Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards).
The manufacturing industry in the UK at that time suffered from three serious problems:
- Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world.
- Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.
- Lack of access to capital. Banks were very reluctant to lend to that sector which made modernisation really difficult. With the ever present threat of nationalization it was hard to raise capital from shareholders. Why invest in technology when you could be nationalised on a whim?
I don't believe that these were significantly contributory, from experience:
- Margret Thatcher: whilst I'm no fan of her, at most she just administered the needle to a sector that was already on end-of-life support.
- The unions: I worked for a large engineering company (fully unionised) that had not had a strike for 30 years. We also introduced modern automation without resistence. The reason? Good management.
UK manufacturing is what long term decline looks like. Apart from a few small examples the UK has not been a world beater in manufacturing for fifty years or more.
On the other hand the UK is particularly good at Finance, Insurance etc.
'"Working in trade" had a low social status'
I think the push in the 90's to drive everyone to university also had a big negative impact on the status of 'working in the trades'.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US this is only half true. Degree-requiring jobs still have better social status over trades and low/no skill work, at least from a "what do you want to be when you grow up" point of view.
However, many more people than previously are skeptical of the math behind the cost of a college degree. Going into significant debt only to find a field flooded with others, competing with overly ambitious expectations for AI, and it's much harder to see the value in becoming a desk jockey at big corp versus becoming a plumber or field tech, or welder.
I'm sure someone will point out the math still works in favor of getting a degree, but I'm not really the one that needs convincing.
The local state flagship public university has $18k listed for annual tuition for residents of the state, and double that if you're from out of state. Add in their estimates for books, housing, food, and a surcharge for computer science majors, and you're looking at $40k for the 2025-26 school year... $160k worth of debt for a 4 year degree, at a public school, with nothing but a piece of paper and a bad economy to greet you on the other end.
Conversely, trade schools in the same city offer $8k tuition for a full 20 accreditation course load, no book costs, and no mandatory dormitory stays. You'll spend the rest of the time probably in a lower paid apprenticeship, especially if you do go for being an electrician or something similar, so it isn't all roses.
Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is. The cynic in me says price increases are about setting up class boundaries and pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations
>The cynic in me says price increases are about setting up class boundaries and pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations
This makes absolutely no sense when you spend two seconds to think about the supply and demand.
Case in point, college is free in Europe and that has led to the exact problem you fear: oversupply of college grads and devaluation of degrees "pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations".
In my European college town it's easier to find a ML developer than a skilled HVAC tech or EV mechanic.
I can't speak for the whole Europie but in my experience those kind of jobs just don't really pay well. They kind of make sense when living in a cheaper area but I personally wouldn't imagine actually making ends meet from this kind of job in a capital city in my country.
European countries have used free college education as a technique to artificially hold down the youth unemployment rate. Full time students don't count as unemployed. The problem is eventually they graduate and then many still can't find a job, or they end up underemployed in a job that doesn't really require a college degree. At least they don't have huge student debts but this system is tremendously inefficient for the rest of society which has to pay the taxes.
>At least they don't have huge student debts but this system is tremendously inefficient for the rest of society which has to pay the taxes.
Depending on which country, but yes it definitely can be very inefficient in the nations with super generous welfare states. I know people still being students well into their late 20s or even early 30s because why not, when government pays for your education and as a student you get a lot of discounts like free public transport, cheaper phone plans, free bank plans, laptop and travel discounts, etc, so then why bother with a bad jobs market with low wages and no more discounts when you can postpone the harsh reality of adulthood?
Hot take here, but honestly IMHO, the government's constant putting their thumbs on the economic free market scale via the overly generous welfare state has been doing more harm than good to society and will lead to a rude awakening for people when the system is not solvent anymore and will have to pull the rug from under them and you have a generation of people who grew up without the skills to survive without the state holding their hand every step of the way. I expect massive political turmoil, extremism and maybe wars.
Is defaulting on student loans possible? I thought, at least in USA, the only way to get out of student loans is: pay it off, work for a qualified nonprofit for awhile, or die
Government student loans made college prices effectively a made up number. If you can just make up a number and anyone can afford it because they're backed by the government, why wouldn't you just make the number go up?
Of course you can also juice up the numbers by lowering standards so that people who don't understand numbers or basic math above a 6th grade level take on these loans without actually understanding what they are doing.
Not every college has crazy tuition. The school I attended in 2000 to 2004 has kept pace with inflation generally. Annual tuition is now around $10k, which is a lot, but not unmanageable for many middle class families. I'm curious how this compares across universities throughout the U.S. Maybe the tuition story has bifurcated somewhat?
Tuition for my college in 2012-2016 was around 6k per year. A quick Google shows me this increased to 11k.
And it's worse than it looks, because this doesn't include cost of materials, the dreaded "other fees", and of course, room and board. Room and board increased 50%.
And this used to be considered a "best value" college. I'm sure it's only worse fr private schools in the state.
There's no class warfare grand conspiracy going on. Like any businesses, colleges charge more because they can. Customers have been willing to pay, and the availability of government subsidized student loans made those customers relatively price insensitive. That model is finally starting to break.
To be fair to colleges, their costs have also increased somewhat. Baumol’s Cost Disease means that it's impossible to achieve significant productivity gains in education and so labor costs continuously increase. But that only accounts for a fraction of the total increase in college tuitions and fees.
You're really missing the point. The college administrators who make those decisions are well paid but generally not wealthy or true members of the upper class.
> Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is.
There is a perfect reason, though I might sympathize if you say there is no excuse. If one wanted to engineer some incredible Rube Goldberg machine to cause prices to spiral out of control beyond all lunacy, one could hardly do better than what we have in the United States right now.
Young people were told that without college/university they were doomed to a life of destitution and misery. They were hounded by teachers, guidance counselors, pundits, politicians, advice columnists, celebrities, journalists, you name it. The propaganda machine was relentless, gigantic, and hilariously un-self-aware. Then grants were minimized and replaced with student loans (unforgivable in bankruptcy, thanks Biden!).
This sets the stage. College administrators knew that everyone could now attend, and that they were guaranteed loans to pay for it, that they were young and foolish and didn't see debt as a millstone around their necks during mandatory swim time, and that they were fickle, fashion-seeking, and indifferent to lack of academic rigor. These universities needed to expand capacity to capture all those loan dollars, they were competing with other universities, and they knew their market. They built resort spa dorms... no longer were these places the dormitories of old, where you packed 6 freshman into a broom closet and made them sleep on floors. They build gorgeous grounds that looks like royal gardens. Expensive new labs and facilities and lecture halls. Why not? The kids would be paying for it (all their lives, thanks to the omnipotently powerful force of compount interest).
The kids, on the other hand, barely more than children, didn't choose the best value schools. They chose the prettiest... it's not as if they couldn't afford them. For most people, the fanciest product seems like the highest quality, and who would choose low quality? Nor could universities be the sanity limit here even if they wanted to. If they refused to build out their own little Versailles, they'd just see enrollment drop. And their costs were going up quite a bit too, when you double the size of the institution, you need more than double the staff. When the buildings are fancier than yesteryear, full of computer labs and high tech, you need more than just janitors. Entire bureaucracies were spun up just to deal with it all.
But a curious thing happened, with every university and college competing for those dollars, none really got ahead near as much as they wanted to or expected to. So they just doubled down, and tried to make their schools more attractive to prospective students. The state school in my city still strives to reach an enrollment of 50,000 last I heard (this would put it more than double its late 1980s enrollment, I think).
In summary, we have a gigantic slush fund of money that means no one has to be price-conscious, perverse incentives prodding those who administrate to jack their own expenses/costs to astronomical levels, and a society that still insists and even demands that everyone be college-bound despite the ambiguous evidence that it is good-value. Until one (or ideally all) of those things changes, there's no way for college to be any less expensive than it is.
Right, and it's worse when you remember that the people who voted for this knew exactly what they were doing because it's how they made their money in the real estate market: obtain property rights over inelastic supply, pump cheap debt into the counterparties, price spiral, laugh all the way to the bank.
The state school I went to 20+ years ago, by contrast, has around $10k in annual tuition, which isn't bad compared to a trade school. No mandatory housing/food costs either. I got a great education there and am still friends with some of my profs. I also got one of the least practical (for most people) degrees (creative writing), and turned it into a comfortable job for myself, though I recognize that's the exception and not the rule.
I never thought of university as a way to get a job. It certainly did help me in many, many ways though, and can't imagine having my current career without it.
In my opinion, shipbuilding is different to other industries that the UK was known for.
The UK was once an 'island of coal in a sea of fish'. But we used up the easy-to-reach coal and ate all of the fish. Not only that, we also used up all of the easy to access iron ore.
I am no fan of Margaret Thatcher, however, how would shipbuilding make sense in the UK once the raw materials have to be shipped in from the lowest wage mines on the planet?
It would make more sense to build the ships nearer to the raw materials. Yes I know the Koreans, Japanese, Germans and Chinese have the same resource allocation problems, but the workers were cheaper, offsetting the material and energy costs.
Regarding the UK being 'particularly good at finance, insurance, etc.', London is the portal to tax havens, as in the islands that were the former British empire. The U.S. has some financial regulation that London lacks, hence the arrangement and relevance of London.
> - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world.
> - Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.
I see these as ultimately being caused by your third point:
> - Lack of access to capital. Banks were very reluctant to lend to that sector which made modernisation really difficult. With the ever present threat of nationalization it was hard to raise capital from shareholders. Why invest in technology when you could be nationalised on a whim?
You remove the problems by paying those workers more to be more productive. You pay them more by having more capital with which to do so.
The threat of nationalization exists because capital is unwilling to do this. Why pay Tommy Adkins more when you can set up a shipbuilding yard in a country with loose regulations, low labor costs, and an authoritarian government that's willing to grind the proles into hamburger if they speak up about either of the former issues?
Ultimately, when you can do that, there's no amount of anything that the workforce in the UK, or any other developed nation, can do to keep up. You have to either instill the nationalism in capital, or scrap the entire enterprise.
That rather implies a society of subsistence farmers is the "most valuable", which is the one thing everyone in every society runs away from as fast as possible when technology prevents economic alternatives.
IME the people who care about societal value more than monetary value either already have plenty of the latter or aren't going to be the ones doing the work.
Do we need more farmers, or for food to be more 'valued' in a monetary sense? The developed world is awash in affordable food. Even machine tools are incredibly cheap and accessible, the issues around those are related to where they're built and creating skilled labor to run them.
I work laughably far from anything that provides basic needs to anybody, but that's not because I don't value food, it's because our system is _incredibly_ successful at creating it so I can go do other stuff.
I do agree we have some huge policy issues to deal with around food affordability and skilled labor and supply chains, but I don't think it's because we've de-valued food production.
ehhhh, lets be real. I’m a dyed in the wool meat eating junk eater.
But, a lot of how we produce food today is not humane or sustainable, and a lot of the food itself is so poor in nutrition that it leaves us unhealthy and unbalanced.
This isn’t a lecture, just an observation, I am guilty of eating (almost exclusively) poor quality, over processed, mass produced foods.
But realistically speaking, if we solve the worlds hunger, what should be left is the pursuit of art and science.
Not whatever we seem to be doing with Excel; how can that be more valuable than feeding and healing humanity?
Not sustainable due to the fossil-fuel laden garbage we feed to bovine stock.
Not sustainable because it causes major health issues which stress the healthcare system and limits quality of life - especially the affordable stuff that people tend to think is “normal value”
As I said, all the fossil fuel inputs could be replaced with renewables. In particular: farm machinery can be run on non-fossil energy, nitrogen fertilizer can be made with green hydrogen, and pesticides can be synthesized with feedstocks derived from non-fossil sources like biomass.
The second sentence doesn't make any sense. None of that makes something unsustainable, just regrettable.
It's possible, but we're not doing it because we believe it makes more economic sense to ignore those issues.
When economic sense no longer makes sense sense then we're going to be having issues. And going back to my primary point, everything should really be serving the primary sector, not the other way around really.
The base issue is that fossil fuels are not being charged the cost of their externalities. All the problems stem from this. Do that, and all these subsidiary problems melt away.
Huh? Nitrogen fertilizer is mostly derived from fossil fuels and has been since the 1900s food boom. Aren't phosphates mainly shipped from islands that build up huge stocks of bird poop? The inputs are all fossil fuel intensive.
Nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized from hydrogen and nitrogen. The hydrogen is currently derived from fossil fuels, but there is no requirement that it be so.
Saying "ammonia is produced from fossil fuels, and so must always be" is like saying "cars run on fossil fuels, and so always must". A non sequitur.
Phosphates are derived from large phosphate deposits in various places, such as Florida. Phosphorus will ultimately have to be mined from lower concentration deposits, perhaps ultimately from average crustal rocks, where it appears at about 0.1% concentration. However, build up of mostly insoluble phosphates in soils will I think likely reduce the need for this fertilizer if erosion is kept in check.
This can't be replaced at a volume that can feed the world nor in a way the world can afford. Lots of things can be done in alternative ways if you remove half the requirements (in this case volume and affordability).
It can be replaced at volume that can feed the world. After all, the total energy involved is small compared to what would have to be produced to power the entirety of industrial civilization. Agriculture uses < 2% of total US energy consumption.
> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.
This highly depends on the actual productivity. Producing food by subsistence farming barely feeds you and your children. Making something that improves food production, from ploughs to better seeds to fertilizers, has a significantly larger impact, even if you're not directly producing something edible.
> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.
Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is. Society, however, does not agree with your sentiment. Obviously I'm nitpicking, but if society agreed with your proposed value, the billionaires of the world would be farmers and not tech people. That's how weird and out of balance we seem to be today.
I'm not sure going into farming is even good for society at the moment. My dad was a farmer for a while and there was mostly a food surplus with the EU paying him to set aside land to control that. You do good for society by providing things it's short off.
You should take a look at the price of food after Russia launched their full scale invasion in Ukraine. A significant increase, 15% at its peak and lowering thereafter to about 5%. Still, it is above pandemic levels.
You rise food prices and there's a domino effect on the economy, everything else also increases in price.
It is important the EU is able to produce its own food at acceptable prices.
if food security is important then the EU should pay for cost-effectiveness, economic sustainability, ecological resilience, storage capacity, and so on.
AFAIK right now it pays the same for a huge unproductive monoculture of non-edible corn (ie. for bioethanol) as it pays for wheat. (though there's finally talk about some changes to CAP, mostly to stop paying already rich big farms.)
food prices are pretty volatile anyway, and as you see even a war only moved them 15% whereas in Hungary inflation was more than 20%.
Hungary is facing a stagnant economy, with poorly targetted subsidies and overall high corruption. Inflation was already high since 2019 compared to other OECD countries with similar GDP per capita (checked Estonia, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia). They have also continued to engage with Russia economically despite sanctions (even outside the energy sector) leading to sometimes having exemptions or attempting to use that as leverage against EU policies. All of this has further destabilized their economy, given neighbours will hesitate in trade.
Hungary is the worst example you could pick from the EU.
>Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is.
America spends $20-$30 billion a year paying corn growers per bushel of corn they grow
America spends $100 billion+ per year paying people to buy the output of those farmers using food stamps.
America requires that 10-15% of all gas in the entire nation is actually ethanol derived from corn.
Twice now, President Trump has personally destroyed the market for American soybean production and dropped $20 billion on the industry to not piss them off.
I am family friends with the family that grows a significant amount of Potatoes in Maine. They love to complain about anything and everything as they drive around in $80k pavement princess trucks that aren't their $80k work trucks about how much liberals suck as those at least third generation farmers inherit the entire thing and they switch to cute "artisanal" breeds of potatoes that they sell to those same liberals for a nice markup and harvest them with the literal undocumented workers they swear they hate and pay a few dollars an hour, and insist the men aren't men anymore as they drive their airconditioned harvesters and aren't missing any fingers like their ancestors, and spend all their free time getting piss drunk and smoking weed which was grown by their cop buddies as they vote for people who want to make such a thing a crime again, and reminisce about when they were important; In high school. They are actually pretty friendly if you have the right skin color and genitals though.
I think farmers can maybe quit the bellyaching. Most of the modern world solved famine by just giving farmers money for doing a basic job, one that's been so improved and enhanced by technology that they are allowed to care about such things as "How will a trade war affect my profits this year" instead of "Oh my god oh my god an unexpected frost we are all going to die". It is some of the best $150 billion the US spends.
Most of the food production in the United States has been moved over from small individual farmers to large corporations. Any time there is government policy that negatively hurts farmers there is a big push from the media to show small time farmers hurting but the biggest losers are actually the much larger corporations.
Farmers are the ultimate DEI hire and are small farmers are just used as political tools, eventually if companies like John Deere keep getting away with blatant consumer rights abuses these small farmers will be completely wiped out and just left with massive corporations that heavily lobby the government for more subsidy's and free hand-outs
> I don't believe that these were significantly contributory, from experience: The unions...
The formally commissioned report clearly demonstrates that the ship building unions were dysfunctional:
"…a laborer (member of the Transport and General Workers Union) [to] carry the ladder to site, a rigger (member of the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers Union) [to] erect it and place it in the proper position, and an electrician (member of the Electrical Trades Union) [to] actually remove the old bulb and screw in the new one. Production was often halted while waiting for a member of the appropriate union to arrive to perform the job reserved by agreement for them. (sunset 96)"
> - Poor quality management. [...] So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.
There's also the challenge of the Baumol effect.
When hiring engineers in the UK, manufacturing companies are competing for smart, numerate graduates against the likes of Google and Facebook and HSBC and Barclays.
But when selling products, manufacturing companies are competing against the likes of Foxconn - so they can't just raise prices to raise salaries.
- Productivity is low, because the pay is low and from that comes everything else (thinking of paying the bills instead of the job, being seen as "cheap" by others etc.)
- Nobody cares about "social status" if the pay is right. Status comes from pay.
- There is some merit to that, but I think the real reason was outsourcing. Why invest at home if you can get the same or better cheaper from overseas.
The problem is the UK is the class system. Shareholders see workforce as slaves and not equals. That's why we see wage compression and it is now next to impossible for working class to climb the social ladder. So why bother? Your quality of life will not be vastly different whether you are stacking shelves or develop software. Everything is being creamed by shareholders, who also enjoy preferential tax system and other incentives not available to working class.
The problem IMO is nothing to do with status or pay, specifically in the UK the issue is capitalism.
Capitalism demands that companies show continous growth, or they are classed to be failing. The UK is very small on the world stage, and so inevitably all manufacturers come up against the need to export and grow beyond the UKs borders. This is when aquisitions and mergers from overseas corperations occur, and they have little need for an expensive workforce in the UK.
Foreign investors or parent corporations buy out the UK businesses, strip out the manufacturing, and use the brand recognition to turn them into shell companies for distributing the material which are produced much cheaper overseas.
This has happened time and time again with all raw material manufacturing, and is now happening to the food production industry too (the Cadbury story is used as a regular example around these parts).
It’s not capitalism in general; it’s the British flavour of it. In most capitalist countries, investing in the workforce is seen as a way to grow. In Britain, it’s seen as a threat to the social order. The class system turns economic policy into a tool of control.
For the British elite, an empowered, well-paid workforce isn’t progress - it’s an uprising. The economy is structured to keep labour cheap and dependent, so productivity stays low and ownership stays concentrated. Profits flow upward, wages stagnate, and the same people who caused the problem deliver lectures about “efficiency” and “global competition.”
So yes, foreign takeovers hollow industries out, but they only can because the domestic system rewards extraction over creation. The real disease is a ruling class that treats workers not as partners in growth but as a cost to be managed.
I dont agree with this at all. Look at other small countries with big production outputs like Japan. This is possible due to an incredibly high work ethic and skilled workforce. They still have the ruling class, and the big fat cat bosses that own all the companies. But the willingness of the population to work extraordinary hours with incredible precision is what makes it possible.
The UK population are lazy, and have been constantly told that manual labour is degrading and low class work. Nobody in the UK takes pride in any manufacturing work.Its nothing to do with a 'ruling class' conspiracy.
As someone who was deeply integrated into the manufacturing industry the population is not lazy.
My former company had plenty of very talented hard-working people ever at basic level jobs such as assembly, that had years of experience that could diagnose an issue with a single part without even without understanding the underlying mechanical engineering and tolerance stack-up.
My former workplaces biggest issues were pressure from other markets consuming market share and the inability of university educated salespeople to promote our unique product for the specific advantages it had over other off the shelf solutions.
Customers who understood the unique advantages always made regular business, but sales folk struggled to actually bring in any new blood.
Nothing to do with the manufacturing environment (which I was largely responsible for improvements in). that was very optimized and honestly pretty low cost. I know it's absolutely a fact as for the number of CAM engineers I spoke to who always assured me there was some cycle time to be saved just for them to send me over a program that was 4x longer than our current production programs.
My biggest takeaway after leaving the UK is that it was rigged from the start and the UK is doomed to fail a sad and slow dying death since about the 1970s, well before I was born.
That argument explains symptoms, not causes. “The British are lazy” is a convenient myth told by people who spent decades dismantling the very conditions that make pride and skill possible.
Japan’s work ethic didn’t appear by magic. It’s the result of long-term industrial policy, lifetime employment norms, and a culture that rewards skill. The UK spent the same decades casualising labour, cutting apprenticeships, and outsourcing production. You can’t get a proud, productive workforce by paying poverty wages and sneering at manual work.
And let’s be honest - would you give your best when your boss says he “can’t afford a raise” while pulling up in a new sports car? Low pay kills motivation. People stop caring because the system made caring pointless.
It’s not a conspiracy; it’s class logic. When those at the top treat labour as a nuisance rather than a partner, the whole structure rots. Japan’s elite reinvest in their workforce. Britain’s extract from it.
What does modern manufacturing look like? Are you limited by a lack of people who can, like, use a screwdriver? Or by a lack of people who can use a CAD package?
I worry that kids might hear “not enough people in the trades” and work on their hammer swinging skills. But in the US at least, you can get through k-12 without learning basic intro math stuff, like linear algebra or calculus.
If that was the minimum, we could, I guess, handle basic applied math like intro differential equations in the first year of a 2-year degree, and then spend the second year figuring out how to ask the computer to solve those problems…
Never mind calculus. There are plenty of kids who graduate high school without the basic arithmetic and trigonometry skills necessary to be a good carpenter. The social promotion practice in primary and secondary schools has been a disaster.
Maybe the decline of manufacturing in the UK correlates with freedom of its colonies? There is loss of access to cheap raw material as well as a dumping ground for finished products.
Close enough, but it's the decline of the (ex-colonies) Commonwealth as a trading bloc. That was probably always inevitable, but it long out-lasted the end of direct colonial rule.
The workers weren't productive because they weren't getting better tools. They weren't out there smashing the new machines to stay in the past, they weren't bought in the first place. So how is this the workers' problem that they somehow created?
The problem is the company ownership didn't invest and let those that did pass them by.
I love how often people who are probably in the bay area say this as the unionized members of Hollywood next door have no problem rejecting truly mediocre laborers and paying "10xers" millions of dollars per performance.
Do you know who were literal members of that union? Both Reagan (twice president of the union) and Trump.
Despite having a stranglehold style, where union members are not allowed to work on non-union projects, the industry still cultivates talent and allows both normal people doing day jobs making average wages and Superstar members like Jeff Bridges and Tom Hanks and George Clooney and Meryl Streep and Betty White.
This union has been able to keep up with changes in technology, ensuring their members benefited from streaming taking over the primary content delivery mechanism and getting a contract that accounts for it, and now getting protections from AI.
These big names regularly show support and go to bat for the literal little guy, knowing that if you can't make rent from writing movies, they won't have anything to star in and make a million dollars from.
This union contract is also a major reason actors are able to actually control how they are used, and gives actors control over things like sex scenes
A significant reason why Hollywood is currently full of terrible quality Visual Effects is that CGI has a significant non-unionized portion that is currently getting absolutely abused. Disney doesn't GAF, people still paid half a billion dollars to see the slop that was Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness.
I agree with you about the way that the entertainment unions work. They have their quirks, but they are generally excellent.
Just to offer some nuance, "union members are not allowed to work on non-union projects" is not strictly true. Union members can apply for waivers to work on non-union shows, and smaller theatres operate under letters of agreement with SAG-AFTRA which require only X-number of union contracts per show or per season. Also, union members - no matter their usual wage level - are free to sign contracts to work for "scale" (minimum wage for union members) on projects about which they're passionate; this happens all the time.
Incidentally, the "minimum wage" scale is also different for theatres of different sizes and business models. It's an attempt to balance workers' rights with the exigencies and economics of a fundamentally unstable industry. Some shows won't (necessarily - there are always surprises!) be commercial enough to be produced at certain theatres, and some actors may be prevented from working on some projects, but the system itself won't ever prevent anything from being done at all.
Another advantage to keep in mind if you consider importing this model to another sector: operating under a LOA provides a huge measure of protection to non-union employees, as well. At a certain point in my theatre career I stopped wanting to work on any non-affiliated project - unlimited rehearsal hours with no required notice period were unappealing, for instance, and (even as a non-union actor) pay was usually better in affiliated companies. There was a line to walk, though: once you accumulate a certain number of affiliated weeks in a rolling period you'll be required to join the union, which can limit employability: it's important to make sure your career / skills / network are sufficiently developed to support that level-up.
Anyway, I think that general model would be a good fit for tech workers, and I'd like to see it tried.
The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now.
Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. If you don't regard this as a core competency which should be kept in the national register, then sure, buy the ships from other places. But, don't come whining when the national-strategic interest needs you to do things outside the commercial domain or under duress, or with restrictions of access to supply in those other places.
There is Autarky, and there is total dependency, and there is a massive road in-between. Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
I might add that Australia is in pretty much the same boat (hah) and the shemozzle over the Tasmanian Ferries (ordered from Scandi, parked in Edinburgh because too big for their home port dockside tie-ups) is an exemplar. And there's a high speed double-hull "cat" style fabricator in Tassie, or at least there was.
In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise. I sailed around Falmouth 30 years ago with a friend and indeed, a lot of big ships were laid up in the estuary and river mouth. Awesome sight in a small sailing boat.
"Originally intended to come into service in 2018 and 2019 respectively, both ferries have been delayed by over five years, and costs have more than quadrupled to £460 million"
The Scottish government tried to do what commentators here are saying is the "right thing", maintaining the last gasp of a dying shipbuilding industry, but it turns out that part of the reason they were dying was not actually being able to build ships on time and under budget.
How do you tell the difference between "maintaining a strategic industry" and "throwing taxpayer money into a lossmaking business with nothing to show for it"?
> In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise
By "wise" you mean "expensive", right? Ships of all sizes require continuous maintenance to remain seaworthy.
This is the problem with destroying industries then trying to keep small remaining pockets of it/restarting it. You lose all of the institutional knowledge, the stuff that isn't written down, the stuff that comes from experience.
This is only exacerbated when those projects you're trying to do become massively over budget and late. People decry it as a waste and a failure, leading to any hard won knowledge being lost yet again as those projects gets scrapped and all the people making it lose their jobs.
You don't get good making things if you only try once every 30 years, you get better by continually doing that thing, passing the hard won knowledge down through the workforce by training incoming people not from hiring "experts" and expecting everyone to be up to speed on project #1 immediately.
This is what has crippled the Nuclear power plant building industry in most countries (ROK, China, Russia excepted). France built dozens of reactors in the 1970's and into the 1980's, then that slowed and then finally stopped for a decade after Chernobyl. When they tried to build the EPR it's been a huge fiasco of delays and cost overruns. Similarly for the US after 3 Mile Island, the AP1000 in Georgia are the first two power reactors built in the US in 40 years, and massively over-budget and behind schedule. Japan hasn't tried anything since Fukushmia Dai Ichi, but I expect that they will have the exact same problem. The ability to deliver on time and budget was just gone because they didn't have a workforce, and so are having to build that from scratch.
ROK found it easier to become world-class in building power reactors from zero than the US, UK, France and Germany has found it to re-build their capability after a decade (or more) of not constructing any power reactors. And that's true for a lot of these post-industrial industrial policy stuff. It is a lot harder to rebuild once lost than to build the first time.
Russia never stopped producing reactors after Chernobyl, because the USSR was a command economy and the Five Year Plan said that they needed to build a reactor here right now, and so the workers kept working even after the disaster, and now they are one of the few countries that can still deliver nuclear reactors. Note that this is NOT an endorsement of a command economy.
The is rarely some kind of inherent cultural or socioeconomic failing on the part of the producers, it's more often a failure of institutional will and a failure of scale.
Take any product that you actually produce well in Scotland for X Euros per unit in M months, scale production down by 99.9%, wait 20 years for them to lay everybody off, sell off all the factories, start relying on more and more stockpiled or imported parts and overseas labor, sell off important subsidiaries, and just generally become a shell of an industry.
Now build another one using domestic labor and parts, demanding competitive bids and constant redesigns and calling executives into the legislature to harangue them for failures and tell them the budget is closed for this year because of their delays, and now tell me what coefficient I have to tack on to N and M.
Our institutions and organizations are bad because they're running on bad morals, bad culture and bad people. If these institutions were not staffed with bad people with bad morals peddling bad organizational culture, they would no so readily produce bad results.
The bureaucrat cooking up the absurd rules, the academic writing the conclusion of some study to lead the bureaucrat to that conclusion, the politician doing the haranguing, the executive shipping it all overseas knowing it's not a long term solution, they all either a) believe in what they're doing b) know it's bullshit and don't care as long as the paychecks don't bounce. And these organizations adopt rules and policies that result in just about anyone who isn't one of those two types washing out or becoming one before they're senior enough to do anything about it.
I have no real opinion on this debate but wouldn't the person you are responding to say that the explosion of budget and lengthening of timeline is exactly because those capacities had been abandoned ?
But I agree it's a good question, how much inefficiency can you accept to revive a branch of industry, how long do you have to wait before you decide to throw the towel ?
There are multiple causes behind that that scandal. But if the buyer had specified the ships to use cheap and simple diesel engines instead of requiring LNG fuel over silly concerns about emissions then they could have been build much faster at a fraction of the cost.
As the article mentions, the U.K. shipbuilding industry was dependent on cheap, skilled labour.
It doesn’t touch upon just how cheap.
My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50.
The other thing that the article elides is just how much that workforce was shattered by the wars - an awful lot of Glaswegian and other shipbuilders signed up for the navy, as it was a much better opportunity than just making the boats - and proceeded to die at sea in droves. Their families did not receive compensation or their pay more often than not, as it was considered to be bad for morale to say a ship had been lost, and instead all aboard would be classed as missing or as deserters, and when they did finally say “yes, this ship was lost” 15 years after each war, it was usually far too late to be of any use.
Anyway. I just can’t see the working classes or international human rights organisations being willing to do the same again.
>My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50.
So basically the same situation as the prior generations of peasants toiling away to pay their taxes to the lord.
Actually, much, much worse. Before Glasgow, my family were crofters in the highlands - and by all accounts had a pretty good laird - but then the clearances happened, and everyone was condemned to the dark, satanic mills.
For a country that is an Island you'd think that the question of whether or not it is 'national-strategic' would have been answered in the affirmative.
Sorry, but it's a bit funny. Based on the name I assume you're French (speaking, at least)?
That "XXIer" contraption is really funny to me, I speak a bit of French. In English it's twenty first so XXI or XXIst, in French as far I know it's vingt et unième, so XXI or XXIème.
Is "XXIer" from another French dialect or another language entirely?
If shipbuilding is a strategic national industry, doesn't that also make all the inputs to a shipyard strategic industries?
After all, if a war broke out and our normal trading partners weren't willing to sell us ships, presumably they wouldn't sell us steel or engines or ball bearings or paint or radar modules or computer chips or plastics.
They is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, unless you believe we buy steel from the same places we buy ships.
The real answer to this is threat analysis: what are the realistic scenarios under which it becomes a problem. e.g. if Japan stops supplying ships a) how likely is that and b) could we just buy them from the Dutch instead? However, the stakes for getting this wrong are high.
The sensible thing would be deep integration with a continent-spanning economy. Sure the UK is an island, but the channel isn't exactly wide (not to mention the tunnel). It's hardly Iceland - even Ireland is more detached.
But the UK decided against that in 2016, and despite demographics having shifted the views, there is no general "rejoin" campaign.
Worth pointing out the UK has an extrememly deep and through free trade agreement with the EU, deeper than USMCA. Integration is still there, and isn't going away.
I've wondered about this too. I live in the UK and have been idly daydreaming about my next startup, and it seems like Brexit, and therefore having a small market / uncooperative EU, is such a headwind for some of the things I'd like to do. Seems like many UK startups just pretend to be based in SF.
I think rejoin is going to be politically unpopular for a while, as there's no way we could rejoin the EU on anything like as good terms as we left on.
The UK is obviously too small and poor to go it alone forever. The other option for them would be economic integration with North America. They could probably join up with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on relatively favorable terms.
That's far from obvious. The UK is 3x the population of Australia, which manages fine without deep economic integrations. The problem of Brexit is not that it is impossible to go it alone as a middle power; it's just an unnecessary handicap when you border a 450m head market but want to ignore them and act like you are an island at the arse end of the world.
Rejoin is polling far ahead of Brexit, which is beginning to be acknowledged as a mistake by everyone. Although not everyone agrees on the reasons.
The problem is the UK is an oligarchy owned and run by non-dom billionaires. It's essentially a floating labour camp. Virtually all the major industries are foreign-owned, and profits flow out of the country instead of being invested in infrastructure, R&D, and national development.
The public school/Oxbridge educational path is based on a 19th century view of the world, which has its roots in a feudal society that expanded into global piracy.
Rejoining the EU isn't just about undoing the direct, about exposing the population at all levels to a more modern culture with elements of social responsibility and rational state planning.
The EU isn't perfect. But Europe successfully rebuilt after WWII, while politically the UK is still stuck in the 1930s.
But that popularity (about 2:1 saying brexit was a mistake) isn't translating to political support, probably because both Labour and Tories supported Brexit.
And while the majority agree we should never have left the EU, and the majority agree we should rejoin, that isn't translating to political support.
Indeed the plurarity of votes is to Mr Brexit himself, who thanks to FPTP is likely to get a majority government in 2029 off 30% of the vote.
Hell 1 in 8 people that voted Farage last year think the UK never should have left Europe. Not that it wasn't the right type of brexit, but that it shouldn't. Yet they voted for Farage, decided that was a mistake, and are continuing to vote for Farage.
I get it. Some people just want the world to burn.
But a similar number think we should rejoin the EU, yet voted Farage last year.
It's no wonder support for democracy is at an all time low.
If it’s sourced from abroad it has to be shipped (blockades anyone ?)
If your usual trading partner is inaccessible for reason X , what are the odds your alternate trading partner is also affected by reason X? Are there geopolitical or national political reasons that partner B might become unavailable or unpalatable at the same time?
Maybe, but it has to be balanced against the economic damage of autarkic policies which sabotages national security in its own way. There's no substitute for a case by case analysis.
I mean, if we are talking about a big war scenario, then simply the distance to Japan would mean Dutch ships are clearly the better choice.
Otherwise sure, realistic threat scenarios. But the world is also changing fast. Denmark or Canada did not expected to be militarily threatened by the US some years ago and still this is where we are now.
The further down the value chain you go, the simpler it is going to be to find alternative suppliers. Or alternative inputs. And figuring out which alternative inputs make sense in your situation is probably much easier if you're the ones integrating the different components. And if you are committed to building X ships a year for strategic reasons, chances are a local company will end up a globally competitive supplier by grabbing the opportunity right in front of them.
If a war broke out and the UK couldn't call in NATO, then the UK is already fucked. And if they can call NATO in, then they can tap into the inputs in all NATO countries.
Even back during the Age of Sail when Britain was the dominant naval power with a worldwide empire, they had to import many of the inputs for their domestic shipbuilding industry. This included basic stuff like timber, tar, hemp, cotton, etc. If you have enough warships to secure your sea lines of communication then depending on imports is less of a concern. But the UK Royal Navy today is a shadow of its former self and can barely serve as a local defense force.
But weren't they mostly importing these from their own colonies? If anything, the acknowledgement of the importance of securing strategic inputs must have been a big part of the push within the governments of colonial powers for territorial expansion. I think there must not have been as much of sense at the time that you could just leave people in other parts of the world to be independent and still buy these things from them at fair prices.
South Korea is a long way away, if supply chains are contested and there are competing bidders for their outputs. South Korea is far closer to Singapore.
"Friends" is a strange concept in national strategic planning. You might ask yourself "just how much are those friends going to come and help when push comes to shove" and look at current politics, and re-assess what has been commonly felt these last 50 years: no prior friend can be assumed to be motivated to still be a friend.
Think about Taiwan. All these friends, and now the biggest one says "we think you're too risky. move all that advanced chip making to us, onshore, we'll talk more about how seriously we want to be a friend and defend you after"
There's always trade-offs. Even local shipping producers can't magic together a ship in a week.
Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends.
My main point is that close allies (both geographically and in terms of relationship) are about as good as having your own local industry. In a few important cases and areas, having production with friends is better than at home.
Mostly because it's harder for local political interests to capture a foreign economy.
> There's always trade-offs. Even local shipping producers can't magic together a ship in a week.
No, but depending on your (presumed national security) needs, you might be able to repurpose a ship that was almost done for another client. If you have active local shipbuilders, there should be some capacity there.
But, the trick is, how do you do it? The US Jones Act is trying, but US ship building capacity is pretty minimal. Just ordering military ships on the regular is expensive... Etc.
> The US Jones Act is trying, but US ship building capacity is pretty minimal.
Some people might go so far as to put a lot of the blame for the sorry state of affairs _on_ the Jones Act.
(Though to be fair, while the Jones Act alone could probably snuff out American ship building, even without it most ships would probably still be build in South Korea. But you can fairly blame the Jones Act for suppressing US-to-US ocean shipping.)
> Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends.
Nobody likes being a back up friend to only be called on when your primary friend is unavailable, or you want to do something your primary friend wouldn't like. Countries make treaties/trade agreements accordingly
Countries (and corporations) aren't like ordinary people with their pesky social norms: your international 'friends' are mostly happy to be compensated with eg money or other goodies for being your backup friends, even when that would be a social faux pas with human friends.
>Singapore is an island, too, and we don't need a national-strategic ship building industry.
That's because it exists on the benevolence and because of the benefits of it existing to several third parties. If/when that balance stops, they could turn it into a failed state in a forthnight.
Being this careless by relying on "friends" (in global politics? lol) is ok for a small place like Singapore that can't do anything else anyway. For an ex-empire, it's more suicidal than prudent.
It's not practical for most countries to have a viable industry in every so-called critical good across an economy. As another commenter noted, it's even less practical the more complex it gets because you need to be self-sufficient in the entire stack, not just parts of it.
What good is fuel refining without oil? What good is shipbuilding without mines and smelters? Without the ability to build massive shipboard diesels? Etc.
Moreover, it tends to make your real friends a bit nervous when you want to make yourself independent of them, because than you have less reason to defend them. It's not to say you should make your food production dependant on them, but when your sole reaosnt to figure out how to build ship engines is so you don't need to buy them from Germany (totally random, probably wrong example) it feels a bit off.
This is all ignoring the tremendous costs inherent in this sort of autarkic ideal. People enjoy the highest standards of living ever today thanks to global trade.
> If/when that balance stops, they could turn it into a failed state in a forthnight.
You say that as if Singapore has no agency here. And you are under-estimating Singapore's resilience: after all just after independence we were close to the nightmare scenario you are trying to conjure.
> Being this careless by relying on "friends" (in global politics? lol) is ok for a small place like Singapore that can't do anything else anyway. For an ex-empire, it's more suicidal than prudent.
What does it matter that the UK was part of an Empire in the past? Singapore used to be part of the same empire.
And yes, keeping good relations with your allies is extremely important in global politics. This shouldn't be news. Or do you think we should all strive for autarky, like North Korea or 1930s Germany?
>And you are under-estimating Singapore's resilience: after all just after independence we were close to the nightmare scenario you are trying to conjure.
And it didn't happen because some conditions regarding foreign forces balance prevented it. Not because of the "agency" of a barely nascent tiny nation.
>What does it matter that the UK was part of an Empire in the past? Singapore used to be part of the same empire.
The UK wasn't "part of an Empire", it was the creator, owner, and benefactor of the Empire. That's why it matters.
>And yes, keeping good relations with your allies is extremely important in global politics. This shouldn't be news
Small island countries shouldn't build their own ships only because they can't due to their size. But they probably should have sovereign manufacturing of asymmetric deterrence tools like anti-ship missiles.
Friends aren't good enough, unless you have a mutual defense treaty, they aren't real friends and can't be counted on. Look at Ukraine struggling to get Tomohawks and ATACMS now, or struggling to get tanks and jets, due to fear of escalation.
They are if you actively manage your relationships with an eye to maintaining redundant access to necessary materiel or having multi-pronged defense strategies. Singapore is constantly nurturing strategic defense ties with multiple allies and attempting to avoid existential reliance on any single ally. And the one nation they definitely wouldn't rely on is Malaysia, the country most likely to threaten their sovereignty. Ukraine's problem was they were politically too dysfunctional and dependent on Russia defense trade until Russia's successive invasions forced them to reform domestically. (To be fair, Russia had a hand in prolonging their dysfunction.)
> Friends aren't good enough, unless you have a mutual defense treaty, they aren't real friends and can't be counted on.
No, no, just the opposite: treaties aren't good enough. Try suing your supposed allies when they break your mutual defense treaty.. Broadly speaking (and with only some exceptions), there's no higher authority you can appeal to for enforcement of international treaties.
Mutual defense treaties only work amongst something like friends. A big part of NATO's success is because they take this lesson very serious and designed the whole system around it.
> As long as your friends build ships, you are fine.
Canada and many other countries collectively thought the US was their friend, which it was, until it wasn't. Friends stopping being friends is a risk that needs to be at least considered.
Similar to prenups. People don't like thinking about prenups at the beginning of a relationship as that suggests you're already thinking about how to end the relationship. Never mind the facts that more relationships fail than succeed. Protecting oneself when things go bad seems to be a logical concept, yet emotionally it is most definitely not.
It is. But you won't get such an answer from the "important" people because they are busy imposing useless laws every other day.
The public is unaware and unwilling to engage in such discussions because there isn't much pain being felt yet from the current structure of the economy.
aka zero skin in the game, and, worse, a lot to earn by doing favors and pushing for quick profits for their friends in the corporate and finance worlds
Disagreements about what is of national interest is always going to be a thing.
In my opinion, having a country that doesn't have the means to build, at the very least, what is needed to keep its economy going is not in a good spot at all.
Those people are thinking just fine. With their wallets.
Why would they prioritize national interests? Because they were elected to do so?
After all they know they were actually elected because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices, and in their naivety they happened to pick their side this time (after all they alternate between the two choices all the time).
They also know they'll be fine and have their salaries, extras, and nice corporate post-politic sinecures whetever their performance. Just see Blair.
>After all they know they were actually elected because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices, and in their naivety they happened to pick their side this time (after all they alternate between the two choices all the time).
Australia has ranked choice voting and mandatory voting. What else could be done to “give” people more choices?
* some kind of proportional representation in lower houses or parliament (see e.g. New Zealand for a Westminster-compatible solution, or Switzerland for something more radical while still working with seats allocated by state populations).
* referendums on laws/treaties, and popular initiatives to propose constitutional changes and/or new laws (like in Switzerland or various western US states).
* reinvigoration of the federal principle that things that can be done by the states (or the local governments) should be done at that level, rather than the feds sticking their nose in everything (see, again, Switzerland).
>Australia has ranked choice voting and mandatory voting. What else could be done to “give” people more choices?
None of the above are even close to giving people choices.
Australia has a seat-by-seat majority-based system that favors the bigger parties (HoR).
Choices come when there's direct proportional elections.
Choices come when you don't need campaign support, advertising budgets, rich sponsors to be elected.
When they media don't sway to their (owners) favorite parties and candidates.
When you're not elected on an huge laundry list of a program, and then left to do whatever and backtrack on any and all promises until the next election with no consequences.
When there are direct referendums for major issues, regularly, not just to change the constitution in rare cases.
And many many other things besides, those are just some big ones.
> Why would they prioritize national interests? Because they were elected to do so?
How about because they are human people like you and me. You don't think you are a bad guy who always does things only in your own interest right? So why do you think they are like that?
How about if they really screw people over they know there will be mass protests
>How about because they are human people like you and me
Oh, sweet summer child.
>You don't think you are a bad guy who always does things only in your own interest right? So why do you think they are like that?
Because I wasn't promoted and passed all the exams of a system designed to promote sociopaths, party interests, and corporate/financial/M.I.C. interests, nor did I have the sociopathic self-selection to want to get to the highest offices of power.
Neither was Jeremy Corbyn, but he would have been Prime Minister if enough people had voted for him. Say what you will about him (I am not a fan), but he is not “establishment approved”.
> because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices
Unless you think Jeremy Corbyn was establishment approved (!), this is clearly not true.
I’m not really sure what to make of your latest comment. Is your preferred world one where the media never criticize your favored politicians and the left wing of the Labour Party ruthlessly crushes internal dissent? If that’s what it would have taken to make Corbyn Prime Minister, then count me out.
Like people were not feeling the pain in the first half of the XXth century when we decided to own our nuclear stack? It's a matter of political courage.
The decisive battle of WWII, as far as the defence of Britain was concerned, was fought in the air. Invading an island nation without air superiority is a non-starter.
I actually doubt the value of modern navies for anything other than gunboat diplomacy, or coastal patrols these days. I think they’re too vulnerable to things like cruise missiles and drones.
It's about a thousand ships, but realsitically it's very fuzzy, with flags of convenaince and all. And British companies own a _lot_ of ships, just flagged under other countries.
It's a country that is also a capitalist economy. Ofcourse they can build cargo ships. But those ships will be ten times more expensive than anything you can buy from Korea.
Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies, as a national priority. If this means building cars, ships, tanks, and planes, then that infrastructure should be built and maintained at taxpayers expense.
Whats more, you need to have market forces within your own country so competition can deliver you the best products. You can't just fund one ship building company, you need to roll the dice on a handful. Every now and then you have to prune back the organizations that are not working, and give a shot to startups to see if they can do better.
If you can't tell, I believe in big, transparent, government.
This is unrealistic for smaller countries, like Ancient Greek poleis or contemporary Estonia. Under your logic, they would have to give up their existence and join some empire.
In practice, already the Greco-Persian wars are an indication that alliances of smaller nations are viable, and that they are more efficient due to specialization. This is not a new problem, nor is it specific for post-industrial history; the Athens were better at fighting at sea, other poleis could provide hoplites.
> Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies
This definitely wasn't true for the UK in WW2. Probably wasn't even true for WW1, especially if in both cases you count "UK" as "GB&NI" rather than the full British Empire of the time.
The only country which managed autarky+export during WW2 was the United States, due to having a large land area, all the required natural resources (except maybe rubber), but especially oil and food.
Defense autarky isn't possible for any European country except maybe Natural Fortress Switzerland.
This seems completely unrealistic nowadays, unless you are the size of China or the United States. The EU could also do this, but there seems to be currently only limited appetite for a more integrated EU.
Yeah, whenever I post a comment you can just prepend "In my humble opinion.."
Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently.
I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes.
We have free trade all over the world now! Our governments seemed to be actively dismantling manufacturing - the information economy was the future for us.
Now the world descends into chaos, and it will be very slow and expensive to restart those heavy industries.
But actually, I don't really know how expensive it will be to get things started again. Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
>Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
I saw a whitepaper that suggested Australia should give up shipbuilding in exchange for drones and electronic warfare. The goal being to present a front like Ukraine does. Bristle with weapons and guarantee that any invasion would be 10 times more costly than anything gained. It was interesting at least.
But they don't do everything, and frankly drones are very overstated: they're not magic, and the idea of fielding masses of things when your adversary is at least China backed is pretty farcical: we can't ever win a conflict on cheap mass production because we don't have it.
So a handful of hard hitting long range weapons is going to be a key part of the strategy: because if we can't hit the factories, we can't win period.
>The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now.
Sometimes the time to fix a thing in general (nevermind the "best time") has come and gone, and the rest is wishful thinking and platitudes like "the next best time is now".
Obviously, this is not going to make up for the loss of the broader ship building industry, but it does show that the UK is thinking about maritime technology as a key strategic area.
In my most cynical moments I think if the UK actually wants to build ships the best thing to do might be to close down the existing shipbuilding industry first, and start a newer more efficient one from scratch.
Per Ferguson Marine, do you want to prop up a dying industry or achieve usable ships? What's the actual priority?
yeah, you're right, best to be delusional that you can fix something when you can't, instead of realistically evaluating your actual situation and finding a pragmatic solution
>Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
The biggest problem with this thinking is that nationally mandated production is fundamentally unable to reduce dependency because national economic policy cannot increase aggregate output. That's to say when you politically prioritize to build ships the question always is what you aren't building instead, because all allocation consists of trade-offs.
Britain does not have a gigantic army of reserve labour to deploy that's doing nothing. It's a relatively small country compared to its competitors (as is Australia), it has limited capital. To recuperate the costs of a large industry in particular you need to be internationally competitive to export at scale. Is that even achievable and worth it at the cost of any other place you could put that capital?
It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff, autarky does not necessarily diminish your dependence because you're necessarily getting less. North Korea is very autark and still dependent because it's also poor.
The problem is that the analysis of the alternatives only ever takes into account efficiency and not resilience. Which is typical of “rational expectations” belief systems based upon atomised individuals.
However the real world has politics in it, as we saw during the pandemic, at which points jurisdictions commandeer resources for themselves regardless of whether a “better price” is available elsewhere.
Within a jurisdiction where resources can be directed you only need one capacity for output. In a market situation you need multiple suppliers all of which with excess capacity to supply that you have reserved and which cannot be countermanded by other action (so it needs to be defended with military capacity). Once you cost all that in you may just find that doing it yourself is more efficient, once resilience is taken into account properly.
Nature rarely goes for the most efficient solution. When it does it tends to go the way of the Dodo.
>It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is.
A comparative advantage is a past fixed cost investment whose output has not been consumed in its entirety. Hence comparative advantages are created outcomes and not something you can follow.
The reason why a competing nation doesn't build their own industry is that they would have to duplicate the fixed costs of initially starting the industry and it is cheaper to pay only for the ships you need. If the government made the investment anyway, it would now have given its economic potential a concrete form and switching to a different form is expensive. Producing a different commodity requires paying fixed costs again. hnwnce, after the investment there is a comparative advantage to produce commodities whose fixed costs are already paid for. They are literally cheaper to produce than other commodities.
Meanwhile if you were to go to the other extreme. What if there was an activity without any fixed costs? The concept of comparative advantage would be meaningless, because switching tasks costs nothing.
> The biggest problem with this thinking is that nationally mandated production is fundamentally unable to reduce dependency because national economic policy cannot increase aggregate output. That's to say when you politically prioritize to build ships the question always is what you aren't building instead, because all allocation consists of trade-offs.
The trade off is worth making. It gives you the ability to survive if things go wrong in return for being slightly worse off in the meantime.
> It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff
It can also mean very little more stuff. Part of the problem with our current system is that we will import rather than produce because its very slightly cheaper.
It would be ridiculous for the UK to grow its own tea, however it would be perfectly reasonable for it to aim to produce more of its own basic foodstuffs.
Makes a lot of sense in textbooks. But in the real world, when politics is involved, the whole theory breaks down. What does your text book say about China holding rare earths hostage in regard of comparative advantage?
Someone else starts their own mines, everyone goes a little poorer.
except for oil, most countries aren't dependant on other countries just to survive in the near term (food is one of the few things countries will usually attempt to ensure they are selfsufficent in, if it's feasible)
The UK is far from self sufficient in food. You'd think they would have learned from their mistakes after they nearly starved to death due to the Axis blockade during WWII, but apparently not.
It's worrying to me that the idea of comparative advantage has become such common parlance among non-economists that it's being used to justify everything without any real analysis or justification. It's not a solution for everything and it's not always applicable or relevant. Free trade is good, sure, but that's not the discussion here. It's not about free trade vs no free trade. Nobody posed that question here, so why are you bringing it up as if it's relevant?
> Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not.
So the simple truth is you can almost never "ignore the cost" because that cost must be borne somewhere. And there's always someone that's considered "national-strategic" by someone. Hell, I recall my dad being enraged that our "blue" passports are now manufactured in Poland under contract from a French company. What actually happened is De La Rue took the piss on their contract bid thinking they would just rinse the taxpayer.
Having the taxpayer there to bail out a failing shipyard blunts the incentive to modernise which, as we can see from the article, was barely there to begin with. Should the taxpayer sit there with effectively unlimited liability to build these ships? Should that come at the expense of, say, funding for the NHS? Housebuilding? Fixing our crumbling prison system? Modernising our water infrastructure?
You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation, some additional labor overhead, some procedural change, some tweak of input sourcing or other reduction of outputs relative to inputs as being "amortized" over the course of whatever to much applause from the comment section.
And yet these same people are smart enough to recognize these sorts of dishonest "the solution to pollution is dilution" type arguments when applied in other contexts. It ought to make you wonder how much malice is sailing under the flag of ignorance.
> You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation
I don't see what regulation has to do with (effectively) nationalising the entire shipbuilding industry. When I say "cost" I literally mean the financial cost to the Exchequer.
I’m not talking about TPS reports, overheads, etc. I’m talking, quite literally, about the actual line item costs that appear on the ledger of the Exchequer. I don’t see why this is hard for you to understand without and why you’re waffling about unrelated things.
1. The article states "In 2023, the UK produced no commercial ships at all." It does not consider military ship building, which still exists in the UK.
2. Given the scale of problems described in the article, it is probably easier to restart a civilian ship building industry from scratch than to expand it from the previously existing.
I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
A lot of people seem to yearn for the "good old days" where we built giant, tangible things that did cool stuff. That's fine, but the "national security" arguments ring hollow as you're basically saying all institutions, intelligence agencies, defense agencies, etc. are asleep at the wheel if it truly is a threat... which I guess is possible but highly unlikely.
> I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
The flaw in that annoyingly common logic is 1) countries are very reluctant to use nuclear weapons, and 2) any kind of nuclear escalation is an instant loss for your own side.
I personally don't think any country would resort to nuclear weapons in the case of an invasion or blockade, and certainly not a democratic one [1]. They may threaten, but I don't think they'd actually put that gun to their own head and pull the trigger.
[1] An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you", because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.
Even Putin did not fire nukes when Ukraine launched a fairly successful invasion of their soil.
US did not fire nukes during Korea or Vietnam despite several high up people wanting to repeatedly.
USSR did not fire nukes the several times they thought the US had launched. USSR did not fire the nukes during the Cuban Missile Crisis even though Fidel was adamant that they be allowed to sacrifice themselves to destroy the US.
Somehow, that generation was able to maintain a sober view of nuclear weapons. Even as Nixon himself drunkenly insisted we nuke most of the world, he was ignored.
As that generation has aged out, it seems like that respect may be going away. Trump wants to start detonating nukes again. There may be a genuine reason, like maybe we have lost confidence in our simulations and models to build new nukes and desperately need to build the next generation of deterrence, but maybe he's just a dumbass. China is going back to building a shitload of nukes, even though they had plenty. Geopolitical conflict is back on the menu the world over, and everyone is itching to claim some century old grievance to go beat up a neighbor. The Ukraine invasion and muffled response proves to everyone that if you don't have nukes, you are not going to be protected, while North Korea proves that if you do have nukes, you can do almost anything you want.
I think a nuke will be used this century in anger. I think the world will be too gunshy to respond adequately, or too split along some axis, and there will be geopolitical bickering about who is the bad guy for using N+1 nukes in a conflict.
Oh, please do not assume I would not be able to see differences between democracy and authoritarianism. I only said I doubt that there are big differences between some of the views of the respective leaders regarding the populace.
Of all the current nuclear weapons delivery systems, Trident is probably the most reliable. Minuteman might be up there due to being a very very mature system, but I would take Trident in a heart beat.
That's also my thinking that nullifies a lot of the discussion here. Like why would anyone start a naval beef with the UK, given the UK's nuclear submarine fleet?
It's not about starting a direct conflict, it's that blockading it can be done at a distance rather easily.
If ships can't get to the UK, or the foreign shipyards reduced to rubble - or outbid - then it's more effective and cost efficient then any direct kinetic action.
No, it's not nearly enough. The exact number of weapons onboard is largely irrelevant. At any given time only about one third of a nation's attack submarines can be out on active patrol while the others are in transit, undergoing maintenance, or working up. During a crisis they can maybe surge two thirds of the force for a few months but that isn't sustainable. Each submarine can only be in one place at a time and they're likely to take some losses against a competent adversary.
That's so naive. Those robot submarines will be useful for local defense but they lack the range, speed, and staying power to project power and protect sea lines of communication over thousands of miles on a sustained basis. The notion of doing that with robots remains firmly in the realm of science fiction today. Maybe in 30 years.
And my point is it's not about a physical blockade.
If you buy your ships from half way around the world, then the shipyards can be destroyed before you get anywhere near them. And certainly now preventing that is politically commiting to a war on the other side of the planet which may not immediately effect you, but is likely to eventually.
But the other part is: you don't have to physically do anything. You could deny shipping to your opponent by someone just outbidding you for the output. Why not? You're already outsourcing so you're cost sensitive, and guaranteed volume is cat nip to manufacturers - no amount of strategic alliance wording is going to save you if an adversary reliably buys 10x as much.
Say, with satellite coverage to find out where any blockade runners are and a lot of cruise missiles you could enforce a blockade from a thousand miles away.
That would be extremely difficult to defend against unless you have enough ships to defend every single convoy. WWII showed how helpless big surface ships were against u-boats in defending shipping.
having nukes doesn't mean when you invade a nuke-free country and it will just fall over for you. but not having nukes means a country with nukes can feel comfy invading you....
Russia aren’t going to use nukes on their own doorstep. That’s a a NATO problem. It’s like openly knifing somebody in public repeatedly while holding the would be hero’s at bay with a gun. Yes this is an actual thing that happened in the UK about 10 years ago.
Um... Russia's doctrine during the Cold War was to turn Poland into a nuclear wasteland to stop Nato advancing through it. At the time, Poland was a part of the USSR.
What Russia considers "a buffer zone" is really "inferior peoples we can atomise without having to open a new conflict with a foreign power." To be clear, I use the term "inferior peoples" as seen from the Russian point of view.
I’ve been looking and you are correct, though I do recall seeing something different, so perhaps what I read was misinterpreting the Seven Days to the Rhine plan.
That’s the point, and you’re in big trouble if that’s what you’re actually dependent upon is something you can’t use. Nukes are only for the other nukes. The bit of butter, so they say, Betty bought to make the bitter butter better.
> An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you"
I don't think that could realistically work. The suicidal leader would need buy-in not only from the military command, but also from the numerous operators responsible for preparing and conducting the launches. Everyone involved would be presented wiath a choice between signing death sentenses for themselves and their loved ones or trying their luck with whatever enemy they were facing.
You seem to think nuclear weapons stop all forms of tension short of nuclear war but the evidence is strong that even nuclear armed parties do things which don't include nuclear weapons. India applies strategic pressures to it's neighbours including ones with nuclear weapons. They're bashing each other with sticks and stones on the border, to avoid pulling nuclear triggers.
There was an ad-blue shortage in Australia last year, we have no onshore refinery and got close to running out. The nearest one is Indonesia and we were in a number of trade disputes regarding lumpy skin diseases and cattle and sheep. It only takes one or two sore points for something like "sorry, we sold your ad-blue to somebody else" and the entire mining sector is shut down.
British strategic military thinking assumed its role in NATO was unchanging. The re-appraisal post Ukraine has been significant and I am sure it includes waking up the arms manufacturing sector, and the input side to that is heavy metals industry, which has unfortunately fallen in a hole because of under-capitalisation and world pricing and Gupta and the like now "own" the national steel plan to some extent.
You would think that kind of thing would have been thought about. Just making trains onshore instead of buying them in from overseas would have possibly demanded continual metals manufacturing and processing capacity, which kept furnaces alight and steel making to the fore.
For anyone else wondering, "ad-blue" is another term for DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), which is a chemical used to decrease emissions from diesel engines.
The purpose of diesel exhaust fluid is to decrease emissions, right? It’s not actually needed for engines to work. So in the case of something like the mining industry, crucial to the national economy, the government can just pass a temporary waiver. Or am I missing something?
Having nuclear weapons does not give you immunity to all threats. Quite recently we had a case of nuclear state being partially occupied by a state without nuclear weapons.
And even in that case use of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable escalation and they used regular army to (mostly) kick them out and carry on with their earlier invasion on other parts of the front.
(I am speaking about Kursk if anyone is confused)
Use of nuclear weapons when you are mildly threatened is not viable. In the same way as responding to a pickpockets with an artillery barrage is not viable.
"We do not need police as we have an artillery" is equivalent of "there is no need for any other weapons if you have nukes".
To be fair, the credibility of the Russian nuclear stack is questionable at this point. Its unclear how much capacity survived the past 30 years of graft. We have developed nations struggling to maintain theirs without layers of blatant corruption weaved into the process.
Even if so, I don't think anyone doubts that they do have functional nuclear weapons. Maybe not all 5000 of them, but definitely enough to use them if they want to.
I think the whole narrative of "well maybe Russian nukes don't actually work" is unhelpful - if they wanted to use nuclear weapons they would and the weapons used would work. I think people sometimes think Russia is North Korea experimenting with sticks to make fire(and even they have managed to get something working) - despite the massive corruption their nuclear industry and the engineering corps are functional and it's in my mind without a doubt that there is a stockpile of weapons which would work if needed.
Russia is just not suicidal enough to actually use them in the current conflict, luckily.
While I generally agree with your point presenting Russia as a decision making entity is dangerously misleading. You're not dealing with democracy or even 1970s committee-run USSR anymore.
Sure Putin has broad support and a number of companions but he remains unilateral, undisputed, unchallenged decision maker. Assuming otherwise brings you back into the fold of rational actor argument which has proven a fallacy for some time now. Yes Putin is not suicidal today, although the chances he'll outlive total retaliation strike. But he may feel differently tomorrow, waking up in a bad mood.
This is just feel good nonsense… Russia has alliances or agreements with multiple major and minor countries including China. I don’t understand why people post these cope posts online unless it’s just to make themselves feel good.
That's the convenient part. There is no shared border or waters; there is no conflicting interests to make a compromise over on the paper. They are not in a military alliance. There isn't really anything to uphold. And the pivot to India started only with Sino-Soviet split.
I am replying to you comment. You are doing the exact same thing again. Saying “Russia honors no treaties or alliances except when it's convenient” is just so you can feel better about whatever. It’s just not how reality and geopolitics work…
From the book Guns of August, page 106, chapter 10, negotiations re: Turkey’ neutrality in Aug 1914. I will just leave this here:
“On August 13 Foreign Minister Sazonov proposed to France to offer Turkey a solemn guarantee of her territorial integrity and a promise of “great financial advantages at the expense of Germany” in return for her neutrality. He was actually willing to include a promise that Russia would abide by the guarantee “even if we are victorious.”
You could come up with nitpicky stuff like this for any country. Sure, make yourself feel better about calling people bots and calling Putin crazy, but you’re just living in your own reality at this point.
Breaching 6 major peace treaties and alliances (that I just remember of) in span of 30 years is not nitpicking and no you can't come up with this for "any country". I also didn't call Putin crazy anywhere but feel like perhaps you come to the right conclusion yourself here.
China also ain't dumb. It would play along but there is no misunderstanding about the nature of any agreement with Russia.
There is open evidente that Russia invested in keeping their nukes working. They gave more control over the military to leaders of the nuke program after the Soviet union fell. There are US - Russia nuke inspection treaties (only reciently are they ending) - while the results are classified those with access to them are behaving as if they think they are still working.
They still haven’t managed a successful launch of their new silo missile.
If you were the US inspector, would you tell Russia if you thought their nukes don’t work?
They have plenty of old missiles. And we never know when they are not launching because they want to hide something, or when they launched something to test how a failure happens.
Direct kinetic war between nuclear powers is pretty much unthinkable - mutual annihilation if either core territory is threatened. Instead, wars happen through proxies or direct attacks on non-nuclear powers, and then you need the ability to project power short of a nuclear response.
Russia can't prevent aid to Ukraine with nuclear blackmail. The US can't defend Taiwan without ships - it can't use nuclear blackmail itself. And if it doesn't defend Taiwan, not only is Western prosperity threatened, but the entire structure of allies that the US built after WW2 crumbles into a chaos of small parties more easily picked apart.
Pursuing total defeat is unthinkable, bu pursuing limited gains with clear signalling is plausible, and it's happened a few times against nuclear powers, like Yom Kippur War.
>>There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
Just a reminder that Ukraine is currently at war with nuclear equipped Russia and it could absolutely use more ships, more tanks, more aircraft, more bombs, more guns, more drones and everything else that forms traditional warfare. It's clearly not like countries will immediately go from zero to nuclear weapons in any conflict.
Nuclear weapons are overrated. Multiple countries already invaded a nuclear power (1973 Yom Kippur War) and nothing happened. If Egypt wasn't afraid of nukes, what makes you so confident that your future enemy will be?
It's an empathy gap. You are rightly cautious of nukes, but you then project that mindset onto belligerents, which is the mistake. A very important rule in strategic planning is to avoid projecting your own calculations onto the enemy.
Nuclear powers, like all states, need to meet the pacing challenge and be capable of winning, or at least have enough asymmetric capabilities to force a frozen conflict if necessary.
Bah, I'm of the opinion that if the intelligence agencies were asleep at the wheel, that might well be an improvement.
But I do think that you're right in that the time of the frigate and aircraft carrier is over, and we'll all more likely to die either from a nuclear missile or from a 50 gram autonomous drone. I agree: the national security argument is hollow.
There are other reasons to build ships though, and some degree of self-sufficiency is always sensible.
Attack drones aren't that useful if the two countries are far apart. Consider the 12 Day War between Israel-Iran. Iran's Shahed drones weren't useful, because the slow travel speeds and the long distance meant that Israel could shoot them down at a leisurely pace while they closed the gap. So even their purpose as a saturation attack was not met.
But in the Ukraine-Russia war, Iran's Shahed drones, which are being manufactured by Russia with small adjustments, are proving useful, because they're close, so saturation attacks can actually work.
For the US's power projection into the Pacific, due to modern SIGINT capabilities, aircraft carriers with stealth bombers are even stronger than 20 years ago due to being able to put those JDAMs onto an actually valuable target. It's basically the power of Zeus, to kill whatever you want whenever you want, unlike in the Vietnam era where you have to carpet bomb everything.
Granted that my comment was an over-simplification. Israel did get use from reconnaissance Hermes drones in the 12 Day War, possibly launched from Azerbaijan, for another example to add to the list. But as a broad gesture I believe the sentiment is correct. Strategic depth shifts the utility from saturation with attack drones and SRBMs, like what Russia is doing to Ukraine, and what Iran couldn't replicate with MRBMs due to the distance ... to the classic F16 missile trucks to deliver JDAMs with F35s for SEAD.
That is a fair point, but do keep in mind that the lower in the stack you come, the more options for sourcing you (generally) have.
Say, those fancy chips going into the ship's targeting radar may all be designed in a country or two, fabbed in Taiwan using Dutch equipment, whereas the steel you construct the hull with can come from anywhere - at my employer we mostly bought steel from Eastern Ukraine until a couple of years ago; after a brief hiccup we now get it from Turkey and Brazil, mostly - but China, South Korea, Germany or India, for instance, can supply it, too.
> Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not.
The UK does not even make any effort. Look at the level of dependency on US cloud providers to deliver basic government services. To be fair, the UK is no worse than the rest of Europe (some small gestures and exceptions aside) in this, but that only makes the overall situation worse.
Successive British governments have not really thought this through, and what dependencies are a problem. Again, not the only country that has done that, but, again, that does not help solve the problem.
> There is Autarky, and there is total dependency, and there is a massive road in-between. Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
Absolutely, but people are not aware of it, politicians do not care, the the ruling class are declinist.
The UK imports half its food, and was almost starved into submission by Nazi U-boats during WW2,, so you’d think they would know this, but laissez-faire ideology is strong in the ruling class.
We import a lot by value but less so by calories. We could probably get by on domestic bread and potatoes if blockaded but the oranges, bananas and tuna fish would be in short supply.
Australias Unofficial naval strategy is "bomb the shit out of scary boats with Growlers".
Australias Official naval strategy is "We need more boats for reasons (cough asylum seekers cough), definitely not because it is politically expedient to keep boat builders employed"
Well I doubt they'd be using Growlers, but even if they needed to they cost too much ( $80 million a piece ) to be thrown into modern naval air defences, and don't have the range to be deployed where they could actually reach ships causing trouble.
Same reason it got out of every other industry. It wasn't short-term profitable. After the 70s at least everything began moving to the private sector and there was no strategic thinking. This completed in the 90s and there was no reason for anyone to think that semi-conductors, minerals, even oil and gas now shouldn't be bought from a friend rather than being produced internally.
Not quite the conclusions of the article. As it points out the UK nationalised its shipbuilding industry in the 70s in a last ditch effort to turn it around, and despite operating it at a significant loss for a decade failed to make it even slightly competitive. In the 90s the industry was then privatised again once it was clear there was no saving it anymore.
For the vast majority of its history the UK shipbuilding industry was completely private, and dominated by many small shipbuilders. Consolidation only started after the UK government stepped in to provide some kind of sensible strategy to improve the competitiveness of the industry, via government loans tied to longer term strategic goals to improve productivity.
Ultimately it seems that the UK shipbuilding industry was kill by the thing that once made it so dominant. It was a highly distributed, extremely flat, high skilled industry, with little to no management. It made it easy for the industry to rapidly grow and shrink, and made it extremely effective at producing bespoke products. But as the world moved towards standardisation, those strengths became weaknesses.
The lack of management structure made it impossible for the industry to properly recognise the issues, or effect change to fix the issues. And the world moved towards standardisation, which gave a huge advantage to shipbuilders that built up capital intensive infrastructure that allowed the use of lower skilled labour to produce standard design quick, cheaper, and to a higher quality, than the UK distributed, high skill, labour force.
> It was a highly distributed, extremely flat, high skilled industry, with little to no management. It made it easy for the industry to rapidly grow and shrink, and made it extremely effective at producing bespoke products.
... That sounds a lot like the Norwegian shipbuilding industry which I work for right now. Maybe not with little management exactly, but nothing crazy either - significantly less than a British multinational I worked for earlier. Of course the hulls are built elsewhere, and half of my colleagues are foreigners, but we're going fairly strong.
So I'm not sure I buy this explanation. Why wouldn't the British do management equally well as us?
"…every reported speech by a British shipbuilder in the Norwegian press usually comprised a list of excuses for poor performance, ranging from official and unofficial stoppages, shortages of labour, failings on the part of subcontractors, modernisation schemes not producing the anticipated results, to recently completed contracts having entailed substantial losses. The impression thus gained by the Norwegians, according to Holt, was of an industry where the shipbuilders had no control or responsibility over problems, and worse, had no ideas as to how to address the problems"
I do think that British mismanagement plays a big role in the decline of the 1970s. I don't think it's a coincidence that the surviving car industry consists of two types of companies:
- small bespoke high end companies like McLaren, with British management but comparatively small staff and throughput;
- former British marques which are now being run more competently by foreigners (Jaguar Land Rover etc)
My working theory is that British management over large groups of British workers collapses into class warfare.
Could you elaborate further on that working theory? Are there unique tendencies in British workforce that devolve into class warfare? Also, I don't want to misinterpret that phrase. Do you mean this about fiscal policies that tax the wealthy to a higher proporation or something more?
This is absolutely not about money and entirely about interpersonal culture and class signifiers and prejudices. It's a little difficult to articulate to people who haven't grown up with it. I don't like the idea of attributing "no good" to whole swathes of people; it seems both prejudiced and inaccurate to say that either British workers were no good at working (although they were on strike a lot) or that British managers were no good at managing (although the businesses such as British Leyland were empirically not very successful) because, as we can see in more recent times than the BL era, there's still successful manufacturing industries.
What I want to argue is that they existed as two cultures which were fundamentally different and in conflict with each other. The endless strikes weren't entirely about pay but a desire for confrontation in and of itself.
(yes, the M word and the C word are involved, but those don't exist in a vacuum either)
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876617 mentions the "low social status of working in Trade" which is another aspect of the class system entirely among the management class.
Except the Tories got their opportunity to demonstrate how unions held them back for most of 40 years and did nothing to improve the situation.
You don't get to blame Unionist culture on failures after Thatcher takes control. Unions were stronger during the times most western nations were doing better.
The government treated people like Derek as hostile foreign spies and enemies of the state, going so far as to sic national security agencies on them.
Derek had no power after he was ousted in 1979, and the workers at British Leyland voted against a retaliatory strike 14000 to 600.
If you want to suggest this is still "cultural" because the Tories were part of the "class" blaming and scapegoating laborers, 1) I agree but 2) Calling that a "two cultures" problem or ascribing blame to the laborer "class" for trying to fight off the Reaganisation of their country is absurd.
Guess what, the unions lost in most of the Anglophone world in 1980, are we really better off without them? Are we really doing better now that we don't let workers offset the power of Capital holders? To me it seems like all we have accomplished is to take a loan out from our futures to enrich the Capital holding class.
Surely if the unions were the problem, we would have clear evidence of improvement since they were thoroughly destroyed in the 80s?
Meanwhile, here in the US, we are still feeling the painful effects of killing the air traffic control union. Turns out people don't want to do an extremely stressful, extremely skill based job for dirt cheap, and the people who can do that job are fine at doing jobs that pay way better, and no amount of removing their collective bargaining power can offset individuals choosing not to get underpaid for a serious job.
The class system in England is quite entrenched. You have to remember this is a country with an 1000 year old monarchy and noble families who still own a substantial amount of the land. England is both very modernist, quite progressive, and remarkably traditionalist in its makeup.
It’s hard to explain when you’re not there. When people say “the working class” that has a very specific connotation in England - it means you aren’t a noble or a peer or someone like that. Of course the boundaries are blurred, but they are not that blurry yet in England.
So walking around there you get the feeling that there is absolutely a two tier system, some people go to Eton and Oxfridge some people do not. Of course they have allowed a lot of foreign millionaire and billionaires into the system.
But the overall feeling is very much us vs them sometimes and it certainly feels like both sides can despise each other. The working class, as famously depicted by Gillian Anderson as Thatcher in The Crown thinks the nobles “don’t do anything” and the nobles etc because of their Etonian and Oxford education think the lower classes are low IQ.
It's important to note that nationalising ship building was a last-ditch parachute for hundreds of thousands of manual workers, not the cause of its decline.
Decades of state subsidy of it both directly and of its suppliers had failed and taking it on was far cheaper for the country than letting it and British Steel, and the National Coal Board all simultaneously fail.
It's almost as if Europe entirely gave up sometime in the 70s. People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years because they know they'll bounce to another position. That's why everything is seemingly slowly crumbling away (healthcare, industries, culture, education), we're putting bandaids here and there to maintain the illusion but I think everyone can tell the general trend
I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation. I thought it was because my city (Coventry) was devastated after world-war-2 (the blitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz), the collapse of the British car industry (which, primarily affected Coventry) and then the closing of the coal mines leading to lower income tax money to the council for roads and things.
However I just returned last night from a trip to London (I live in Sweden now) and I have to say, the decline is precipitous and pronounced, London gets all the investment so if it's decaying this way then I shudder to think about the rest of the nation.
I think a lot of people outside the UK believe that because the UK had an empire that everybody was rich. This is decidedly not the case, the first people the British elite subjugated was the British themselves, that's why most of the food we're mocked about is so bland: it's poverty food, so when I say that it feels like a decline, please keep it within the context that most of us have our entire family tree in the underclass - not because we were once rich.
Most infrastructure has not been invested in during my lifetime, and it was old when I was a child.
>>I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation
I live in the UK and not in London either, and it constantly feels like everything is just decaying and the country lives in the past not the present. Everything is just dilapidated, falling apart, or shut down. The streets are full of rubbish, dirty and local infrastructure doesn't get fixed up for months if someone damages it. Local councils are saying they will shut down care homes soon because there is no money for anything. And it's not even a private vs state funded issue - our local pharmacy literally looks like something out of afganistan, you walk in and there is actual dirty carpet on the floor, the shelves are 50% empty and there are several broken lights in the ceiling - with 4 people working behind the counter packing prescriptions. And that's operated by a private company! Which I believe is only doing it because they are required by an NHS contract, otherwise they would have shut the place down. And don't even get me started on the NHS - a friend with suicidal thoughts was told he needs to see a psychiatrist, the current wait time for one is 260 weeks(just short of 5 years). Honestly if I were cynical I'd say the system prefers if he kills himself, less of a burden.
Honestly, I feel so weird. One one hand, I work from home on a tech worker salary and I'm very comfortable financially - but I take a step out of my house and you don't feel like the 5th wealthiest nation in the world. Our local library had to be closed due to lack of funding recently. A library. What kind of 3rd world behaviour is that? And honestly I don't think even 3rd world countries are closing down libraries, it's just unthinkable.
I'm very jaded about it, I keep trying to find positives and there are some but generally I've learnt to expect that things are broken, forgotten or just in poor state in some way or another, because there is never any money to do anything. It's a poor country cosplaying as a superpower.
Poor country through which a lot of wealth passes, or is held. But there's also a lot of very British defeatism. A sort of squashed spirit which is against the possibility that things might be better, because then they'd be different. And of course the easy blame on foreigners.
I do think there used to be more middle class public/civic pride, and you can see this in some places that have retained it and cleaned themselves up. I see the various "transition towns" (Totnes, Bristol etc) as one way forward: they have a vision of a future involving local people, not just a vision of the past.
> Our local library had to be closed due to lack of funding recently. A library. What kind of 3rd world behaviour is that?
Closing things down in order to avoid having to put up taxes is extremely first world behavior now.
Europe as a whole didn't give up in the 1970s, but the 1970s was famously bad for the UK.
That said, I think this was more a case of when the rot in the UK became visible rather than when it started; the British government hasn't been competent for a very long time, and still isn't. With the caveat that I'm not a historian and have only an amateur knowledge of the events, I'd say the problems set in even before the peak of the British Empire, which itself I place at just before the outbreak of WW1 owing to how Pyrrhic that victory was.
It feels like the British establishment is particularly good at one thing: Being pragmatic enough to stay in power.
That appears to take precedence over anything else. It may have "saved" the UK from revolutions or major clearouts of its governing structures and legal system, and results in a system that is delightlyfully quirky on the surface.
But it's also a way of governing that seems to lead to managing decline over fixing things because managing decline is less risky in the short term.
If you think the British Empire was ever competent then I strongly recommend you listen to the episodes of the Empire podcast that cover the British Empire (there’s a lot of different episodes across the series).
With the exception of the Royal Navy, the British Empire was spectacularly incompetent. It’s a running joke that the British stumbled into being the largest empire in history.
That said, I don’t think it’s unique to Britain. The Roman Empire has many tales of staggering incompetence and wild idiocy throughout its expansion. If you have the time, The History of Rome is an excellent podcast that covers the entire time period.
I suspect it’s the truth of human nature that it isn’t possible for such large organisations to be competent throughout, just by virtue of how many people they take to operate.
> With the exception of the Royal Navy, the British Empire was spectacularly incompetent. It’s a running joke that the British stumbled into being the largest empire in history.
Hm. Well, I can't say I know any better than that, I was rather assuming that becoming the biggest empire was itself due to something approximating competence.
Certainly, if one takes the view that all large organisations are mediocre, the British Empire is unambiguously an example of "large organisation".
Edit:
Just to check, the Empire podcast by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple?
People have a very clear vision of 50 years in the future, it has been a major fight playing out for decades. One side wanted cheap energy and lots of industry, the other side wanted green energy and not much industry. That debate has been ongoing and everyone involved was pretty up-front about what the consequences would be.
The turn away from nuclear power around the turn of the century was probably the decisive moment. From then on it hasn't been possible to articulate a vision of a prosperous society with a realistic path to get there.
Nuclear energy belongs in the "unaffordable industries which failed to adapt" category. They could have maybe eventually reconciled with the safety question and the weapons question, but getting undercut by renewables means that's the way forwards to green energy.
Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.
> Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.
Which is a policy choice that people were pretty clear on when they bought the policies in. That is basically the only way to get a negative learning curve on an exciting new tech like nuclear. Bet you that China is seeing a more natural learning curve.
China seem to be following a "yes and" policy for power: demand is so huge that they're just building all possible types of generation to avoid bottlenecking the construction of any one in particular. Even they seem to have slowed slightly on nuclear since Fukushima and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse (who were supplying one of the designs).
There is very little new with nuclear except bubble money. It’s fundamentally a ton of capital spend with high operational cost and risk.
Would be energy barons like it because it really begs for concentration of generation from a political perspective, as every marginal unit of distributed generation hurts the P&L of the nuclear generator.
Europe? I'm building high tech vessels in Europe right now. Even most of the hulls are made in Europe.
Are you sure this isn't about Britain, and how the finance industry gave that county its own version of "Dutch disease", making it comparatively unprofitable to do anything but managing assets?
I think it's in part generational (a bunch of western countries have a quasi dead-locked democracy because boomers will vote whatever suits them short term, they will be dead when the bill comes anyway) and part due to the lack of accountability that democracy has brought to the upper echelon of society, or lack of skin in the game for the ruling class.
Revolving doors, blatant corruption, and downright incompetence lead to absolutely no repercussions; what's there to lose? Schröder is the poster child of this.
We are creating generations of people with no stake in society (no housing, no family because it's costs too much and no time anyway) while at the same time having a complete lack of ethos as a civilization, with a terrible ruling class. Europe (and the UK) are in a horrible position.
The upper class has none to little stake in society either, or so they seem to believe. I bet in practice, if the shit really hits the fan, it won't be so fun for them either. Other countries may also have problems at the same time.
Colonies disappeared quickly post ww2. US imperialism did continue strongly for a while with Cia/political meddling to allow American companies to continue resource extraction.
" People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years "
This sounds like a modern version of Golden Age nostalgia. First, I am not at all sure that people had longer visions; some probably did, but the entire nations? Not so sure.
Second, there is a certain wisdom in accepting that you don't know how the world will look in 50+ years. 50 years ago, China was an extremely impoverished country that no one would take seriously as a competitor for global influence, Iran was US-friendly and the USSR was on the peak of its power.
> This sounds like a modern version of Golden Age nostalgia.
When France built their nuclear programs, or railways, it was a massive investment, the people in charge when these decisions were taken were long gone by the time the projects were completed. It wasn't seen as a cost but as a national interest, now we're cutting everything down because everything is seen as a short term cost regardless of the long term benefits.
> I am not at all sure that people had longer visions; some probably did, but the entire nations? Not so sure.
Nations don't matter, the 10 or so people truly in charge do, when they have a spine at least, now that we have business men thinking about the next quarter it's more complicated.
> Second, there is a certain wisdom in accepting that you don't know how the world will look in 50+ years
History doesn't just happen... countries with long term visions make history, of course if you check out of the race you're at the mercy of whatever other people decide for you. China didn't automagically get where it is today, the planned economy helps in that regard.
In Europe, we are in the middle of a very expensive and long term decarbonization push, an order of magnitude (if not two) more expensive that what France did. In fact, it is so expensive that the question if we can even pull it off is still open.
That does not seem to support your idea that "everything gets cut down over short term costs now". There is a massive amount of long term spending happening right now.
Oh sure we do spend, on foreign tech, foreign factories, &c. That's not what I call long term vision, if anything it's the opposite. Germany was Putin's bitch because of gas, now the whole EU will be China's bitch for panels and batteries, amazing!
FYI: China produces >70% of windmills blades, solar panels and lithium batteries
What I meant by vision is securing the long term independence of your country through home grown technologies, for example France got cheap/clean electricity and nukes from their program. What you're describing is just the continuity of the lack of vision we had since the 70s, we outsourced everything to Asia and kept "services", which aren't worth much when shit hits the fan.
It's not really nostalgia, when 95% of infrastructure was constructed in the 70's and not maintained (something you see a lot in the UK outside of the south-east) you can feel this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_consensus
The bigger issue is that there’s no demand for ships. When containers distributed the industry, the whole thing moved to flags of convenience and mostly asian crews.
There’s a reason why the docks in every rich country have given way to condos and esplanades. The financialization of everything was an accelerant, not a root cause.
I think a lot of it is because after world war 2 the labour government decided that a centralised planned economy and nationalisation of every business (and I do mean every, this was in labours manifesto until new labour in the 90s) would perform better. It didn't work, it destroyed industries.
Assembly of civilian merchant ships is a notoriously low-margin industry (as opposed to manufacturing of engines/propellers/control systems). You could heavily subsidize it (by protectionism measures and/or by juicing up your Navy) like the US does in the name of strategic importance, but be prepared to pay heavily for it. If you want to preserve shipbuilding capabilities for military reasons, then chasing after the Asian shipbuilding countries may not be the most efficient way of achieving this, i.e. it may be better to just invest into building of military ships and manufacturing of higher-margin components without bothering with the low-margin assembly stuff.
Not a single mention of the Thatcher government in the 1970s, that sold off public-owed industries like British Coal and British Steel, and then set about acquiring and breaking up the shipyards themselves for scrap.
All of it was worth more smashed up and sold for scrap, for the little quick "fix" that the Money Junkies in the Conservative government wanted. Unemployment and poverty rose steadily except for the bankers and politicians, the UK lost just about all forms of skilled industry, and by 1987 it was all over with the Stock Market Crash that obliterated the economy.
We've had about 45 years of Tory misrule and right now there are no political parties prepared to effect any improvement. It's all bleating about how "illegal immigrants in small boats" are costing billions, but no real breakdown of where the money is going.
Well after 45 years isn’t that just reflecting what the median voter actually cares about (or doesn’t care about)?
If voters were genuinely willing to expend their political capital, time, attention, energy, etc., to a significant degree on this issue, year and year for 45 years… there’s no amount of party intrigues that could have blocked it.
Don't underestimate the power of divide and conquer.
Over here we had miners, farmers, steelmill and shipyard workers protesting due to similar reasons and for the majority the takeaway wasn't that those industries were in danger, but that the protesters demanded too much, because that's what people with influence said.
Of course there will always be various motivated factions looking to divide and conquer… that’s the baseline background noise in any ruling or opposition party.
And the minimum expectation, to advance any policy at all, is to be able to resist that and have leftover political capital, energy, time, etc., above and beyond.
Somehow the UK is really in a downhill trend. For decades. BREXIT kind of accelerated that; people such as Nigel Farage won't follow on their promise. There won't be noteworthy economic growth for the common man.
The naval situation is even worse, because the UK totally depends on the USA now for its own nuclear arsenal. The UK has basically stopped being independent. Changing this will be hard and I don't think anyone in the UK wants to do that. There is no way for the UK to compete against South Korea's production; Canada will buy more equipment from South Korea. UK has never been in the race for competition (only Germany has). The UK kind of went into decline ever since Thatcher ruled, with a (too) few years in between that were not terrible.
The conclusions of the FT article are completely wrong. With fewer rich people around, chances are that legislation would be less frequently bought to benefit them at the cost of the country's overall prosperity.
Out of interest what are the positives? Other than cultural, in flagrant displays of excess, I can't think of anything they couldn't accomplish by them existing as poorer business leaders and having competent national wealth funds empowered to lend/give grants.
What I'm saying is you may be defending billionaires when you mean to be defending a system you believe is optimal but still has the negative outcome of billionaires (not to imply the billionaires themselves are intrinsically bad as people but the concentration of wealth in their hands is).
That is closer to my intent, yes, not a direct defense of billionaires as an intrinsic good, more a rejection of the idea that removing them via any means automatically leads to a less bad state of affairs. Careful reform that reduces them can be good, but it depends on what exactly that reform entails. Simply scaring them away and experiencing capital flight does not achieve good things.
The stuff in the article, that the UK is losing rich people isn't a long term issue but fairly recent, basically since brexit and the getting rid of non dom tax breaks.
So you complain about dependency to US but think that it should completely depend on Brussels?
Also what does Brexit have to do with a 130 years long decline?
This article radically downplays the role that unions had in killing the UK shipbuilding industry.
While it's true that shipbuilders were reluctant to introduce new technologies and techniques due to capital requirements, the much bigger reason they did not was the impediment put up by unions. Yes, capital expenditure is painful in a cyclical industry, but in previous eras of shipbuilding, companies did invest in modernization ... in those previous eras, unions were much less active or absent. Other countries also faced the same capital crunches and cyclical business environment, and still invested. It was not that the Japanese, Koreans, and Italians were somehow more "risk-taking" than the English ... no, rather their unions had not yet taken hold post-war to smother innovation.
Unions always trade away the advancements of tomorrow for the security of the workers today. When one supports a union one should always keep in mind that you are putting down for your comfort today and mortgaging your children's tomorrow. This might not be an issue if your children don't follow your trade. But if they do, you've just screwed them over. The rest of the world doesn't stand still while your union blocks radical progress.
You will often hear historians talk about working hours. They explain how Trade Unions and Socialist campaigners brought about a much reduced work day. That happened mostly over the 19th century and the 20th century. This is true, but I think the presentations of it tend to be myopic.
In the early 19th century across the whole world people were very poor by modern standards. Due to the Industrial Revolution that changed and in Europe wages increased significantly. In the UK wages in 1900 were more than twice what they had been in 1800. That's in real terms, adjusted for inflation.
Some workers campaigned for shorter working hours because they could afford it. Of course, if working hours are lower then total wages are too. Everyone knew this. By the end of the 19th century wages had risen enough that many workers were prepared to sacrifice lower total wages for more leisure time. The labour organizations would never have successfully talked their members into these campaigns unless those members were in this situation. As growth continued in the 20th century and spread to other countries there were more and more people willing to sacrifice some wage for more free time.
Suppose that there had been a law in, say, 1770 which forced people to work less than 35 hours per day. In that case many people would probably have flouted the law because their incomes were so low that they considered more work necessary to buy things. Similarly, if people find the standard working week too long then they can search out employers who offer part-time work which covers a shorter part of the week.
It's worth mentioning that in a sense, employers never control the amount of time worked. Employment contracts may specify an amount of working time, but people can leave employment. It has always been possible to work for a few years, then quit your job and enjoy some leisure time. Then take up another job. Economists call changes to the number of hours worked over the short-run changes to the intensive margin. The changes to the number of hours worked over the long-run are changes to the extensive margin - changes that come about from the decision to work or not. Of course, this doesn't mean that changes to the intensive margin are irrelevant. When the labour campaigners succeeded in bringing down weekly working hours they really did change things for many workers. Quitting jobs and restarting is inconvenient and risky in times of high unemployment. Of course, some people don't have the willpower to save up for long periods of time either. However, it's also true that changes to the length of the full-time working week probably have much less effect on total working hours than people think. For example, people will tell you that the standard working week in the US is 40 hours. In a sense this is true for full-time employees. Despite that though, working hours have continued to fall from the 1950s to the present day. This is partially because of part-time work, but also because of people taking time off by quitting.
Jm2c, but this sort of problems would've been smaller if the UK stayed in the EU. Then you can do this sort of strategic planning on a larger scale as the EU tends to promote economical activities that make sense for specific countries.
The EU, while not subsidizing ship building per se, it did subsidize the R&D.
Ship building subsidies are banned in the EU for a very specific reasons: from the 70s to the early 90s European ship builders could not stay competitive with the asian ones.
This led France, Spain, UK, Germany into a race of subsidies that:
1. created a lot of overcapacity
2. tanked prices
3. didn't make shipyards more, but *less* competitive with their asian counterparts, as they had less reasons to invest with the guarantee of minimal effort and guaranteed money
This is really a damn if you do, damn if you don't situation for which there are no real solutions.
We lack the materials, we lack the energy, even if we stepped up to the great levels of efficiency of Japanese/Korean/Chinese ship building have (and we're unlikely to do, it's not just a technological but cultural challenge), we'd still not be able to compete on costs (energy, materials, labor) and R&D (the asian dragons produce way more engineers in the sectors than we do).
Can't wait for the battle of the Thames river between the British North Sea fleet (purchased from China) against the imperial Russian fleet (also purchased from China)
On a more serious note, the problem with centering your economy on international finance is that it's only lucrative if no one else in the world has capital and access to worldwide industry.
I feel the double standard of such articles quick in pointing out Italy being behind in many statistics (which it is and is fair to point it out).
When it's Britain behind the whole article is written only from the point of view of the UK and avoids mentioning what other countries did better.
This is unfair.
Italy manufacturs the Costa Crociere cruise ships and many other things.
Everyone loved to laugh when Costa Concordia sink. It made them confirm their bias that Italian are funny and bad at technical things. While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.
There are few ships ever built that don't sink when you ram them properly into rocks. I don't think that I have read a single article that faulted the shipbuilder for the disaster.
It's true the shipbuilders were not critized but they were also not praised in this very specific article.
Good and bad results should be both noticed.
Times in the articles countries are mentioned:
Japan 17x
Germany 6x
USA 4x
China 3x
France 3x
Italy 1x
South Korea 1x
compare that with the current tonnage of shipbuilding production:
1 China 32,859,862 51%
2 South Korea 18,317,886 28%
3 Japan 9,965,182 15%
4 Philippines 805,938 1%
5 Italy 402,164 0.62%
6 France 326,680 0.50%
7 Germany 289,666 0.45%
8 Finland 261,654 0.40%
9 Taiwan 187,558 0.29%
10 Russia 177,571 0.27%
11 Netherlands 90,596 0.14%
12 Türkiye 79,032 0.12%
13 Indonesia 75,979 0.12%
14 U.S. 64,809 0.10%
15 Iran 64,760 0.09%
Italy produces 2x ships than Germany but Germany is mentioned 6x.
Stereotypical bias of German being engineers and Italian being funny/pizza makers.
South Korea is also freaking awesome and shipbuiling and it's mentioned 1x.
Maybe also the reason why the UK is behind is their arrogance in dismissing competitors that they have stereotypically decided they are not good at shipbuilding.
The Brits don't produce anything anymore except money laundering in the City of London (where i work btw) and some cattle, so you should expect that kind of biased narrative from them. We in Italy are among the best and most profitable in the high-tech mechanical manufacturing industry, but we also have the worst paid engineers and technicians of the western world. The Italian Miracle.
England is an island, both geographically and culturally. This is the culture from where Brexit comes.
They still think that the world spins around their navel, that football (soccer) is their game and the sun never sets in their empire.
At the end of WWI, 4 empires collapsed: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian tzar, the Ottoman Empire and the British. The Austrians accepted it and moved on. The Russians and Turkish are in denial and resisting to accept what they already know. The British didn't even get the memo, they're totally oblivious, in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy.
> While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.
Bullshit. People know about Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo, Maseratti, Ducati, Beretta (guns), Carpiggiani (ice-cream machines), La Marzocco, De Longhi (espresso machines), etc.
The Premier is the largest soccer league by revenue. England also spends the most on players. So yes, soccer is 'our' game currently.
And the sun still doesn't set on our Commonwealth.
Also, Great Britain is an island, not England.
We can't win in the UK: if we cheer on our achievements and be positive, we're accused of being stuck in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy. If we get depressed about our economy, we're told we're not being positive enough and are 'talking down' the UK.
> We can't win in the UK: if we cheer on our achievements and be positive, we're accused of being stuck in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy. If we get depressed about our economy, we're told we're not being positive enough and are 'talking down' the UK.
If you want others to cheer you on when you do great you should do the same to others (when they deserve it). Human behaviour is mostly imitation.
I respect you for your knowledge of Beretta, La Marzocco, De Longhi and Carpiggiani. I was not aware of Carpiggiani.
Ferrero is also Italian. Kinder Surprise is Italian (from German branch) and Ferrero Roché is Italian (from French branch).
Italy has also a massive monopoly of glasses lenses in Luxotica.
I deeply admire the UK, the USA and anything great in any other country.
Even when I disagree with their leaders I still admire their technical achievements and the great men that work hard for it.
We should strive to admire, applaud and copy the best in each other.
Pushing each other forward in a upgoing spiral of betterment.
I don’t think that modern Turkey thinks of itself as an empire. They overthrew the Sultanate themselves, seems they were glad to be rid of it.
I doubt any sensible modern country wants a physical empire, they’re much too much trouble to maintain. You basically get the same benefits with outsourcing and cheap imports, without having to maintain garrisons.
This has a connection to the way the British have lionized "Some Guys in a Shed" as their main source of industry and innovation. Their shipyards were dominant at merchant ships, but were all capital light work by skilled manpower. Which worked great, right up until it ran into someone really clever figured out how to mass-produce things, and then the "M/V This Was Laid Down in Ulsan Two Weeks Ago" crushed them all.
It was sort of a Innovator's Dilemma sort of situation, where these guys who had built careers out of being the skilled labor and had long hated management were not interested in the sort of capital investment it would take to build their own "M/V This Was Laid Down in Rosyth Two Weeks Ago."
All the industries in the UK are on the decline and most UK companies are being either sold off, shut down or are being owned (for a long time) by foreign companies.
It may take several decades for the UK to come back from this.
The economic situation in the UK has become bizarre.
I would recommend interested HNers to read up on the State Pension Triple Lock; and the various income tax cliff edges as some key examples.
With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus.
The triple lock is a politically motivated policy which always grows the state pension (given to essentially all UK citizens and anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years) at a rate faster than earnings grow or faster than the economy grows. It will subsume the entire government budget.
Given the extremely high cost of energy, and housing in many places, younger people also seem to be opting out entirely. Disability payments the government pays are increasing at a rapid rate. (1 in 13 of the population are currently receiving this benefit).
You touch on the core issue of the UK, but there's both a cultural and policy aspect.
1. As you say, an aging population has placed the entire country into a gridlock - the pensions system as it stands is ridiculous and unsustainable. Unfortunately, it is an almost immediate political suicide to even attempt to reform it. Young people are disillusioned and wield little monetary or political power. The old generation has all the cards, and are actively destroying their children's future for their own short term benefit. They have mortgaged their children's future, which they won't get to see, for the short period of time they still have remaining.
2. There's no investment culture in the UK. Literally everything and everyone is rent seeking. Want a retirement? Buy property and rent it out. Want a pension? Pension funds just buy gilts - government bonds. Very little money goes into productive assets. This creates a vicious cycle where money is simply siphoned away from the little productivity that remains to an ever growing number of rent seekers.
There's no easy way out of this. One generation will effectively have to give up their welfare, but nobody wants to do this (understandable). The UK cannot afford to be the welfare state it wants to be.
> There's no easy way out of this. One generation will effectively have to give up their welfare, but nobody wants to do this (understandable). The UK cannot afford to be the welfare state it wants to be.
It can be done over a period of time. Canada moved from a non-funded pension model like the UK currently has, to a partially funded model which currently has over $731 billion in assets.
They began this change in 1999. If they hadn't made that change in direction they'd be in a much worse situation today.
It's possible to change from one system to another, if a government is able to look much further ahead than its own term in government.
With the Canadian model, your payments out at the end are tied to what you put in. Which is not quite the case in the UK, which allows extremely low payments in for just 10 years to get a very high amount out indefinitely.
The British government must take the same path the Canadians took.
>anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years
To be fair what you get is proportional. If you are an NI payer for 4 years then you only get 4/32 of the state pension.
Having said that the triple lock is a ridiculous idea. The trouble is people are loss averse so it is really hard to take away things people have got used to.
A minimum amount of 10 years is needed to get the basic pension (which is proportional to years worked), but years on Universal Credit (benefits) count towards this. Also, anyone who is of pension age is entitled to a Pension Credit top-up to a weekly income of £227.10.
> With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus.
What are you referring to here? Higher rates of income tax are only taken on the money earned over the band. So If you earn £50,271, you pay 20% on £50,270 and 40% on £1.
As well as the childcare benefit removal others have mentioned, you also begin losing your "tax free allowance".
The marginal tax rate for 100k -> 125k is 60% (due to losing the ~£12k tax free allowance)
"Your personal allowance goes down by £1 for every £2 that your adjusted net income is above £100,000. This means your allowance is zero if your income is £125,140 or above."
there are benefits such as child tax credits which are not tapered. You either get the full benefit if earning £99,999 a year, or nothing at £100,000. This benefit if you have children can be worth tens of thousands of pounds, thus resulting in a net loss. If you look at income data after tax this causes a weird drop in take home pay in the roughly 100-130k range, where people just salary sacrifice all their extra pay to make sure they are under 100k. This is not productive to the economy.
"As other countries expanded their output, adopted modern production methods, and built new, efficient shipyards, British shipbuilders found themselves increasingly uncompetitive."
> Even today, Asian shipyards have people crawling all over them.
When you don't have a minimum wage, or your minimum wage is vastly lower than other competitors, it's far more efficient to hire more people than to invest in process improvements.
The cost of labour is DRASTICALLY overstated (except when it comes to executive pay then its apparently good value for money?), and the push/obsession with supernormal profits is DRASTICALLY understated.
General economic defeatism in this, and similar discussions, is staggering. Historically, many countries were suffering from various forms of economic malaise and managed to pull trough. Countries that lacked almost any form of industry have become powerhouses.
South Korea is a good example. The previous century hasn't been kind to Korea in general. By the 50s, the southern part of peninsula was generally less industrialized than the north, and recovering from horribly destructive war. Threat of another invasion from the north never went away.
And yet, successive governments have turned things around, and turned South Korea into advanced, functional, industrialized country. It has problems with aging population, but who hasn't?
West Germany in the second half of 20th century is another example. Devastated by war, occupied, mistrusted by neighbors, reliant on imported labor. And yet it put itself together. Lately it hasn't been doing so well, but for decades it was a model of prosperity.
Stories like this are abundant. Unfortunately, it takes a significant amount of political courage. Politicians must be willing to withstand short term pain, and plan for the future. They must focus on long term prosperity, not on immediate popularity boosts.
Everyone here, I believe, agrees that the way things have been going is unsustainable and incredibly damaging to the very people it's meant to benefit. It can be fixed, it will take time, but it can be. Because it happened before.
I think the defeatism is generally because there seems to be no way out. The two winning approaches right now are Starmer's “radical change through stability and continuity” and Farage's “Brexit 2: This time with Elon Musk”. Both strategies have clearly failed in the past.
You give two examples of countries that managed to save themselves but there’s far more historical examples of empires that faded and disappeared entirely, or more modern examples of countries in perpetual (so far) decline and failure. No, stories of turning around failing countries are not in fact abundant. There is no reason to believe the UK will be a success story and lots of reasons to believe its time has come and gone. It is in many ways a failing state with no prospects for recovery. Across virtually every metric it looks bleak. And vague comments about withstanding short term pain and planning for the future ignores that they already tried that, and it didn’t work.
Over large, historical periods of time no empire resisted. So, the fact that UK was a great empire is an argument that they will decline in the next immediate period.
That being said, "success" stories appear as much as "failures", and many times on/from the ruins of previous empires.
The UK faces serious structural problems (low productivity, weak investment, stagnant wages, and an over-centralized economy), but none of that automatically translates to terminal decline.
In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis.
The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well.
Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well.
Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace.
Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier.
There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News).
Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.
We are punching way above our weight in arts (disproportionally many Hollywood actors and directors are British), complex engineering (off the top of my head, Rolls Royce, Sheffield Forgemasters, and BAE are good examples), and recently building alliances (Japan's JASDF just made their first European deployment in 71 years). We are unusually constitutionally resilient, still maintaining control of the legislature over the executive, which is becoming rarer and rarer in the west.
But below all of that is bubbling energy and drive to fix and improve things. I saw it at startup meetups, I saw it in thinktanks, I saw it at Labour Conference. I see it in your comment.
There are massive risks to navigate, but I'm optimistic about this country's future.
When you source out part of your production to a friendly nation, it's a cooperation. If you source it out to a non-friendly nation, this dependence is a liability.
I've been watching this thread. Almost everything posted makes me say "no I don't think it was that", but also "I suppose that was something of a factor". This probably tells us there are many reasons not one.
I will say that having lived through this time, it seemed that the message was "there aren't the things we want to do". Thatcherites said there would be a new services based economy. Nobody said "we could have an excellent heavy industry economy if only the pesky unions weren't involved".
Also, at the time (1970s) it felt like the industry was pretty much already gone. In my family the end was the cancelation of the TSR-2 (which my Dad worked on as an avionics designer). That was in the mid-60s. So by the 80s it wasn't that there was an industry that might be saved/preserved, rather the unsavable rump of what once was.
Lastly, I'm unconvinced unions are the cause. I think they're the symptom. Business is in decline, management doesn't know what to do, so begins laying off workers. Unions respond. Death spiral.
Anyway, for me it seemed like the class running the country just didn't understand nor like the engineering/manufacturing world. They were arts graduates.
I think let's not forget that at the start of the period they mention, the UK (and British Empire) as a share of world GDP was larger than the US is today. It was clearly never going to be able to sustain that position.
Let's also not forget that the country effectively bankrupted itself during WWII. Investment from the Marshall Plan was basically used to prop up the currency which ultimately failed. There were 'balance of payments' crises well through into the 1970s when Bretton Woods collapsed.
They can build faster and cheaper in Asia. Something the Netherlands learned after they threw a lot of money at it trying to save the shipyard industry.
Just accept heavy industry is over and find new ways to make money. You will never out build Asians but you can out bullshit them and nobody bullshits better than the Dutch!
I've struggled to understand exactly why our productivity is so bad here and I feel that this really explains it quite well - over reliance in tried and tested methods coupled with a lack of capital investment - for example relying on push-carts in the yards rather than looking at whatever was a more automated approach. It's not necessarily a case of a "productivity puzzle" but rather a puzzle as to why business owners aren't investing.
I got talking to a guy in the pub who told me about a local tire business, running completely on paper and manpower. In 2025 there's barely a hint of computers in the business. Seems like a similar story really. They could be making more sales, be more efficient, still employ people but redeploy to more useful roles. But no, a prevailing attitude of just carry on with pen and paper, and the MD can buy himself a flash new motor every year. When asked why the don't use technology it was like a fear of it, that they would be made redundant. I don't even mean AI, I mean even like a simple messaging system to IM from one side of the warehouse to another.
It goes into a lot of detail on exactly how the process modernization happened in Brompton, with the sorts of challenges that you and the replies are talking about. The process and the workers need to adapt, in ways that the workers appreciate and fit the actual process of manufacture. Too often modernizations fail because they look at the "on paper" process, which isn't what the workers are actually doing.
> Too often modernizations fail because they look at the "on paper" process, which isn't what the workers are actually doing.
Also software installations fail because management decide what they want and go shopping for it, the users are not really in the loop about what they actually need, and management is an interchangeable class of people who think they know management but have often never done the job they are managing.
At the core of what you're saying about the "on paper" process is the fact that nobody does time-and-motion studies anymore.
Systems analysts barely exist in 2025, largely because interchangeable people in management get interchangeable "solutions providers" in, and they build the only flow that fits their existing tool.
A few years back I was hired to fix a bad web-based product for a niche-ish market (a niche within a standardised market) put together by rushed remote subcontractors who'd never talked to the client.
I was handed the spec and told I was to implement it. So I implemented it to a certain point, and then (because my mother had worked in that field and I knew what annoyed her) I thought: Hold on, a core flow of this implementation is awful tiresome CRUD busywork and they will hate it within hours. I already hate it and I'm only testing it.
So I argued to change the spec, suggested a better flow that better suited their needs (and allowed two use patterns — on-the-spot and at-the-end-of-the-day — which had different flow needs), and was told by the disconnected management: that looks good but we need to stick to our plan.
So sure was I that a bunch of hard-working good-hearted people would curse my name that I "prototyped" it to show everyone, and they loved it. Because it wasn't just better and faster, it was instinctive and fun. They had already understood that they were going to quickly hate the thing built for them, but this they wanted to use.
And then we put the prototype in production because it wasn't really a prototype at all: the job was so easy that the "prototype" was the solution. It was just something nobody had thought to offer because nobody listens.
Upshot: incredibly happy end users who gained back lots of time, and also experienced so much less frustration that a subsequent feature improvement could be less rushed because they were able to spend a little more time on a process they didn't hate as much.
I dread to think what this actively-not-listening development process will do to people when solutions providers just shoehorn AI in to solve anything they don't want to do a proper process for.
If you perceive your work to be artisanship (and a lot of people in the automotive and custom bicycle business do, along with people in the high end furniture business, for example), and you have enough customers who agree, and enough work to keep yourself and your employees busy and your families all fed, then a messaging system that speeds up productivity really is a lot of bollocks, basically (particularly for a company which is, in my experience of these amazing people, still disproportionately likely to hire people with dyslexia or reading difficulties). Because you cannot do more work of the same quality faster.
One thing tech people misunderstand is that these "artisanship" oriented companies can scale at least into the dozens of employees, almost all of whom want to do methodical uninterrupted skilled work or quiet, consistent labour, and who would rather hire four or five very understanding, very capable tech people to handle all that stuff for them. This is not a failing, it's a culture. Some great businesses in the UK run on the "don't add unnecessary tech bollocks" model, and IMO they should be encouraged to continue if they can, because that, it seems to me, is one route to surviving in an AI-bullshit-led industry.
The fact that the tech industry seems to thrill at systemically fucking this up and selling systems users do not need based on marketing fear that they are falling behind is quite depressing to me, not to mention a failure of systems analysis. Just because you are a tech person it doesn't mean you should be selling a messaging system to people who actually could just get the benefit from one more person to handle co-ordinating with the front office.
Tech people are, IMO, quite irresponsible in this way. We have all been trained to answer "we have a problem with X" questions with "we can build you a Y for that", when responsible consultancy would first rule out non-technical process flow improvements.
This is not Luddism. It is obvious that in skilled-work industries you should get things like "office-wide-instant-messengers" out of the way of people doing the skilled work so they can do it uninterrupted at an appropriate pace. There is no non-desk-bound job that is meaningfully improved by notifications buzzing.
I understand what you're saying, and I agree, technology doesn't always make things better. In this particular example though I'm not talking about adding frivolous software, I'm making the point they don't want to invest in ANY computing technology. Inventory, logistic, order, people or timesheet management. The example of IM is more a case of removing the requirement to hand a runner a note and them literally go to the other side of a warehouse to hand that note over. Apologies if that wasn't clear.
The thing is, that runner learns the business over time and could one day replace another employee. This is why automating away entry level jobs is not always a good long-term decision. Whereas e.g. Slack is just Slack forever.
And 100% agree, AI - Generative in particular - is a load of snake oil bollocks. It's not going to help any of us really. Hence the evidence coming out that companies are failing to see any return on their investments.
Ha, see what the unions have to say when you threaten the livelihoods of the poor downtrodden push card operatives, there will be placards and flaming braziers by the front gates before you can blink.
It's somewhat reasonable given the dire history of UK labour relations in the 1970s. As you say, it's now 2025 and the only people who can get away with that are maybe the train drivers. Everyone else has been casualized.
Except the post that you were replying to was not, was it? And you were talking in the present tense.
If you think unions have no possible value in 2025 you are either independently wealthy, retired on an excellent pension, or very misinformed. Right now everyone should be considering whether there is a union for them, because what is coming down the pipe is not good.
Nobody here is talking about unions in 2025 except you, the whole post is about the decline of British shipbuilding which happened in the second half of the 1900's, along with a lot of other industry.
So I responded, quite logically, as if you were talking about unions in a contemporary context. Not least because you replied in the present tense to a comment about the present.
Parent referenced push cart use which is from the article, hence my reply was also intended in that context. For future reference you might want to go a little easier on people rather than coming straight in with the snarky 'you must be independently wealthy' remarks, and make the goal to understand each other.
If the MD is able to buy himself a flash motor every year, perhaps he doesn't have any incentive to improve the efficiency. Sounds like he's doing alright.
I love how the capitalist laws of markets that instigated the rise of China as a the main ship builder - cheaper labor, automated production, low cost of all the source materials also coming from China - don't seem to apply for the people making the argument of protectional national strategic industries.
This is no different than any other industry. Unless you are on the cutting edge of a product where innovation is still being pushed, then your industry is going to be eaten up by China.
The UK at its peak was producing 1.4M in ship tonnage, now it produces zero. The US currently produces 69k in ship tonnage. China produces 37M in ship tonnage. Even if you can scale back to the historic peak, it's nowhere near enough. The difference between zero produced ships a year and 3 per year or 30 per year may as well be zero when China is producing 3 per day. It's over.
Labor cost is like 1% of shipbuilding cost. Also China just followed Japan's playbook, who did it first after WWII. It's entirely about the financing model and heavy cooperation between the State, Banks and Shipbuilders.
I feel this explains our "productivity puzzle" quite well - A lack of infrastructure and R&D investment that is holding the UK back and really needs to be fixed.
- Unique, state backed financial instruments that remove a lot of the risk for purchasers. The state needs a large amount of foreign reserves to do this;
- A concentration of industrial and labour capacity. You need to achieve a certain scale in order for the economics to work.
They also look at the case of Germany, who don't produce a lot of finished ships, but export the most profitable, complex components to east Asia. They are at least pursuing a rational strategy, even if they don't have the ability to crank out thousands of ships a year.
I can't believe how much I read on this that's just dead wrong.
The reason China, Korea and Japan dominate shipbuilding today is entirely two factors: export credits and generous financing by government-run banks.
The financing terms are so attractive that you don't want to buy from anywhere else. Those governments also reinvested almost all proceeds into expansion. There's something like a three-year backlog and you can place orders without tying up capital.
In a way it is story that repeats itself on a larger scale as a whole with the western world.
One of the things that annoys me is that the west lost the opportunity to continue to be world's manufacturing powerhouse in the 90s and early 00s. We should have invested in automation and efficiency to the point where developing countries even if using slave labor and no environmental regulations to still not be able to compete on price of end product. It is not as if there was not substantial technological advantage at the time.
If there was going to be a rust belt - well it is better if jobs were outright destroyed/obsoleted than moved to other countries.
China has "dark factories" - so little labor that they could turn the lights off. Absolutely no reason those couldn't be in US or UK if proper investments were made at the time.
the rust belt, and deindustrialization in general was a political choice. The free trade agreements that enabled it were enacted for a number of reasons, some well intentioned, but ultimately they were a choice to mortgage our industrial capacity now, in exchange for gdp growth back then.
It's a good analysis but probably over-fixates on shipping specific factors. The UK also lost its car industry, its steel industry etc. The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result. From the comments:
> I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on the production line at the British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Oxford. By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift. Needless to say, BL went belly-up and now BMW is producing Minis there (although they are no longer very mini).
I grew up in the UK and it felt like everyone of my parent's generation had stories like that. My father was in management and had to go toe-to-toe with a union that was on the verge of wiping out his industry (private sector TV), they were doing things like shutting down transmissions as part of demanding higher wages. In that specific case the unions failed as the TV companies were able to automate the transmission suites and then fired all the workers, this was in the 1980s I think when the legal environment was more conducive to that. Funny story: one of the fired workers moved to the US and ended up writing a popular series of thriller books that ended up being turned into a movie series, he became very rich in the process. So the union failing ended up being good for that guy in the end.
But in many industries they weren't able to beat the unions thanks to a series of very weak left wing governments in the 50s, 60s and 70s (even the Conservatives were weak on labour until Thatcher) that largely made opposing the unions illegal. So the industries just got wiped out one by one. Today the same problem exists but with Net Zero instead of unions, it makes electricity so expensive that industry becomes uncompetitive vs parts of the world where they don't care, and the political class is fine with this outcome. Decades and decades of governments that cheered on deindustrialization for left wing ideological reasons.
So whilst the shipping industry probably did have problems in management (just like the car/steel industry), ultimately having good management wouldn't have helped. What determined if an industry survived this period or not was whether the management was able to automate fast and completely enough to break union power.
The main reason the car industry couldn't hack it is because of quality issues. There was this joke sticker for the back of your Jaguar or Rolls: "The parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture".
I worked a lot on classic Mini's, Metros and Maxi's. The degree to which body work had been patched and bent to match it to the corresponding chassis was quite amazing. Rumor had it the Leyland factory had a guy with a very large hammer standing at the end of the line to 'adjust' the doors if they didn't close properly. I totally believe it. I've seen almost new subframes that were Swiss cheese from rust and/or with very bad welding.
That said, there are few cars that are more fun to drive than a souped up Classic Mini, and even fewer that would be as lethal in an accident.
Cars like Jaguar and Land Rover have famously bad electrical systems. But just saying quality issues doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country, and its the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to, there has to be a deeper reason. I don’t know it unions were the whole story, as really only Germany or Germanic countries have ever had great quality control for cars in Europe, but there must be some systemic reason.
There are lots of manufacturers in the UK right now who have fantastic quality. Rolls Royce aero engines. Lots of pharmaceuticals. Airbus wings and landing gear. Lots of cars as well. Medical devices. The list is endless.
The UK manufacturing sector was worth $279 billion in the last year.
That's all true. But the list could have been a lot longer. The UK had a lot more industry than it does today and there definitely were quality issues. At the same time: competition that wasn't even on the horizon back then (for instance: Korea) became a major factor and at some point you need the scale. For the UK driving on the left side of the road made that all of their exports had to be made for domestic or foreign use, foreign manufacturers often chose to simply not field a model in the UK, so that was an extra cost.
It's funny, I've a complete love/hate relationship with cars from the UK. I love them, love the looks, love to drive them. But I hate the unreliability that was part and parcel of it and I hated even more to buy a spare part and then to find out that it subtly didn't fit because of some defect in body geometry with as a result that it looked like crap (fenders... subframes... don't get me started on that one, I can bore you to death about the kind of crap they sold).
The Metro could have been what the 206 was for Peugeot, instead they made fairly nice design in the most cheap and unsafe way possible. In comparison the 206 was a little tank.
This is an under-appreciated point: the UK manufacturing sector is highly successful, but only where it doesn't employ large armies of workers, and is instead either automated or very small volume/large margin.
News coverage of this is, as expected, completely dire.
> Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country
There's a culture in industries. As you said, look at Germany. Look at the culture in SV - it would be hard to open a development business of any size that ran completely against the SV engineering culture.
> the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to
That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history. :)
> I don’t know it unions were the whole story
Looking at the two countries with the best reputations for quality, a lack of union and labor projection may be the problem: Germany has very strong unions; in many cases, they get a seat on the board of directors. Japan treats its labor very well - often lifetime jobs, famously Toyota empowers assembly line workers to stop the entire line themselves - and has low labor market liquidity (but my info on Japan could be out of date).
TBF, the industrial revolution started 250 years ago and the Merlin ceased production 75 years ago and has almost literally nothing in common with the Trent - not design, metallurgy, thermodynamic cycle, fuel...
Calling the referenced achievements ancient history isn't an unreasonable take, despite current successes.
Which, it should be noted, is not a common goal among unions.
I’m a union metalworker in the US shipbuilding industry— our products are expensive, but in very high demand domestically and internationally. That’s true for various reasons, but in no small part because our quality is exceptional, and people regularly get fired for compromising it. Some unions do seem to strive to protect incompetence at all costs, but none of the ones I worked for in any industry ever defended it. I have a feeling the cases where they do are heavily influenced by shakedowns and corruption rather than being genuinely that tribal. Some police unions probably fall on both sides of that spectrum.
A union is functionally a business which sells labor. It's usually structured so that sales are indirect, with their customers paying the workers directly, but that's just accounting.
There's no fundamental reason that a union should seek to prevent anyone from ever getting fired, anymore than any other business would see to prevent any of their employees from being fired. Likewise, there's no fundamental reason that unions should be bad for the businesses that hire their members. A prosperous client is good for business.
Some unions are badly run and hurt themselves. Americans especially tend to assume all unions are this way, partly because of some high-profile examples, partly because of a culture of individualism and association of unions with communism, and partly because of propaganda. But they definitely do not have to be like that.
Typically you incorporate union representatives onto boards of companies, make the members shareholders etc. You tie incentive structures together.
Even so, I'm a reject your framing to a certain degree. Employees, and by extension labor unions, typically want to see the company they work at succeed. Labor always pays the price, e.g. forgoing wages during a strike.
And even when a deal is struck, employees often put the interest of the company ahead of their own, e.g. trading away already agreed upon wage increases in a labor contract in order to keep the company solvent.
Are there examples of both situations? Of course! I've seen both first hand, but it certainly isn't completely one or the other. Some companies have a good relationship with their unions, others are very antagonistic.
Well, how do you craft corporate rules to prevent companies from extracting value out of their labor without being abusive, under-compensating people, discriminating, valuing nepotism over competence, exposing employees to unreasonable risk, etc? Most people take pride in their work, care about what they do, want to see the company they work for succeed, want to see competence rewarded, hate having to repeatedly clean up other people’s mistakes and will respect a company that treats them well for doing so. The company has leverage and the union has leverage and they work together. If the union has all the leverage and the company has none and the people in charge of the union are greedy jerks, well then that’s a problem. If the workers have no leverage and the people in charge of the company are greedy jerks, that’s also a problem— but it’s a far more common problem because it’s much easier for companies to get leverage than workers.
Look at the case of the boring company having workers spraying caustic chemicals in enclosed spaces with no PPE and laboring in ankle deep water in heavy work boots which abrade skin even when it’s dry. If a company can’t afford to stay in business without treating their workers humanely then they can’t afford to stay in business. But we all know from the rather well known CEO that lack of capital isn’t the problem.
Erm, British management is also famously terrible.
Coal has horrible externalities and its demise is a good thing.
British iron ore is not very rich, and it never was; Britain has imported iron ore since the 19th century. Given how cheap it is to ship iron by sea, it's very hard to justify using low-grade ore that has to be moved by rail.
Because of the large size of the manufacturers, a medium-size country will only have a couple of them, leaving it vulnerable to mismanagement like what happened at British Leyland, AMC, Chrysler, Nissan, ...
"The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong".
That's the conventional wisdom, but is it true?
It was the Thatcher government that shut down those industries. Maybe they didn't need to. There was a lot of collateral damage, privately owned suppliers that went bankrupt etc. A lot of countries have state subsidised industries, including the USA. GM was bailed out by the Obama government. Boeing and Tesla and SpaceX get tons of government money..
There is an interesting book by Tim Lankester, who was the chief economist in the Thatcher government. He has mixed feelings.
If you are interested, the book is:
Inside Thatcher's Monetarist Experiment by Tim Lankester
Thatcher didn't so much shut them down as turned off the life support subsidies. They were already dead, commercially.
A bailout isn't great and Obama was criticized for it, but it's not the same as ongoing state subsidies and outright nationalization. Boeing and SpaceX get oney for selling the government unique services. The USA has historically not gone in for subsidies of industries like steel and coal, and that's one reason it's ahead.
Free trade is not a cold rational economic choice. It is a political choice. It is a choice to put more money into the hands of the capitalist class, by means of improving their investment returns at the expense of that country’s industrial capacity.
> The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result.
And yet Germany, the great success story of retaining manufacturing in a western developed country, had and has far stronger leftists and far stronger unions than the UK. So evidently this was not the reason at all, although I'm sure getting the public to think it was is very useful to certain monied interests.
> By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift.
Note that a work-to-rule is a dispute escalation tactic, one step down from a full-on strike. This was not routine activity.
> Note that a work-to-rule is a dispute escalation tactic, one step down from a full-on strike. This was not routine activity.
In the period where the British industries were wiped, that kind of tactic was being used routinely. The German unions were much less aggressively leftist than British unions.
UK labour-management relations were bad in that period, worse than in Germany, resulting in high levels of conflict and escalation. I don't think it's because the UK's unions were more aggressive though.
British unions were so aggressive there was serious fear of a communist revolution in those times, or a military coup to prevent one. They forced a three day week, rolling blackouts and an IMF bailout. Management doesn't deserve blame here, they were trying to keep their companies afloat in the face of people who were outright promoting Marxism and a government sympathetic to that / weak in the face of it.
Sit-ins and factory occupations were inspired by the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in led by Jimmy Airlie, Sam Barr and Jimmy Reid, all leading [Communist Part] members.
Blame the workers, it’s absolute bullshit (apologies for language).
My view is privatization opened up the British market to globalization, and fundamentally once everyone is trying to get things for the cheapest price the domestic supply chain shrinks, in the UK it has shrunk to the point it vanished. Other countries with stronger protection for domestic production (like the US with the Jones act and dredging acts, Norway) avoided exposure to the global market and survived.
The Jones Act and friends are exactly what turned US shipbuilding into rent-seeking. You can have protectionism or you can have manufacturing, but not both.
The most most successful car companies in the world are from a country even less advantageous to auto manufacture, Japan. They had very little natural resources and about the only avdantage vs UK was a little bit bigger population.
I didn't realize the UK was known for wool production. I know it as the birthplace of the industrial revolution and the country that mined enough coal to cover the entire country to a depth of three inches.
Blaming it on unions is dumb (German car makers seem to do just fine), but if you were looking at the situation in the first half of the last century, it would be pretty reasonable to expect UK car manufacturing to be a big deal. And especially ship building. They had the world's largest navy for a long time, and they didn't do it by importing ships.
For steel you need iron ore and coal, which the UK has plenty of. It was heavily industrialized in the 19th century. It's not that different in terms of natural resources to Germany.
British cars could have remained competitive for a lot longer if labour relations had been like in Germany. Germany's organized labour is/was famously mild compared to the feral British unions that were run by open Marxists and did things like topple governments.
Germany's economy is currently collapsing because they can't import cheap energy. I don't think unions matter much, except to democracy.
The british isle is also unlikely to become a steel production hub unless it both grows massively and reorganizes its labor around efficiency rather than profit.
That's true today but is a very recent thing. The trends I'm talking about were mostly in the 20th century when Germany had cheap energy.
Britain was a steel production hub once, making 40% of the world's output. But I agree it's unlikely to become one again. For one many of its coal mines were shut down and flooded or otherwise destroyed.
It sounds like your hypothesis is that if only the poor people knew their place, and remained serfs, then UK manufacturing would be the best in the World...
I'm sure you're insisting on working for below minimum wage with no holidays and no sick pay, just to show that unions are worthless.
This is called mean reversion in history. The UK and Japan are small island countries. They lack the resources and manpower to sustain long-term industrial prosperity. Everything they have is temporary. In the end these industries flow to large nations with vast resources and large pools of technical talent. It used to be the United States. Now it is China absorbing Japan and Korea. This applies not only to shipbuilding but also to automobiles and all precision industries.
Seems a naive simplistic philosophy. The UK is larger than South Korea and has a similar population size. Yet South Korea has outcompeted the UK and US in ship building. By most accounts by investing in advanced technology and ship building technologies.
Having population and talented populous is a requirement but not sufficient for achieving big things. It requires leadership as well. Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
> Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
it wont last long. even china dont use military to take taiwan, china will still win on this in the the end. It's just a matter of time. A lead of a few decades doesn't mean everything from the perspective of historical dimensions, it's still too short.
also, china will take taiwan in short times(less than 10 years), so the result wont change anyway. From a historical perspective, this is a normal means of transferring power and status.
This seems, either naive or wishful thinking. The ‘normal means’ of transferring power and status as far as I recall from most history I’ve read usually involves some sort of massive war. Sometimes this ends well for the rising power, other times they wind up finding their fortunes being reversed.
Even when things don’t wind up being so dire, it’s not very often you see complete forgone conclusions in international relations, especially between countries separated by a body of water.
So your solution to “Taiwan is outcompeting on silicon” is that the PLA Navy should take it by violent force and overthrow a peaceful nation and justify that calling that normal?
“ china will take taiwan in short times(less than 10 years), so the result wont change anyway. From a historical perspective, this is a normal means of transferring power and status.”
Japan has always been an industrious, populous and quite productive country even back then (before the colonial era). It tops rankings on historical GDP. I agree to a certain degree about the UK, but even in this era of Japanese depression, they are still the world 3-4th most productive country.
yes but for now.if you analyze Japan's industrial data in detail, you'll find that they are in an unstoppable downward trend. Basically, all the industries they excel in, just like those in South Korea and Taiwan, are being replaced by China. Shipbuilding has become a game dominated by China(>50%) and Korea; home appliances, automotive industry, steel, chips, computers, and so on. Of course, right now, like in the automotive sector, Japan still holds an advantage in terms of volume, but everyone knows that electric vehicles are the future, and the core technology for the battery industry is almost entirely in China's hands. Even Tesla initially used Japanese technology, but they were ultimately surpassed by China. Relying on native protectionist strategies from the US and Canada, Japanese cars still have many advantages. But in open markets, Chinese electric vehicles are making inroads everywhere. Vietnam is gradually banning fuel-powered motorcycles, which is one of Japan's main products, but policy changes will allow Chinese electric vehicle brands and VinFast to capture more market share. We cannot predict exactly how long it will take for Japan's industry to completely exit the historical stage, but what we see is indeed a dying man. (Of course, Germany is already dead.)
so i wouldn't say 'always', even it can be reach to 100 years(unlikely). its a great achievement, but its not 'always'.
(Moreover, when predicting industrial trends, we must note that the future trend is robots. In this regard, due to China's vast population, the per capita number of robots hasn't yet reached the top spot, falling below Singapore and South Korea. But in terms of robot technology, I believe even the United States can't compare. Of course, in large models, the United States is still leading by a wide margin. So, determining how long China can rule industry in history, first of all, it will definitely be much longer than Britain and Japan, and another core reason is the decisive role of robots. If robots lead to the end of industrial transfer, then as long as China doesn't collapse for other reasons, China will forever have industrial advantages.)
Here’s the thing though, if china keeps on alienating all of it’s export markets by variously undercutting them, monopolizing strategic resources and then embargoing them, stealing technology and dumping excess capacity from its industrial sector, it may find itself with no more export markets to sell to.
Human societies are, in general, fairly well attuned to collective action against a perceived collective threat, that’s what we evolved to do after all. And unlike the USSR, China has done a fairly bad job of building any soft power that it could use to modify public opinion.
That is simply not true. UK and Japan are big enough to compete in specific sectors. The problem is the entire world gifted China their manufacturing ability and then gave up. Climate policy, short term economic thinking and unions all worked together to destroy the west manufacturing capability.
a lot of people point back at history, with the argument of "we did it before, we can do it now!"
but whats to say it wasn't a transient? transients can last 1 year or 100 years, but in the latter case i think its 'hard' for us to believe that it was a fluke, because we view transients that last longer than a human lifespan with a bias of perceived permanence.
how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry? on virtually every objective metric, it is off by an order of magnitude. frankly it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
>without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
London would be considerably poorer, there is an argument that the rest of the country may well be better off. The finance sector is our equivalent to the oil industry in Dutch Disease.
How could Shenzhen possibly compete with the rest of the world in electronics?
Specialization is the answer. The bigger you are, the more fields you can be competitive in. But even regions much smaller than the UK can be world leaders in something, if they choose to prioritize that and play their cards right.
There is nothing preventing the UK from taking advantage of the talent pool, supply chain, and consumer market of an equally large economy in their chosen field. Except maybe the UK itself.
National borders are as important as you choose to make them. Small countries have always relied on diplomacy and trade to be successful. The UK just needs to accept that it's one small country among many, and start acting accordingly.
> how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry?
How could Switzerland?
How could Japan?
How could the Netherlands?
And so on... The UK is still pretty good at plenty of things, but they lacked a specific USP. I think their biggest issues (from an industry perspective) were not so much scale as quality control and the willingness to improve their processes. Compare a German car from the 1970's or 80's under the hood with a UK made car and the difference could not be larger.
I don't think so. It certainly did not hurt but there is another major factor: The UK is the house where the industrial revolution was born. And they still have the scars from it. And I think that is in part why they lost it: they were ahead but with fairly primitive stuff and then others overtook them because they didn't have that heritage to maintain and keep up. Just have a look at the London subway for an excellent example of why being early out of the gate with stuff like that isn't always the best in the long run.
Some more examples: Some countries in Africa are now ahead in mobile usage for all kinds of official stuff including payments, insurance and government interaction. Countries that were late to adapt to mobile infrastructure ended up with 4G or better where as the rest is having trouble phasing out their 3G networks because they've become invisibly dependent on them.
I've read a book called Four Hundred Years In America before; I don't know if its English version is popular. It points out that one core reason for the South's defeat in the Civil War was how vital the cotton trade between the American South and Britain was to both sides. So the North used their fleet to blockade the South's cotton exports to Britain right away, leaving the South without the trade revenue to import steel and other materials needed for building railroads—basically sealing their fate. Britain just pivoted to sourcing cotton from places like India, still not relying on local production. This example really drives home how Britain's industrial foundation was way too dependent on raw material inflows from the colonies.
I haven't read the book you referenced but there are many articles which say essentially the same thing. In addition, there are some historians who claim the British created the conflict in an attempt to partition the US into north and south, a trick they used almost everywhere they went. Matt Ehret for one.
India is the most prominent example, to tiny Cyprus.
I think this kind of mean reversion is actually worse than imagined. I'm not belittling the UK or anyone else; I just want to say that the governments of these countries haven't prepared any contingency plans for this kind of crisis at all. The lost industrial capacity is almost impossible to recover, and they also have to face the impact of immigration issues. The lower classes in the US, the lower classes in China, and even the global lower classes live more miserably than people in the UK and the EU, but they work longer hours. This isn't a stable state(The UK and the EU also lack priority in military and technological aspects.), so major changes are bound to happen. It's just a matter of time—maybe just a few decades away.
well... i dont know about that. i dont think its as virtual as people think. fundamentally any industry is about people, and london is chock full of hft shops, and they're all in-office. where would they go? they are quite serious software engineers (ive met only a few) and very selective. london being an intellectual hub, i dont see that changing any time soon.
as for sanctions, i think the gov will cut out perfectly sized legal (loop)holes for the people that matter.
The real value in London - actually more accurately the City of London - is in the networks built up over the decades. By networks I mean the old boys networks where insiders share information with each other over the phone.
Software as in used in trading or other financial services is only of value if there are takers for those services.
One rapidly eroding service is insurance. The so-called "shadow fleets" are called that only by London, because they're not insured by London. That doesn't mean that they're not insured: various governments have already created vehicles to insure strategically important shipping.
England (and the Netherlands, Belgium, Northern Italy, and a few other regions) have been some of the richest parts of the world for centuries. Not quite millenia, but not far from it. That's hardly transient.
Makes no sense in economics, the whole history since industrialization is that the economy gets bigger and bigger, both in absolute terms and per capita.
The position in the world will. At its peak, Britain was truly the empire on which the sun never sets, but these colonies were not assimilated by British culture to become part of Britain. Therefore, they were ultimately lost. Britain will eventually revert to the position befitting a small island nation—insignificant in the realm of geopolitics.
There's a presumption that it would be beneficial to return mid-20th century manufacturing economies. If you look at economic output and productivity, and quality of life for labor (physical labor, especially repetitive physical labor, is hard to do for decades), we want to move forward and we did. We want to plan for a mid-21st century economy.
The problem is a small group seizing the benefits for themselves.
Yes, but in the end you still live in physical reality, and this determines our actual productivity.
Whether we can make a boat, or a tennis racket, or a toothbrush cheaply is in the end what determines how many people can have boats, tennis rackets and toothbrushes, not whether the service economy, or our scientific research is excellent. We can hope to be able to do neat stuff and trade that for products, but in the end, once trade is no longer mandatory when people do not need to obtain foreign currency to obtain oil, everything having become battery-electric, I suspect that everybody will be better off simply building what they want.
That's not how, in physical reality, the world works. The question is not 'what is needed' but 'what adds value'.
If you walk into a room where a full crew of people are painting the walls, you don't add any value by picking up a paintbrush yourself - you may even get in the way. You need to find something valuable to contribute.
In our real world, many things that are needed are already well provided for: They are so cheap and easy to produce, that making more doesn't add value (and consequently earns little income). Making t-shirts is very cheap and easy; you provide little value by doing it yourself and consequently you won't be paid much for it. Another example is water: Potable water is absolutely essential to life - the most essential thing. But it's already well provided for and therefore we don't invest substantial resources in producing it. We'd be a very poor country if we made t-shirts and potable water, and deservedly so - we'd be adding little value to the world.
We add value to the world by doing hard things that others can't do: Designing chips, designing airplanes, writing software. Science is hard. Those add a lot of value - and you get paid well for it.
We're not starting from a world of nothing - maybe like 10,000 years ago - and adding things to it. Then t-shirts and especially potable water would be essential. We're starting in the world as it is now. Manufacturing, for many products, was valuable and hard in early-to-mid 20th century; when Henry Ford first did it, it was hard and extremely valuable. Now lots of people can do it and we add little value by doing it ourselves, and we won't get paid well either.
This is economic myopia that leads to long term subservience to countries which have maintained manufacturing capability. China can literally bring the rest of the developed world to their knees at will with rare earths.
Actually, the most powerful country in the world by far is the United States, and other than China, other Western countries that have followed this "myopia".
> rare earths
Rare earths are not a manufacturing product, but a natural resource. That's not an applicable example here.
Also, China is more dependent on the rest of the world than vice-versa; China has power, but certainly hasn't brought anyone to their knees - when has that happened?
The reason your original post was downvoted was because the events of the last few years have so thoroughly damaged your neoliberal ideas and of course this follow up just confirms how poorly you are informed.
I have plenty of arguments but have learned arguing to be a complete waste of time. Neoliberals are experts at ignoring/dismissing real life evidence to maintain their thought bubbles.
The point of my post was what it says, express why your thinking is no longer popular, even though it was main stream just a short while ago.
There's lots of rare earth deposits all over the world, but the question is, are you willing to accept the pollution that results from extracting them as efficiently as possible?
China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.
It’s easy for a small group to seize the benefits when productivity is centralized in the hands of a small group. If you diversify the ability to build boats, then you may not be rich, but you’ll have a boat.
The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy. If China could turn on a switch and become independent, they'd do it. They can't and it's interesting that the US/EU are not happy with this superior status quo and would rather return to a pre-1900 world where they are the sole center of the world.
It's not going to work, in my opinion; and it's going to end with them having neither. You being downvoted shows that this is not the opinion of the elite only but everyone is onboard the insanity train.
>The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy.
Except that we don't have monopoly on that. Assembled in China, designed in California worked for a while because of the inertia of the previous times when the whole pyramid was located in the US. For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.
Guess what - we moved the bottom layers of the industrial pyramid and we are acting surprised that the top layers are also organically happening there. We are probably somewhat ahead, but if we get wiped out of existence tomorrow the progress in China won't slow down.
> For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.
What am saying is that this is not happening because shit got assembled in China but because of internal issues in the West. Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better; and I think this is where I (and most?) people disagree here.
This is the fundamental thing you get wrong. The whole industrial knowledge thing was build because we were building stuff internally. When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing. For free.
We live at a physical world - so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper is extremely important for continuous dominance.
The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.
> When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing.
I don't think so. Employees on the chain line are not going to become literate and engineers just because you are outsourcing the menial stuff.
> so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper
That is knowledge work.
> The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.
It didn't stop Brazil from creating a rather very good aerospace company.
I am afraid we cannot reconcile the difference in our thinking.
> Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better;
How so? Why would bringing back domestic manufacturing be worse for a country than outsourcing all of it to another country that is actively working to replace the few parts of the process your country's still involved in?
Of the top of my head: pollution, jobs that negatively affect your countryman and then require expensive healthcare, side effects (noise, truck traffic) that negatively affect knowledge workers, low pay.
I can't also think of any reason why bringing these jobs is a net positive. Like I get it, China is adversarial but there are 2-3 billion more people you can outsource this work to who are unlikely to get adversarial.
The impression is that you must know nothing about the merits and this is all you have - name-calling, swearing, condescension. But most of that is unnecessary and definitely inappropriate to HN: What makes you think you can treat people this way? Because they have economic ideas you don't like - and, it seems, don't understand?
I don’t think I insulted anyone, I said neoliberal ideas are bullshit. Because they’re demonstrably so. In the UK, Thatcherism resulted in terrible decision after terrible decision, and we must all live with the consequences.
Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards).
The manufacturing industry in the UK at that time suffered from three serious problems:
- Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world.
- Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.
- Lack of access to capital. Banks were very reluctant to lend to that sector which made modernisation really difficult. With the ever present threat of nationalization it was hard to raise capital from shareholders. Why invest in technology when you could be nationalised on a whim?
I don't believe that these were significantly contributory, from experience:
- Margret Thatcher: whilst I'm no fan of her, at most she just administered the needle to a sector that was already on end-of-life support.
- The unions: I worked for a large engineering company (fully unionised) that had not had a strike for 30 years. We also introduced modern automation without resistence. The reason? Good management.
UK manufacturing is what long term decline looks like. Apart from a few small examples the UK has not been a world beater in manufacturing for fifty years or more.
On the other hand the UK is particularly good at Finance, Insurance etc.
'"Working in trade" had a low social status' I think the push in the 90's to drive everyone to university also had a big negative impact on the status of 'working in the trades'.
Don't worry, this trend has been in reverse the past couple of years.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US this is only half true. Degree-requiring jobs still have better social status over trades and low/no skill work, at least from a "what do you want to be when you grow up" point of view.
However, many more people than previously are skeptical of the math behind the cost of a college degree. Going into significant debt only to find a field flooded with others, competing with overly ambitious expectations for AI, and it's much harder to see the value in becoming a desk jockey at big corp versus becoming a plumber or field tech, or welder.
I'm sure someone will point out the math still works in favor of getting a degree, but I'm not really the one that needs convincing.
The local state flagship public university has $18k listed for annual tuition for residents of the state, and double that if you're from out of state. Add in their estimates for books, housing, food, and a surcharge for computer science majors, and you're looking at $40k for the 2025-26 school year... $160k worth of debt for a 4 year degree, at a public school, with nothing but a piece of paper and a bad economy to greet you on the other end.
Conversely, trade schools in the same city offer $8k tuition for a full 20 accreditation course load, no book costs, and no mandatory dormitory stays. You'll spend the rest of the time probably in a lower paid apprenticeship, especially if you do go for being an electrician or something similar, so it isn't all roses.
Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is. The cynic in me says price increases are about setting up class boundaries and pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations
>The cynic in me says price increases are about setting up class boundaries and pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations
This makes absolutely no sense when you spend two seconds to think about the supply and demand.
Case in point, college is free in Europe and that has led to the exact problem you fear: oversupply of college grads and devaluation of degrees "pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations".
In my European college town it's easier to find a ML developer than a skilled HVAC tech or EV mechanic.
I can't speak for the whole Europie but in my experience those kind of jobs just don't really pay well. They kind of make sense when living in a cheaper area but I personally wouldn't imagine actually making ends meet from this kind of job in a capital city in my country.
European countries have used free college education as a technique to artificially hold down the youth unemployment rate. Full time students don't count as unemployed. The problem is eventually they graduate and then many still can't find a job, or they end up underemployed in a job that doesn't really require a college degree. At least they don't have huge student debts but this system is tremendously inefficient for the rest of society which has to pay the taxes.
>At least they don't have huge student debts but this system is tremendously inefficient for the rest of society which has to pay the taxes.
Depending on which country, but yes it definitely can be very inefficient in the nations with super generous welfare states. I know people still being students well into their late 20s or even early 30s because why not, when government pays for your education and as a student you get a lot of discounts like free public transport, cheaper phone plans, free bank plans, laptop and travel discounts, etc, so then why bother with a bad jobs market with low wages and no more discounts when you can postpone the harsh reality of adulthood?
Hot take here, but honestly IMHO, the government's constant putting their thumbs on the economic free market scale via the overly generous welfare state has been doing more harm than good to society and will lead to a rude awakening for people when the system is not solvent anymore and will have to pull the rug from under them and you have a generation of people who grew up without the skills to survive without the state holding their hand every step of the way. I expect massive political turmoil, extremism and maybe wars.
Not true for ie doctors... and generally your example is an outlier not valid for most Europe.
Because med school still has, and for good reason, very hard barriers to entry and to exit, no matter if it's free.
Government backed loans inflate demand. If banks had to consider the risk of repayment prices would come back to reality.
Colleges should be on the hook for a least a portion of defaulted student loans. That would give them a direct incentive to hold down tuition.
Is defaulting on student loans possible? I thought, at least in USA, the only way to get out of student loans is: pay it off, work for a qualified nonprofit for awhile, or die
Government student loans made college prices effectively a made up number. If you can just make up a number and anyone can afford it because they're backed by the government, why wouldn't you just make the number go up?
Of course you can also juice up the numbers by lowering standards so that people who don't understand numbers or basic math above a 6th grade level take on these loans without actually understanding what they are doing.
Not every college has crazy tuition. The school I attended in 2000 to 2004 has kept pace with inflation generally. Annual tuition is now around $10k, which is a lot, but not unmanageable for many middle class families. I'm curious how this compares across universities throughout the U.S. Maybe the tuition story has bifurcated somewhat?
Tuition for my college in 2012-2016 was around 6k per year. A quick Google shows me this increased to 11k.
And it's worse than it looks, because this doesn't include cost of materials, the dreaded "other fees", and of course, room and board. Room and board increased 50%.
And this used to be considered a "best value" college. I'm sure it's only worse fr private schools in the state.
There's no class warfare grand conspiracy going on. Like any businesses, colleges charge more because they can. Customers have been willing to pay, and the availability of government subsidized student loans made those customers relatively price insensitive. That model is finally starting to break.
To be fair to colleges, their costs have also increased somewhat. Baumol’s Cost Disease means that it's impossible to achieve significant productivity gains in education and so labor costs continuously increase. But that only accounts for a fraction of the total increase in college tuitions and fees.
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/diagnosing-william-baumo...
"It's not a war because side X won" is truly one of the arguments of all time.
You're really missing the point. The college administrators who make those decisions are well paid but generally not wealthy or true members of the upper class.
If you look at admin's average pay, many would be inclined to disagree. Saying "but they aren't billionaires" isn't very comforting.
> Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is.
There is a perfect reason, though I might sympathize if you say there is no excuse. If one wanted to engineer some incredible Rube Goldberg machine to cause prices to spiral out of control beyond all lunacy, one could hardly do better than what we have in the United States right now.
Young people were told that without college/university they were doomed to a life of destitution and misery. They were hounded by teachers, guidance counselors, pundits, politicians, advice columnists, celebrities, journalists, you name it. The propaganda machine was relentless, gigantic, and hilariously un-self-aware. Then grants were minimized and replaced with student loans (unforgivable in bankruptcy, thanks Biden!).
This sets the stage. College administrators knew that everyone could now attend, and that they were guaranteed loans to pay for it, that they were young and foolish and didn't see debt as a millstone around their necks during mandatory swim time, and that they were fickle, fashion-seeking, and indifferent to lack of academic rigor. These universities needed to expand capacity to capture all those loan dollars, they were competing with other universities, and they knew their market. They built resort spa dorms... no longer were these places the dormitories of old, where you packed 6 freshman into a broom closet and made them sleep on floors. They build gorgeous grounds that looks like royal gardens. Expensive new labs and facilities and lecture halls. Why not? The kids would be paying for it (all their lives, thanks to the omnipotently powerful force of compount interest).
The kids, on the other hand, barely more than children, didn't choose the best value schools. They chose the prettiest... it's not as if they couldn't afford them. For most people, the fanciest product seems like the highest quality, and who would choose low quality? Nor could universities be the sanity limit here even if they wanted to. If they refused to build out their own little Versailles, they'd just see enrollment drop. And their costs were going up quite a bit too, when you double the size of the institution, you need more than double the staff. When the buildings are fancier than yesteryear, full of computer labs and high tech, you need more than just janitors. Entire bureaucracies were spun up just to deal with it all.
But a curious thing happened, with every university and college competing for those dollars, none really got ahead near as much as they wanted to or expected to. So they just doubled down, and tried to make their schools more attractive to prospective students. The state school in my city still strives to reach an enrollment of 50,000 last I heard (this would put it more than double its late 1980s enrollment, I think).
In summary, we have a gigantic slush fund of money that means no one has to be price-conscious, perverse incentives prodding those who administrate to jack their own expenses/costs to astronomical levels, and a society that still insists and even demands that everyone be college-bound despite the ambiguous evidence that it is good-value. Until one (or ideally all) of those things changes, there's no way for college to be any less expensive than it is.
Right, and it's worse when you remember that the people who voted for this knew exactly what they were doing because it's how they made their money in the real estate market: obtain property rights over inelastic supply, pump cheap debt into the counterparties, price spiral, laugh all the way to the bank.
We really are a society of ponzi schemes.
The state school I went to 20+ years ago, by contrast, has around $10k in annual tuition, which isn't bad compared to a trade school. No mandatory housing/food costs either. I got a great education there and am still friends with some of my profs. I also got one of the least practical (for most people) degrees (creative writing), and turned it into a comfortable job for myself, though I recognize that's the exception and not the rule.
I never thought of university as a way to get a job. It certainly did help me in many, many ways though, and can't imagine having my current career without it.
In my opinion, shipbuilding is different to other industries that the UK was known for.
The UK was once an 'island of coal in a sea of fish'. But we used up the easy-to-reach coal and ate all of the fish. Not only that, we also used up all of the easy to access iron ore.
I am no fan of Margaret Thatcher, however, how would shipbuilding make sense in the UK once the raw materials have to be shipped in from the lowest wage mines on the planet?
It would make more sense to build the ships nearer to the raw materials. Yes I know the Koreans, Japanese, Germans and Chinese have the same resource allocation problems, but the workers were cheaper, offsetting the material and energy costs.
Regarding the UK being 'particularly good at finance, insurance, etc.', London is the portal to tax havens, as in the islands that were the former British empire. The U.S. has some financial regulation that London lacks, hence the arrangement and relevance of London.
> - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world.
> - Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.
I see these as ultimately being caused by your third point:
> - Lack of access to capital. Banks were very reluctant to lend to that sector which made modernisation really difficult. With the ever present threat of nationalization it was hard to raise capital from shareholders. Why invest in technology when you could be nationalised on a whim?
You remove the problems by paying those workers more to be more productive. You pay them more by having more capital with which to do so.
The threat of nationalization exists because capital is unwilling to do this. Why pay Tommy Adkins more when you can set up a shipbuilding yard in a country with loose regulations, low labor costs, and an authoritarian government that's willing to grind the proles into hamburger if they speak up about either of the former issues?
Ultimately, when you can do that, there's no amount of anything that the workforce in the UK, or any other developed nation, can do to keep up. You have to either instill the nationalism in capital, or scrap the entire enterprise.
Thanks for sharing :)
I have very little context but it's interesting that, presumably, the lower profit industry was replaced with the higher profit one.
And on top of that the higher profit one is probably of less value to society.
The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.
The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials).
The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food.
This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" comes from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector
The goal of each sector is to make the previous sectors more productive, and so they're squeezed to become commodity.
We therefore intentionally incentivise de-valuing the things that bring us value as a civilisation, and over-valuing the things that don't.
That rather implies a society of subsistence farmers is the "most valuable", which is the one thing everyone in every society runs away from as fast as possible when technology prevents economic alternatives.
just because people don’t wanna do it doesn’t mean it’s not important.
It’s interesting that we would care about monetary value more than societal value- that kind of leans into my point don’t you think?
IME the people who care about societal value more than monetary value either already have plenty of the latter or aren't going to be the ones doing the work.
Charity fails when the charitable can't even pay rent. Offer $40/hr to these "essential workers" and suddenly people will be charitable again.
Seems like you’ve smuggled in your conclusion with your definition of “highest value”?
Using the normal definition (how many dollars we will pay for it) the statement is of course objectively false.
Agriculture is certainly necessary, but to take a more extreme example, is air valuable?
>Using the normal definition (how many dollars we will pay for it)
Ah, pot calling kettle black!
The "normal" definition you claim is smuggling the equivalent of an entire cultural ideological framing.
Do we need more farmers, or for food to be more 'valued' in a monetary sense? The developed world is awash in affordable food. Even machine tools are incredibly cheap and accessible, the issues around those are related to where they're built and creating skilled labor to run them.
I work laughably far from anything that provides basic needs to anybody, but that's not because I don't value food, it's because our system is _incredibly_ successful at creating it so I can go do other stuff.
I do agree we have some huge policy issues to deal with around food affordability and skilled labor and supply chains, but I don't think it's because we've de-valued food production.
ehhhh, lets be real. I’m a dyed in the wool meat eating junk eater.
But, a lot of how we produce food today is not humane or sustainable, and a lot of the food itself is so poor in nutrition that it leaves us unhealthy and unbalanced.
This isn’t a lecture, just an observation, I am guilty of eating (almost exclusively) poor quality, over processed, mass produced foods.
But realistically speaking, if we solve the worlds hunger, what should be left is the pursuit of art and science.
Not whatever we seem to be doing with Excel; how can that be more valuable than feeding and healing humanity?
Why isn't it sustainable? All the inputs can be derived from non-fossil sources.
Maybe N2O emission? But I think that could be addressed technically.
Not sustainable due to the fossil-fuel laden garbage we feed to bovine stock.
Not sustainable because it causes major health issues which stress the healthcare system and limits quality of life - especially the affordable stuff that people tend to think is “normal value”
As I said, all the fossil fuel inputs could be replaced with renewables. In particular: farm machinery can be run on non-fossil energy, nitrogen fertilizer can be made with green hydrogen, and pesticides can be synthesized with feedstocks derived from non-fossil sources like biomass.
The second sentence doesn't make any sense. None of that makes something unsustainable, just regrettable.
Sure, so we're agreeing I think.
It's possible, but we're not doing it because we believe it makes more economic sense to ignore those issues.
When economic sense no longer makes sense sense then we're going to be having issues. And going back to my primary point, everything should really be serving the primary sector, not the other way around really.
The base issue is that fossil fuels are not being charged the cost of their externalities. All the problems stem from this. Do that, and all these subsidiary problems melt away.
Huh? Nitrogen fertilizer is mostly derived from fossil fuels and has been since the 1900s food boom. Aren't phosphates mainly shipped from islands that build up huge stocks of bird poop? The inputs are all fossil fuel intensive.
Nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized from hydrogen and nitrogen. The hydrogen is currently derived from fossil fuels, but there is no requirement that it be so.
Saying "ammonia is produced from fossil fuels, and so must always be" is like saying "cars run on fossil fuels, and so always must". A non sequitur.
Phosphates are derived from large phosphate deposits in various places, such as Florida. Phosphorus will ultimately have to be mined from lower concentration deposits, perhaps ultimately from average crustal rocks, where it appears at about 0.1% concentration. However, build up of mostly insoluble phosphates in soils will I think likely reduce the need for this fertilizer if erosion is kept in check.
This can't be replaced at a volume that can feed the world nor in a way the world can afford. Lots of things can be done in alternative ways if you remove half the requirements (in this case volume and affordability).
It can be replaced at volume that can feed the world. After all, the total energy involved is small compared to what would have to be produced to power the entirety of industrial civilization. Agriculture uses < 2% of total US energy consumption.
> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.
This highly depends on the actual productivity. Producing food by subsistence farming barely feeds you and your children. Making something that improves food production, from ploughs to better seeds to fertilizers, has a significantly larger impact, even if you're not directly producing something edible.
People change their diets to live longer, and in general medicine seems more valuable. People happily pay a lot for more QALYs.
Having food security is important, just as having warm clothes and shelter too, right?
Providing what people need is value, just providing "food" can lead to a lot of negative value (see the obesity epidemic).
What is the lowest value thing you can do with your life? Props comedian who destroys good food with a sledge hammer?
Bill Hicks on Gallagher and Carrot top
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJjgFcJ0DoQ
> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.
Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is. Society, however, does not agree with your sentiment. Obviously I'm nitpicking, but if society agreed with your proposed value, the billionaires of the world would be farmers and not tech people. That's how weird and out of balance we seem to be today.
I think you missed my point.
My point is that we’ve inversed the “value” of each sector.
The highest good you can do for civilisation/society is also the least profitable.
The lowest good you can do for civilisation is the most profitable.
Thus our incentives are opposed diametrically from the benefit of society.
I'm not sure going into farming is even good for society at the moment. My dad was a farmer for a while and there was mostly a food surplus with the EU paying him to set aside land to control that. You do good for society by providing things it's short off.
You should take a look at the price of food after Russia launched their full scale invasion in Ukraine. A significant increase, 15% at its peak and lowering thereafter to about 5%. Still, it is above pandemic levels.
You rise food prices and there's a domino effect on the economy, everything else also increases in price.
It is important the EU is able to produce its own food at acceptable prices.
if food security is important then the EU should pay for cost-effectiveness, economic sustainability, ecological resilience, storage capacity, and so on.
AFAIK right now it pays the same for a huge unproductive monoculture of non-edible corn (ie. for bioethanol) as it pays for wheat. (though there's finally talk about some changes to CAP, mostly to stop paying already rich big farms.)
food prices are pretty volatile anyway, and as you see even a war only moved them 15% whereas in Hungary inflation was more than 20%.
Hungary is facing a stagnant economy, with poorly targetted subsidies and overall high corruption. Inflation was already high since 2019 compared to other OECD countries with similar GDP per capita (checked Estonia, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia). They have also continued to engage with Russia economically despite sanctions (even outside the energy sector) leading to sometimes having exemptions or attempting to use that as leverage against EU policies. All of this has further destabilized their economy, given neighbours will hesitate in trade.
Hungary is the worst example you could pick from the EU.
>Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is.
America spends $20-$30 billion a year paying corn growers per bushel of corn they grow
America spends $100 billion+ per year paying people to buy the output of those farmers using food stamps.
America requires that 10-15% of all gas in the entire nation is actually ethanol derived from corn.
Twice now, President Trump has personally destroyed the market for American soybean production and dropped $20 billion on the industry to not piss them off.
I am family friends with the family that grows a significant amount of Potatoes in Maine. They love to complain about anything and everything as they drive around in $80k pavement princess trucks that aren't their $80k work trucks about how much liberals suck as those at least third generation farmers inherit the entire thing and they switch to cute "artisanal" breeds of potatoes that they sell to those same liberals for a nice markup and harvest them with the literal undocumented workers they swear they hate and pay a few dollars an hour, and insist the men aren't men anymore as they drive their airconditioned harvesters and aren't missing any fingers like their ancestors, and spend all their free time getting piss drunk and smoking weed which was grown by their cop buddies as they vote for people who want to make such a thing a crime again, and reminisce about when they were important; In high school. They are actually pretty friendly if you have the right skin color and genitals though.
I think farmers can maybe quit the bellyaching. Most of the modern world solved famine by just giving farmers money for doing a basic job, one that's been so improved and enhanced by technology that they are allowed to care about such things as "How will a trade war affect my profits this year" instead of "Oh my god oh my god an unexpected frost we are all going to die". It is some of the best $150 billion the US spends.
Most of the food production in the United States has been moved over from small individual farmers to large corporations. Any time there is government policy that negatively hurts farmers there is a big push from the media to show small time farmers hurting but the biggest losers are actually the much larger corporations.
Farmers are the ultimate DEI hire and are small farmers are just used as political tools, eventually if companies like John Deere keep getting away with blatant consumer rights abuses these small farmers will be completely wiped out and just left with massive corporations that heavily lobby the government for more subsidy's and free hand-outs
> I don't believe that these were significantly contributory, from experience: The unions...
The formally commissioned report clearly demonstrates that the ship building unions were dysfunctional:
"…a laborer (member of the Transport and General Workers Union) [to] carry the ladder to site, a rigger (member of the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers Union) [to] erect it and place it in the proper position, and an electrician (member of the Electrical Trades Union) [to] actually remove the old bulb and screw in the new one. Production was often halted while waiting for a member of the appropriate union to arrive to perform the job reserved by agreement for them. (sunset 96)"
> - Poor quality management. [...] So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.
There's also the challenge of the Baumol effect.
When hiring engineers in the UK, manufacturing companies are competing for smart, numerate graduates against the likes of Google and Facebook and HSBC and Barclays.
But when selling products, manufacturing companies are competing against the likes of Foxconn - so they can't just raise prices to raise salaries.
People often miss:
- Productivity is low, because the pay is low and from that comes everything else (thinking of paying the bills instead of the job, being seen as "cheap" by others etc.)
- Nobody cares about "social status" if the pay is right. Status comes from pay.
- There is some merit to that, but I think the real reason was outsourcing. Why invest at home if you can get the same or better cheaper from overseas.
The problem is the UK is the class system. Shareholders see workforce as slaves and not equals. That's why we see wage compression and it is now next to impossible for working class to climb the social ladder. So why bother? Your quality of life will not be vastly different whether you are stacking shelves or develop software. Everything is being creamed by shareholders, who also enjoy preferential tax system and other incentives not available to working class.
The problem IMO is nothing to do with status or pay, specifically in the UK the issue is capitalism.
Capitalism demands that companies show continous growth, or they are classed to be failing. The UK is very small on the world stage, and so inevitably all manufacturers come up against the need to export and grow beyond the UKs borders. This is when aquisitions and mergers from overseas corperations occur, and they have little need for an expensive workforce in the UK.
Foreign investors or parent corporations buy out the UK businesses, strip out the manufacturing, and use the brand recognition to turn them into shell companies for distributing the material which are produced much cheaper overseas.
This has happened time and time again with all raw material manufacturing, and is now happening to the food production industry too (the Cadbury story is used as a regular example around these parts).
It’s not capitalism in general; it’s the British flavour of it. In most capitalist countries, investing in the workforce is seen as a way to grow. In Britain, it’s seen as a threat to the social order. The class system turns economic policy into a tool of control.
For the British elite, an empowered, well-paid workforce isn’t progress - it’s an uprising. The economy is structured to keep labour cheap and dependent, so productivity stays low and ownership stays concentrated. Profits flow upward, wages stagnate, and the same people who caused the problem deliver lectures about “efficiency” and “global competition.”
So yes, foreign takeovers hollow industries out, but they only can because the domestic system rewards extraction over creation. The real disease is a ruling class that treats workers not as partners in growth but as a cost to be managed.
I dont agree with this at all. Look at other small countries with big production outputs like Japan. This is possible due to an incredibly high work ethic and skilled workforce. They still have the ruling class, and the big fat cat bosses that own all the companies. But the willingness of the population to work extraordinary hours with incredible precision is what makes it possible.
The UK population are lazy, and have been constantly told that manual labour is degrading and low class work. Nobody in the UK takes pride in any manufacturing work.Its nothing to do with a 'ruling class' conspiracy.
As someone who was deeply integrated into the manufacturing industry the population is not lazy.
My former company had plenty of very talented hard-working people ever at basic level jobs such as assembly, that had years of experience that could diagnose an issue with a single part without even without understanding the underlying mechanical engineering and tolerance stack-up.
My former workplaces biggest issues were pressure from other markets consuming market share and the inability of university educated salespeople to promote our unique product for the specific advantages it had over other off the shelf solutions.
Customers who understood the unique advantages always made regular business, but sales folk struggled to actually bring in any new blood. Nothing to do with the manufacturing environment (which I was largely responsible for improvements in). that was very optimized and honestly pretty low cost. I know it's absolutely a fact as for the number of CAM engineers I spoke to who always assured me there was some cycle time to be saved just for them to send me over a program that was 4x longer than our current production programs.
My biggest takeaway after leaving the UK is that it was rigged from the start and the UK is doomed to fail a sad and slow dying death since about the 1970s, well before I was born.
That argument explains symptoms, not causes. “The British are lazy” is a convenient myth told by people who spent decades dismantling the very conditions that make pride and skill possible.
Japan’s work ethic didn’t appear by magic. It’s the result of long-term industrial policy, lifetime employment norms, and a culture that rewards skill. The UK spent the same decades casualising labour, cutting apprenticeships, and outsourcing production. You can’t get a proud, productive workforce by paying poverty wages and sneering at manual work.
And let’s be honest - would you give your best when your boss says he “can’t afford a raise” while pulling up in a new sports car? Low pay kills motivation. People stop caring because the system made caring pointless.
It’s not a conspiracy; it’s class logic. When those at the top treat labour as a nuisance rather than a partner, the whole structure rots. Japan’s elite reinvest in their workforce. Britain’s extract from it.
What does modern manufacturing look like? Are you limited by a lack of people who can, like, use a screwdriver? Or by a lack of people who can use a CAD package?
I worry that kids might hear “not enough people in the trades” and work on their hammer swinging skills. But in the US at least, you can get through k-12 without learning basic intro math stuff, like linear algebra or calculus.
If that was the minimum, we could, I guess, handle basic applied math like intro differential equations in the first year of a 2-year degree, and then spend the second year figuring out how to ask the computer to solve those problems…
Never mind calculus. There are plenty of kids who graduate high school without the basic arithmetic and trigonometry skills necessary to be a good carpenter. The social promotion practice in primary and secondary schools has been a disaster.
Social promotion is the expected outcome of rewarding schools for graduation rates.
Maybe the decline of manufacturing in the UK correlates with freedom of its colonies? There is loss of access to cheap raw material as well as a dumping ground for finished products.
Close enough, but it's the decline of the (ex-colonies) Commonwealth as a trading bloc. That was probably always inevitable, but it long out-lasted the end of direct colonial rule.
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It's all downstream of lack of investment.
The workers weren't productive because they weren't getting better tools. They weren't out there smashing the new machines to stay in the past, they weren't bought in the first place. So how is this the workers' problem that they somehow created?
The problem is the company ownership didn't invest and let those that did pass them by.
I love how often people who are probably in the bay area say this as the unionized members of Hollywood next door have no problem rejecting truly mediocre laborers and paying "10xers" millions of dollars per performance.
Do you know who were literal members of that union? Both Reagan (twice president of the union) and Trump.
Despite having a stranglehold style, where union members are not allowed to work on non-union projects, the industry still cultivates talent and allows both normal people doing day jobs making average wages and Superstar members like Jeff Bridges and Tom Hanks and George Clooney and Meryl Streep and Betty White.
This union has been able to keep up with changes in technology, ensuring their members benefited from streaming taking over the primary content delivery mechanism and getting a contract that accounts for it, and now getting protections from AI.
These big names regularly show support and go to bat for the literal little guy, knowing that if you can't make rent from writing movies, they won't have anything to star in and make a million dollars from.
This union contract is also a major reason actors are able to actually control how they are used, and gives actors control over things like sex scenes
A significant reason why Hollywood is currently full of terrible quality Visual Effects is that CGI has a significant non-unionized portion that is currently getting absolutely abused. Disney doesn't GAF, people still paid half a billion dollars to see the slop that was Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness.
I agree with you about the way that the entertainment unions work. They have their quirks, but they are generally excellent.
Just to offer some nuance, "union members are not allowed to work on non-union projects" is not strictly true. Union members can apply for waivers to work on non-union shows, and smaller theatres operate under letters of agreement with SAG-AFTRA which require only X-number of union contracts per show or per season. Also, union members - no matter their usual wage level - are free to sign contracts to work for "scale" (minimum wage for union members) on projects about which they're passionate; this happens all the time.
Incidentally, the "minimum wage" scale is also different for theatres of different sizes and business models. It's an attempt to balance workers' rights with the exigencies and economics of a fundamentally unstable industry. Some shows won't (necessarily - there are always surprises!) be commercial enough to be produced at certain theatres, and some actors may be prevented from working on some projects, but the system itself won't ever prevent anything from being done at all.
Another advantage to keep in mind if you consider importing this model to another sector: operating under a LOA provides a huge measure of protection to non-union employees, as well. At a certain point in my theatre career I stopped wanting to work on any non-affiliated project - unlimited rehearsal hours with no required notice period were unappealing, for instance, and (even as a non-union actor) pay was usually better in affiliated companies. There was a line to walk, though: once you accumulate a certain number of affiliated weeks in a rolling period you'll be required to join the union, which can limit employability: it's important to make sure your career / skills / network are sufficiently developed to support that level-up.
Anyway, I think that general model would be a good fit for tech workers, and I'd like to see it tried.
The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now.
Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. If you don't regard this as a core competency which should be kept in the national register, then sure, buy the ships from other places. But, don't come whining when the national-strategic interest needs you to do things outside the commercial domain or under duress, or with restrictions of access to supply in those other places.
There is Autarky, and there is total dependency, and there is a massive road in-between. Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
I might add that Australia is in pretty much the same boat (hah) and the shemozzle over the Tasmanian Ferries (ordered from Scandi, parked in Edinburgh because too big for their home port dockside tie-ups) is an exemplar. And there's a high speed double-hull "cat" style fabricator in Tassie, or at least there was.
In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise. I sailed around Falmouth 30 years ago with a friend and indeed, a lot of big ships were laid up in the estuary and river mouth. Awesome sight in a small sailing boat.
If you're going to talk about Edinburgh (I could almost see the Tasman ferry from my house), may I introduce you to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_ferry_fiasco
"Originally intended to come into service in 2018 and 2019 respectively, both ferries have been delayed by over five years, and costs have more than quadrupled to £460 million"
The Scottish government tried to do what commentators here are saying is the "right thing", maintaining the last gasp of a dying shipbuilding industry, but it turns out that part of the reason they were dying was not actually being able to build ships on time and under budget.
How do you tell the difference between "maintaining a strategic industry" and "throwing taxpayer money into a lossmaking business with nothing to show for it"?
> In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise
By "wise" you mean "expensive", right? Ships of all sizes require continuous maintenance to remain seaworthy.
This is the problem with destroying industries then trying to keep small remaining pockets of it/restarting it. You lose all of the institutional knowledge, the stuff that isn't written down, the stuff that comes from experience.
This is only exacerbated when those projects you're trying to do become massively over budget and late. People decry it as a waste and a failure, leading to any hard won knowledge being lost yet again as those projects gets scrapped and all the people making it lose their jobs.
You don't get good making things if you only try once every 30 years, you get better by continually doing that thing, passing the hard won knowledge down through the workforce by training incoming people not from hiring "experts" and expecting everyone to be up to speed on project #1 immediately.
This is what has crippled the Nuclear power plant building industry in most countries (ROK, China, Russia excepted). France built dozens of reactors in the 1970's and into the 1980's, then that slowed and then finally stopped for a decade after Chernobyl. When they tried to build the EPR it's been a huge fiasco of delays and cost overruns. Similarly for the US after 3 Mile Island, the AP1000 in Georgia are the first two power reactors built in the US in 40 years, and massively over-budget and behind schedule. Japan hasn't tried anything since Fukushmia Dai Ichi, but I expect that they will have the exact same problem. The ability to deliver on time and budget was just gone because they didn't have a workforce, and so are having to build that from scratch.
ROK found it easier to become world-class in building power reactors from zero than the US, UK, France and Germany has found it to re-build their capability after a decade (or more) of not constructing any power reactors. And that's true for a lot of these post-industrial industrial policy stuff. It is a lot harder to rebuild once lost than to build the first time.
Russia never stopped producing reactors after Chernobyl, because the USSR was a command economy and the Five Year Plan said that they needed to build a reactor here right now, and so the workers kept working even after the disaster, and now they are one of the few countries that can still deliver nuclear reactors. Note that this is NOT an endorsement of a command economy.
The is rarely some kind of inherent cultural or socioeconomic failing on the part of the producers, it's more often a failure of institutional will and a failure of scale.
Take any product that you actually produce well in Scotland for X Euros per unit in M months, scale production down by 99.9%, wait 20 years for them to lay everybody off, sell off all the factories, start relying on more and more stockpiled or imported parts and overseas labor, sell off important subsidiaries, and just generally become a shell of an industry.
Now build another one using domestic labor and parts, demanding competitive bids and constant redesigns and calling executives into the legislature to harangue them for failures and tell them the budget is closed for this year because of their delays, and now tell me what coefficient I have to tack on to N and M.
I'm gonna take it a step further.
Garbage in. Garbage out.
Our institutions and organizations are bad because they're running on bad morals, bad culture and bad people. If these institutions were not staffed with bad people with bad morals peddling bad organizational culture, they would no so readily produce bad results.
The bureaucrat cooking up the absurd rules, the academic writing the conclusion of some study to lead the bureaucrat to that conclusion, the politician doing the haranguing, the executive shipping it all overseas knowing it's not a long term solution, they all either a) believe in what they're doing b) know it's bullshit and don't care as long as the paychecks don't bounce. And these organizations adopt rules and policies that result in just about anyone who isn't one of those two types washing out or becoming one before they're senior enough to do anything about it.
I have no real opinion on this debate but wouldn't the person you are responding to say that the explosion of budget and lengthening of timeline is exactly because those capacities had been abandoned ?
But I agree it's a good question, how much inefficiency can you accept to revive a branch of industry, how long do you have to wait before you decide to throw the towel ?
There are multiple causes behind that that scandal. But if the buyer had specified the ships to use cheap and simple diesel engines instead of requiring LNG fuel over silly concerns about emissions then they could have been build much faster at a fraction of the cost.
The ferries in Denmark that funny use diesel are nice. No awful fumes for passengers, crew or local residents.
Why shouldn't Scotland also enjoy this improvement?
I just don’t know that it’s feasible.
As the article mentions, the U.K. shipbuilding industry was dependent on cheap, skilled labour.
It doesn’t touch upon just how cheap.
My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50.
The other thing that the article elides is just how much that workforce was shattered by the wars - an awful lot of Glaswegian and other shipbuilders signed up for the navy, as it was a much better opportunity than just making the boats - and proceeded to die at sea in droves. Their families did not receive compensation or their pay more often than not, as it was considered to be bad for morale to say a ship had been lost, and instead all aboard would be classed as missing or as deserters, and when they did finally say “yes, this ship was lost” 15 years after each war, it was usually far too late to be of any use.
Anyway. I just can’t see the working classes or international human rights organisations being willing to do the same again.
>My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50.
So basically the same situation as the prior generations of peasants toiling away to pay their taxes to the lord.
Actually, much, much worse. Before Glasgow, my family were crofters in the highlands - and by all accounts had a pretty good laird - but then the clearances happened, and everyone was condemned to the dark, satanic mills.
For a country that is an Island you'd think that the question of whether or not it is 'national-strategic' would have been answered in the affirmative.
australia has almost no fuel refining capacity
most of australia has less than 2 weeks of gasoline and imports it on weekly barges from singapore.
in the XXIer century some australia cities have run out of gasoline for half a day, an afternoon, a few days
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-15/singapore-bound-duel-...
> most of australia has less than 2 weeks of gasoline and imports it on weekly barges from singapore.
And you know how much oil is found in the vast lands of Singapore... That stuff floating to Australia is probably Russian oil https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/nov/09/looph...
That's unbelievable. A lot of 3rd world countries have their own refineries.. Wow.
> XXIer century
Sorry, but it's a bit funny. Based on the name I assume you're French (speaking, at least)?
That "XXIer" contraption is really funny to me, I speak a bit of French. In English it's twenty first so XXI or XXIst, in French as far I know it's vingt et unième, so XXI or XXIème.
Is "XXIer" from another French dialect or another language entirely?
As a french person, it looks weird to me. I would only use it for the very first century: Ier siècle.
Probably German (Zwanzig Erster)
See, that's the problem with (my) assumptions :-D
If shipbuilding is a strategic national industry, doesn't that also make all the inputs to a shipyard strategic industries?
After all, if a war broke out and our normal trading partners weren't willing to sell us ships, presumably they wouldn't sell us steel or engines or ball bearings or paint or radar modules or computer chips or plastics.
They is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, unless you believe we buy steel from the same places we buy ships.
The real answer to this is threat analysis: what are the realistic scenarios under which it becomes a problem. e.g. if Japan stops supplying ships a) how likely is that and b) could we just buy them from the Dutch instead? However, the stakes for getting this wrong are high.
The sensible thing would be deep integration with a continent-spanning economy. Sure the UK is an island, but the channel isn't exactly wide (not to mention the tunnel). It's hardly Iceland - even Ireland is more detached.
But the UK decided against that in 2016, and despite demographics having shifted the views, there is no general "rejoin" campaign.
Worth pointing out the UK has an extrememly deep and through free trade agreement with the EU, deeper than USMCA. Integration is still there, and isn't going away.
I've wondered about this too. I live in the UK and have been idly daydreaming about my next startup, and it seems like Brexit, and therefore having a small market / uncooperative EU, is such a headwind for some of the things I'd like to do. Seems like many UK startups just pretend to be based in SF.
I think rejoin is going to be politically unpopular for a while, as there's no way we could rejoin the EU on anything like as good terms as we left on.
The UK is obviously too small and poor to go it alone forever. The other option for them would be economic integration with North America. They could probably join up with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on relatively favorable terms.
That's far from obvious. The UK is 3x the population of Australia, which manages fine without deep economic integrations. The problem of Brexit is not that it is impossible to go it alone as a middle power; it's just an unnecessary handicap when you border a 450m head market but want to ignore them and act like you are an island at the arse end of the world.
Austrailia is 80 times the size of the UK, it has a lot of resources - 240 times as much space per person than the UK.
The UK is too large to be an independent city state, but too small to be self sufficient.
Rejoin is polling far ahead of Brexit, which is beginning to be acknowledged as a mistake by everyone. Although not everyone agrees on the reasons.
The problem is the UK is an oligarchy owned and run by non-dom billionaires. It's essentially a floating labour camp. Virtually all the major industries are foreign-owned, and profits flow out of the country instead of being invested in infrastructure, R&D, and national development.
The public school/Oxbridge educational path is based on a 19th century view of the world, which has its roots in a feudal society that expanded into global piracy.
Rejoining the EU isn't just about undoing the direct, about exposing the population at all levels to a more modern culture with elements of social responsibility and rational state planning.
The EU isn't perfect. But Europe successfully rebuilt after WWII, while politically the UK is still stuck in the 1930s.
But that popularity (about 2:1 saying brexit was a mistake) isn't translating to political support, probably because both Labour and Tories supported Brexit.
And while the majority agree we should never have left the EU, and the majority agree we should rejoin, that isn't translating to political support.
Indeed the plurarity of votes is to Mr Brexit himself, who thanks to FPTP is likely to get a majority government in 2029 off 30% of the vote.
Hell 1 in 8 people that voted Farage last year think the UK never should have left Europe. Not that it wasn't the right type of brexit, but that it shouldn't. Yet they voted for Farage, decided that was a mistake, and are continuing to vote for Farage.
I get it. Some people just want the world to burn.
But a similar number think we should rejoin the EU, yet voted Farage last year.
It's no wonder support for democracy is at an all time low.
Support for Brexit evaporates when people realise they will have to adopt the Euro.
On day one - for past bad behaviour.
If it’s sourced from abroad it has to be shipped (blockades anyone ?)
If your usual trading partner is inaccessible for reason X , what are the odds your alternate trading partner is also affected by reason X? Are there geopolitical or national political reasons that partner B might become unavailable or unpalatable at the same time?
Maybe, but it has to be balanced against the economic damage of autarkic policies which sabotages national security in its own way. There's no substitute for a case by case analysis.
I mean, if we are talking about a big war scenario, then simply the distance to Japan would mean Dutch ships are clearly the better choice.
Otherwise sure, realistic threat scenarios. But the world is also changing fast. Denmark or Canada did not expected to be militarily threatened by the US some years ago and still this is where we are now.
The further down the value chain you go, the simpler it is going to be to find alternative suppliers. Or alternative inputs. And figuring out which alternative inputs make sense in your situation is probably much easier if you're the ones integrating the different components. And if you are committed to building X ships a year for strategic reasons, chances are a local company will end up a globally competitive supplier by grabbing the opportunity right in front of them.
If a war broke out and the UK couldn't call in NATO, then the UK is already fucked. And if they can call NATO in, then they can tap into the inputs in all NATO countries.
Even back during the Age of Sail when Britain was the dominant naval power with a worldwide empire, they had to import many of the inputs for their domestic shipbuilding industry. This included basic stuff like timber, tar, hemp, cotton, etc. If you have enough warships to secure your sea lines of communication then depending on imports is less of a concern. But the UK Royal Navy today is a shadow of its former self and can barely serve as a local defense force.
But weren't they mostly importing these from their own colonies? If anything, the acknowledgement of the importance of securing strategic inputs must have been a big part of the push within the governments of colonial powers for territorial expansion. I think there must not have been as much of sense at the time that you could just leave people in other parts of the world to be independent and still buy these things from them at fair prices.
Why? Singapore is an island, too, and we don't need a national-strategic ship building industry.
As long as your friends build ships, you are fine.
The UK is friends with South Korea, for example.
South Korea is a long way away, if supply chains are contested and there are competing bidders for their outputs. South Korea is far closer to Singapore.
"Friends" is a strange concept in national strategic planning. You might ask yourself "just how much are those friends going to come and help when push comes to shove" and look at current politics, and re-assess what has been commonly felt these last 50 years: no prior friend can be assumed to be motivated to still be a friend.
Think about Taiwan. All these friends, and now the biggest one says "we think you're too risky. move all that advanced chip making to us, onshore, we'll talk more about how seriously we want to be a friend and defend you after"
There's always trade-offs. Even local shipping producers can't magic together a ship in a week.
Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends.
My main point is that close allies (both geographically and in terms of relationship) are about as good as having your own local industry. In a few important cases and areas, having production with friends is better than at home.
Mostly because it's harder for local political interests to capture a foreign economy.
> There's always trade-offs. Even local shipping producers can't magic together a ship in a week.
No, but depending on your (presumed national security) needs, you might be able to repurpose a ship that was almost done for another client. If you have active local shipbuilders, there should be some capacity there.
But, the trick is, how do you do it? The US Jones Act is trying, but US ship building capacity is pretty minimal. Just ordering military ships on the regular is expensive... Etc.
> The US Jones Act is trying, but US ship building capacity is pretty minimal.
Some people might go so far as to put a lot of the blame for the sorry state of affairs _on_ the Jones Act.
(Though to be fair, while the Jones Act alone could probably snuff out American ship building, even without it most ships would probably still be build in South Korea. But you can fairly blame the Jones Act for suppressing US-to-US ocean shipping.)
> Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends.
Nobody likes being a back up friend to only be called on when your primary friend is unavailable, or you want to do something your primary friend wouldn't like. Countries make treaties/trade agreements accordingly
Countries (and corporations) aren't like ordinary people with their pesky social norms: your international 'friends' are mostly happy to be compensated with eg money or other goodies for being your backup friends, even when that would be a social faux pas with human friends.
>Singapore is an island, too, and we don't need a national-strategic ship building industry.
That's because it exists on the benevolence and because of the benefits of it existing to several third parties. If/when that balance stops, they could turn it into a failed state in a forthnight.
Being this careless by relying on "friends" (in global politics? lol) is ok for a small place like Singapore that can't do anything else anyway. For an ex-empire, it's more suicidal than prudent.
This can go round and round forever.
It's not practical for most countries to have a viable industry in every so-called critical good across an economy. As another commenter noted, it's even less practical the more complex it gets because you need to be self-sufficient in the entire stack, not just parts of it.
What good is fuel refining without oil? What good is shipbuilding without mines and smelters? Without the ability to build massive shipboard diesels? Etc.
Moreover, it tends to make your real friends a bit nervous when you want to make yourself independent of them, because than you have less reason to defend them. It's not to say you should make your food production dependant on them, but when your sole reaosnt to figure out how to build ship engines is so you don't need to buy them from Germany (totally random, probably wrong example) it feels a bit off.
This is all ignoring the tremendous costs inherent in this sort of autarkic ideal. People enjoy the highest standards of living ever today thanks to global trade.
>It's not practical for most countries to have a viable industry in every so-called critical good across an economy
Sure. The UK isn't "most countries", and shipbuilding is not any random "so-called critical" good.
> If/when that balance stops, they could turn it into a failed state in a forthnight.
You say that as if Singapore has no agency here. And you are under-estimating Singapore's resilience: after all just after independence we were close to the nightmare scenario you are trying to conjure.
> Being this careless by relying on "friends" (in global politics? lol) is ok for a small place like Singapore that can't do anything else anyway. For an ex-empire, it's more suicidal than prudent.
What does it matter that the UK was part of an Empire in the past? Singapore used to be part of the same empire.
And yes, keeping good relations with your allies is extremely important in global politics. This shouldn't be news. Or do you think we should all strive for autarky, like North Korea or 1930s Germany?
>You say that as if Singapore has no agency here
It doesn't.
>And you are under-estimating Singapore's resilience: after all just after independence we were close to the nightmare scenario you are trying to conjure.
And it didn't happen because some conditions regarding foreign forces balance prevented it. Not because of the "agency" of a barely nascent tiny nation.
>What does it matter that the UK was part of an Empire in the past? Singapore used to be part of the same empire.
The UK wasn't "part of an Empire", it was the creator, owner, and benefactor of the Empire. That's why it matters.
>And yes, keeping good relations with your allies is extremely important in global politics. This shouldn't be news
That's irrelevant, since its orthogonal.
Small island countries shouldn't build their own ships only because they can't due to their size. But they probably should have sovereign manufacturing of asymmetric deterrence tools like anti-ship missiles.
Friends aren't good enough, unless you have a mutual defense treaty, they aren't real friends and can't be counted on. Look at Ukraine struggling to get Tomohawks and ATACMS now, or struggling to get tanks and jets, due to fear of escalation.
> Friends aren't good enough
They are if you actively manage your relationships with an eye to maintaining redundant access to necessary materiel or having multi-pronged defense strategies. Singapore is constantly nurturing strategic defense ties with multiple allies and attempting to avoid existential reliance on any single ally. And the one nation they definitely wouldn't rely on is Malaysia, the country most likely to threaten their sovereignty. Ukraine's problem was they were politically too dysfunctional and dependent on Russia defense trade until Russia's successive invasions forced them to reform domestically. (To be fair, Russia had a hand in prolonging their dysfunction.)
> Friends aren't good enough, unless you have a mutual defense treaty, they aren't real friends and can't be counted on.
No, no, just the opposite: treaties aren't good enough. Try suing your supposed allies when they break your mutual defense treaty.. Broadly speaking (and with only some exceptions), there's no higher authority you can appeal to for enforcement of international treaties.
Mutual defense treaties only work amongst something like friends. A big part of NATO's success is because they take this lesson very serious and designed the whole system around it.
> As long as your friends build ships, you are fine.
Canada and many other countries collectively thought the US was their friend, which it was, until it wasn't. Friends stopping being friends is a risk that needs to be at least considered.
Similar to prenups. People don't like thinking about prenups at the beginning of a relationship as that suggests you're already thinking about how to end the relationship. Never mind the facts that more relationships fail than succeed. Protecting oneself when things go bad seems to be a logical concept, yet emotionally it is most definitely not.
Yes, that's why it's useful to have some backup friends.
It is. But you won't get such an answer from the "important" people because they are busy imposing useless laws every other day.
The public is unaware and unwilling to engage in such discussions because there isn't much pain being felt yet from the current structure of the economy.
If the people who have the most to lose don't think that something is in the national interest, then is it really?
They're also the people with the most ability to jump ship should something happen.
aka zero skin in the game, and, worse, a lot to earn by doing favors and pushing for quick profits for their friends in the corporate and finance worlds
It's the old world old money version of cashing out your tech bucks and retiring to Colorado.
Disagreements about what is of national interest is always going to be a thing.
In my opinion, having a country that doesn't have the means to build, at the very least, what is needed to keep its economy going is not in a good spot at all.
"think" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Are the people really thinking? I don't think they are.
Those people are thinking just fine. With their wallets.
Why would they prioritize national interests? Because they were elected to do so?
After all they know they were actually elected because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices, and in their naivety they happened to pick their side this time (after all they alternate between the two choices all the time).
They also know they'll be fine and have their salaries, extras, and nice corporate post-politic sinecures whetever their performance. Just see Blair.
>After all they know they were actually elected because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices, and in their naivety they happened to pick their side this time (after all they alternate between the two choices all the time).
Australia has ranked choice voting and mandatory voting. What else could be done to “give” people more choices?
As an Aussie:
* some kind of proportional representation in lower houses or parliament (see e.g. New Zealand for a Westminster-compatible solution, or Switzerland for something more radical while still working with seats allocated by state populations).
* referendums on laws/treaties, and popular initiatives to propose constitutional changes and/or new laws (like in Switzerland or various western US states).
* reinvigoration of the federal principle that things that can be done by the states (or the local governments) should be done at that level, rather than the feds sticking their nose in everything (see, again, Switzerland).
>Australia has ranked choice voting and mandatory voting. What else could be done to “give” people more choices?
None of the above are even close to giving people choices.
Australia has a seat-by-seat majority-based system that favors the bigger parties (HoR).
Choices come when there's direct proportional elections.
Choices come when you don't need campaign support, advertising budgets, rich sponsors to be elected.
When they media don't sway to their (owners) favorite parties and candidates.
When you're not elected on an huge laundry list of a program, and then left to do whatever and backtrack on any and all promises until the next election with no consequences.
When there are direct referendums for major issues, regularly, not just to change the constitution in rare cases.
And many many other things besides, those are just some big ones.
> Why would they prioritize national interests? Because they were elected to do so?
How about because they are human people like you and me. You don't think you are a bad guy who always does things only in your own interest right? So why do you think they are like that?
How about if they really screw people over they know there will be mass protests
etc.
>How about because they are human people like you and me
Oh, sweet summer child.
>You don't think you are a bad guy who always does things only in your own interest right? So why do you think they are like that?
Because I wasn't promoted and passed all the exams of a system designed to promote sociopaths, party interests, and corporate/financial/M.I.C. interests, nor did I have the sociopathic self-selection to want to get to the highest offices of power.
Neither was Jeremy Corbyn, but he would have been Prime Minister if enough people had voted for him. Say what you will about him (I am not a fan), but he is not “establishment approved”.
That's why he "didn't pass all the tests" and was undermined both by the media and by his own parties, and various establishment interests.
You said:
> because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices
Unless you think Jeremy Corbyn was establishment approved (!), this is clearly not true.
I’m not really sure what to make of your latest comment. Is your preferred world one where the media never criticize your favored politicians and the left wing of the Labour Party ruthlessly crushes internal dissent? If that’s what it would have taken to make Corbyn Prime Minister, then count me out.
Like people were not feeling the pain in the first half of the XXth century when we decided to own our nuclear stack? It's a matter of political courage.
The decisive battle of WWII, as far as the defence of Britain was concerned, was fought in the air. Invading an island nation without air superiority is a non-starter.
I actually doubt the value of modern navies for anything other than gunboat diplomacy, or coastal patrols these days. I think they’re too vulnerable to things like cruise missiles and drones.
For an Island that has been dependent importing most goods for hundreds of years...
I don't even think there's much of a merchant marine fleet left in the UK.
Interesting question. Its plausible that there are not many vessels that are UK flagged anymore.
The more interesting question is how many of these are under "control"/influence of domestic operators
If required, a flag can be exchanged in a pinch and tax codes /regulations can be adapted to allow/encourage this.
Happened during the Falklands War.
There are peacetime rules and war time rules, war time rules are best summarised as “government does what it wants and justifies it after the fact”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War_order_of_battle:... under “Ships taken from trade”.
I just clicked through to some of the listed ships and it appears they were all flying a British flag in 1982 before being requisitioned.
It’s not at all clear to me a government would have that power about a foreign flagged vessel, even if the shipping line owning it might be British.
Maybe not legally, but most of the countries used as a flag of convenience are tiny, what could the Marshall islands do about it?
It's about a thousand ships, but realsitically it's very fuzzy, with flags of convenaince and all. And British companies own a _lot_ of ships, just flagged under other countries.
It's a country that is also a capitalist economy. Ofcourse they can build cargo ships. But those ships will be ten times more expensive than anything you can buy from Korea.
Who is going to make up the difference?
The idea is that, if it's that important, you ultimately fund it from taxation. It's so important that it's really defence spending.
The UK has been slashing defence spending since WW2. And with reason the USSR lost because they couldn't afford the cold war anymore.
And now the UK has committed to increase defense spending.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies, as a national priority. If this means building cars, ships, tanks, and planes, then that infrastructure should be built and maintained at taxpayers expense.
Whats more, you need to have market forces within your own country so competition can deliver you the best products. You can't just fund one ship building company, you need to roll the dice on a handful. Every now and then you have to prune back the organizations that are not working, and give a shot to startups to see if they can do better.
If you can't tell, I believe in big, transparent, government.
"without reliance on allies"
This is unrealistic for smaller countries, like Ancient Greek poleis or contemporary Estonia. Under your logic, they would have to give up their existence and join some empire.
In practice, already the Greco-Persian wars are an indication that alliances of smaller nations are viable, and that they are more efficient due to specialization. This is not a new problem, nor is it specific for post-industrial history; the Athens were better at fighting at sea, other poleis could provide hoplites.
> Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies
This definitely wasn't true for the UK in WW2. Probably wasn't even true for WW1, especially if in both cases you count "UK" as "GB&NI" rather than the full British Empire of the time.
The only country which managed autarky+export during WW2 was the United States, due to having a large land area, all the required natural resources (except maybe rubber), but especially oil and food.
Defense autarky isn't possible for any European country except maybe Natural Fortress Switzerland.
This seems completely unrealistic nowadays, unless you are the size of China or the United States. The EU could also do this, but there seems to be currently only limited appetite for a more integrated EU.
Who are you to decide these priorities for other people?
Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?
Yeah, whenever I post a comment you can just prepend "In my humble opinion.."
Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently.
I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes.
We have free trade all over the world now! Our governments seemed to be actively dismantling manufacturing - the information economy was the future for us.
Now the world descends into chaos, and it will be very slow and expensive to restart those heavy industries.
But actually, I don't really know how expensive it will be to get things started again. Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
>Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
I saw a whitepaper that suggested Australia should give up shipbuilding in exchange for drones and electronic warfare. The goal being to present a front like Ukraine does. Bristle with weapons and guarantee that any invasion would be 10 times more costly than anything gained. It was interesting at least.
During Talisman Sabre 25, a RCAF C-17 air-dropped a Himars and some ADF personnel on Christmas Island, simulated a firing and then left.
Pushes the defensive line quite a bit further out from the mainland, and you could potentially cover choke points for a naval invasion from the north.
I didn't know that. That's actually impressive, both strategically and in terms of our readiness and capability.
That puts Jakarta in range. I'm sure the Indonesian military took note as well.
Plus we've got Tomahawks now, that's 2500km range, sea launched.
Yeah, so much drama around the gigantic submarines, we should be building water drones of some kind.
We literally are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Shark_(submarine)
But they don't do everything, and frankly drones are very overstated: they're not magic, and the idea of fielding masses of things when your adversary is at least China backed is pretty farcical: we can't ever win a conflict on cheap mass production because we don't have it.
So a handful of hard hitting long range weapons is going to be a key part of the strategy: because if we can't hit the factories, we can't win period.
Which is why Australia is re-orienting its defence by moving towards missiles, UAVs, USVs, while still being lumbered with AUKUS.
It's also shoring up diplomacy with Japan, South Korea, was trying to with India, when Biden was attempting to move India away from China.
The future wars are going to be mostly unmanned and Australia will need hyper-local defence, so has to be low cost and easily deployed.
> Who are you to decide these priorities for other people?
A democratically elected, competent government I would imagine.
So it's up to them to decide whether they want to "be able to defend [themselves], without reliance on allies, as a national priority", ain't it?
Except for most of Europe know it doesn’t stop there.
I'm sure the Baltic States with a population between 1-2M each, would find that problematic :)
Ehh, I think the reason we have less wars in Europe the last decades is because we're all connected now.
>The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now.
Sometimes the time to fix a thing in general (nevermind the "best time") has come and gone, and the rest is wishful thinking and platitudes like "the next best time is now".
The UK is actually doing something(ish) about it now.
Innovate UK (the UK’s public innovation funding) recently had a bid out for maritime R&D but with a focus on clean tech:
https://iuk-business-connect.org.uk/opportunities/clean-mari...
Obviously, this is not going to make up for the loss of the broader ship building industry, but it does show that the UK is thinking about maritime technology as a key strategic area.
In my most cynical moments I think if the UK actually wants to build ships the best thing to do might be to close down the existing shipbuilding industry first, and start a newer more efficient one from scratch.
Per Ferguson Marine, do you want to prop up a dying industry or achieve usable ships? What's the actual priority?
To add to that, we just won a £10bn contract to build Type 26 anti-sub frigates for Norway https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5rgdpvn63o
yeah, you're right, better to sit on your hands and just sit it out idly
yeah, you're right, best to be delusional that you can fix something when you can't, instead of realistically evaluating your actual situation and finding a pragmatic solution
see how such dismissal can cut both ways?
>Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
The biggest problem with this thinking is that nationally mandated production is fundamentally unable to reduce dependency because national economic policy cannot increase aggregate output. That's to say when you politically prioritize to build ships the question always is what you aren't building instead, because all allocation consists of trade-offs.
Britain does not have a gigantic army of reserve labour to deploy that's doing nothing. It's a relatively small country compared to its competitors (as is Australia), it has limited capital. To recuperate the costs of a large industry in particular you need to be internationally competitive to export at scale. Is that even achievable and worth it at the cost of any other place you could put that capital?
It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff, autarky does not necessarily diminish your dependence because you're necessarily getting less. North Korea is very autark and still dependent because it's also poor.
The problem is that the analysis of the alternatives only ever takes into account efficiency and not resilience. Which is typical of “rational expectations” belief systems based upon atomised individuals.
However the real world has politics in it, as we saw during the pandemic, at which points jurisdictions commandeer resources for themselves regardless of whether a “better price” is available elsewhere.
Within a jurisdiction where resources can be directed you only need one capacity for output. In a market situation you need multiple suppliers all of which with excess capacity to supply that you have reserved and which cannot be countermanded by other action (so it needs to be defended with military capacity). Once you cost all that in you may just find that doing it yourself is more efficient, once resilience is taken into account properly.
Nature rarely goes for the most efficient solution. When it does it tends to go the way of the Dodo.
>It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is.
A comparative advantage is a past fixed cost investment whose output has not been consumed in its entirety. Hence comparative advantages are created outcomes and not something you can follow.
The reason why a competing nation doesn't build their own industry is that they would have to duplicate the fixed costs of initially starting the industry and it is cheaper to pay only for the ships you need. If the government made the investment anyway, it would now have given its economic potential a concrete form and switching to a different form is expensive. Producing a different commodity requires paying fixed costs again. hnwnce, after the investment there is a comparative advantage to produce commodities whose fixed costs are already paid for. They are literally cheaper to produce than other commodities.
Meanwhile if you were to go to the other extreme. What if there was an activity without any fixed costs? The concept of comparative advantage would be meaningless, because switching tasks costs nothing.
> The biggest problem with this thinking is that nationally mandated production is fundamentally unable to reduce dependency because national economic policy cannot increase aggregate output. That's to say when you politically prioritize to build ships the question always is what you aren't building instead, because all allocation consists of trade-offs.
The trade off is worth making. It gives you the ability to survive if things go wrong in return for being slightly worse off in the meantime.
> It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff
It can also mean very little more stuff. Part of the problem with our current system is that we will import rather than produce because its very slightly cheaper.
It would be ridiculous for the UK to grow its own tea, however it would be perfectly reasonable for it to aim to produce more of its own basic foodstuffs.
>comparative advantage
Makes a lot of sense in textbooks. But in the real world, when politics is involved, the whole theory breaks down. What does your text book say about China holding rare earths hostage in regard of comparative advantage?
Someone else starts their own mines, everyone goes a little poorer.
except for oil, most countries aren't dependant on other countries just to survive in the near term (food is one of the few things countries will usually attempt to ensure they are selfsufficent in, if it's feasible)
The UK is far from self sufficient in food. You'd think they would have learned from their mistakes after they nearly starved to death due to the Axis blockade during WWII, but apparently not.
It's worrying to me that the idea of comparative advantage has become such common parlance among non-economists that it's being used to justify everything without any real analysis or justification. It's not a solution for everything and it's not always applicable or relevant. Free trade is good, sure, but that's not the discussion here. It's not about free trade vs no free trade. Nobody posed that question here, so why are you bringing it up as if it's relevant?
> Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not.
So the simple truth is you can almost never "ignore the cost" because that cost must be borne somewhere. And there's always someone that's considered "national-strategic" by someone. Hell, I recall my dad being enraged that our "blue" passports are now manufactured in Poland under contract from a French company. What actually happened is De La Rue took the piss on their contract bid thinking they would just rinse the taxpayer.
Having the taxpayer there to bail out a failing shipyard blunts the incentive to modernise which, as we can see from the article, was barely there to begin with. Should the taxpayer sit there with effectively unlimited liability to build these ships? Should that come at the expense of, say, funding for the NHS? Housebuilding? Fixing our crumbling prison system? Modernising our water infrastructure?
Society can't ignore the cost.
But the bad faith peddlers of the costs sure can.
You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation, some additional labor overhead, some procedural change, some tweak of input sourcing or other reduction of outputs relative to inputs as being "amortized" over the course of whatever to much applause from the comment section.
And yet these same people are smart enough to recognize these sorts of dishonest "the solution to pollution is dilution" type arguments when applied in other contexts. It ought to make you wonder how much malice is sailing under the flag of ignorance.
> You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation
I don't see what regulation has to do with (effectively) nationalising the entire shipbuilding industry. When I say "cost" I literally mean the financial cost to the Exchequer.
Regulation was just one example. Could be any sort of TPS report or other overhead type crap.
I’m not talking about TPS reports, overheads, etc. I’m talking, quite literally, about the actual line item costs that appear on the ledger of the Exchequer. I don’t see why this is hard for you to understand without and why you’re waffling about unrelated things.
1. The article states "In 2023, the UK produced no commercial ships at all." It does not consider military ship building, which still exists in the UK. 2. Given the scale of problems described in the article, it is probably easier to restart a civilian ship building industry from scratch than to expand it from the previously existing.
I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
A lot of people seem to yearn for the "good old days" where we built giant, tangible things that did cool stuff. That's fine, but the "national security" arguments ring hollow as you're basically saying all institutions, intelligence agencies, defense agencies, etc. are asleep at the wheel if it truly is a threat... which I guess is possible but highly unlikely.
> I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
The flaw in that annoyingly common logic is 1) countries are very reluctant to use nuclear weapons, and 2) any kind of nuclear escalation is an instant loss for your own side.
I personally don't think any country would resort to nuclear weapons in the case of an invasion or blockade, and certainly not a democratic one [1]. They may threaten, but I don't think they'd actually put that gun to their own head and pull the trigger.
[1] An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you", because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.
> An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you", because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.
Too bad it's hard to find a country which isn't autocratic by this standard in practice.
Even Putin did not fire nukes when Ukraine launched a fairly successful invasion of their soil.
US did not fire nukes during Korea or Vietnam despite several high up people wanting to repeatedly.
USSR did not fire nukes the several times they thought the US had launched. USSR did not fire the nukes during the Cuban Missile Crisis even though Fidel was adamant that they be allowed to sacrifice themselves to destroy the US.
Somehow, that generation was able to maintain a sober view of nuclear weapons. Even as Nixon himself drunkenly insisted we nuke most of the world, he was ignored.
As that generation has aged out, it seems like that respect may be going away. Trump wants to start detonating nukes again. There may be a genuine reason, like maybe we have lost confidence in our simulations and models to build new nukes and desperately need to build the next generation of deterrence, but maybe he's just a dumbass. China is going back to building a shitload of nukes, even though they had plenty. Geopolitical conflict is back on the menu the world over, and everyone is itching to claim some century old grievance to go beat up a neighbor. The Ukraine invasion and muffled response proves to everyone that if you don't have nukes, you are not going to be protected, while North Korea proves that if you do have nukes, you can do almost anything you want.
I think a nuke will be used this century in anger. I think the world will be too gunshy to respond adequately, or too split along some axis, and there will be geopolitical bickering about who is the bad guy for using N+1 nukes in a conflict.
We will have some great new video footage though.
> because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.
I am not convinced the current breed of politicians in (more or less) democratic countries sees that differently.
Right, it's sometimes hard to see the difference with democracy and authoritarianism if you never experienced the latter.
Oh, please do not assume I would not be able to see differences between democracy and authoritarianism. I only said I doubt that there are big differences between some of the views of the respective leaders regarding the populace.
We may add to that - the UK’s nuclear deterrent is onboard submarines.
It's a lot of reliance placed on one rather complex system. See "Trident Missile Test Fails for Second Time in a Row" (Feb 2024)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68355395
Of all the current nuclear weapons delivery systems, Trident is probably the most reliable. Minuteman might be up there due to being a very very mature system, but I would take Trident in a heart beat.
https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2024/03...
That's also my thinking that nullifies a lot of the discussion here. Like why would anyone start a naval beef with the UK, given the UK's nuclear submarine fleet?
It's not about starting a direct conflict, it's that blockading it can be done at a distance rather easily.
If ships can't get to the UK, or the foreign shipyards reduced to rubble - or outbid - then it's more effective and cost efficient then any direct kinetic action.
Submarine fleets will torpedo your blockade. No need to fire nukes.
My understanding is that the UK currently has 5 attack submarines. Is that enough to break a blockade?
More are planned (the SSN-AUKUS), but it is probably still some time away.
That's around 100 torpedoes loaded in the water. Is that enough to break a blockade?
No, it's not nearly enough. The exact number of weapons onboard is largely irrelevant. At any given time only about one third of a nation's attack submarines can be out on active patrol while the others are in transit, undergoing maintenance, or working up. During a crisis they can maybe surge two thirds of the force for a few months but that isn't sustainable. Each submarine can only be in one place at a time and they're likely to take some losses against a competent adversary.
That's why my money(figuratively) is on Kraken Roboticss and Anduril's autonomous robot submarines. This will be the future of naval warfare.
That's so naive. Those robot submarines will be useful for local defense but they lack the range, speed, and staying power to project power and protect sea lines of communication over thousands of miles on a sustained basis. The notion of doing that with robots remains firmly in the realm of science fiction today. Maybe in 30 years.
And my point is it's not about a physical blockade.
If you buy your ships from half way around the world, then the shipyards can be destroyed before you get anywhere near them. And certainly now preventing that is politically commiting to a war on the other side of the planet which may not immediately effect you, but is likely to eventually.
But the other part is: you don't have to physically do anything. You could deny shipping to your opponent by someone just outbidding you for the output. Why not? You're already outsourcing so you're cost sensitive, and guaranteed volume is cat nip to manufacturers - no amount of strategic alliance wording is going to save you if an adversary reliably buys 10x as much.
A blockade need not be enforced in situ.
Say, with satellite coverage to find out where any blockade runners are and a lot of cruise missiles you could enforce a blockade from a thousand miles away.
That would be extremely difficult to defend against unless you have enough ships to defend every single convoy. WWII showed how helpless big surface ships were against u-boats in defending shipping.
Nukes are useless as anything other than a self destruct mechanism. A gunman pointing at your head with himself in the line of fire.
Tell that to Ukraine!
Edit: it's not about throwing nukes at each other... It's about having nukes that you can use if someone invades you.
> Edit: it's not about throwing nukes at each other... It's about having nukes that you can use if someone invades you.
Russia has nukes and got invaded (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_campaign), did it use them?
having nukes doesn't mean when you invade a nuke-free country and it will just fall over for you. but not having nukes means a country with nukes can feel comfy invading you....
Russia aren’t going to use nukes on their own doorstep. That’s a a NATO problem. It’s like openly knifing somebody in public repeatedly while holding the would be hero’s at bay with a gun. Yes this is an actual thing that happened in the UK about 10 years ago.
Um... Russia's doctrine during the Cold War was to turn Poland into a nuclear wasteland to stop Nato advancing through it. At the time, Poland was a part of the USSR.
What Russia considers "a buffer zone" is really "inferior peoples we can atomise without having to open a new conflict with a foreign power." To be clear, I use the term "inferior peoples" as seen from the Russian point of view.
Poland was part of the Warsaw Pact but it was never in the USSR.
You've got it reversed...
Soviet doctrine (not Russian) was to use tactical nuclear weapons immediately during their attempt to invade West Germany and march to the Atlantic.
I’ve been looking and you are correct, though I do recall seeing something different, so perhaps what I read was misinterpreting the Seven Days to the Rhine plan.
Nuclear submarines as in nuclear propulsion submarines. And nukes are useful because you never need to fire them.
That’s the point, and you’re in big trouble if that’s what you’re actually dependent upon is something you can’t use. Nukes are only for the other nukes. The bit of butter, so they say, Betty bought to make the bitter butter better.
> An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you"
I don't think that could realistically work. The suicidal leader would need buy-in not only from the military command, but also from the numerous operators responsible for preparing and conducting the launches. Everyone involved would be presented wiath a choice between signing death sentenses for themselves and their loved ones or trying their luck with whatever enemy they were facing.
You seem to think nuclear weapons stop all forms of tension short of nuclear war but the evidence is strong that even nuclear armed parties do things which don't include nuclear weapons. India applies strategic pressures to it's neighbours including ones with nuclear weapons. They're bashing each other with sticks and stones on the border, to avoid pulling nuclear triggers.
There was an ad-blue shortage in Australia last year, we have no onshore refinery and got close to running out. The nearest one is Indonesia and we were in a number of trade disputes regarding lumpy skin diseases and cattle and sheep. It only takes one or two sore points for something like "sorry, we sold your ad-blue to somebody else" and the entire mining sector is shut down.
British strategic military thinking assumed its role in NATO was unchanging. The re-appraisal post Ukraine has been significant and I am sure it includes waking up the arms manufacturing sector, and the input side to that is heavy metals industry, which has unfortunately fallen in a hole because of under-capitalisation and world pricing and Gupta and the like now "own" the national steel plan to some extent.
You would think that kind of thing would have been thought about. Just making trains onshore instead of buying them in from overseas would have possibly demanded continual metals manufacturing and processing capacity, which kept furnaces alight and steel making to the fore.
For anyone else wondering, "ad-blue" is another term for DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), which is a chemical used to decrease emissions from diesel engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust_fluid
And DEF is ~33% urea in water.
The purpose of diesel exhaust fluid is to decrease emissions, right? It’s not actually needed for engines to work. So in the case of something like the mining industry, crucial to the national economy, the government can just pass a temporary waiver. Or am I missing something?
Having nuclear weapons does not give you immunity to all threats. Quite recently we had a case of nuclear state being partially occupied by a state without nuclear weapons.
And even in that case use of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable escalation and they used regular army to (mostly) kick them out and carry on with their earlier invasion on other parts of the front.
(I am speaking about Kursk if anyone is confused)
Use of nuclear weapons when you are mildly threatened is not viable. In the same way as responding to a pickpockets with an artillery barrage is not viable.
"We do not need police as we have an artillery" is equivalent of "there is no need for any other weapons if you have nukes".
People like to imagine a big obvious threat that you respond to in kind, but what about a gradual creeping encroachment aka salami tactics?
Classic scene from "Yes, Prime Minister": https://youtu.be/yg-UqIIvang
Voted up just for the reference to Yes Prime Minister, one of the UK's best contributions to political education and entertainment.
On the other hand, there's Sir Humphrey's opinion on Trident.
"It's the nuclear deterrent Harrods would sell."
https://youtu.be/XyJh3qKjSMk?si=S8wpuTSnFsRUZGrf&t=87
To be fair, the credibility of the Russian nuclear stack is questionable at this point. Its unclear how much capacity survived the past 30 years of graft. We have developed nations struggling to maintain theirs without layers of blatant corruption weaved into the process.
Even if so, I don't think anyone doubts that they do have functional nuclear weapons. Maybe not all 5000 of them, but definitely enough to use them if they want to.
I think the whole narrative of "well maybe Russian nukes don't actually work" is unhelpful - if they wanted to use nuclear weapons they would and the weapons used would work. I think people sometimes think Russia is North Korea experimenting with sticks to make fire(and even they have managed to get something working) - despite the massive corruption their nuclear industry and the engineering corps are functional and it's in my mind without a doubt that there is a stockpile of weapons which would work if needed.
Russia is just not suicidal enough to actually use them in the current conflict, luckily.
While I generally agree with your point presenting Russia as a decision making entity is dangerously misleading. You're not dealing with democracy or even 1970s committee-run USSR anymore.
Sure Putin has broad support and a number of companions but he remains unilateral, undisputed, unchallenged decision maker. Assuming otherwise brings you back into the fold of rational actor argument which has proven a fallacy for some time now. Yes Putin is not suicidal today, although the chances he'll outlive total retaliation strike. But he may feel differently tomorrow, waking up in a bad mood.
This is just feel good nonsense… Russia has alliances or agreements with multiple major and minor countries including China. I don’t understand why people post these cope posts online unless it’s just to make themselves feel good.
Aside from you apparently replying to some other comment than mine: Russia honors no treaties or alliances except when it's convenient.
> Russia honors no treaties or alliances except when it's convenient.
Russia has a strong historical track record of honoring its treaties and commitments with India and many other Asian nations.
Also, one could point at the US and apply your statement more accurately.
That's the convenient part. There is no shared border or waters; there is no conflicting interests to make a compromise over on the paper. They are not in a military alliance. There isn't really anything to uphold. And the pivot to India started only with Sino-Soviet split.
I am replying to you comment. You are doing the exact same thing again. Saying “Russia honors no treaties or alliances except when it's convenient” is just so you can feel better about whatever. It’s just not how reality and geopolitics work…
From the book Guns of August, page 106, chapter 10, negotiations re: Turkey’ neutrality in Aug 1914. I will just leave this here:
“On August 13 Foreign Minister Sazonov proposed to France to offer Turkey a solemn guarantee of her territorial integrity and a promise of “great financial advantages at the expense of Germany” in return for her neutrality. He was actually willing to include a promise that Russia would abide by the guarantee “even if we are victorious.”
I am replying to you comment.
Please. Your reply had nothing to do with the context of my comment. I in fact gave you a benefit of doubt that you're not just a very quantized LLM.
As to the trustworthiness let's tally:
- Khasavyurt Accords. Breached by Russia.
- New START Treaty. Breached by Russia.
- Armenian request under allied auspices of CSTO: not honored by Russia.
- Russia-Ukraine Friendship Treaty, Budapest Memorandum, Border Treaty: breached by Russia.
It's clear you speak very confidently on the subject you have zero clue about.
You could come up with nitpicky stuff like this for any country. Sure, make yourself feel better about calling people bots and calling Putin crazy, but you’re just living in your own reality at this point.
Breaching 6 major peace treaties and alliances (that I just remember of) in span of 30 years is not nitpicking and no you can't come up with this for "any country". I also didn't call Putin crazy anywhere but feel like perhaps you come to the right conclusion yourself here.
China also ain't dumb. It would play along but there is no misunderstanding about the nature of any agreement with Russia.
There is open evidente that Russia invested in keeping their nukes working. They gave more control over the military to leaders of the nuke program after the Soviet union fell. There are US - Russia nuke inspection treaties (only reciently are they ending) - while the results are classified those with access to them are behaving as if they think they are still working.
They still haven’t managed a successful launch of their new silo missile. If you were the US inspector, would you tell Russia if you thought their nukes don’t work?
They have plenty of old missiles. And we never know when they are not launching because they want to hide something, or when they launched something to test how a failure happens.
I never understood this line of thinking. It doesn't matter if graft ruined 95% of Russia's nukes. Your city is still gone.
That is nonsense. Even if (optimistically) 90% are nonoperational, what it would change?
Direct kinetic war between nuclear powers is pretty much unthinkable - mutual annihilation if either core territory is threatened. Instead, wars happen through proxies or direct attacks on non-nuclear powers, and then you need the ability to project power short of a nuclear response.
Russia can't prevent aid to Ukraine with nuclear blackmail. The US can't defend Taiwan without ships - it can't use nuclear blackmail itself. And if it doesn't defend Taiwan, not only is Western prosperity threatened, but the entire structure of allies that the US built after WW2 crumbles into a chaos of small parties more easily picked apart.
We just had a direct kinetic war between nuclear powers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_India–Pakistan_conflict
Pursuing total defeat is unthinkable, bu pursuing limited gains with clear signalling is plausible, and it's happened a few times against nuclear powers, like Yom Kippur War.
>>There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
Just a reminder that Ukraine is currently at war with nuclear equipped Russia and it could absolutely use more ships, more tanks, more aircraft, more bombs, more guns, more drones and everything else that forms traditional warfare. It's clearly not like countries will immediately go from zero to nuclear weapons in any conflict.
Nuclear weapons are overrated. Multiple countries already invaded a nuclear power (1973 Yom Kippur War) and nothing happened. If Egypt wasn't afraid of nukes, what makes you so confident that your future enemy will be?
It's an empathy gap. You are rightly cautious of nukes, but you then project that mindset onto belligerents, which is the mistake. A very important rule in strategic planning is to avoid projecting your own calculations onto the enemy.
Nuclear powers, like all states, need to meet the pacing challenge and be capable of winning, or at least have enough asymmetric capabilities to force a frozen conflict if necessary.
Bah, I'm of the opinion that if the intelligence agencies were asleep at the wheel, that might well be an improvement.
But I do think that you're right in that the time of the frigate and aircraft carrier is over, and we'll all more likely to die either from a nuclear missile or from a 50 gram autonomous drone. I agree: the national security argument is hollow.
There are other reasons to build ships though, and some degree of self-sufficiency is always sensible.
Attack drones aren't that useful if the two countries are far apart. Consider the 12 Day War between Israel-Iran. Iran's Shahed drones weren't useful, because the slow travel speeds and the long distance meant that Israel could shoot them down at a leisurely pace while they closed the gap. So even their purpose as a saturation attack was not met.
But in the Ukraine-Russia war, Iran's Shahed drones, which are being manufactured by Russia with small adjustments, are proving useful, because they're close, so saturation attacks can actually work.
For the US's power projection into the Pacific, due to modern SIGINT capabilities, aircraft carriers with stealth bombers are even stronger than 20 years ago due to being able to put those JDAMs onto an actually valuable target. It's basically the power of Zeus, to kill whatever you want whenever you want, unlike in the Vietnam era where you have to carpet bomb everything.
All you need to do is to smuggle in a little box. Ukraine already did it in Russia.
Granted that my comment was an over-simplification. Israel did get use from reconnaissance Hermes drones in the 12 Day War, possibly launched from Azerbaijan, for another example to add to the list. But as a broad gesture I believe the sentiment is correct. Strategic depth shifts the utility from saturation with attack drones and SRBMs, like what Russia is doing to Ukraine, and what Iran couldn't replicate with MRBMs due to the distance ... to the classic F16 missile trucks to deliver JDAMs with F35s for SEAD.
Even without nuclear weapons, shipping seems quite vulnerable to naval drones and cruise missiles these days.
You've got to go up the chain - protect steelmaking, too. And ultimately, where does the iron ore come from?
Not saying you're wrong (idk either way), saying that to do it right is a big pivot.
That is a fair point, but do keep in mind that the lower in the stack you come, the more options for sourcing you (generally) have.
Say, those fancy chips going into the ship's targeting radar may all be designed in a country or two, fabbed in Taiwan using Dutch equipment, whereas the steel you construct the hull with can come from anywhere - at my employer we mostly bought steel from Eastern Ukraine until a couple of years ago; after a brief hiccup we now get it from Turkey and Brazil, mostly - but China, South Korea, Germany or India, for instance, can supply it, too.
> Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not.
The UK does not even make any effort. Look at the level of dependency on US cloud providers to deliver basic government services. To be fair, the UK is no worse than the rest of Europe (some small gestures and exceptions aside) in this, but that only makes the overall situation worse.
Successive British governments have not really thought this through, and what dependencies are a problem. Again, not the only country that has done that, but, again, that does not help solve the problem.
> There is Autarky, and there is total dependency, and there is a massive road in-between. Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
Absolutely, but people are not aware of it, politicians do not care, the the ruling class are declinist.
The UK imports half its food, and was almost starved into submission by Nazi U-boats during WW2,, so you’d think they would know this, but laissez-faire ideology is strong in the ruling class.
We import a lot by value but less so by calories. We could probably get by on domestic bread and potatoes if blockaded but the oranges, bananas and tuna fish would be in short supply.
The UK was never even near starvation levels during WW2. Bread, Vegetables and Fish were never even rationed.
Australias Unofficial naval strategy is "bomb the shit out of scary boats with Growlers".
Australias Official naval strategy is "We need more boats for reasons (cough asylum seekers cough), definitely not because it is politically expedient to keep boat builders employed"
Australia's naval strategy is to defend our sea lanes that we rely on for trade, primarily our trade with our largest customer, which is China.
Conveniently, they need what we have, and we want what they make.
On the other hand, the primary strategic threat is apparently also China.
https://youtu.be/sgspkxfkS4k?si=9n6fTPusYI9jcUhj
Well I doubt they'd be using Growlers, but even if they needed to they cost too much ( $80 million a piece ) to be thrown into modern naval air defences, and don't have the range to be deployed where they could actually reach ships causing trouble.
Same reason it got out of every other industry. It wasn't short-term profitable. After the 70s at least everything began moving to the private sector and there was no strategic thinking. This completed in the 90s and there was no reason for anyone to think that semi-conductors, minerals, even oil and gas now shouldn't be bought from a friend rather than being produced internally.
Not quite the conclusions of the article. As it points out the UK nationalised its shipbuilding industry in the 70s in a last ditch effort to turn it around, and despite operating it at a significant loss for a decade failed to make it even slightly competitive. In the 90s the industry was then privatised again once it was clear there was no saving it anymore.
For the vast majority of its history the UK shipbuilding industry was completely private, and dominated by many small shipbuilders. Consolidation only started after the UK government stepped in to provide some kind of sensible strategy to improve the competitiveness of the industry, via government loans tied to longer term strategic goals to improve productivity.
Ultimately it seems that the UK shipbuilding industry was kill by the thing that once made it so dominant. It was a highly distributed, extremely flat, high skilled industry, with little to no management. It made it easy for the industry to rapidly grow and shrink, and made it extremely effective at producing bespoke products. But as the world moved towards standardisation, those strengths became weaknesses.
The lack of management structure made it impossible for the industry to properly recognise the issues, or effect change to fix the issues. And the world moved towards standardisation, which gave a huge advantage to shipbuilders that built up capital intensive infrastructure that allowed the use of lower skilled labour to produce standard design quick, cheaper, and to a higher quality, than the UK distributed, high skill, labour force.
> It was a highly distributed, extremely flat, high skilled industry, with little to no management. It made it easy for the industry to rapidly grow and shrink, and made it extremely effective at producing bespoke products.
... That sounds a lot like the Norwegian shipbuilding industry which I work for right now. Maybe not with little management exactly, but nothing crazy either - significantly less than a British multinational I worked for earlier. Of course the hulls are built elsewhere, and half of my colleagues are foreigners, but we're going fairly strong.
So I'm not sure I buy this explanation. Why wouldn't the British do management equally well as us?
From the article re: Norwegian customers:
"…every reported speech by a British shipbuilder in the Norwegian press usually comprised a list of excuses for poor performance, ranging from official and unofficial stoppages, shortages of labour, failings on the part of subcontractors, modernisation schemes not producing the anticipated results, to recently completed contracts having entailed substantial losses. The impression thus gained by the Norwegians, according to Holt, was of an industry where the shipbuilders had no control or responsibility over problems, and worse, had no ideas as to how to address the problems"
I do think that British mismanagement plays a big role in the decline of the 1970s. I don't think it's a coincidence that the surviving car industry consists of two types of companies:
- small bespoke high end companies like McLaren, with British management but comparatively small staff and throughput;
- former British marques which are now being run more competently by foreigners (Jaguar Land Rover etc)
My working theory is that British management over large groups of British workers collapses into class warfare.
Could you elaborate further on that working theory? Are there unique tendencies in British workforce that devolve into class warfare? Also, I don't want to misinterpret that phrase. Do you mean this about fiscal policies that tax the wealthy to a higher proporation or something more?
This is absolutely not about money and entirely about interpersonal culture and class signifiers and prejudices. It's a little difficult to articulate to people who haven't grown up with it. I don't like the idea of attributing "no good" to whole swathes of people; it seems both prejudiced and inaccurate to say that either British workers were no good at working (although they were on strike a lot) or that British managers were no good at managing (although the businesses such as British Leyland were empirically not very successful) because, as we can see in more recent times than the BL era, there's still successful manufacturing industries.
What I want to argue is that they existed as two cultures which were fundamentally different and in conflict with each other. The endless strikes weren't entirely about pay but a desire for confrontation in and of itself.
Compare and contrast these two individuals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Edwardes vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Robinson_(trade_unionist...
(yes, the M word and the C word are involved, but those don't exist in a vacuum either)
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876617 mentions the "low social status of working in Trade" which is another aspect of the class system entirely among the management class.
Except the Tories got their opportunity to demonstrate how unions held them back for most of 40 years and did nothing to improve the situation.
You don't get to blame Unionist culture on failures after Thatcher takes control. Unions were stronger during the times most western nations were doing better.
The government treated people like Derek as hostile foreign spies and enemies of the state, going so far as to sic national security agencies on them.
Derek had no power after he was ousted in 1979, and the workers at British Leyland voted against a retaliatory strike 14000 to 600.
If you want to suggest this is still "cultural" because the Tories were part of the "class" blaming and scapegoating laborers, 1) I agree but 2) Calling that a "two cultures" problem or ascribing blame to the laborer "class" for trying to fight off the Reaganisation of their country is absurd.
Guess what, the unions lost in most of the Anglophone world in 1980, are we really better off without them? Are we really doing better now that we don't let workers offset the power of Capital holders? To me it seems like all we have accomplished is to take a loan out from our futures to enrich the Capital holding class.
Surely if the unions were the problem, we would have clear evidence of improvement since they were thoroughly destroyed in the 80s?
Meanwhile, here in the US, we are still feeling the painful effects of killing the air traffic control union. Turns out people don't want to do an extremely stressful, extremely skill based job for dirt cheap, and the people who can do that job are fine at doing jobs that pay way better, and no amount of removing their collective bargaining power can offset individuals choosing not to get underpaid for a serious job.
The class system in England is quite entrenched. You have to remember this is a country with an 1000 year old monarchy and noble families who still own a substantial amount of the land. England is both very modernist, quite progressive, and remarkably traditionalist in its makeup.
It’s hard to explain when you’re not there. When people say “the working class” that has a very specific connotation in England - it means you aren’t a noble or a peer or someone like that. Of course the boundaries are blurred, but they are not that blurry yet in England.
So walking around there you get the feeling that there is absolutely a two tier system, some people go to Eton and Oxfridge some people do not. Of course they have allowed a lot of foreign millionaire and billionaires into the system.
But the overall feeling is very much us vs them sometimes and it certainly feels like both sides can despise each other. The working class, as famously depicted by Gillian Anderson as Thatcher in The Crown thinks the nobles “don’t do anything” and the nobles etc because of their Etonian and Oxford education think the lower classes are low IQ.
> My working theory is that British management over large groups of British workers collapses into class warfare.
Interesting. Care to share a bit more about your reasoning here?
> My working theory is that British management over large groups of British workers collapses into class warfare.
May this spread to all other nations. Down with management.
It's important to note that nationalising ship building was a last-ditch parachute for hundreds of thousands of manual workers, not the cause of its decline.
Decades of state subsidy of it both directly and of its suppliers had failed and taking it on was far cheaper for the country than letting it and British Steel, and the National Coal Board all simultaneously fail.
It's almost as if Europe entirely gave up sometime in the 70s. People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years because they know they'll bounce to another position. That's why everything is seemingly slowly crumbling away (healthcare, industries, culture, education), we're putting bandaids here and there to maintain the illusion but I think everyone can tell the general trend
I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation. I thought it was because my city (Coventry) was devastated after world-war-2 (the blitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz), the collapse of the British car industry (which, primarily affected Coventry) and then the closing of the coal mines leading to lower income tax money to the council for roads and things.
However I just returned last night from a trip to London (I live in Sweden now) and I have to say, the decline is precipitous and pronounced, London gets all the investment so if it's decaying this way then I shudder to think about the rest of the nation.
I think a lot of people outside the UK believe that because the UK had an empire that everybody was rich. This is decidedly not the case, the first people the British elite subjugated was the British themselves, that's why most of the food we're mocked about is so bland: it's poverty food, so when I say that it feels like a decline, please keep it within the context that most of us have our entire family tree in the underclass - not because we were once rich.
Most infrastructure has not been invested in during my lifetime, and it was old when I was a child.
>>I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation
I live in the UK and not in London either, and it constantly feels like everything is just decaying and the country lives in the past not the present. Everything is just dilapidated, falling apart, or shut down. The streets are full of rubbish, dirty and local infrastructure doesn't get fixed up for months if someone damages it. Local councils are saying they will shut down care homes soon because there is no money for anything. And it's not even a private vs state funded issue - our local pharmacy literally looks like something out of afganistan, you walk in and there is actual dirty carpet on the floor, the shelves are 50% empty and there are several broken lights in the ceiling - with 4 people working behind the counter packing prescriptions. And that's operated by a private company! Which I believe is only doing it because they are required by an NHS contract, otherwise they would have shut the place down. And don't even get me started on the NHS - a friend with suicidal thoughts was told he needs to see a psychiatrist, the current wait time for one is 260 weeks(just short of 5 years). Honestly if I were cynical I'd say the system prefers if he kills himself, less of a burden.
Honestly, I feel so weird. One one hand, I work from home on a tech worker salary and I'm very comfortable financially - but I take a step out of my house and you don't feel like the 5th wealthiest nation in the world. Our local library had to be closed due to lack of funding recently. A library. What kind of 3rd world behaviour is that? And honestly I don't think even 3rd world countries are closing down libraries, it's just unthinkable.
I'm very jaded about it, I keep trying to find positives and there are some but generally I've learnt to expect that things are broken, forgotten or just in poor state in some way or another, because there is never any money to do anything. It's a poor country cosplaying as a superpower.
Poor country through which a lot of wealth passes, or is held. But there's also a lot of very British defeatism. A sort of squashed spirit which is against the possibility that things might be better, because then they'd be different. And of course the easy blame on foreigners.
I do think there used to be more middle class public/civic pride, and you can see this in some places that have retained it and cleaned themselves up. I see the various "transition towns" (Totnes, Bristol etc) as one way forward: they have a vision of a future involving local people, not just a vision of the past.
> Our local library had to be closed due to lack of funding recently. A library. What kind of 3rd world behaviour is that?
Closing things down in order to avoid having to put up taxes is extremely first world behavior now.
Europe as a whole didn't give up in the 1970s, but the 1970s was famously bad for the UK.
That said, I think this was more a case of when the rot in the UK became visible rather than when it started; the British government hasn't been competent for a very long time, and still isn't. With the caveat that I'm not a historian and have only an amateur knowledge of the events, I'd say the problems set in even before the peak of the British Empire, which itself I place at just before the outbreak of WW1 owing to how Pyrrhic that victory was.
It feels like the British establishment is particularly good at one thing: Being pragmatic enough to stay in power.
That appears to take precedence over anything else. It may have "saved" the UK from revolutions or major clearouts of its governing structures and legal system, and results in a system that is delightlyfully quirky on the surface.
But it's also a way of governing that seems to lead to managing decline over fixing things because managing decline is less risky in the short term.
If you think the British Empire was ever competent then I strongly recommend you listen to the episodes of the Empire podcast that cover the British Empire (there’s a lot of different episodes across the series).
With the exception of the Royal Navy, the British Empire was spectacularly incompetent. It’s a running joke that the British stumbled into being the largest empire in history.
That said, I don’t think it’s unique to Britain. The Roman Empire has many tales of staggering incompetence and wild idiocy throughout its expansion. If you have the time, The History of Rome is an excellent podcast that covers the entire time period.
I suspect it’s the truth of human nature that it isn’t possible for such large organisations to be competent throughout, just by virtue of how many people they take to operate.
> With the exception of the Royal Navy, the British Empire was spectacularly incompetent. It’s a running joke that the British stumbled into being the largest empire in history.
Hm. Well, I can't say I know any better than that, I was rather assuming that becoming the biggest empire was itself due to something approximating competence.
Certainly, if one takes the view that all large organisations are mediocre, the British Empire is unambiguously an example of "large organisation".
Edit:
Just to check, the Empire podcast by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple?
> Certainly, if one takes the view that all large organisations are mediocre, the British Empire is unambiguously an example of "large organisation".
Absolutely! I think all governments can safely fall under "large organisation" as it's pretty much necessary.
> Just to check, the Empire podcast by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple?
That's the one.
Tbf if the government isn't united, the people aren't united either. And having lived here for almost 8 years now I can see that that's the case.
People have a very clear vision of 50 years in the future, it has been a major fight playing out for decades. One side wanted cheap energy and lots of industry, the other side wanted green energy and not much industry. That debate has been ongoing and everyone involved was pretty up-front about what the consequences would be.
The turn away from nuclear power around the turn of the century was probably the decisive moment. From then on it hasn't been possible to articulate a vision of a prosperous society with a realistic path to get there.
Nuclear energy belongs in the "unaffordable industries which failed to adapt" category. They could have maybe eventually reconciled with the safety question and the weapons question, but getting undercut by renewables means that's the way forwards to green energy.
Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.
> Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.
Which is a policy choice that people were pretty clear on when they bought the policies in. That is basically the only way to get a negative learning curve on an exciting new tech like nuclear. Bet you that China is seeing a more natural learning curve.
China seem to be following a "yes and" policy for power: demand is so huge that they're just building all possible types of generation to avoid bottlenecking the construction of any one in particular. Even they seem to have slowed slightly on nuclear since Fukushima and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse (who were supplying one of the designs).
There is very little new with nuclear except bubble money. It’s fundamentally a ton of capital spend with high operational cost and risk.
Would be energy barons like it because it really begs for concentration of generation from a political perspective, as every marginal unit of distributed generation hurts the P&L of the nuclear generator.
Europe? I'm building high tech vessels in Europe right now. Even most of the hulls are made in Europe.
Are you sure this isn't about Britain, and how the finance industry gave that county its own version of "Dutch disease", making it comparatively unprofitable to do anything but managing assets?
I think it's in part generational (a bunch of western countries have a quasi dead-locked democracy because boomers will vote whatever suits them short term, they will be dead when the bill comes anyway) and part due to the lack of accountability that democracy has brought to the upper echelon of society, or lack of skin in the game for the ruling class.
Revolving doors, blatant corruption, and downright incompetence lead to absolutely no repercussions; what's there to lose? Schröder is the poster child of this.
We are creating generations of people with no stake in society (no housing, no family because it's costs too much and no time anyway) while at the same time having a complete lack of ethos as a civilization, with a terrible ruling class. Europe (and the UK) are in a horrible position.
The upper class has none to little stake in society either, or so they seem to believe. I bet in practice, if the shit really hits the fan, it won't be so fun for them either. Other countries may also have problems at the same time.
Colonies disappeared quickly post ww2. US imperialism did continue strongly for a while with Cia/political meddling to allow American companies to continue resource extraction.
3-5 years is "long term vision" now.
People plan quarter to quarter.
The rest of Europe keeps building ships.
[dead]
" People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years "
This sounds like a modern version of Golden Age nostalgia. First, I am not at all sure that people had longer visions; some probably did, but the entire nations? Not so sure.
Second, there is a certain wisdom in accepting that you don't know how the world will look in 50+ years. 50 years ago, China was an extremely impoverished country that no one would take seriously as a competitor for global influence, Iran was US-friendly and the USSR was on the peak of its power.
> This sounds like a modern version of Golden Age nostalgia.
When France built their nuclear programs, or railways, it was a massive investment, the people in charge when these decisions were taken were long gone by the time the projects were completed. It wasn't seen as a cost but as a national interest, now we're cutting everything down because everything is seen as a short term cost regardless of the long term benefits.
> I am not at all sure that people had longer visions; some probably did, but the entire nations? Not so sure.
Nations don't matter, the 10 or so people truly in charge do, when they have a spine at least, now that we have business men thinking about the next quarter it's more complicated.
> Second, there is a certain wisdom in accepting that you don't know how the world will look in 50+ years
History doesn't just happen... countries with long term visions make history, of course if you check out of the race you're at the mercy of whatever other people decide for you. China didn't automagically get where it is today, the planned economy helps in that regard.
In Europe, we are in the middle of a very expensive and long term decarbonization push, an order of magnitude (if not two) more expensive that what France did. In fact, it is so expensive that the question if we can even pull it off is still open.
That does not seem to support your idea that "everything gets cut down over short term costs now". There is a massive amount of long term spending happening right now.
Oh sure we do spend, on foreign tech, foreign factories, &c. That's not what I call long term vision, if anything it's the opposite. Germany was Putin's bitch because of gas, now the whole EU will be China's bitch for panels and batteries, amazing!
FYI: China produces >70% of windmills blades, solar panels and lithium batteries
What I meant by vision is securing the long term independence of your country through home grown technologies, for example France got cheap/clean electricity and nukes from their program. What you're describing is just the continuity of the lack of vision we had since the 70s, we outsourced everything to Asia and kept "services", which aren't worth much when shit hits the fan.
>we outsourced everything to Asia and kept "services", which aren't worth much when shit hits the fan.
Don't worry, those "services" are now being outsourced too this time around.
What's left is stakeholders, scrum masters and managers to boss those offshore workers around while they use ChatGPT.
It's all a big comedy show and we are born just in time to get the front row seats.
It's not really nostalgia, when 95% of infrastructure was constructed in the 70's and not maintained (something you see a lot in the UK outside of the south-east) you can feel this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_consensus
The (much longer) article says something different than you do, though there is certain overlap.
The issues were longer-term and revolved around a failure to update working methods as the rest of the world developed.
The bigger issue is that there’s no demand for ships. When containers distributed the industry, the whole thing moved to flags of convenience and mostly asian crews.
There’s a reason why the docks in every rich country have given way to condos and esplanades. The financialization of everything was an accelerant, not a root cause.
there are reason why most advance country move to service based economy than manufacturing
1. manufacturing doesnt scale
2. in peace time, globalization is really good with no downside. while factory is not in the western soil. the owner is still largely western company
You mean a friend with a lobbying budget and a revolving door?
I think a lot of it is because after world war 2 the labour government decided that a centralised planned economy and nationalisation of every business (and I do mean every, this was in labours manifesto until new labour in the 90s) would perform better. It didn't work, it destroyed industries.
This gives some idea of what happened: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUgYWRhbSBzbWl...
See this video on the economics of shipbuilding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo
Assembly of civilian merchant ships is a notoriously low-margin industry (as opposed to manufacturing of engines/propellers/control systems). You could heavily subsidize it (by protectionism measures and/or by juicing up your Navy) like the US does in the name of strategic importance, but be prepared to pay heavily for it. If you want to preserve shipbuilding capabilities for military reasons, then chasing after the Asian shipbuilding countries may not be the most efficient way of achieving this, i.e. it may be better to just invest into building of military ships and manufacturing of higher-margin components without bothering with the low-margin assembly stuff.
Great video. I came across it a few weeks ago and I was surprised how much the financing from the Asian governments mattered in shaping the industry
Not a single mention of the Thatcher government in the 1970s, that sold off public-owed industries like British Coal and British Steel, and then set about acquiring and breaking up the shipyards themselves for scrap.
All of it was worth more smashed up and sold for scrap, for the little quick "fix" that the Money Junkies in the Conservative government wanted. Unemployment and poverty rose steadily except for the bankers and politicians, the UK lost just about all forms of skilled industry, and by 1987 it was all over with the Stock Market Crash that obliterated the economy.
We've had about 45 years of Tory misrule and right now there are no political parties prepared to effect any improvement. It's all bleating about how "illegal immigrants in small boats" are costing billions, but no real breakdown of where the money is going.
Thatcher was elected in 1979 so was not involved in the 1979s when there was a Labour government.
Do you notice that the graph in that article heads rapidly south in 1979/1980?
Well after 45 years isn’t that just reflecting what the median voter actually cares about (or doesn’t care about)?
If voters were genuinely willing to expend their political capital, time, attention, energy, etc., to a significant degree on this issue, year and year for 45 years… there’s no amount of party intrigues that could have blocked it.
Don't underestimate the power of divide and conquer.
Over here we had miners, farmers, steelmill and shipyard workers protesting due to similar reasons and for the majority the takeaway wasn't that those industries were in danger, but that the protesters demanded too much, because that's what people with influence said.
Of course there will always be various motivated factions looking to divide and conquer… that’s the baseline background noise in any ruling or opposition party.
And the minimum expectation, to advance any policy at all, is to be able to resist that and have leftover political capital, energy, time, etc., above and beyond.
Somehow the UK is really in a downhill trend. For decades. BREXIT kind of accelerated that; people such as Nigel Farage won't follow on their promise. There won't be noteworthy economic growth for the common man.
The naval situation is even worse, because the UK totally depends on the USA now for its own nuclear arsenal. The UK has basically stopped being independent. Changing this will be hard and I don't think anyone in the UK wants to do that. There is no way for the UK to compete against South Korea's production; Canada will buy more equipment from South Korea. UK has never been in the race for competition (only Germany has). The UK kind of went into decline ever since Thatcher ruled, with a (too) few years in between that were not terrible.
BREXIT accelerated this but isn't the root cause - the root cause has to do with structural problems: https://www.ftadviser.com/uk/2025/7/21/the-uk-is-losing-weal...
The conclusions of the FT article are completely wrong. With fewer rich people around, chances are that legislation would be less frequently bought to benefit them at the cost of the country's overall prosperity.
If you insist on only focusing on the negatives of their existence, then sure, eliminating wealthy people sounds like a good idea.
Out of interest what are the positives? Other than cultural, in flagrant displays of excess, I can't think of anything they couldn't accomplish by them existing as poorer business leaders and having competent national wealth funds empowered to lend/give grants.
What I'm saying is you may be defending billionaires when you mean to be defending a system you believe is optimal but still has the negative outcome of billionaires (not to imply the billionaires themselves are intrinsically bad as people but the concentration of wealth in their hands is).
That is closer to my intent, yes, not a direct defense of billionaires as an intrinsic good, more a rejection of the idea that removing them via any means automatically leads to a less bad state of affairs. Careful reform that reduces them can be good, but it depends on what exactly that reform entails. Simply scaring them away and experiencing capital flight does not achieve good things.
The stuff in the article, that the UK is losing rich people isn't a long term issue but fairly recent, basically since brexit and the getting rid of non dom tax breaks.
So you complain about dependency to US but think that it should completely depend on Brussels? Also what does Brexit have to do with a 130 years long decline?
This article radically downplays the role that unions had in killing the UK shipbuilding industry.
While it's true that shipbuilders were reluctant to introduce new technologies and techniques due to capital requirements, the much bigger reason they did not was the impediment put up by unions. Yes, capital expenditure is painful in a cyclical industry, but in previous eras of shipbuilding, companies did invest in modernization ... in those previous eras, unions were much less active or absent. Other countries also faced the same capital crunches and cyclical business environment, and still invested. It was not that the Japanese, Koreans, and Italians were somehow more "risk-taking" than the English ... no, rather their unions had not yet taken hold post-war to smother innovation.
Unions always trade away the advancements of tomorrow for the security of the workers today. When one supports a union one should always keep in mind that you are putting down for your comfort today and mortgaging your children's tomorrow. This might not be an issue if your children don't follow your trade. But if they do, you've just screwed them over. The rest of the world doesn't stand still while your union blocks radical progress.
Enjoy your two days off this week. Glad you safely made it this far.
From a Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1bbvvxb/comme...
You will often hear historians talk about working hours. They explain how Trade Unions and Socialist campaigners brought about a much reduced work day. That happened mostly over the 19th century and the 20th century. This is true, but I think the presentations of it tend to be myopic.
In the early 19th century across the whole world people were very poor by modern standards. Due to the Industrial Revolution that changed and in Europe wages increased significantly. In the UK wages in 1900 were more than twice what they had been in 1800. That's in real terms, adjusted for inflation.
Some workers campaigned for shorter working hours because they could afford it. Of course, if working hours are lower then total wages are too. Everyone knew this. By the end of the 19th century wages had risen enough that many workers were prepared to sacrifice lower total wages for more leisure time. The labour organizations would never have successfully talked their members into these campaigns unless those members were in this situation. As growth continued in the 20th century and spread to other countries there were more and more people willing to sacrifice some wage for more free time.
Suppose that there had been a law in, say, 1770 which forced people to work less than 35 hours per day. In that case many people would probably have flouted the law because their incomes were so low that they considered more work necessary to buy things. Similarly, if people find the standard working week too long then they can search out employers who offer part-time work which covers a shorter part of the week.
It's worth mentioning that in a sense, employers never control the amount of time worked. Employment contracts may specify an amount of working time, but people can leave employment. It has always been possible to work for a few years, then quit your job and enjoy some leisure time. Then take up another job. Economists call changes to the number of hours worked over the short-run changes to the intensive margin. The changes to the number of hours worked over the long-run are changes to the extensive margin - changes that come about from the decision to work or not. Of course, this doesn't mean that changes to the intensive margin are irrelevant. When the labour campaigners succeeded in bringing down weekly working hours they really did change things for many workers. Quitting jobs and restarting is inconvenient and risky in times of high unemployment. Of course, some people don't have the willpower to save up for long periods of time either. However, it's also true that changes to the length of the full-time working week probably have much less effect on total working hours than people think. For example, people will tell you that the standard working week in the US is 40 hours. In a sense this is true for full-time employees. Despite that though, working hours have continued to fall from the 1950s to the present day. This is partially because of part-time work, but also because of people taking time off by quitting.
Jm2c, but this sort of problems would've been smaller if the UK stayed in the EU. Then you can do this sort of strategic planning on a larger scale as the EU tends to promote economical activities that make sense for specific countries.
The EU, while not subsidizing ship building per se, it did subsidize the R&D.
Ship building subsidies are banned in the EU for a very specific reasons: from the 70s to the early 90s European ship builders could not stay competitive with the asian ones.
This led France, Spain, UK, Germany into a race of subsidies that:
1. created a lot of overcapacity
2. tanked prices
3. didn't make shipyards more, but *less* competitive with their asian counterparts, as they had less reasons to invest with the guarantee of minimal effort and guaranteed money
This is really a damn if you do, damn if you don't situation for which there are no real solutions.
We lack the materials, we lack the energy, even if we stepped up to the great levels of efficiency of Japanese/Korean/Chinese ship building have (and we're unlikely to do, it's not just a technological but cultural challenge), we'd still not be able to compete on costs (energy, materials, labor) and R&D (the asian dragons produce way more engineers in the sectors than we do).
Can't wait for the battle of the Thames river between the British North Sea fleet (purchased from China) against the imperial Russian fleet (also purchased from China)
On a more serious note, the problem with centering your economy on international finance is that it's only lucrative if no one else in the world has capital and access to worldwide industry.
They'll all sink when they crash in to the dumped Lime bike reef (purchased from China)
Hopefully the Russians don't try and destroy the fishermen of Hull again.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_incident
Good thing that Japanese and South Korean shipbuilding industries exist
You only need a small naval drone to down an entire ship.
As long as the British people suffer, who am I to judge who built the boats.
Italy is barely mentioned in the whole article. Today Italy is the biggest shipbuilding manufacturer in Europe: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s...
I feel the double standard of such articles quick in pointing out Italy being behind in many statistics (which it is and is fair to point it out). When it's Britain behind the whole article is written only from the point of view of the UK and avoids mentioning what other countries did better. This is unfair.
Italy manufacturs the Costa Crociere cruise ships and many other things. Everyone loved to laugh when Costa Concordia sink. It made them confirm their bias that Italian are funny and bad at technical things. While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.
There are few ships ever built that don't sink when you ram them properly into rocks. I don't think that I have read a single article that faulted the shipbuilder for the disaster.
It's true the shipbuilders were not critized but they were also not praised in this very specific article. Good and bad results should be both noticed. Times in the articles countries are mentioned: Japan 17x Germany 6x USA 4x China 3x France 3x Italy 1x South Korea 1x
compare that with the current tonnage of shipbuilding production: 1 China 32,859,862 51% 2 South Korea 18,317,886 28% 3 Japan 9,965,182 15% 4 Philippines 805,938 1% 5 Italy 402,164 0.62% 6 France 326,680 0.50% 7 Germany 289,666 0.45% 8 Finland 261,654 0.40% 9 Taiwan 187,558 0.29% 10 Russia 177,571 0.27% 11 Netherlands 90,596 0.14% 12 Türkiye 79,032 0.12% 13 Indonesia 75,979 0.12% 14 U.S. 64,809 0.10% 15 Iran 64,760 0.09%
Italy produces 2x ships than Germany but Germany is mentioned 6x. Stereotypical bias of German being engineers and Italian being funny/pizza makers.
South Korea is also freaking awesome and shipbuiling and it's mentioned 1x. Maybe also the reason why the UK is behind is their arrogance in dismissing competitors that they have stereotypically decided they are not good at shipbuilding.
The Brits don't produce anything anymore except money laundering in the City of London (where i work btw) and some cattle, so you should expect that kind of biased narrative from them. We in Italy are among the best and most profitable in the high-tech mechanical manufacturing industry, but we also have the worst paid engineers and technicians of the western world. The Italian Miracle.
England is an island, both geographically and culturally. This is the culture from where Brexit comes.
They still think that the world spins around their navel, that football (soccer) is their game and the sun never sets in their empire.
At the end of WWI, 4 empires collapsed: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian tzar, the Ottoman Empire and the British. The Austrians accepted it and moved on. The Russians and Turkish are in denial and resisting to accept what they already know. The British didn't even get the memo, they're totally oblivious, in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy.
> While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.
Bullshit. People know about Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo, Maseratti, Ducati, Beretta (guns), Carpiggiani (ice-cream machines), La Marzocco, De Longhi (espresso machines), etc.
The Premier is the largest soccer league by revenue. England also spends the most on players. So yes, soccer is 'our' game currently.
And the sun still doesn't set on our Commonwealth.
Also, Great Britain is an island, not England.
We can't win in the UK: if we cheer on our achievements and be positive, we're accused of being stuck in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy. If we get depressed about our economy, we're told we're not being positive enough and are 'talking down' the UK.
> We can't win in the UK: if we cheer on our achievements and be positive, we're accused of being stuck in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy. If we get depressed about our economy, we're told we're not being positive enough and are 'talking down' the UK.
If you want others to cheer you on when you do great you should do the same to others (when they deserve it). Human behaviour is mostly imitation.
I respect you for your knowledge of Beretta, La Marzocco, De Longhi and Carpiggiani. I was not aware of Carpiggiani. Ferrero is also Italian. Kinder Surprise is Italian (from German branch) and Ferrero Roché is Italian (from French branch). Italy has also a massive monopoly of glasses lenses in Luxotica.
I deeply admire the UK, the USA and anything great in any other country. Even when I disagree with their leaders I still admire their technical achievements and the great men that work hard for it. We should strive to admire, applaud and copy the best in each other. Pushing each other forward in a upgoing spiral of betterment.
I don’t think that modern Turkey thinks of itself as an empire. They overthrew the Sultanate themselves, seems they were glad to be rid of it.
I doubt any sensible modern country wants a physical empire, they’re much too much trouble to maintain. You basically get the same benefits with outsourcing and cheap imports, without having to maintain garrisons.
This has a connection to the way the British have lionized "Some Guys in a Shed" as their main source of industry and innovation. Their shipyards were dominant at merchant ships, but were all capital light work by skilled manpower. Which worked great, right up until it ran into someone really clever figured out how to mass-produce things, and then the "M/V This Was Laid Down in Ulsan Two Weeks Ago" crushed them all.
It was sort of a Innovator's Dilemma sort of situation, where these guys who had built careers out of being the skilled labor and had long hated management were not interested in the sort of capital investment it would take to build their own "M/V This Was Laid Down in Rosyth Two Weeks Ago."
A fantastic long read on this issue from a Glaswegian perspective (2022): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/ian-jack/chasing-ste...
If we zoom out a bit the UK is a failed country.
All the industries in the UK are on the decline and most UK companies are being either sold off, shut down or are being owned (for a long time) by foreign companies.
It may take several decades for the UK to come back from this.
The economic situation in the UK has become bizarre.
I would recommend interested HNers to read up on the State Pension Triple Lock; and the various income tax cliff edges as some key examples.
With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus.
The triple lock is a politically motivated policy which always grows the state pension (given to essentially all UK citizens and anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years) at a rate faster than earnings grow or faster than the economy grows. It will subsume the entire government budget.
Given the extremely high cost of energy, and housing in many places, younger people also seem to be opting out entirely. Disability payments the government pays are increasing at a rapid rate. (1 in 13 of the population are currently receiving this benefit).
You touch on the core issue of the UK, but there's both a cultural and policy aspect.
1. As you say, an aging population has placed the entire country into a gridlock - the pensions system as it stands is ridiculous and unsustainable. Unfortunately, it is an almost immediate political suicide to even attempt to reform it. Young people are disillusioned and wield little monetary or political power. The old generation has all the cards, and are actively destroying their children's future for their own short term benefit. They have mortgaged their children's future, which they won't get to see, for the short period of time they still have remaining. 2. There's no investment culture in the UK. Literally everything and everyone is rent seeking. Want a retirement? Buy property and rent it out. Want a pension? Pension funds just buy gilts - government bonds. Very little money goes into productive assets. This creates a vicious cycle where money is simply siphoned away from the little productivity that remains to an ever growing number of rent seekers.
There's no easy way out of this. One generation will effectively have to give up their welfare, but nobody wants to do this (understandable). The UK cannot afford to be the welfare state it wants to be.
> There's no easy way out of this. One generation will effectively have to give up their welfare, but nobody wants to do this (understandable). The UK cannot afford to be the welfare state it wants to be.
It can be done over a period of time. Canada moved from a non-funded pension model like the UK currently has, to a partially funded model which currently has over $731 billion in assets.
They began this change in 1999. If they hadn't made that change in direction they'd be in a much worse situation today.
It's possible to change from one system to another, if a government is able to look much further ahead than its own term in government.
With the Canadian model, your payments out at the end are tied to what you put in. Which is not quite the case in the UK, which allows extremely low payments in for just 10 years to get a very high amount out indefinitely.
The British government must take the same path the Canadians took.
This is happening elsewhere too. France is in a very similar situation which keeps causing their government to fall apart.
>anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years
To be fair what you get is proportional. If you are an NI payer for 4 years then you only get 4/32 of the state pension.
Having said that the triple lock is a ridiculous idea. The trouble is people are loss averse so it is really hard to take away things people have got used to.
Actually once you are back in your home country (or in fact any other country) you can pay an optional £180/year to buy a full qualifying year.
Anybody who ever worked in the UK can do it and you don’t need to have ever been a citizen.
There are adverts on Irish radio about it quite often.
It’s an absolutely terrible deal for the British government when you consider how high the state pension annual payout is.
I live in another country right now and I do it myself!
A minimum amount of 10 years is needed to get the basic pension (which is proportional to years worked), but years on Universal Credit (benefits) count towards this. Also, anyone who is of pension age is entitled to a Pension Credit top-up to a weekly income of £227.10.
>Also, anyone who is of pension age is entitled to a Pension Credit top-up to a weekly income of £227.10.
As long as you have less than £8,000 in the bank.
> With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus.
What are you referring to here? Higher rates of income tax are only taken on the money earned over the band. So If you earn £50,271, you pay 20% on £50,270 and 40% on £1.
Are you referring to some other kind of tax then?
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
As well as the childcare benefit removal others have mentioned, you also begin losing your "tax free allowance".
The marginal tax rate for 100k -> 125k is 60% (due to losing the ~£12k tax free allowance)
there are benefits such as child tax credits which are not tapered. You either get the full benefit if earning £99,999 a year, or nothing at £100,000. This benefit if you have children can be worth tens of thousands of pounds, thus resulting in a net loss. If you look at income data after tax this causes a weird drop in take home pay in the roughly 100-130k range, where people just salary sacrifice all their extra pay to make sure they are under 100k. This is not productive to the economy.
After 100k, you get childcare benefit removed. This mean less money you pocket going from 99999 to 100k.
"As other countries expanded their output, adopted modern production methods, and built new, efficient shipyards, British shipbuilders found themselves increasingly uncompetitive."
This feels like the US with longshoremen and coal
I do feel the cost of labour is DRASTICALLY understated. Even today, Asian shipyards have people crawling all over them.
My last job, in oil and gas, on a large offshore vessel had I think 4000 people engaged in the shipyard during construction.
> Even today, Asian shipyards have people crawling all over them.
When you don't have a minimum wage, or your minimum wage is vastly lower than other competitors, it's far more efficient to hire more people than to invest in process improvements.
The cost of labour is DRASTICALLY overstated (except when it comes to executive pay then its apparently good value for money?), and the push/obsession with supernormal profits is DRASTICALLY understated.
Even then, living costs in the US are quite bloated due to over-regulation
Labor in the US is extremely pricey because you have to keep the landlords happy
General economic defeatism in this, and similar discussions, is staggering. Historically, many countries were suffering from various forms of economic malaise and managed to pull trough. Countries that lacked almost any form of industry have become powerhouses.
South Korea is a good example. The previous century hasn't been kind to Korea in general. By the 50s, the southern part of peninsula was generally less industrialized than the north, and recovering from horribly destructive war. Threat of another invasion from the north never went away.
And yet, successive governments have turned things around, and turned South Korea into advanced, functional, industrialized country. It has problems with aging population, but who hasn't?
West Germany in the second half of 20th century is another example. Devastated by war, occupied, mistrusted by neighbors, reliant on imported labor. And yet it put itself together. Lately it hasn't been doing so well, but for decades it was a model of prosperity.
Stories like this are abundant. Unfortunately, it takes a significant amount of political courage. Politicians must be willing to withstand short term pain, and plan for the future. They must focus on long term prosperity, not on immediate popularity boosts.
Everyone here, I believe, agrees that the way things have been going is unsustainable and incredibly damaging to the very people it's meant to benefit. It can be fixed, it will take time, but it can be. Because it happened before.
I think the defeatism is generally because there seems to be no way out. The two winning approaches right now are Starmer's “radical change through stability and continuity” and Farage's “Brexit 2: This time with Elon Musk”. Both strategies have clearly failed in the past.
You give two examples of countries that managed to save themselves but there’s far more historical examples of empires that faded and disappeared entirely, or more modern examples of countries in perpetual (so far) decline and failure. No, stories of turning around failing countries are not in fact abundant. There is no reason to believe the UK will be a success story and lots of reasons to believe its time has come and gone. It is in many ways a failing state with no prospects for recovery. Across virtually every metric it looks bleak. And vague comments about withstanding short term pain and planning for the future ignores that they already tried that, and it didn’t work.
Over large, historical periods of time no empire resisted. So, the fact that UK was a great empire is an argument that they will decline in the next immediate period.
That being said, "success" stories appear as much as "failures", and many times on/from the ruins of previous empires.
The UK faces serious structural problems (low productivity, weak investment, stagnant wages, and an over-centralized economy), but none of that automatically translates to terminal decline.
In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis.
The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well.
Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well.
Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace.
Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier.
There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News).
Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.
Beautifully said.
We are punching way above our weight in arts (disproportionally many Hollywood actors and directors are British), complex engineering (off the top of my head, Rolls Royce, Sheffield Forgemasters, and BAE are good examples), and recently building alliances (Japan's JASDF just made their first European deployment in 71 years). We are unusually constitutionally resilient, still maintaining control of the legislature over the executive, which is becoming rarer and rarer in the west.
But below all of that is bubbling energy and drive to fix and improve things. I saw it at startup meetups, I saw it in thinktanks, I saw it at Labour Conference. I see it in your comment.
There are massive risks to navigate, but I'm optimistic about this country's future.
Well put.
More broadly - the United Kingdom exports services worth £500+ billion each year (versus goods worth £400 billion or so).
And these service exports have grown 6-7% on average for the past decade and show no signs of slowing down.
Good exports have flatlined but certainly not collapsed.
Source: ONS UK trade, August 2025 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpay...
When you source out part of your production to a friendly nation, it's a cooperation. If you source it out to a non-friendly nation, this dependence is a liability.
I've been watching this thread. Almost everything posted makes me say "no I don't think it was that", but also "I suppose that was something of a factor". This probably tells us there are many reasons not one.
I will say that having lived through this time, it seemed that the message was "there aren't the things we want to do". Thatcherites said there would be a new services based economy. Nobody said "we could have an excellent heavy industry economy if only the pesky unions weren't involved".
Also, at the time (1970s) it felt like the industry was pretty much already gone. In my family the end was the cancelation of the TSR-2 (which my Dad worked on as an avionics designer). That was in the mid-60s. So by the 80s it wasn't that there was an industry that might be saved/preserved, rather the unsavable rump of what once was.
Lastly, I'm unconvinced unions are the cause. I think they're the symptom. Business is in decline, management doesn't know what to do, so begins laying off workers. Unions respond. Death spiral.
Anyway, for me it seemed like the class running the country just didn't understand nor like the engineering/manufacturing world. They were arts graduates.
I think let's not forget that at the start of the period they mention, the UK (and British Empire) as a share of world GDP was larger than the US is today. It was clearly never going to be able to sustain that position.
Let's also not forget that the country effectively bankrupted itself during WWII. Investment from the Marshall Plan was basically used to prop up the currency which ultimately failed. There were 'balance of payments' crises well through into the 1970s when Bretton Woods collapsed.
They can build faster and cheaper in Asia. Something the Netherlands learned after they threw a lot of money at it trying to save the shipyard industry.
Just accept heavy industry is over and find new ways to make money. You will never out build Asians but you can out bullshit them and nobody bullshits better than the Dutch!
The Chinese are moving up the chain.
If the Dutch thing they can make money just being a middle man they are in for a surprise.
Just like the telecom industry found out.
It can be done if you can adopt the same practices that the Asian nations did to build their shipping industry.
Western governments just aren't committed enough, have too much bloat and want a fiction of separation from private businesses.
I've struggled to understand exactly why our productivity is so bad here and I feel that this really explains it quite well - over reliance in tried and tested methods coupled with a lack of capital investment - for example relying on push-carts in the yards rather than looking at whatever was a more automated approach. It's not necessarily a case of a "productivity puzzle" but rather a puzzle as to why business owners aren't investing.
I got talking to a guy in the pub who told me about a local tire business, running completely on paper and manpower. In 2025 there's barely a hint of computers in the business. Seems like a similar story really. They could be making more sales, be more efficient, still employ people but redeploy to more useful roles. But no, a prevailing attitude of just carry on with pen and paper, and the MD can buy himself a flash new motor every year. When asked why the don't use technology it was like a fear of it, that they would be made redundant. I don't even mean AI, I mean even like a simple messaging system to IM from one side of the warehouse to another.
Mental.
There's a book on this subject by someone I follow which I must get round to reading: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-brompton/will-butler-ad...
It goes into a lot of detail on exactly how the process modernization happened in Brompton, with the sorts of challenges that you and the replies are talking about. The process and the workers need to adapt, in ways that the workers appreciate and fit the actual process of manufacture. Too often modernizations fail because they look at the "on paper" process, which isn't what the workers are actually doing.
> Too often modernizations fail because they look at the "on paper" process, which isn't what the workers are actually doing.
Also software installations fail because management decide what they want and go shopping for it, the users are not really in the loop about what they actually need, and management is an interchangeable class of people who think they know management but have often never done the job they are managing.
At the core of what you're saying about the "on paper" process is the fact that nobody does time-and-motion studies anymore.
Systems analysts barely exist in 2025, largely because interchangeable people in management get interchangeable "solutions providers" in, and they build the only flow that fits their existing tool.
A few years back I was hired to fix a bad web-based product for a niche-ish market (a niche within a standardised market) put together by rushed remote subcontractors who'd never talked to the client.
I was handed the spec and told I was to implement it. So I implemented it to a certain point, and then (because my mother had worked in that field and I knew what annoyed her) I thought: Hold on, a core flow of this implementation is awful tiresome CRUD busywork and they will hate it within hours. I already hate it and I'm only testing it.
So I argued to change the spec, suggested a better flow that better suited their needs (and allowed two use patterns — on-the-spot and at-the-end-of-the-day — which had different flow needs), and was told by the disconnected management: that looks good but we need to stick to our plan.
So sure was I that a bunch of hard-working good-hearted people would curse my name that I "prototyped" it to show everyone, and they loved it. Because it wasn't just better and faster, it was instinctive and fun. They had already understood that they were going to quickly hate the thing built for them, but this they wanted to use.
And then we put the prototype in production because it wasn't really a prototype at all: the job was so easy that the "prototype" was the solution. It was just something nobody had thought to offer because nobody listens.
Upshot: incredibly happy end users who gained back lots of time, and also experienced so much less frustration that a subsequent feature improvement could be less rushed because they were able to spend a little more time on a process they didn't hate as much.
I dread to think what this actively-not-listening development process will do to people when solutions providers just shoehorn AI in to solve anything they don't want to do a proper process for.
If you perceive your work to be artisanship (and a lot of people in the automotive and custom bicycle business do, along with people in the high end furniture business, for example), and you have enough customers who agree, and enough work to keep yourself and your employees busy and your families all fed, then a messaging system that speeds up productivity really is a lot of bollocks, basically (particularly for a company which is, in my experience of these amazing people, still disproportionately likely to hire people with dyslexia or reading difficulties). Because you cannot do more work of the same quality faster.
One thing tech people misunderstand is that these "artisanship" oriented companies can scale at least into the dozens of employees, almost all of whom want to do methodical uninterrupted skilled work or quiet, consistent labour, and who would rather hire four or five very understanding, very capable tech people to handle all that stuff for them. This is not a failing, it's a culture. Some great businesses in the UK run on the "don't add unnecessary tech bollocks" model, and IMO they should be encouraged to continue if they can, because that, it seems to me, is one route to surviving in an AI-bullshit-led industry.
The fact that the tech industry seems to thrill at systemically fucking this up and selling systems users do not need based on marketing fear that they are falling behind is quite depressing to me, not to mention a failure of systems analysis. Just because you are a tech person it doesn't mean you should be selling a messaging system to people who actually could just get the benefit from one more person to handle co-ordinating with the front office.
Tech people are, IMO, quite irresponsible in this way. We have all been trained to answer "we have a problem with X" questions with "we can build you a Y for that", when responsible consultancy would first rule out non-technical process flow improvements.
This is not Luddism. It is obvious that in skilled-work industries you should get things like "office-wide-instant-messengers" out of the way of people doing the skilled work so they can do it uninterrupted at an appropriate pace. There is no non-desk-bound job that is meaningfully improved by notifications buzzing.
I understand what you're saying, and I agree, technology doesn't always make things better. In this particular example though I'm not talking about adding frivolous software, I'm making the point they don't want to invest in ANY computing technology. Inventory, logistic, order, people or timesheet management. The example of IM is more a case of removing the requirement to hand a runner a note and them literally go to the other side of a warehouse to hand that note over. Apologies if that wasn't clear.
The thing is, that runner learns the business over time and could one day replace another employee. This is why automating away entry level jobs is not always a good long-term decision. Whereas e.g. Slack is just Slack forever.
And 100% agree, AI - Generative in particular - is a load of snake oil bollocks. It's not going to help any of us really. Hence the evidence coming out that companies are failing to see any return on their investments.
Ha, see what the unions have to say when you threaten the livelihoods of the poor downtrodden push card operatives, there will be placards and flaming braziers by the front gates before you can blink.
This frankly reads as somewhat sociopathic, not just anti-union.
In 2025 I admire anyone brave enough to take this position: are you independently wealthy?
It's somewhat reasonable given the dire history of UK labour relations in the 1970s. As you say, it's now 2025 and the only people who can get away with that are maybe the train drivers. Everyone else has been casualized.
Come now, trying to talk about UK industry in the 70's without mentioning unions?
Except the post that you were replying to was not, was it? And you were talking in the present tense.
If you think unions have no possible value in 2025 you are either independently wealthy, retired on an excellent pension, or very misinformed. Right now everyone should be considering whether there is a union for them, because what is coming down the pipe is not good.
Nobody here is talking about unions in 2025 except you, the whole post is about the decline of British shipbuilding which happened in the second half of the 1900's, along with a lot of other industry.
Sorry, this is just untrue.
You were responding to a comment that was only talking about contemporary issues, so at least someone was talking about contemporary issues:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873952
So I responded, quite logically, as if you were talking about unions in a contemporary context. Not least because you replied in the present tense to a comment about the present.
Parent referenced push cart use which is from the article, hence my reply was also intended in that context. For future reference you might want to go a little easier on people rather than coming straight in with the snarky 'you must be independently wealthy' remarks, and make the goal to understand each other.
If the MD is able to buy himself a flash motor every year, perhaps he doesn't have any incentive to improve the efficiency. Sounds like he's doing alright.
Yes, he is, could be better, could be exposed to a competitor. Medium to longer term it's not a great approach.
* tyre
Near everyone lost their shipping industry.
I love how the capitalist laws of markets that instigated the rise of China as a the main ship builder - cheaper labor, automated production, low cost of all the source materials also coming from China - don't seem to apply for the people making the argument of protectional national strategic industries.
This is no different than any other industry. Unless you are on the cutting edge of a product where innovation is still being pushed, then your industry is going to be eaten up by China.
The UK at its peak was producing 1.4M in ship tonnage, now it produces zero. The US currently produces 69k in ship tonnage. China produces 37M in ship tonnage. Even if you can scale back to the historic peak, it's nowhere near enough. The difference between zero produced ships a year and 3 per year or 30 per year may as well be zero when China is producing 3 per day. It's over.
Labor cost is like 1% of shipbuilding cost. Also China just followed Japan's playbook, who did it first after WWII. It's entirely about the financing model and heavy cooperation between the State, Banks and Shipbuilders.
I feel this explains our "productivity puzzle" quite well - A lack of infrastructure and R&D investment that is holding the UK back and really needs to be fixed.
This video answers a lot of the questions around why shipbuilding is concentrated in east Asia now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo&t
The TLDR is:
- Unique, state backed financial instruments that remove a lot of the risk for purchasers. The state needs a large amount of foreign reserves to do this;
- A concentration of industrial and labour capacity. You need to achieve a certain scale in order for the economics to work.
They also look at the case of Germany, who don't produce a lot of finished ships, but export the most profitable, complex components to east Asia. They are at least pursuing a rational strategy, even if they don't have the ability to crank out thousands of ships a year.
I can't believe how much I read on this that's just dead wrong.
The reason China, Korea and Japan dominate shipbuilding today is entirely two factors: export credits and generous financing by government-run banks.
The financing terms are so attractive that you don't want to buy from anywhere else. Those governments also reinvested almost all proceeds into expansion. There's something like a three-year backlog and you can place orders without tying up capital.
Meanwhile the UK did give us the web and the CPUs we all use.
Wait till you find out how India lost it's ship building industry.....
TLDR: Failed to innovate and adapt.
In a way it is story that repeats itself on a larger scale as a whole with the western world.
One of the things that annoys me is that the west lost the opportunity to continue to be world's manufacturing powerhouse in the 90s and early 00s. We should have invested in automation and efficiency to the point where developing countries even if using slave labor and no environmental regulations to still not be able to compete on price of end product. It is not as if there was not substantial technological advantage at the time.
If there was going to be a rust belt - well it is better if jobs were outright destroyed/obsoleted than moved to other countries.
China has "dark factories" - so little labor that they could turn the lights off. Absolutely no reason those couldn't be in US or UK if proper investments were made at the time.
the rust belt, and deindustrialization in general was a political choice. The free trade agreements that enabled it were enacted for a number of reasons, some well intentioned, but ultimately they were a choice to mortgage our industrial capacity now, in exchange for gdp growth back then.
well to be fair UK lost much more important things than shipbuilding
shipbuilding is the least of they are gonna worry
Some was lost. Some was freely given; Thatcher was no fan of shipbuilders.
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It's a good analysis but probably over-fixates on shipping specific factors. The UK also lost its car industry, its steel industry etc. The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result. From the comments:
> I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on the production line at the British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Oxford. By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift. Needless to say, BL went belly-up and now BMW is producing Minis there (although they are no longer very mini).
I grew up in the UK and it felt like everyone of my parent's generation had stories like that. My father was in management and had to go toe-to-toe with a union that was on the verge of wiping out his industry (private sector TV), they were doing things like shutting down transmissions as part of demanding higher wages. In that specific case the unions failed as the TV companies were able to automate the transmission suites and then fired all the workers, this was in the 1980s I think when the legal environment was more conducive to that. Funny story: one of the fired workers moved to the US and ended up writing a popular series of thriller books that ended up being turned into a movie series, he became very rich in the process. So the union failing ended up being good for that guy in the end.
But in many industries they weren't able to beat the unions thanks to a series of very weak left wing governments in the 50s, 60s and 70s (even the Conservatives were weak on labour until Thatcher) that largely made opposing the unions illegal. So the industries just got wiped out one by one. Today the same problem exists but with Net Zero instead of unions, it makes electricity so expensive that industry becomes uncompetitive vs parts of the world where they don't care, and the political class is fine with this outcome. Decades and decades of governments that cheered on deindustrialization for left wing ideological reasons.
So whilst the shipping industry probably did have problems in management (just like the car/steel industry), ultimately having good management wouldn't have helped. What determined if an industry survived this period or not was whether the management was able to automate fast and completely enough to break union power.
The main reason the car industry couldn't hack it is because of quality issues. There was this joke sticker for the back of your Jaguar or Rolls: "The parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture".
I worked a lot on classic Mini's, Metros and Maxi's. The degree to which body work had been patched and bent to match it to the corresponding chassis was quite amazing. Rumor had it the Leyland factory had a guy with a very large hammer standing at the end of the line to 'adjust' the doors if they didn't close properly. I totally believe it. I've seen almost new subframes that were Swiss cheese from rust and/or with very bad welding.
That said, there are few cars that are more fun to drive than a souped up Classic Mini, and even fewer that would be as lethal in an accident.
Cars like Jaguar and Land Rover have famously bad electrical systems. But just saying quality issues doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country, and its the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to, there has to be a deeper reason. I don’t know it unions were the whole story, as really only Germany or Germanic countries have ever had great quality control for cars in Europe, but there must be some systemic reason.
There are lots of manufacturers in the UK right now who have fantastic quality. Rolls Royce aero engines. Lots of pharmaceuticals. Airbus wings and landing gear. Lots of cars as well. Medical devices. The list is endless.
The UK manufacturing sector was worth $279 billion in the last year.
https://www.makeuk.org/insights/reports/uk-manufacturing-fac...
That's all true. But the list could have been a lot longer. The UK had a lot more industry than it does today and there definitely were quality issues. At the same time: competition that wasn't even on the horizon back then (for instance: Korea) became a major factor and at some point you need the scale. For the UK driving on the left side of the road made that all of their exports had to be made for domestic or foreign use, foreign manufacturers often chose to simply not field a model in the UK, so that was an extra cost.
It's funny, I've a complete love/hate relationship with cars from the UK. I love them, love the looks, love to drive them. But I hate the unreliability that was part and parcel of it and I hated even more to buy a spare part and then to find out that it subtly didn't fit because of some defect in body geometry with as a result that it looked like crap (fenders... subframes... don't get me started on that one, I can bore you to death about the kind of crap they sold).
The Metro could have been what the 206 was for Peugeot, instead they made fairly nice design in the most cheap and unsafe way possible. In comparison the 206 was a little tank.
This is an under-appreciated point: the UK manufacturing sector is highly successful, but only where it doesn't employ large armies of workers, and is instead either automated or very small volume/large margin.
News coverage of this is, as expected, completely dire.
> Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country
There's a culture in industries. As you said, look at Germany. Look at the culture in SV - it would be hard to open a development business of any size that ran completely against the SV engineering culture.
> the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to
That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history. :)
> I don’t know it unions were the whole story
Looking at the two countries with the best reputations for quality, a lack of union and labor projection may be the problem: Germany has very strong unions; in many cases, they get a seat on the board of directors. Japan treats its labor very well - often lifetime jobs, famously Toyota empowers assembly line workers to stop the entire line themselves - and has low labor market liquidity (but my info on Japan could be out of date).
"That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history".
What absolute rubbish.
Rolls Royce is one of the leading aero engine makers today. They make the engines for the 787 and the A350, and many other planes.
TBF, the industrial revolution started 250 years ago and the Merlin ceased production 75 years ago and has almost literally nothing in common with the Trent - not design, metallurgy, thermodynamic cycle, fuel...
Calling the referenced achievements ancient history isn't an unreasonable take, despite current successes.
Quality issues are inevitable if the unions see their role as preventing anyone from getting fired.
Which, it should be noted, is not a common goal among unions.
I’m a union metalworker in the US shipbuilding industry— our products are expensive, but in very high demand domestically and internationally. That’s true for various reasons, but in no small part because our quality is exceptional, and people regularly get fired for compromising it. Some unions do seem to strive to protect incompetence at all costs, but none of the ones I worked for in any industry ever defended it. I have a feeling the cases where they do are heavily influenced by shakedowns and corruption rather than being genuinely that tribal. Some police unions probably fall on both sides of that spectrum.
A union is functionally a business which sells labor. It's usually structured so that sales are indirect, with their customers paying the workers directly, but that's just accounting.
There's no fundamental reason that a union should seek to prevent anyone from ever getting fired, anymore than any other business would see to prevent any of their employees from being fired. Likewise, there's no fundamental reason that unions should be bad for the businesses that hire their members. A prosperous client is good for business.
Some unions are badly run and hurt themselves. Americans especially tend to assume all unions are this way, partly because of some high-profile examples, partly because of a culture of individualism and association of unions with communism, and partly because of propaganda. But they definitely do not have to be like that.
How can union rules get crafted to keep the company in business, fire incompetence, and breed innovation, rather than self-perpetuation?
Typically you incorporate union representatives onto boards of companies, make the members shareholders etc. You tie incentive structures together.
Even so, I'm a reject your framing to a certain degree. Employees, and by extension labor unions, typically want to see the company they work at succeed. Labor always pays the price, e.g. forgoing wages during a strike.
And even when a deal is struck, employees often put the interest of the company ahead of their own, e.g. trading away already agreed upon wage increases in a labor contract in order to keep the company solvent.
Are there examples of both situations? Of course! I've seen both first hand, but it certainly isn't completely one or the other. Some companies have a good relationship with their unions, others are very antagonistic.
Well, how do you craft corporate rules to prevent companies from extracting value out of their labor without being abusive, under-compensating people, discriminating, valuing nepotism over competence, exposing employees to unreasonable risk, etc? Most people take pride in their work, care about what they do, want to see the company they work for succeed, want to see competence rewarded, hate having to repeatedly clean up other people’s mistakes and will respect a company that treats them well for doing so. The company has leverage and the union has leverage and they work together. If the union has all the leverage and the company has none and the people in charge of the union are greedy jerks, well then that’s a problem. If the workers have no leverage and the people in charge of the company are greedy jerks, that’s also a problem— but it’s a far more common problem because it’s much easier for companies to get leverage than workers.
Look at the case of the boring company having workers spraying caustic chemicals in enclosed spaces with no PPE and laboring in ankle deep water in heavy work boots which abrade skin even when it’s dry. If a company can’t afford to stay in business without treating their workers humanely then they can’t afford to stay in business. But we all know from the rather well known CEO that lack of capital isn’t the problem.
Erm, British management is also famously terrible.
Coal has horrible externalities and its demise is a good thing.
British iron ore is not very rich, and it never was; Britain has imported iron ore since the 19th century. Given how cheap it is to ship iron by sea, it's very hard to justify using low-grade ore that has to be moved by rail.
Because of the large size of the manufacturers, a medium-size country will only have a couple of them, leaving it vulnerable to mismanagement like what happened at British Leyland, AMC, Chrysler, Nissan, ...
"Laborers wanted their fair slice of the pie so the bosses moved all industries and investments to Asia."
"Why did the laborers do this?"
Bosses didn't move things to Asia. During this period British companies stayed in Britain and were outcompeted by Asian firms.
"The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong".
That's the conventional wisdom, but is it true?
It was the Thatcher government that shut down those industries. Maybe they didn't need to. There was a lot of collateral damage, privately owned suppliers that went bankrupt etc. A lot of countries have state subsidised industries, including the USA. GM was bailed out by the Obama government. Boeing and Tesla and SpaceX get tons of government money..
There is an interesting book by Tim Lankester, who was the chief economist in the Thatcher government. He has mixed feelings.
If you are interested, the book is:
Inside Thatcher's Monetarist Experiment by Tim Lankester
Thatcher didn't so much shut them down as turned off the life support subsidies. They were already dead, commercially.
A bailout isn't great and Obama was criticized for it, but it's not the same as ongoing state subsidies and outright nationalization. Boeing and SpaceX get oney for selling the government unique services. The USA has historically not gone in for subsidies of industries like steel and coal, and that's one reason it's ahead.
Free trade is not a cold rational economic choice. It is a political choice. It is a choice to put more money into the hands of the capitalist class, by means of improving their investment returns at the expense of that country’s industrial capacity.
Jeopardy style, Who is Lee Child?
> The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result.
And yet Germany, the great success story of retaining manufacturing in a western developed country, had and has far stronger leftists and far stronger unions than the UK. So evidently this was not the reason at all, although I'm sure getting the public to think it was is very useful to certain monied interests.
> By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift.
Note that a work-to-rule is a dispute escalation tactic, one step down from a full-on strike. This was not routine activity.
> Note that a work-to-rule is a dispute escalation tactic, one step down from a full-on strike. This was not routine activity.
In the period where the British industries were wiped, that kind of tactic was being used routinely. The German unions were much less aggressively leftist than British unions.
UK labour-management relations were bad in that period, worse than in Germany, resulting in high levels of conflict and escalation. I don't think it's because the UK's unions were more aggressive though.
British unions were so aggressive there was serious fear of a communist revolution in those times, or a military coup to prevent one. They forced a three day week, rolling blackouts and an IMF bailout. Management doesn't deserve blame here, they were trying to keep their companies afloat in the face of people who were outright promoting Marxism and a government sympathetic to that / weak in the face of it.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41931869?seq=3
Sit-ins and factory occupations were inspired by the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in led by Jimmy Airlie, Sam Barr and Jimmy Reid, all leading [Communist Part] members.
Blame the workers, it’s absolute bullshit (apologies for language).
My view is privatization opened up the British market to globalization, and fundamentally once everyone is trying to get things for the cheapest price the domestic supply chain shrinks, in the UK it has shrunk to the point it vanished. Other countries with stronger protection for domestic production (like the US with the Jones act and dredging acts, Norway) avoided exposure to the global market and survived.
The Jones Act and friends are exactly what turned US shipbuilding into rent-seeking. You can have protectionism or you can have manufacturing, but not both.
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The most most successful car companies in the world are from a country even less advantageous to auto manufacture, Japan. They had very little natural resources and about the only avdantage vs UK was a little bit bigger population.
Longbridge is not inherently a worse place to manufacture cars than Munich, South Carolina or even Detroit.
I didn't realize the UK was known for wool production. I know it as the birthplace of the industrial revolution and the country that mined enough coal to cover the entire country to a depth of three inches.
Blaming it on unions is dumb (German car makers seem to do just fine), but if you were looking at the situation in the first half of the last century, it would be pretty reasonable to expect UK car manufacturing to be a big deal. And especially ship building. They had the world's largest navy for a long time, and they didn't do it by importing ships.
For steel you need iron ore and coal, which the UK has plenty of. It was heavily industrialized in the 19th century. It's not that different in terms of natural resources to Germany.
British cars could have remained competitive for a lot longer if labour relations had been like in Germany. Germany's organized labour is/was famously mild compared to the feral British unions that were run by open Marxists and did things like topple governments.
Germany's economy is currently collapsing because they can't import cheap energy. I don't think unions matter much, except to democracy.
The british isle is also unlikely to become a steel production hub unless it both grows massively and reorganizes its labor around efficiency rather than profit.
That's true today but is a very recent thing. The trends I'm talking about were mostly in the 20th century when Germany had cheap energy.
Britain was a steel production hub once, making 40% of the world's output. But I agree it's unlikely to become one again. For one many of its coal mines were shut down and flooded or otherwise destroyed.
It sounds like your hypothesis is that if only the poor people knew their place, and remained serfs, then UK manufacturing would be the best in the World...
I'm sure you're insisting on working for below minimum wage with no holidays and no sick pay, just to show that unions are worthless.
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This is called mean reversion in history. The UK and Japan are small island countries. They lack the resources and manpower to sustain long-term industrial prosperity. Everything they have is temporary. In the end these industries flow to large nations with vast resources and large pools of technical talent. It used to be the United States. Now it is China absorbing Japan and Korea. This applies not only to shipbuilding but also to automobiles and all precision industries.
Seems a naive simplistic philosophy. The UK is larger than South Korea and has a similar population size. Yet South Korea has outcompeted the UK and US in ship building. By most accounts by investing in advanced technology and ship building technologies.
Having population and talented populous is a requirement but not sufficient for achieving big things. It requires leadership as well. Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
> Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
it wont last long. even china dont use military to take taiwan, china will still win on this in the the end. It's just a matter of time. A lead of a few decades doesn't mean everything from the perspective of historical dimensions, it's still too short.
also, china will take taiwan in short times(less than 10 years), so the result wont change anyway. From a historical perspective, this is a normal means of transferring power and status.
This seems, either naive or wishful thinking. The ‘normal means’ of transferring power and status as far as I recall from most history I’ve read usually involves some sort of massive war. Sometimes this ends well for the rising power, other times they wind up finding their fortunes being reversed. Even when things don’t wind up being so dire, it’s not very often you see complete forgone conclusions in international relations, especially between countries separated by a body of water.
So your solution to “Taiwan is outcompeting on silicon” is that the PLA Navy should take it by violent force and overthrow a peaceful nation and justify that calling that normal?
thats clear not what i said
Its not clear what you said
“ china will take taiwan in short times(less than 10 years), so the result wont change anyway. From a historical perspective, this is a normal means of transferring power and status.”
Japan has always been an industrious, populous and quite productive country even back then (before the colonial era). It tops rankings on historical GDP. I agree to a certain degree about the UK, but even in this era of Japanese depression, they are still the world 3-4th most productive country.
yes but for now.if you analyze Japan's industrial data in detail, you'll find that they are in an unstoppable downward trend. Basically, all the industries they excel in, just like those in South Korea and Taiwan, are being replaced by China. Shipbuilding has become a game dominated by China(>50%) and Korea; home appliances, automotive industry, steel, chips, computers, and so on. Of course, right now, like in the automotive sector, Japan still holds an advantage in terms of volume, but everyone knows that electric vehicles are the future, and the core technology for the battery industry is almost entirely in China's hands. Even Tesla initially used Japanese technology, but they were ultimately surpassed by China. Relying on native protectionist strategies from the US and Canada, Japanese cars still have many advantages. But in open markets, Chinese electric vehicles are making inroads everywhere. Vietnam is gradually banning fuel-powered motorcycles, which is one of Japan's main products, but policy changes will allow Chinese electric vehicle brands and VinFast to capture more market share. We cannot predict exactly how long it will take for Japan's industry to completely exit the historical stage, but what we see is indeed a dying man. (Of course, Germany is already dead.)
so i wouldn't say 'always', even it can be reach to 100 years(unlikely). its a great achievement, but its not 'always'.
(Moreover, when predicting industrial trends, we must note that the future trend is robots. In this regard, due to China's vast population, the per capita number of robots hasn't yet reached the top spot, falling below Singapore and South Korea. But in terms of robot technology, I believe even the United States can't compare. Of course, in large models, the United States is still leading by a wide margin. So, determining how long China can rule industry in history, first of all, it will definitely be much longer than Britain and Japan, and another core reason is the decisive role of robots. If robots lead to the end of industrial transfer, then as long as China doesn't collapse for other reasons, China will forever have industrial advantages.)
Here’s the thing though, if china keeps on alienating all of it’s export markets by variously undercutting them, monopolizing strategic resources and then embargoing them, stealing technology and dumping excess capacity from its industrial sector, it may find itself with no more export markets to sell to.
Human societies are, in general, fairly well attuned to collective action against a perceived collective threat, that’s what we evolved to do after all. And unlike the USSR, China has done a fairly bad job of building any soft power that it could use to modify public opinion.
This is very much "why does China, the largest country, not simply eat the others".
That is simply not true. UK and Japan are big enough to compete in specific sectors. The problem is the entire world gifted China their manufacturing ability and then gave up. Climate policy, short term economic thinking and unions all worked together to destroy the west manufacturing capability.
ive long held this take aswell.
a lot of people point back at history, with the argument of "we did it before, we can do it now!"
but whats to say it wasn't a transient? transients can last 1 year or 100 years, but in the latter case i think its 'hard' for us to believe that it was a fluke, because we view transients that last longer than a human lifespan with a bias of perceived permanence.
how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry? on virtually every objective metric, it is off by an order of magnitude. frankly it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
>without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
London would be considerably poorer, there is an argument that the rest of the country may well be better off. The finance sector is our equivalent to the oil industry in Dutch Disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
How could Shenzhen possibly compete with the rest of the world in electronics?
Specialization is the answer. The bigger you are, the more fields you can be competitive in. But even regions much smaller than the UK can be world leaders in something, if they choose to prioritize that and play their cards right.
> How could Shenzhen possibly compete with the rest of the world in electronics?
Because Shenzhen has access to the entire talent pool and supply chain and the consume market of China to support its development.
There is nothing preventing the UK from taking advantage of the talent pool, supply chain, and consumer market of an equally large economy in their chosen field. Except maybe the UK itself.
National borders are as important as you choose to make them. Small countries have always relied on diplomacy and trade to be successful. The UK just needs to accept that it's one small country among many, and start acting accordingly.
> how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry?
How could Switzerland?
How could Japan?
How could the Netherlands?
And so on... The UK is still pretty good at plenty of things, but they lacked a specific USP. I think their biggest issues (from an industry perspective) were not so much scale as quality control and the willingness to improve their processes. Compare a German car from the 1970's or 80's under the hood with a UK made car and the difference could not be larger.
German cars are a bit of joke these days in terms of reliability but their legacy and brand image is still keeping them afloat.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/used-car-brand-reliabil...
https://www.vibilagare.se/public/documents/2011/09/maskinska...
The car thing is in the distant past, we were making 2 million cars a year in the 2010's (at least until Brexit).
Their USP was their empire, a source of free raw materials.
I don't think so. It certainly did not hurt but there is another major factor: The UK is the house where the industrial revolution was born. And they still have the scars from it. And I think that is in part why they lost it: they were ahead but with fairly primitive stuff and then others overtook them because they didn't have that heritage to maintain and keep up. Just have a look at the London subway for an excellent example of why being early out of the gate with stuff like that isn't always the best in the long run.
Some more examples: Some countries in Africa are now ahead in mobile usage for all kinds of official stuff including payments, insurance and government interaction. Countries that were late to adapt to mobile infrastructure ended up with 4G or better where as the rest is having trouble phasing out their 3G networks because they've become invisibly dependent on them.
The British used to export cotton from the colonies, process them in England and then ship them back.
I don't have the links handy but they taxed the colonies multiple times over both while exporting and reimporting.
Without the colonies they would have been nothing.
I've read a book called Four Hundred Years In America before; I don't know if its English version is popular. It points out that one core reason for the South's defeat in the Civil War was how vital the cotton trade between the American South and Britain was to both sides. So the North used their fleet to blockade the South's cotton exports to Britain right away, leaving the South without the trade revenue to import steel and other materials needed for building railroads—basically sealing their fate. Britain just pivoted to sourcing cotton from places like India, still not relying on local production. This example really drives home how Britain's industrial foundation was way too dependent on raw material inflows from the colonies.
I haven't read the book you referenced but there are many articles which say essentially the same thing. In addition, there are some historians who claim the British created the conflict in an attempt to partition the US into north and south, a trick they used almost everywhere they went. Matt Ehret for one.
India is the most prominent example, to tiny Cyprus.
I think this kind of mean reversion is actually worse than imagined. I'm not belittling the UK or anyone else; I just want to say that the governments of these countries haven't prepared any contingency plans for this kind of crisis at all. The lost industrial capacity is almost impossible to recover, and they also have to face the impact of immigration issues. The lower classes in the US, the lower classes in China, and even the global lower classes live more miserably than people in the UK and the EU, but they work longer hours. This isn't a stable state(The UK and the EU also lack priority in military and technological aspects.), so major changes are bound to happen. It's just a matter of time—maybe just a few decades away.
> it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
This is a virtual advantage, which is being eroded as we speak.
Thanks to the overuse of sanctions, many countries have already switched to bilateral currencies.
well... i dont know about that. i dont think its as virtual as people think. fundamentally any industry is about people, and london is chock full of hft shops, and they're all in-office. where would they go? they are quite serious software engineers (ive met only a few) and very selective. london being an intellectual hub, i dont see that changing any time soon.
as for sanctions, i think the gov will cut out perfectly sized legal (loop)holes for the people that matter.
The real value in London - actually more accurately the City of London - is in the networks built up over the decades. By networks I mean the old boys networks where insiders share information with each other over the phone.
Software as in used in trading or other financial services is only of value if there are takers for those services.
One rapidly eroding service is insurance. The so-called "shadow fleets" are called that only by London, because they're not insured by London. That doesn't mean that they're not insured: various governments have already created vehicles to insure strategically important shipping.
England (and the Netherlands, Belgium, Northern Italy, and a few other regions) have been some of the richest parts of the world for centuries. Not quite millenia, but not far from it. That's hardly transient.
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Here's your trophy, Sir. Indeed China is irrelevant, you are so right!
Thank you. I'd like to thank my comrades, mother and all those who believed in me all these years ...
Worst comment I’ve ever read on hn
No it isn't, but how do you feel about that?
holy cope
"This is called mean reversion in history."
Citation? I tried a search on your term and ... crickets.
EDIT:
Sorry: "Mean reversion is a financial term for the assumption that an asset's price will tend to converge to the average price over time"
What on earth does that have to do with the price of frogs?
If you google "reversion to the mean" or "regression to the mean" you'll see a more general definition.
Makes no sense in economics, the whole history since industrialization is that the economy gets bigger and bigger, both in absolute terms and per capita.
The position in the world will. At its peak, Britain was truly the empire on which the sun never sets, but these colonies were not assimilated by British culture to become part of Britain. Therefore, they were ultimately lost. Britain will eventually revert to the position befitting a small island nation—insignificant in the realm of geopolitics.
What makes no sense is infinite growth and the "west" is starting to find out
There's a presumption that it would be beneficial to return mid-20th century manufacturing economies. If you look at economic output and productivity, and quality of life for labor (physical labor, especially repetitive physical labor, is hard to do for decades), we want to move forward and we did. We want to plan for a mid-21st century economy.
The problem is a small group seizing the benefits for themselves.
Yes, but in the end you still live in physical reality, and this determines our actual productivity.
Whether we can make a boat, or a tennis racket, or a toothbrush cheaply is in the end what determines how many people can have boats, tennis rackets and toothbrushes, not whether the service economy, or our scientific research is excellent. We can hope to be able to do neat stuff and trade that for products, but in the end, once trade is no longer mandatory when people do not need to obtain foreign currency to obtain oil, everything having become battery-electric, I suspect that everybody will be better off simply building what they want.
That's not how, in physical reality, the world works. The question is not 'what is needed' but 'what adds value'.
If you walk into a room where a full crew of people are painting the walls, you don't add any value by picking up a paintbrush yourself - you may even get in the way. You need to find something valuable to contribute.
In our real world, many things that are needed are already well provided for: They are so cheap and easy to produce, that making more doesn't add value (and consequently earns little income). Making t-shirts is very cheap and easy; you provide little value by doing it yourself and consequently you won't be paid much for it. Another example is water: Potable water is absolutely essential to life - the most essential thing. But it's already well provided for and therefore we don't invest substantial resources in producing it. We'd be a very poor country if we made t-shirts and potable water, and deservedly so - we'd be adding little value to the world.
We add value to the world by doing hard things that others can't do: Designing chips, designing airplanes, writing software. Science is hard. Those add a lot of value - and you get paid well for it.
We're not starting from a world of nothing - maybe like 10,000 years ago - and adding things to it. Then t-shirts and especially potable water would be essential. We're starting in the world as it is now. Manufacturing, for many products, was valuable and hard in early-to-mid 20th century; when Henry Ford first did it, it was hard and extremely valuable. Now lots of people can do it and we add little value by doing it ourselves, and we won't get paid well either.
This is economic myopia that leads to long term subservience to countries which have maintained manufacturing capability. China can literally bring the rest of the developed world to their knees at will with rare earths.
Actually, the most powerful country in the world by far is the United States, and other than China, other Western countries that have followed this "myopia".
> rare earths
Rare earths are not a manufacturing product, but a natural resource. That's not an applicable example here.
Also, China is more dependent on the rest of the world than vice-versa; China has power, but certainly hasn't brought anyone to their knees - when has that happened?
The reason your original post was downvoted was because the events of the last few years have so thoroughly damaged your neoliberal ideas and of course this follow up just confirms how poorly you are informed.
If I understand you, you have no argument but you feel threatened by what I say ?
Generally we don't talk about up/downvoting on HN, but it's especially odd when someone else talks about it.
I have plenty of arguments but have learned arguing to be a complete waste of time. Neoliberals are experts at ignoring/dismissing real life evidence to maintain their thought bubbles.
The point of my post was what it says, express why your thinking is no longer popular, even though it was main stream just a short while ago.
There's lots of rare earth deposits all over the world, but the question is, are you willing to accept the pollution that results from extracting them as efficiently as possible?
China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.
China dominates refining, which is also a nasty industry. The mining is done in many places.
> China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.
i.e. long term thinking is their strategic advantage.
It’s easy for a small group to seize the benefits when productivity is centralized in the hands of a small group. If you diversify the ability to build boats, then you may not be rich, but you’ll have a boat.
The increase in wealth concentration mostly happened after ship-building (and other manufacturing) departed.
The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy. If China could turn on a switch and become independent, they'd do it. They can't and it's interesting that the US/EU are not happy with this superior status quo and would rather return to a pre-1900 world where they are the sole center of the world.
It's not going to work, in my opinion; and it's going to end with them having neither. You being downvoted shows that this is not the opinion of the elite only but everyone is onboard the insanity train.
>The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy.
Except that we don't have monopoly on that. Assembled in China, designed in California worked for a while because of the inertia of the previous times when the whole pyramid was located in the US. For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.
Guess what - we moved the bottom layers of the industrial pyramid and we are acting surprised that the top layers are also organically happening there. We are probably somewhat ahead, but if we get wiped out of existence tomorrow the progress in China won't slow down.
> For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.
What am saying is that this is not happening because shit got assembled in China but because of internal issues in the West. Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better; and I think this is where I (and most?) people disagree here.
This is the fundamental thing you get wrong. The whole industrial knowledge thing was build because we were building stuff internally. When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing. For free.
We live at a physical world - so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper is extremely important for continuous dominance.
The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.
> When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing.
I don't think so. Employees on the chain line are not going to become literate and engineers just because you are outsourcing the menial stuff.
> so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper
That is knowledge work.
> The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.
It didn't stop Brazil from creating a rather very good aerospace company.
I am afraid we cannot reconcile the difference in our thinking.
>It didn't stop Brazil from creating a rather very good aerospace company.
That uses prat and whitney and GE engines
> Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better;
How so? Why would bringing back domestic manufacturing be worse for a country than outsourcing all of it to another country that is actively working to replace the few parts of the process your country's still involved in?
Of the top of my head: pollution, jobs that negatively affect your countryman and then require expensive healthcare, side effects (noise, truck traffic) that negatively affect knowledge workers, low pay.
I can't also think of any reason why bringing these jobs is a net positive. Like I get it, China is adversarial but there are 2-3 billion more people you can outsource this work to who are unlikely to get adversarial.
Somewhat ahead in a few areas but those are only temporary.
Unfortunately, neoliberal bullshit only works out the long term in a political fantasy world.
The impression is that you must know nothing about the merits and this is all you have - name-calling, swearing, condescension. But most of that is unnecessary and definitely inappropriate to HN: What makes you think you can treat people this way? Because they have economic ideas you don't like - and, it seems, don't understand?
I don’t think I insulted anyone, I said neoliberal ideas are bullshit. Because they’re demonstrably so. In the UK, Thatcherism resulted in terrible decision after terrible decision, and we must all live with the consequences.