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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
Why shouldn't Scotland also enjoy this improvement?
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.
So basically the same situation as the prior generations of peasants toiling away to pay their taxes to the lord.
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-...
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...
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?
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.
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.
But the UK decided against that in 2016, and despite demographics having shifted the views, there is no general "rejoin" campaign.
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 too large to be an independent city state, but too small to be self sufficient.
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.
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.
On day one - for past bad behaviour.
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?
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.
As long as your friends build ships, you are fine.
The UK is friends with South Korea, for example.
"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"
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
Sure. The UK isn't "most countries", and shipbuilding is not any random "so-called critical" good.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't even think there's much of a merchant marine fleet left in the UK.
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.
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”.
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.
Who is going to make up the difference?
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
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.
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.
Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A democratically elected, competent government I would imagine.
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".
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.
Per Ferguson Marine, do you want to prop up a dying industry or achieve usable ships? What's the actual priority?
see how such dismissal can cut both ways?
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.
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.
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 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?
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Too bad it's hard to find a country which isn't autocratic by this standard in practice.
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.
I am not convinced the current breed of politicians in (more or less) democratic countries sees that differently.
https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2024/03...
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.
More are planned (the SSN-AUKUS), but it is probably still some time away.
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.
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?
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.
Soviet doctrine (not Russian) was to use tactical nuclear weapons immediately during their attempt to invade West Germany and march to the Atlantic.
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.
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.
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".
Classic scene from "Yes, Prime Minister": https://youtu.be/yg-UqIIvang
On the other hand, there's Sir Humphrey's opinion on Trident.
"It's the nuclear deterrent Harrods would sell."
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
China also ain't dumb. It would play along but there is no misunderstanding about the nature of any agreement with Russia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not saying you're wrong (idk either way), saying that to do it right is a big pivot.
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.
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.
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"
Conveniently, they need what we have, and we want what they make.
On the other hand, the primary strategic threat is apparently also China.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
We really are a society of ponzi schemes.
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...
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.
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.
> - 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.
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 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.
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?
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?
Ah, pot calling kettle black!
The "normal" definition you claim is smuggling the equivalent of an entire cultural ideological framing.
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.
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?
Maybe N2O emission? But I think that could be addressed technically.
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”
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.
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 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.
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).
Bill Hicks on Gallagher and Carrot top
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.
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.
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.
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 the worst example you could pick from the EU.
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.
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
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)"
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting. Care to share a bit more about your reasoning here?
May this spread to all other nations. Down with management.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The issues were longer-term and revolved around a failure to update working methods as the rest of the world developed.
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.
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
This gives some idea of what happened: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUgYWRhbSBzbWl...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
As long as you have less than £8,000 in the bank.
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?
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."This feels like the US with longshoremen and coal
My last job, in oil and gas, on a large offshore vessel had I think 4000 people engaged in the shipyard during construction.
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.
Labor in the US is extremely pricey because you have to keep the landlords happy
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.
That being said, "success" stories appear as much as "failures", and many times on/from the ruins of previous empires.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
Western governments just aren't committed enough, have too much bloat and want a fiction of separation from private businesses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2025 I admire anyone brave enough to take this position: are you independently wealthy?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
shipbuilding is the least of they are gonna worry
> 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.
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.
The UK manufacturing sector was worth $279 billion in the last year.
https://www.makeuk.org/insights/reports/uk-manufacturing-fac...
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.
News coverage of this is, as expected, completely dire.
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).
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.
Calling the referenced achievements ancient history isn't an unreasonable take, despite current successes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, ...
"Why did the laborers do this?"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“ 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.”
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because Shenzhen has access to the entire talent pool and supply chain and the consume market of China to support its development.
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 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.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/used-car-brand-reliabil...
https://www.vibilagare.se/public/documents/2011/09/maskinska...
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 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.
India is the most prominent example, to tiny Cyprus.
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.
as for sanctions, i think the gov will cut out perfectly sized legal (loop)holes for the people that matter.
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.
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?
The problem is a small group seizing the benefits for themselves.
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.
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.
> 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?
Generally we don't talk about up/downvoting on HN, but it's especially odd when someone else talks about it.
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.
China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That uses prat and whitney and GE engines
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?
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.