> I'll believe that when I see it

You're seeing it right now, if you actually look.

"UK economy could be comparable to “Slovakia” in 10 years - says economist Duncan Weldon"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5g_S9BBtqw

> The UK, Germany and France are declining in lockstep,

Nope.

https://youtu.be/R5g_S9BBtqw?t=155

"Britain is unique among the G7 countries in that GDP per head is still below that when the pandemic hit."

Notice the "unique" bit.

>says economist Duncan Weldon

Forgive me but I disregard the predictions made by economists, a class of people who bear no consequences for their predictions.

You may be correct but this proves nothing.

Genuinely curious: why/how are these countries declining in your view?

brexit was - from an economic suprarational viewpoint - obviously a non-forced error. the resentment that eventually got channeled into this populist surge is very real and stems from the same deepening inequality that plagues the US and other globalizing economies.

people scraping by outside London see the decades going by and their lot not improving, and eventually the busy beavers crafting messages found the right ones ("the UK is paying so and so much pounds every day to the EU instead of funding the NHS more")

this solved nothing, people scraping by still have low economic productivity. infrastructure development outside London is late by decades (because every time there was a cost increase it slowed down basically, and there were a lot of cost increases - every recession, interest rate cut, Baumol effect, etc meant costs going up)

similarly development inside big cities is stunted because of cost increases.

because a lot of globalization made local services relatively more expensive (this is the Baumol effect basically) and all the affected areas are very labor heavy: NHS (healthcare), education, construction.

then all this recently culminated in idiots getting elected (Boris Johnson, etc) who then made things worse by not doing anything.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-the-uk-is-having-an-ec... - in this paywalled post Noah argues that the UK is going through a mild version of the emerging economy crisis (like Sri Lanka), because its import dependent, trade deficit, capital flight, pegged currency (basically for price stability the Bank of England has to), and lots of borrowing in foreign currency (USD, EUR), and accelerating inflation

Totally agree regarding the UK, I was mostly trying to understand where the belief in the "lockstep decline" of the other countries (Germany, France, ...) comes from.