This is the problem with destroying industries then trying to keep small remaining pockets of it/restarting it. You lose all of the institutional knowledge, the stuff that isn't written down, the stuff that comes from experience.

This is only exacerbated when those projects you're trying to do become massively over budget and late. People decry it as a waste and a failure, leading to any hard won knowledge being lost yet again as those projects gets scrapped and all the people making it lose their jobs.

You don't get good making things if you only try once every 30 years, you get better by continually doing that thing, passing the hard won knowledge down through the workforce by training incoming people not from hiring "experts" and expecting everyone to be up to speed on project #1 immediately.

The is rarely some kind of inherent cultural or socioeconomic failing on the part of the producers, it's more often a failure of institutional will and a failure of scale.

Take any product that you actually produce well in Scotland for X Euros per unit in M months, scale production down by 99.9%, wait 20 years for them to lay everybody off, sell off all the factories, start relying on more and more stockpiled or imported parts and overseas labor, sell off important subsidiaries, and just generally become a shell of an industry.

Now build another one using domestic labor and parts, demanding competitive bids and constant redesigns and calling executives into the legislature to harangue them for failures and tell them the budget is closed for this year because of their delays, and now tell me what coefficient I have to tack on to N and M.

I have no real opinion on this debate but wouldn't the person you are responding to say that the explosion of budget and lengthening of timeline is exactly because those capacities had been abandoned ?

But I agree it's a good question, how much inefficiency can you accept to revive a branch of industry, how long do you have to wait before you decide to throw the towel ?

There are multiple causes behind that that scandal. But if the buyer had specified the ships to use cheap and simple diesel engines instead of requiring LNG fuel over silly concerns about emissions then they could have been build much faster at a fraction of the cost.

>My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50.

So basically the same situation as the prior generations of peasants toiling away to pay their taxes to the lord.

australia has almost no fuel refining capacity

most of australia has less than 2 weeks of gasoline and imports it on weekly barges from singapore.

in the XXIer century some australia cities have run out of gasoline for half a day, an afternoon, a few days

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-15/singapore-bound-duel-...

If shipbuilding is a strategic national industry, doesn't that also make all the inputs to a shipyard strategic industries?

After all, if a war broke out and our normal trading partners weren't willing to sell us ships, presumably they wouldn't sell us steel or engines or ball bearings or paint or radar modules or computer chips or plastics.

Why? Singapore is an island, too, and we don't need a national-strategic ship building industry.

As long as your friends build ships, you are fine.

The UK is friends with South Korea, for example.

It is. But you won't get such an answer from the "important" people because they are busy imposing useless laws every other day.

The public is unaware and unwilling to engage in such discussions because there isn't much pain being felt yet from the current structure of the economy.

The decisive battle of WWII, as far as the defence of Britain was concerned, was fought in the air. Invading an island nation without air superiority is a non-starter.

I actually doubt the value of modern navies for anything other than gunboat diplomacy, or coastal patrols these days. I think they’re too vulnerable to things like cruise missiles and drones.

For an Island that has been dependent importing most goods for hundreds of years...

I don't even think there's much of a merchant marine fleet left in the UK.

It's a country that is also a capitalist economy. Ofcourse they can build cargo ships. But those ships will be ten times more expensive than anything you can buy from Korea.

Who is going to make up the difference?

"without reliance on allies"

This is unrealistic for smaller countries, like Ancient Greek poleis or contemporary Estonia. Under your logic, they would have to give up their existence and join some empire.

In practice, already the Greco-Persian wars are an indication that alliances of smaller nations are viable, and that they are more efficient due to specialization. This is not a new problem, nor is it specific for post-industrial history; the Athens were better at fighting at sea, other poleis could provide hoplites.

> Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies

This definitely wasn't true for the UK in WW2. Probably wasn't even true for WW1, especially if in both cases you count "UK" as "GB&NI" rather than the full British Empire of the time.

The only country which managed autarky+export during WW2 was the United States, due to having a large land area, all the required natural resources (except maybe rubber), but especially oil and food.

Defense autarky isn't possible for any European country except maybe Natural Fortress Switzerland.

This seems completely unrealistic nowadays, unless you are the size of China or the United States. The EU could also do this, but there seems to be currently only limited appetite for a more integrated EU.

Who are you to decide these priorities for other people?

Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?

I'm sure the Baltic States with a population between 1-2M each, would find that problematic :)

Ehh, I think the reason we have less wars in Europe the last decades is because we're all connected now.

The UK is actually doing something(ish) about it now.

Innovate UK (the UK’s public innovation funding) recently had a bid out for maritime R&D but with a focus on clean tech:

https://iuk-business-connect.org.uk/opportunities/clean-mari...

Obviously, this is not going to make up for the loss of the broader ship building industry, but it does show that the UK is thinking about maritime technology as a key strategic area.

yeah, you're right, better to sit on your hands and just sit it out idly

The problem is that the analysis of the alternatives only ever takes into account efficiency and not resilience. Which is typical of “rational expectations” belief systems based upon atomised individuals.

However the real world has politics in it, as we saw during the pandemic, at which points jurisdictions commandeer resources for themselves regardless of whether a “better price” is available elsewhere.

Within a jurisdiction where resources can be directed you only need one capacity for output. In a market situation you need multiple suppliers all of which with excess capacity to supply that you have reserved and which cannot be countermanded by other action (so it needs to be defended with military capacity). Once you cost all that in you may just find that doing it yourself is more efficient, once resilience is taken into account properly.

Nature rarely goes for the most efficient solution. When it does it tends to go the way of the Dodo.

>It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is.

A comparative advantage is a past fixed cost investment whose output has not been consumed in its entirety. Hence comparative advantages are created outcomes and not something you can follow.

The reason why a competing nation doesn't build their own industry is that they would have to duplicate the fixed costs of initially starting the industry and it is cheaper to pay only for the ships you need. If the government made the investment anyway, it would now have given its economic potential a concrete form and switching to a different form is expensive. Producing a different commodity requires paying fixed costs again. hnwnce, after the investment there is a comparative advantage to produce commodities whose fixed costs are already paid for. They are literally cheaper to produce than other commodities.

Meanwhile if you were to go to the other extreme. What if there was an activity without any fixed costs? The concept of comparative advantage would be meaningless, because switching tasks costs nothing.

> The biggest problem with this thinking is that nationally mandated production is fundamentally unable to reduce dependency because national economic policy cannot increase aggregate output. That's to say when you politically prioritize to build ships the question always is what you aren't building instead, because all allocation consists of trade-offs.

The trade off is worth making. It gives you the ability to survive if things go wrong in return for being slightly worse off in the meantime.

> It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff

It can also mean very little more stuff. Part of the problem with our current system is that we will import rather than produce because its very slightly cheaper.

It would be ridiculous for the UK to grow its own tea, however it would be perfectly reasonable for it to aim to produce more of its own basic foodstuffs.

>comparative advantage

Makes a lot of sense in textbooks. But in the real world, when politics is involved, the whole theory breaks down. What does your text book say about China holding rare earths hostage in regard of comparative advantage?

It's worrying to me that the idea of comparative advantage has become such common parlance among non-economists that it's being used to justify everything without any real analysis or justification. It's not a solution for everything and it's not always applicable or relevant. Free trade is good, sure, but that's not the discussion here. It's not about free trade vs no free trade. Nobody posed that question here, so why are you bringing it up as if it's relevant?

Society can't ignore the cost.

But the bad faith peddlers of the costs sure can.

You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation, some additional labor overhead, some procedural change, some tweak of input sourcing or other reduction of outputs relative to inputs as being "amortized" over the course of whatever to much applause from the comment section.

And yet these same people are smart enough to recognize these sorts of dishonest "the solution to pollution is dilution" type arguments when applied in other contexts. It ought to make you wonder how much malice is sailing under the flag of ignorance.

> I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.

The flaw in that annoyingly common logic is 1) countries are very reluctant to use nuclear weapons, and 2) any kind of nuclear escalation is an instant loss for your own side.

I personally don't think any country would resort to nuclear weapons in the case of an invasion or blockade, and certainly not a democratic one [1]. They may threaten, but I don't think they'd actually put that gun to their own head and pull the trigger.

[1] An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you", because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.

You seem to think nuclear weapons stop all forms of tension short of nuclear war but the evidence is strong that even nuclear armed parties do things which don't include nuclear weapons. India applies strategic pressures to it's neighbours including ones with nuclear weapons. They're bashing each other with sticks and stones on the border, to avoid pulling nuclear triggers.

There was an ad-blue shortage in Australia last year, we have no onshore refinery and got close to running out. The nearest one is Indonesia and we were in a number of trade disputes regarding lumpy skin diseases and cattle and sheep. It only takes one or two sore points for something like "sorry, we sold your ad-blue to somebody else" and the entire mining sector is shut down.

British strategic military thinking assumed its role in NATO was unchanging. The re-appraisal post Ukraine has been significant and I am sure it includes waking up the arms manufacturing sector, and the input side to that is heavy metals industry, which has unfortunately fallen in a hole because of under-capitalisation and world pricing and Gupta and the like now "own" the national steel plan to some extent.

You would think that kind of thing would have been thought about. Just making trains onshore instead of buying them in from overseas would have possibly demanded continual metals manufacturing and processing capacity, which kept furnaces alight and steel making to the fore.

Having nuclear weapons does not give you immunity to all threats. Quite recently we had a case of nuclear state being partially occupied by a state without nuclear weapons.

And even in that case use of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable escalation and they used regular army to (mostly) kick them out and carry on with their earlier invasion on other parts of the front.

(I am speaking about Kursk if anyone is confused)

Use of nuclear weapons when you are mildly threatened is not viable. In the same way as responding to a pickpockets with an artillery barrage is not viable.

"We do not need police as we have an artillery" is equivalent of "there is no need for any other weapons if you have nukes".

Direct kinetic war between nuclear powers is pretty much unthinkable - mutual annihilation if either core territory is threatened. Instead, wars happen through proxies or direct attacks on non-nuclear powers, and then you need the ability to project power short of a nuclear response.

Russia can't prevent aid to Ukraine with nuclear blackmail. The US can't defend Taiwan without ships - it can't use nuclear blackmail itself. And if it doesn't defend Taiwan, not only is Western prosperity threatened, but the entire structure of allies that the US built after WW2 crumbles into a chaos of small parties more easily picked apart.

>>There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.

Just a reminder that Ukraine is currently at war with nuclear equipped Russia and it could absolutely use more ships, more tanks, more aircraft, more bombs, more guns, more drones and everything else that forms traditional warfare. It's clearly not like countries will immediately go from zero to nuclear weapons in any conflict.

Nuclear weapons are overrated. Multiple countries already invaded a nuclear power (1973 Yom Kippur War) and nothing happened. If Egypt wasn't afraid of nukes, what makes you so confident that your future enemy will be?

It's an empathy gap. You are rightly cautious of nukes, but you then project that mindset onto belligerents, which is the mistake. A very important rule in strategic planning is to avoid projecting your own calculations onto the enemy.

Nuclear powers, like all states, need to meet the pacing challenge and be capable of winning, or at least have enough asymmetric capabilities to force a frozen conflict if necessary.

Bah, I'm of the opinion that if the intelligence agencies were asleep at the wheel, that might well be an improvement.

But I do think that you're right in that the time of the frigate and aircraft carrier is over, and we'll all more likely to die either from a nuclear missile or from a 50 gram autonomous drone. I agree: the national security argument is hollow.

There are other reasons to build ships though, and some degree of self-sufficiency is always sensible.

Even without nuclear weapons, shipping seems quite vulnerable to naval drones and cruise missiles these days.

That is a fair point, but do keep in mind that the lower in the stack you come, the more options for sourcing you (generally) have.

Say, those fancy chips going into the ship's targeting radar may all be designed in a country or two, fabbed in Taiwan using Dutch equipment, whereas the steel you construct the hull with can come from anywhere - at my employer we mostly bought steel from Eastern Ukraine until a couple of years ago; after a brief hiccup we now get it from Turkey and Brazil, mostly - but China, South Korea, Germany or India, for instance, can supply it, too.

We import a lot by value but less so by calories. We could probably get by on domestic bread and potatoes if blockaded but the oranges, bananas and tuna fish would be in short supply.

The UK was never even near starvation levels during WW2. Bread, Vegetables and Fish were never even rationed.

Australia's naval strategy is to defend our sea lanes that we rely on for trade, primarily our trade with our largest customer, which is China.

Conveniently, they need what we have, and we want what they make.

On the other hand, the primary strategic threat is apparently also China.

https://youtu.be/sgspkxfkS4k?si=9n6fTPusYI9jcUhj

Well I doubt they'd be using Growlers, but even if they needed to they cost too much ( $80 million a piece ) to be thrown into modern naval air defences, and don't have the range to be deployed where they could actually reach ships causing trouble.

Don't worry, this trend has been in reverse the past couple of years.

The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials).

The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food.

This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" comes from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector

The goal of each sector is to make the previous sectors more productive, and so they're squeezed to become commodity.

We therefore intentionally incentivise de-valuing the things that bring us value as a civilisation, and over-valuing the things that don't.

The problem IMO is nothing to do with status or pay, specifically in the UK the issue is capitalism.

Capitalism demands that companies show continous growth, or they are classed to be failing. The UK is very small on the world stage, and so inevitably all manufacturers come up against the need to export and grow beyond the UKs borders. This is when aquisitions and mergers from overseas corperations occur, and they have little need for an expensive workforce in the UK.

Foreign investors or parent corporations buy out the UK businesses, strip out the manufacturing, and use the brand recognition to turn them into shell companies for distributing the material which are produced much cheaper overseas.

This has happened time and time again with all raw material manufacturing, and is now happening to the food production industry too (the Cadbury story is used as a regular example around these parts).

Never mind calculus. There are plenty of kids who graduate high school without the basic arithmetic and trigonometry skills necessary to be a good carpenter. The social promotion practice in primary and secondary schools has been a disaster.

Close enough, but it's the decline of the (ex-colonies) Commonwealth as a trading bloc. That was probably always inevitable, but it long out-lasted the end of direct colonial rule.

It's all downstream of lack of investment.

The workers weren't productive because they weren't getting better tools. They weren't out there smashing the new machines to stay in the past, they weren't bought in the first place. So how is this the workers' problem that they somehow created?

The problem is the company ownership didn't invest and let those that did pass them by.

I love how often people who are probably in the bay area say this as the unionized members of Hollywood next door have no problem rejecting truly mediocre laborers and paying "10xers" millions of dollars per performance.

Do you know who were literal members of that union? Both Reagan (twice president of the union) and Trump.

Despite having a stranglehold style, where union members are not allowed to work on non-union projects, the industry still cultivates talent and allows both normal people doing day jobs making average wages and Superstar members like Jeff Bridges and Tom Hanks and George Clooney and Meryl Streep and Betty White.

This union has been able to keep up with changes in technology, ensuring their members benefited from streaming taking over the primary content delivery mechanism and getting a contract that accounts for it, and now getting protections from AI.

These big names regularly show support and go to bat for the literal little guy, knowing that if you can't make rent from writing movies, they won't have anything to star in and make a million dollars from.

This union contract is also a major reason actors are able to actually control how they are used, and gives actors control over things like sex scenes

A significant reason why Hollywood is currently full of terrible quality Visual Effects is that CGI has a significant non-unionized portion that is currently getting absolutely abused. Disney doesn't GAF, people still paid half a billion dollars to see the slop that was Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness.

> It was a highly distributed, extremely flat, high skilled industry, with little to no management. It made it easy for the industry to rapidly grow and shrink, and made it extremely effective at producing bespoke products.

... That sounds a lot like the Norwegian shipbuilding industry which I work for right now. Maybe not with little management exactly, but nothing crazy either - significantly less than a British multinational I worked for earlier. Of course the hulls are built elsewhere, and half of my colleagues are foreigners, but we're going fairly strong.

So I'm not sure I buy this explanation. Why wouldn't the British do management equally well as us?

It's important to note that nationalising ship building was a last-ditch parachute for hundreds of thousands of manual workers, not the cause of its decline.

Decades of state subsidy of it both directly and of its suppliers had failed and taking it on was far cheaper for the country than letting it and British Steel, and the National Coal Board all simultaneously fail.

I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation. I thought it was because my city (Coventry) was devastated after world-war-2 (the blitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz), the collapse of the British car industry (which, primarily affected Coventry) and then the closing of the coal mines leading to lower income tax money to the council for roads and things.

However I just returned last night from a trip to London (I live in Sweden now) and I have to say, the decline is precipitous and pronounced, London gets all the investment so if it's decaying this way then I shudder to think about the rest of the nation.

I think a lot of people outside the UK believe that because the UK had an empire that everybody was rich. This is decidedly not the case, the first people the British elite subjugated was the British themselves, that's why most of the food we're mocked about is so bland: it's poverty food, so when I say that it feels like a decline, please keep it within the context that most of us have our entire family tree in the underclass - not because we were once rich.

Most infrastructure has not been invested in during my lifetime, and it was old when I was a child.

Europe as a whole didn't give up in the 1970s, but the 1970s was famously bad for the UK.

That said, I think this was more a case of when the rot in the UK became visible rather than when it started; the British government hasn't been competent for a very long time, and still isn't. With the caveat that I'm not a historian and have only an amateur knowledge of the events, I'd say the problems set in even before the peak of the British Empire, which itself I place at just before the outbreak of WW1 owing to how Pyrrhic that victory was.

People have a very clear vision of 50 years in the future, it has been a major fight playing out for decades. One side wanted cheap energy and lots of industry, the other side wanted green energy and not much industry. That debate has been ongoing and everyone involved was pretty up-front about what the consequences would be.

The turn away from nuclear power around the turn of the century was probably the decisive moment. From then on it hasn't been possible to articulate a vision of a prosperous society with a realistic path to get there.

Europe? I'm building high tech vessels in Europe right now. Even most of the hulls are made in Europe.

Are you sure this isn't about Britain, and how the finance industry gave that county its own version of "Dutch disease", making it comparatively unprofitable to do anything but managing assets?

I think it's in part generational (a bunch of western countries have a quasi dead-locked democracy because boomers will vote whatever suits them short term, they will be dead when the bill comes anyway) and part due to the lack of accountability that democracy has brought to the upper echelon of society, or lack of skin in the game for the ruling class.

Revolving doors, blatant corruption, and downright incompetence lead to absolutely no repercussions; what's there to lose? Schröder is the poster child of this.

We are creating generations of people with no stake in society (no housing, no family because it's costs too much and no time anyway) while at the same time having a complete lack of ethos as a civilization, with a terrible ruling class. Europe (and the UK) are in a horrible position.

Colonies disappeared quickly post ww2. US imperialism did continue strongly for a while with Cia/political meddling to allow American companies to continue resource extraction.

3-5 years is "long term vision" now.

People plan quarter to quarter.

The rest of Europe keeps building ships.

[dead]

" People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years "

This sounds like a modern version of Golden Age nostalgia. First, I am not at all sure that people had longer visions; some probably did, but the entire nations? Not so sure.

Second, there is a certain wisdom in accepting that you don't know how the world will look in 50+ years. 50 years ago, China was an extremely impoverished country that no one would take seriously as a competitor for global influence, Iran was US-friendly and the USSR was on the peak of its power.

Do you notice that the graph in that article heads rapidly south in 1979/1980?

Don't underestimate the power of divide and conquer.

Over here we had miners, farmers, steelmill and shipyard workers protesting due to similar reasons and for the majority the takeaway wasn't that those industries were in danger, but that the protesters demanded too much, because that's what people with influence said.

If you insist on only focusing on the negatives of their existence, then sure, eliminating wealthy people sounds like a good idea.

From a Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1bbvvxb/comme...

You will often hear historians talk about working hours. They explain how Trade Unions and Socialist campaigners brought about a much reduced work day. That happened mostly over the 19th century and the 20th century. This is true, but I think the presentations of it tend to be myopic.

In the early 19th century across the whole world people were very poor by modern standards. Due to the Industrial Revolution that changed and in Europe wages increased significantly. In the UK wages in 1900 were more than twice what they had been in 1800. That's in real terms, adjusted for inflation.

Some workers campaigned for shorter working hours because they could afford it. Of course, if working hours are lower then total wages are too. Everyone knew this. By the end of the 19th century wages had risen enough that many workers were prepared to sacrifice lower total wages for more leisure time. The labour organizations would never have successfully talked their members into these campaigns unless those members were in this situation. As growth continued in the 20th century and spread to other countries there were more and more people willing to sacrifice some wage for more free time.

Suppose that there had been a law in, say, 1770 which forced people to work less than 35 hours per day. In that case many people would probably have flouted the law because their incomes were so low that they considered more work necessary to buy things. Similarly, if people find the standard working week too long then they can search out employers who offer part-time work which covers a shorter part of the week.

It's worth mentioning that in a sense, employers never control the amount of time worked. Employment contracts may specify an amount of working time, but people can leave employment. It has always been possible to work for a few years, then quit your job and enjoy some leisure time. Then take up another job. Economists call changes to the number of hours worked over the short-run changes to the intensive margin. The changes to the number of hours worked over the long-run are changes to the extensive margin - changes that come about from the decision to work or not. Of course, this doesn't mean that changes to the intensive margin are irrelevant. When the labour campaigners succeeded in bringing down weekly working hours they really did change things for many workers. Quitting jobs and restarting is inconvenient and risky in times of high unemployment. Of course, some people don't have the willpower to save up for long periods of time either. However, it's also true that changes to the length of the full-time working week probably have much less effect on total working hours than people think. For example, people will tell you that the standard working week in the US is 40 hours. In a sense this is true for full-time employees. Despite that though, working hours have continued to fall from the 1950s to the present day. This is partially because of part-time work, but also because of people taking time off by quitting.

It's true the shipbuilders were not critized but they were also not praised in this very specific article. Good and bad results should be both noticed. Times in the articles countries are mentioned: Japan 17x Germany 6x USA 4x China 3x France 3x Italy 1x South Korea 1x

compare that with the current tonnage of shipbuilding production: 1 China 32,859,862 51% 2 South Korea 18,317,886 28% 3 Japan 9,965,182 15% 4 Philippines 805,938 1% 5 Italy 402,164 0.62% 6 France 326,680 0.50% 7 Germany 289,666 0.45% 8 Finland 261,654 0.40% 9 Taiwan 187,558 0.29% 10 Russia 177,571 0.27% 11 Netherlands 90,596 0.14% 12 Türkiye 79,032 0.12% 13 Indonesia 75,979 0.12% 14 U.S. 64,809 0.10% 15 Iran 64,760 0.09%

Italy produces 2x ships than Germany but Germany is mentioned 6x. Stereotypical bias of German being engineers and Italian being funny/pizza makers.

I respect you for your knowledge of Beretta, La Marzocco, De Longhi and Carpiggiani. I was not aware of Carpiggiani. Ferrero is also Italian. Kinder Surprise is Italian (from German branch) and Ferrero Roché is Italian (from French branch). Italy has also a massive monopoly of glasses lenses in Luxotica.

I deeply admire the UK, the USA and anything great in any other country. Even when I disagree with their leaders I still admire their technical achievements and the great men that work hard for it. We should strive to admire, applaud and copy the best in each other. Pushing each other forward in a upgoing spiral of betterment.

The Premier is the largest soccer league by revenue. England also spends the most on players. So yes, soccer is 'our' game currently.

And the sun still doesn't set on our Commonwealth.

Also, Great Britain is an island, not England.

We can't win in the UK: if we cheer on our achievements and be positive, we're accused of being stuck in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy. If we get depressed about our economy, we're told we're not being positive enough and are 'talking down' the UK.

I don’t think that modern Turkey thinks of itself as an empire. They overthrew the Sultanate themselves, seems they were glad to be rid of it.

I doubt any sensible modern country wants a physical empire, they’re much too much trouble to maintain. You basically get the same benefits with outsourcing and cheap imports, without having to maintain garrisons.

You touch on the core issue of the UK, but there's both a cultural and policy aspect.

1. As you say, an aging population has placed the entire country into a gridlock - the pensions system as it stands is ridiculous and unsustainable. Unfortunately, it is an almost immediate political suicide to even attempt to reform it. Young people are disillusioned and wield little monetary or political power. The old generation has all the cards, and are actively destroying their children's future for their own short term benefit. They have mortgaged their children's future, which they won't get to see, for the short period of time they still have remaining. 2. There's no investment culture in the UK. Literally everything and everyone is rent seeking. Want a retirement? Buy property and rent it out. Want a pension? Pension funds just buy gilts - government bonds. Very little money goes into productive assets. This creates a vicious cycle where money is simply siphoned away from the little productivity that remains to an ever growing number of rent seekers.

There's no easy way out of this. One generation will effectively have to give up their welfare, but nobody wants to do this (understandable). The UK cannot afford to be the welfare state it wants to be.

>anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years

To be fair what you get is proportional. If you are an NI payer for 4 years then you only get 4/32 of the state pension.

Having said that the triple lock is a ridiculous idea. The trouble is people are loss averse so it is really hard to take away things people have got used to.

> With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus.

What are you referring to here? Higher rates of income tax are only taken on the money earned over the band. So If you earn £50,271, you pay 20% on £50,270 and 40% on £1.

Are you referring to some other kind of tax then?

https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates

> Even today, Asian shipyards have people crawling all over them.

When you don't have a minimum wage, or your minimum wage is vastly lower than other competitors, it's far more efficient to hire more people than to invest in process improvements.

The cost of labour is DRASTICALLY overstated (except when it comes to executive pay then its apparently good value for money?), and the push/obsession with supernormal profits is DRASTICALLY understated.

Even then, living costs in the US are quite bloated due to over-regulation

Labor in the US is extremely pricey because you have to keep the landlords happy

Over large, historical periods of time no empire resisted. So, the fact that UK was a great empire is an argument that they will decline in the next immediate period.

That being said, "success" stories appear as much as "failures", and many times on/from the ruins of previous empires.

The UK faces serious structural problems (low productivity, weak investment, stagnant wages, and an over-centralized economy), but none of that automatically translates to terminal decline.

In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis.

The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well.

Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well.

Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace.

Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier.

There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News).

Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.

> 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.

I understand what you're saying, and I agree, technology doesn't always make things better. In this particular example though I'm not talking about adding frivolous software, I'm making the point they don't want to invest in ANY computing technology. Inventory, logistic, order, people or timesheet management. The example of IM is more a case of removing the requirement to hand a runner a note and them literally go to the other side of a warehouse to hand that note over. Apologies if that wasn't clear.

And 100% agree, AI - Generative in particular - is a load of snake oil bollocks. It's not going to help any of us really. Hence the evidence coming out that companies are failing to see any return on their investments.

This frankly reads as somewhat sociopathic, not just anti-union.

In 2025 I admire anyone brave enough to take this position: are you independently wealthy?

Yes, he is, could be better, could be exposed to a competitor. Medium to longer term it's not a great approach.

Cars like Jaguar and Land Rover have famously bad electrical systems. But just saying quality issues doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country, and its the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to, there has to be a deeper reason. I don’t know it unions were the whole story, as really only Germany or Germanic countries have ever had great quality control for cars in Europe, but there must be some systemic reason.

Quality issues are inevitable if the unions see their role as preventing anyone from getting fired.

Bosses didn't move things to Asia. During this period British companies stayed in Britain and were outcompeted by Asian firms.

Thatcher didn't so much shut them down as turned off the life support subsidies. They were already dead, commercially.

A bailout isn't great and Obama was criticized for it, but it's not the same as ongoing state subsidies and outright nationalization. Boeing and SpaceX get oney for selling the government unique services. The USA has historically not gone in for subsidies of industries like steel and coal, and that's one reason it's ahead.

Free trade is not a cold rational economic choice. It is a political choice. It is a choice to put more money into the hands of the capitalist class, by means of improving their investment returns at the expense of that country’s industrial capacity.

> 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.

The Jones Act and friends are exactly what turned US shipbuilding into rent-seeking. You can have protectionism or you can have manufacturing, but not both.

The most most successful car companies in the world are from a country even less advantageous to auto manufacture, Japan. They had very little natural resources and about the only avdantage vs UK was a little bit bigger population.

Longbridge is not inherently a worse place to manufacture cars than Munich, South Carolina or even Detroit.

I didn't realize the UK was known for wool production. I know it as the birthplace of the industrial revolution and the country that mined enough coal to cover the entire country to a depth of three inches.

Blaming it on unions is dumb (German car makers seem to do just fine), but if you were looking at the situation in the first half of the last century, it would be pretty reasonable to expect UK car manufacturing to be a big deal. And especially ship building. They had the world's largest navy for a long time, and they didn't do it by importing ships.

For steel you need iron ore and coal, which the UK has plenty of. It was heavily industrialized in the 19th century. It's not that different in terms of natural resources to Germany.

British cars could have remained competitive for a lot longer if labour relations had been like in Germany. Germany's organized labour is/was famously mild compared to the feral British unions that were run by open Marxists and did things like topple governments.

> 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.

yes but for now.if you analyze Japan's industrial data in detail, you'll find that they are in an unstoppable downward trend. Basically, all the industries they excel in, just like those in South Korea and Taiwan, are being replaced by China. Shipbuilding has become a game dominated by China(>50%) and Korea; home appliances, automotive industry, steel, chips, computers, and so on. Of course, right now, like in the automotive sector, Japan still holds an advantage in terms of volume, but everyone knows that electric vehicles are the future, and the core technology for the battery industry is almost entirely in China's hands. Even Tesla initially used Japanese technology, but they were ultimately surpassed by China. Relying on native protectionist strategies from the US and Canada, Japanese cars still have many advantages. But in open markets, Chinese electric vehicles are making inroads everywhere. Vietnam is gradually banning fuel-powered motorcycles, which is one of Japan's main products, but policy changes will allow Chinese electric vehicle brands and VinFast to capture more market share. We cannot predict exactly how long it will take for Japan's industry to completely exit the historical stage, but what we see is indeed a dying man. (Of course, Germany is already dead.)

so i wouldn't say 'always', even it can be reach to 100 years(unlikely). its a great achievement, but its not 'always'.

(Moreover, when predicting industrial trends, we must note that the future trend is robots. In this regard, due to China's vast population, the per capita number of robots hasn't yet reached the top spot, falling below Singapore and South Korea. But in terms of robot technology, I believe even the United States can't compare. Of course, in large models, the United States is still leading by a wide margin. So, determining how long China can rule industry in history, first of all, it will definitely be much longer than Britain and Japan, and another core reason is the decisive role of robots. If robots lead to the end of industrial transfer, then as long as China doesn't collapse for other reasons, China will forever have industrial advantages.)

>without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.

London would be considerably poorer, there is an argument that the rest of the country may well be better off. The finance sector is our equivalent to the oil industry in Dutch Disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

How could Shenzhen possibly compete with the rest of the world in electronics?

Specialization is the answer. The bigger you are, the more fields you can be competitive in. But even regions much smaller than the UK can be world leaders in something, if they choose to prioritize that and play their cards right.

> how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry?

How could Switzerland?

How could Japan?

How could the Netherlands?

And so on... The UK is still pretty good at plenty of things, but they lacked a specific USP. I think their biggest issues (from an industry perspective) were not so much scale as quality control and the willingness to improve their processes. Compare a German car from the 1970's or 80's under the hood with a UK made car and the difference could not be larger.

I think this kind of mean reversion is actually worse than imagined. I'm not belittling the UK or anyone else; I just want to say that the governments of these countries haven't prepared any contingency plans for this kind of crisis at all. The lost industrial capacity is almost impossible to recover, and they also have to face the impact of immigration issues. The lower classes in the US, the lower classes in China, and even the global lower classes live more miserably than people in the UK and the EU, but they work longer hours. This isn't a stable state(The UK and the EU also lack priority in military and technological aspects.), so major changes are bound to happen. It's just a matter of time—maybe just a few decades away.

> it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.

This is a virtual advantage, which is being eroded as we speak.

Thanks to the overuse of sanctions, many countries have already switched to bilateral currencies.

England (and the Netherlands, Belgium, Northern Italy, and a few other regions) have been some of the richest parts of the world for centuries. Not quite millenia, but not far from it. That's hardly transient.

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If you google "reversion to the mean" or "regression to the mean" you'll see a more general definition.

That's not how, in physical reality, the world works. The question is not 'what is needed' but 'what adds value'.

If you walk into a room where a full crew of people are painting the walls, you don't add any value by picking up a paintbrush yourself - you may even get in the way. You need to find something valuable to contribute.

In our real world, many things that are needed are already well provided for: They are so cheap and easy to produce, that making more doesn't add value (and consequently earns little income). Making t-shirts is very cheap and easy; you provide little value by doing it yourself and consequently you won't be paid much for it. Another example is water: Potable water is absolutely essential to life - the most essential thing. But it's already well provided for and therefore we don't invest substantial resources in producing it. We'd be a very poor country if we made t-shirts and potable water, and deservedly so - we'd be adding little value to the world.

We add value to the world by doing hard things that others can't do: Designing chips, designing airplanes, writing software. Science is hard. Those add a lot of value - and you get paid well for it.

We're not starting from a world of nothing - maybe like 10,000 years ago - and adding things to it. Then t-shirts and especially potable water would be essential. We're starting in the world as it is now. Manufacturing, for many products, was valuable and hard in early-to-mid 20th century; when Henry Ford first did it, it was hard and extremely valuable. Now lots of people can do it and we add little value by doing it ourselves, and we won't get paid well either.

Actually, the most powerful country in the world by far is the United States, and other than China, other Western countries that have followed this "myopia".

> rare earths

Rare earths are not a manufacturing product, but a natural resource. That's not an applicable example here.

Also, China is more dependent on the rest of the world than vice-versa; China has power, but certainly hasn't brought anyone to their knees - when has that happened?

There's lots of rare earth deposits all over the world, but the question is, are you willing to accept the pollution that results from extracting them as efficiently as possible?

China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.

The increase in wealth concentration mostly happened after ship-building (and other manufacturing) departed.

>The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy.

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.

The impression is that you must know nothing about the merits and this is all you have - name-calling, swearing, condescension. But most of that is unnecessary and definitely inappropriate to HN: What makes you think you can treat people this way? Because they have economic ideas you don't like - and, it seems, don't understand?