- The unions: I worked for a large engineering company (fully unionised) that had not had a strike …

Thanks for sharing :) I have very little context but it's interesting that, presumably, the lower profit industry was replaced with the higher profit one. And on top of that the higher profit one is probably of less value to society.

'"Working in trade" had a low social status' I think the push in the 90's to drive everyone to university also had a big negative impact on the status of 'working in the trades'.

> - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world. > - Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing. I see these as ultimately being caused by your third point: > - Lack of access to capital. Banks were very reluctant to lend to that sector which made modernisation really difficult. With the ever present threat of nationalization it was hard to raise capital from shareholders. Why invest in technology when you could be nationalised on a whim? You remove the problems by paying those workers more to be more productive. You pay them more by having more capital with which to …

Maybe the decline of manufacturing in the UK correlates with freedom of its colonies? There is loss of access to cheap raw material as well as a dumping ground for finished products.

What does modern manufacturing look like? Are you limited by a lack of people who can, like, use a screwdriver? Or by a lack of people who can use a CAD package? I worry that kids might hear “not enough people in the trades” and work on their hammer swinging skills. But in the US at least, you can get through k-12 without learning basic intro math stuff, like linear algebra or calculus. If that was the minimum, we could, I guess, handle basic applied math like intro differential equations in the first year of a 2-year degree, and then spend the second year figuring out how to ask the computer to solve those problems…

In my opinion, shipbuilding is different to other industries that the UK was known for. The UK was once an 'island of coal in a sea of fish'. But we used up the easy-to-reach coal and ate all of the fish. Not only that, we also used up all of the easy to access iron ore. I am no fan of Margaret Thatcher, however, how would shipbuilding make sense in the UK once the raw materials have to be shipped in from the lowest wage mines on the planet? It would make more sense to build the ships nearer to the raw materials. Yes I know the Koreans, Japanese, Germans and Chinese have the same resource allocation problems, but the workers were cheaper, offsetting the material and energy costs. Regarding the UK being 'particularly good at finance, insurance, etc.', London is the portal to tax havens, as in the islands that were the former British empire. The U.S. has some financial regulation that Lond…

People often miss: - Productivity is low, because the pay is low and from that comes everything else (thinking of paying the bills instead of the job, being seen as "cheap" by others etc.) - Nobody cares about "social status" if the pay is right. Status comes from pay. - There is some merit to that, but I think the real reason was outsourcing. Why invest at home if you can get the same or better cheaper from overseas. The problem is the UK is the class system. Shareholders see workforce as slaves and not equals. That's why we see wage compression and it is now next to impossible for working class to climb the social ladder. So why bother? Your quality of life will not be vastly different whether you are stacking shelves or develop software. Everything is being creamed by shareholders, who also enjoy preferential tax system and other incentives not available to working class.

> - Poor quality management. [...] So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing. There's also the challenge of the Baumol effect. When hiring engineers in the UK, manufacturing companies are competing for smart, numerate graduates against the likes of Google and Facebook and HSBC and Barclays. But when selling products, manufacturing companies are competing against the likes of Foxconn - so they can't just raise prices to raise salaries.