I forget what motivated me to go and look it up, but a few days ago looked into a comparison of the British and Irish economy between shortly after arriving in 2014 and finally leaving in 2021. Below is the chart snaffled off the dataset website Google pointed me at:
Ireland up 85% from $57.3 to $106 while Britain shrank from $47.4 to $46.9.
I am not sure of the ins-and-outs of ‘nominal’ GDP but Dublin in the mid-2010s felt like a vibrant place that was on the up, and it is in those years I built my career. Much change was also happening in Irish culture and overall it turned out to be a good fit for that stage of my life. At the time I was not paying much attention to Britain but my general view was it had turned the corner around 2014 although this was somewhat biased by London-centric visits. Ultimately I left to escape Ireland’s Covid lockdown and the morons who were allegedly running it.
London in the latter part of 2021 was de-facto fully open and at least the greater London region was going through a massive post-Covid bounce, but then inflation hit its peak at the start of 2023 and upon properly scratching the surface things no longer looked rosey. A chance visit to Bristol was a horrifying experience of a worn out and declining city, the sort of thing that gives into memes about Britain without London being poorer than Mississippi.
As it turned out all of 2023 was within statistical noise of recession. It felt like the stagnation of 2012 that made me emigrate. While New Zealand turned out to be a mistake in economic terms going to Ireland rather than to Britain is increasingly looking like one of the best decisions in my life. My pessimism at the time of the British economy proved correct.
Coincidentally I was on the verge of emigrating again when I started a new job recently.