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How Andrew Wood Got Literally Everything Wrong

Why the author of How Countries Fail is a prisoner of MAGA lies and completely ignorant of reality

Allan Milne Lees
5 min readJan 15, 2025
Dress code for MAGA enthusiasts

One of the interesting things about Medium is the breadth of content. On the one hand, you have well-informed commentators like Dylan Combelick who reports daily on Ukraine; on the other you have crude Russian trolling. And very close to the latter, but unintentionally so, you get the extremely ignorant folk who think they’re clever because they’re repeating lies they’ve been fed by cynical politicians. Andrew Wood is firmly in the latter camp. His article dated 21st December 2024 is an outstanding example of how to get literally every single thing wrong, and as such it deserves an autopsy.

Poor Andrew thinks that the ‘Murkan Way is the only option possible. He thinks that the UK (and presumably other “socialist” European nations) is on the verge of collapse because its welfare state system absorbs too much government spending. This leads to the UK borrowing money on the bond markets. Poor Andrew doesn’t seem to realize that all OECD nations have been net borrowers over the last twenty-five years and that the USA actually has a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than the UK. The USA’s debt ratio is around 110% while the UK’s ratio is 89%.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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