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Lyman Stone 石來民

@lymanstoneky

almost as high annual income! not almost as wealthy! britain's accumulated wealth is very very large!

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Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Aug 24

I would like to remind people that Poland is almost as wealthy as Britain and it's on track to surpass it in the mid-2030s.

9:42 AM · Aug 25, 2025

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Lyman Stone 石來民

@lymanstoneky

Aug 25

for example: britain's 100 largest public companies have market cap of $3.7 trillion. poland's have $253 billion. divide by populations: poland's 100 biggest firms are worth $6,900 per capita, britain's are worth $54,000 per capita.

this is actually a big problem in international perceptions of wellbeing by the way! many people feel like europe is very rich even though the gdp numbers clearly show europe is rather poor compared to e.g. the US the difference is europe is old and industrialized early so has

this is true in many obvious ways! "value of art stored in museums per capita" is high in europe! if western europe auctioned off all their art they'd get more for it per capita than if many other similar-GDP-per-capita countries auctioned off all of their art.

there are similar stories for a lot of other kinds of assets. and guess what? having lots of assets can make you feel very rich! and it can make you look very rich! and you are very rich! but being asset-rich-cash-flow-poor is, of course, a tricky situation!

some painful bad economics in the replies no, GDP per capita cannot be interpreted as return on assets! nonono! the returns on national wealth are only the share of GDP made up of actual returns to wealth: returns to land, capital, maybe some weird math around pension incomes

it's easy to imagine a country having relatively high per capita income from those sources, but relatively low income from labor, and thus having high wealth and relatively lower GDP per capita! if the country simply has an older age structure!

i'm sure there's some database somewhere that lists countries by wealth and also tracks income from capital+land, idk what it is but surely it exists but all that to say: yes! the capital depth and capital intensity of economies really does vary and in some ways that aren't just

Augusta Klumpke

@AugustaKlumpke

Aug 25

accumulated wealth isn't an applicable concept to states. all the fixed assets it has will deteriorate rapidly without regular capital infusion and upkeep.

pray tell-- does egypt today benefit from the pyramids? how much of that benefit is due to regular capital infusion? is the full benefit of the pyramids measured by the depreciated expected future flows of revenues from pyramid tourism? my answers: yes, not much, no

Nice distinction, thank you.

Oh yeah, that colonial loot is still working

Wealth is important primarily because it generates income. When you look at income, included in that is the effect of wealth. If a high-accumulated-wealth nation has the same level of income as a low-accumulated-wealth nation, the trajectory of the former is probably very bad.

These are fake PPP numbers. In fact, per capita income in Poland is less than half of Britain.

Still doesn’t bode well that Poland is managing to catch up in annual income without the huge accumulated wealth advantage of Britain

GDP should account for most accumulated wealth, though. Imputed rent of owner-occupied housing is counted. Accumulated capital is valued largely based on its productive capacity, so countries with similar GDP per capita should have similar capital stock.

Many people conflate the stock vs flow problem in US/Euro wealth comparisons, but if you’re not generating national income from a comparatively high “stock” of wealth that indicates you have even bigger problems, even if you can cope that you’re in the asymptotic phase of an

Correct. Purchase price adjusted also means that superior British wealth could be spent in Poland to procure cheap goods or property or services.

Yes, also true for Japan

CharlieMartel

@CharlieMartelll

Aug 25

Britain has all that diversity, amirite?

Right, Britain is old money rich. If and when Poland catches up, they'll be new money rich. It's very different.

What wealth does UK have that Poland doesn't? More expensive real estate? If anything, that leads to a *lower* standard of living as the median person is more squeezed to afford housing. More holdings of offshore investments? Per person this is likely minimal.

Wealth is fundamentally delayed consumption and for your objection to matter, British wealth must be stored either in way that produces significant consumer surplus somehow, but doesn't show up financially. And I have no idea what kind of asset you describe.

So this means that Poland’s capital stock is just much more productive than English capital? Or possibly just used/geared more for productive uses?

Poles earn 80% of a British income and work 20% more hours

A large chunk of the UKs entire economy for 20+ years has been London being a shady safe heaven for various rich people, from post soviet oligarchs and 3rd world dictators families to really old money. Most places in Wales I've seen is not far off of most shitty Balkan towns.

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Charalambos Balachamis

@HaroldosBalak

Aug 25

very interesting take

Yes but wealth has maintenance costs, and the older it is the costlier it gets. Britain could sell its wealth to boost its income and lower costs, but eventually it will run out I know what you’re getting at but gdp is a better metric of a country’s economic “health”

For example a built up stock of beautiful towns and properties is hard to measure from GDP, but it certainly counts as wealth. Wealth is a stock, GDP is a flow (subject to foreign currency conversions). A pond versus a hose.

Master Ridley

@mstr_ridley

Aug 25

Yea so many people don’t get this in the “europoor” debate. Like how much is Notre Dame worth? Like even putting aside historical significance, just what would it cost to build that exact thing today out of same materials? Maybe hundreds of billions. HS2 cost $100bn and

GDP measures size of economy, not income They are also not even close to being similar in annual income

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@assafzim

Would that interest you? Do you have an interesting take on the matter?

what are most recent median household income for poland and great britain (adjusted ppp)?

how many Polands by monetary value are in the British Museum alone? :)

Oliver Fisk

@anotherfish759

Aug 26

Wealth is just the ability to translate into assets or cash (for access to current production) UK “wealth” is bound up in illiquid housing assets which cannot be translated into purchasing power.