Austerity measures also play a part.

It's a painful to take a look at cities like London and Vancouver and compare them to SF and Seattle.

I can’t imagine how bad the standard of living in the Uk has got.

The only people living in 4+ bed detached / semi detached houses are people with inherited wealth or huge joint incomes. Doctors, senior software engineers, people who work in finance. Your average middle class professionals, teachers, civil servants, lecturers, journalists and so on, will all have gone down a rung in the ladder. They're doing OK, but probably living in a smaller terraced house or maybe a flat.

Part of our problem (in the UK) is that very few people with any kind of power can imagine it either.

They just don't realise how bad it is. They seem to think it's about choosing a cheaper brand of food rather than the reality of choosing who in the family gets to eat food at all. Or going out less often, rather than the reality of not even being able to afford to get to interviews and then having benefits cut for not doing enough to find a job.

This isn't me personally (I'm doing reasonably okay on a tech salary, though not even London-scale let alone the Valley, and I hope I never need to retire). It's based on the little I know, and I suspect even my own awareness is under-stating the reality.

Everybody has their circles, and no matter how egalitarian you hope to be or how much you try to keep abreast of the truth we never really feel how it is for those with less than us. Unfortunately for the UK, and especially in the last decade, our politicians mostly don't even seem self-aware enough to understand the levels of ignorance caused by the stratification of society and the othering of the poor.