Mississippi Overtakes Britain |
Something remarkable has happened here in Mississippi. The state that for most of the last century sat at the bottom of nearly every American economic table has, quietly, pulled ahead of the United Kingdom in GDP per capita. Last week, Governor Tate Reeves highlighted the fact on X in his characteristically Southern style – and the post went viral.
It is a moment worth pausing over — and worth understanding because what Mississippi has achieved over the past five years is not an accident or down to luck. It is the product of a deliberate, sustained program of free-market reform that few governments successfully deliver.
I first noticed that Mississippi was overtaking Britain in terms of output per person back in 2023 and wrote about it for both The Atlantic and The Sunday Times. The reaction from British commentators at the time was a familiar scramble for excuses — purchasing power parity adjustments, Ukraine, COVID — anything, in fact, other than the policy choices Britain itself had been making for 30 years.
Now the claim that Mississippi has overtaken the U.K. is no longer disputed. A new report from the Institute of Economic Affairs last week........