The UK ain't alone in that either. California's agricultural sector is one of the largest in the world (let alone in the US) in terms of revenue and output, in many cases providing most/all of national and even global supplies of various fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Virtually all American almonds and broccoli, 90% or more of American dates and avocados, top producer of peaches and dairy products, the list goes on.
And yet, California's entire agricultural sector only totals to $50 billion in annual revenue. There are multiple tech and entertainment companies in California that individually surpass that, in some cases (like Apple and Amazon) by an order of magnitude.
This is so key to understand because it illuminates how not every job is equal in raw value.
You cannot have a drying rack manufacturer in the US that pays a bunch of workers $35/hr. There simply is not enough value in drying racks to achieve this.
This is what is lost on the populist crowd. They compare themselves to high value workers (i.e. workers that produce a lot of raw economic value per hour), and then want to legislate that low value work pays on the same order.
To put that into simple terms, they want to make it so that producing a single $20 bill per hours pays them $30 an hour. No matter what, that isn't going to work out well.
Value isn't static, of course. Take the food that was brought up earlier. Food saw a real increase in value by around 30% from 2019 to 2024. A couple of destructive weather events, fertilizer scarcity, and war in the Ukrainian breadbasket shook people enough to think that maybe they shouldn't take food quite so for granted.
Drying racks aren't considered terribly valuable today, but if you lock up manufacturing to a single country and impose a number of other restrictions, sentiment can change quickly. The latest episode of Ted Lasso might not seem so important anymore.
And yet, California's entire agricultural sector only totals to $50 billion in annual revenue. There are multiple tech and entertainment companies in California that individually surpass that, in some cases (like Apple and Amazon) by an order of magnitude.