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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

construction-physics.com

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Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#101

Post by geysersam »

mike_hearn wrote: post #5

It's a good analysis but probably over-fixates on shipping specific factors. The UK also lost its car industry, its steel industry etc. The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result. From the comments: > I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on…

"Laborers wanted their fair slice of the pie so the bosses moved all industries and investments to Asia."

"Why did the laborers do this?"

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#102

Post by rusk »

eru wrote: post #43
jay_kyburz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies, as a national priority. If this means building cars, ships, tanks, and planes, then that infrastructure should be built and maintained at taxpayers expense. Whats more, you need to have market forces within your own country so competition can deliver you the best products. You can't just fund one ship building company, you need to roll the dic…

Who are you to decide these priorities for other people? Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?

> Who are you to decide these priorities for other people?

A democratically elected, competent government I would imagine.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#103

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jacquesm wrote: post #17
webdevver wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ive long held this take aswell. a lot of people point back at history, with the argument of "we did it before, we can do it now!" but whats to say it wasn't a transient? transients can last 1 year or 100 years, but in the latter case i think its 'hard' for us to believe that it was a fluke, because we view transients that last longer than a human lifespan with a bias of perceived permanence. how could the UK ever com…

> 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 1…

The car thing is in the distant past, we were making 2 million cars a year in the 2010's (at least until Brexit).

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#104

Post by rapsey »

mmooss wrote: post #57

There's a presumption that it would be beneficial to return mid-20th century manufacturing economies. If you look at economic output and productivity, and quality of life for labor (physical labor, especially repetitive physical labor, is hard to do for decades), we want to move forward and we did. We want to plan for a mid-21st century economy. The problem is a small group seizing the benefits for themselves.

This is economic myopia that leads to long term subservience to countries which have maintained manufacturing capability. China can literally bring the rest of the developed world to their knees at will with rare earths.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#105

Post by tonyedgecombe »

sefrost wrote: post #47
colesantiago wrote: post #31

If we zoom out a bit the UK is a failed country. All the industries in the UK are on the decline and most UK companies are being either sold off, shut down or are being owned (for a long time) by foreign companies. It may take several decades for the UK to come back from this.

The economic situation in the UK has become bizarre. I would recommend interested HNers to read up on the State Pension Triple Lock; and the various income tax cliff edges as some key examples. With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus. The triple lock is a politically motiv…

>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.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#106

Post by lordnacho »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #32
gerdesj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is called mean reversion in history." Citation? I tried a search on your term and ... crickets. EDIT: Sorry: "Mean reversion is a financial term for the assumption that an asset's price will tend to converge to the average price over time" What on earth does that have to do with the price of frogs?

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

Makes no sense in economics, the whole history since industrialization is that the economy gets bigger and bigger, both in absolute terms and per capita.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#107

Post by purple_turtle »

hypeatei wrote: post #45
ggm wrote: post #2

The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now. Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. If you don't regard this as a core competency which should be kept in the national register, then sure, buy the ships from other places. But, don't come whining when the national-strategic in…

I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country. A lot of people seem to yearn for the "good old days" where we built giant, tangible things that did cool stuff. That's fine, but the "national security" arguments ring hollow as you're basically saying…

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".

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#108

Post by impossiblefork »

mmooss wrote: post #57

There's a presumption that it would be beneficial to return mid-20th century manufacturing economies. If you look at economic output and productivity, and quality of life for labor (physical labor, especially repetitive physical labor, is hard to do for decades), we want to move forward and we did. We want to plan for a mid-21st century economy. The problem is a small group seizing the benefits for themselves.

Yes, but in the end you still live in physical reality, and this determines our actual productivity.

Whether we can make a boat, or a tennis racket, or a toothbrush cheaply is in the end what determines how many people can have boats, tennis rackets and toothbrushes, not whether the service economy, or our scientific research is excellent. We can hope to be able to do neat stuff and trade that for products, but in the end, once trade is no longer mandatory when people do not need to obtain foreign currency to obtain oil, everything having become battery-electric, I suspect that everybody will be better off simply building what they want.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#109

Post by yanhangyhy »

lordnacho wrote: post #106
apical_dendrite wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Makes no sense in economics, the whole history since industrialization is that the economy gets bigger and bigger, both in absolute terms and per capita.

The position in the world will. At its peak, Britain was truly the empire on which the sun never sets, but these colonies were not assimilated by British culture to become part of Britain. Therefore, they were ultimately lost. Britain will eventually revert to the position befitting a small island nation—insignificant in the realm of geopolitics.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#110

Post by noir_lord »

Vespasian wrote: post #92
calvinmorrison wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an Island that has been dependent importing most goods for hundreds of years... I don't even think there's much of a merchant marine fleet left in the UK.

Interesting question. Its plausible that there are not many vessels that are UK flagged anymore. The more interesting question is how many of these are under "control"/influence of domestic operators If required, a flag can be exchanged in a pinch and tax codes /regulations can be adapted to allow/encourage this.

Happened during the Falklands War.

There are peacetime rules and war time rules, war time rules are best summarised as “government does what it wants and justifies it after the fact”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War_order_of_battle:... under “Ships taken from trade”.

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