They're not that bad at all. There's a lot of fud. The whole world is struggling at the moment, you won't find a single country that isn't affected by high interest rates or inflation or some other crisis or issue. We're real doomers in the UK so everything is the end of the world.
I think the rise in food bank usage over the last decade and a half has been quite alarming[0]. You can find supporting statistics elsewhere too[2][3].
I know that plenty of people are doing alright and, in my opinion, this group is vastly over-represented on HN. The food bank usage stats suggest that the living conditions of people across this country have been getting worse for a while now, and while the pandemic and inflation have exacerbated this problem, they did not create it.
That is an argument for not assuming the absolute levels are accurate. It does not explain the increase unless you're arguing that people have for some unexplained reason gotten more steadily more willing to exploit it.
You are saying it cost money before? People drinking more tap water and less bottled water would be a sign of decline in purchasing power and that doesn't even include a factor of losing time for something of insufficient value.
You can use the same argument to explain away homelessness. Personally I doubt _many_ is any big, or even most. Unfortunately, like you, I do not have any data.
It's interesting - I follow various UK and Canadian subreddits, and you get almost the same rhetoric in both.
"This country is much worse than it used to be, I'm going to emigrate soon"
Except in the UK, they're going to emigrate to Canada.
The UK does have some uniquely local problems to deal with, but they're overlayed with a global downturn as well. It's easy to attribute the whole thing to local problems, when in fact a big chunk of it is global. The issues seem to mostly be the same - the massive house price inflation that's sucking the joy out of life for everyone under 40.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the border.
Everyone knows the issues of their home country pretty well - but it's harder to get a real "feel" for issues of other countries without living there.
The best indicator you can find is net migration flows (those people who move from the UK to Canada/USA, and have the opportunity to return, do they?).
Every country in Europe feels the same way. Things are worse and the country is going to the dogs. That's not really the case though. High inflation and the post COVID, Ukraine war situation has caused problems that people haven't seen in a while. On the whole though, things are way better than they have ever been.
Both Australia and the US has larger populations of UK migrants than Canada (Australia alone more than twice as many), and while no individual EU country has as many UK migrants as Canada does, the EU as a whole (yes, unsurprisingly given the population size) also has far more despite the bigger language barriers.
I do agree that many of the problems are the same, but the UK is facing both the global issues and a case of repeated political footguns.
