation, an energy crisis, thousands of poorly controlled nuclear weapons, a shooting war...
Typical politics.
You are right that it is very easy to find convenient statistics for almost anything. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
