Konstantin Kisin

Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone.

That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is without accounting for the number of people living in it.

A household income of £100,000 per year is high by British standards at least, but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household.

A single person living on 100,000 pounds is in a very different position to a family of five who are effectively getting 20 grand each.

The explanation for why labor and the Tories let immigration run rampant was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger when he said, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

If all you care about is the headline figure, why not hand the bedroom to your in-laws to top up your prosperity with their pension?

When described like this, it sounds frankly insane.

Yet that is precisely what our politicians are incentivized to do.

They are judged on the country's total GDP.

The easiest way to increase it when you're busy strangling your economy with net zero high taxes and endless regulation?

Bring in more bodies.

This really isn't complicated to understand.

So why do so many people in Britain who clearly feel the economic pain

nonetheless refuse to see it.

To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivized politicians to deceive them about what's actually happening.

Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive but false idea that they are struggling because the rich aren't paying their fair share.

A report last month, however, has opened my eyes to another reason, one I had never considered.

It turns out many British people think that the decline in their living standards is personal to them while the rest of Britain is somehow thriving.

A big new poll and focus group studies conducted by Freshwater Strategy with the support of the John Templeton Foundation asked participants where they thought Britain stood economically compared to our main competitors.

As David Frost put it in his excellent article, voters are living in a dream world.