I really didn’t see it that way. When I got by degree the Chief Engineer suggested I could move to another company that could be beneficial for me. I accepted.
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That’s not how the OP is set up. It’s one thing to ask which country is best for “commoners”. It’s another thing to specifically say that the UK is not the best for commoners and expect everyone to prove that it is while you contradict them.
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Fair, I re-read my opening post and you are right. It was clear I was seeking contributions about places other than the UK. And it was clear that my view was the UK is pretty dismal for people on low and modest incomes. Still is my view. You can’t have 13 years of austerity and wage constraint and not have problems.
What problems, most of the neighborhoods I visit have at least one BMW of less the five years old, see, the commoners were quite clever, and became middle class, that’s Blighty for you.
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And leeched off the real commoners.
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Gosh, does that mean that there is in fact no cost of living crisis in the UK? All is well? Upper-ward mobility is the norm? The wealth divide is narrowing?
I’ve clearly been out of the country too much.
It was narrowing, more by accident than strategy, but, it probably peaked pre Brexit, Brexit becoming the scapegoat, there is always a national scapegoat when the tomtit is about to hit the fan. 
Cough, splutter, gasp. That’s not the data I’ve seen - let me go digging and see if I can validate this claim.
I’ve got to express a bit of surprise here because a number of sources confirm:
“over the past 14 years wealth inequality measured by the Gini coefficient has remained by and large stable, according to the ONS” - this statement or similar was found in multiple places such the FT, ONS itself and others.
However I also noted two things:
“The median income was rising by 2.2% on average for the last five years before the pandemic. However, in 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5%, whilst incomes for the richest fifth saw a 7.8% increase” - although this is talking about income not wealth.
The other interesting thing is how the UK compares to other countries. On the Gini index (look it up, but essentially an index of how unequal wealth is across a country’s population) the UK ranks 6th worst with the US, China & India being worse but pretty much every European country being much better.
So I found nothing to confirm that the wealth gap was widening or closing. And it is still too large.
These surveys are a bit suspect, they would have had some credibility in say 1960, one has to assume in 2023, a lot of the wealth held by the perceived lower echelons is invisible to the compilers, we won’t go into what the possible reasons for that may be.
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