what a bizarre article, completely disconnected from reality. in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
why does The Economist have so much disdain of manufacturing and people who work in it? look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it. then look at the UK, who is struggling to build Hinkley Point C, or HS2 (projected to be the most expensive high-speed rail in the world btw). The Economist is an absolute f*ing joke.
The point is that manufacturing is a relatively small part of both the economy and the job market; AND the popular view of manufacturing (large plant staffed by a large number of men being the dominant employer of a nearby town or city) doesn't look anything like the reality of modern manufacturing (small run boutique high value stuff like satellites and turbines, highly automated and professionalized, relatively small number of employees).
This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
>The point is that manufacturing is a relatively small part of both the economy and the job market
Yes because the UK is overfinancialised to a ridiculous degree.
It has deindustralised in doing so.
>This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
I'd call it more of a major import industry.
At the same time your doctors and such are leaving the country.
Besides, if these are so profitable why are they making the cuts you think?
Is it that those degrees aren't exactly paying off in an economy that can't consist of HR departments and other PMC's?
Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned.
[...]
The subjects with the biggest staff cuts were social work (-9%), English and classics (both -8%), anthropology (-7%) and linguistics (-6%).
"Universities brought in an estimated £24 billion to the UK economy from abroad in 2022. They provide services (education) to international students who bring money to the institutions from abroad through international fees. These students also bring money to the local economy by spending on goods and services while they are studying"
(presumably there's an attempt to imply that those are bad courses in some way, but you haven't shown your working)
It's not boutique vs large plant. It's base materials (paper mills, steel smelters, plastic etc) that tend to be low in added value, versus higher up the stack (like your examples) that also tend to be higher in added value.
Most countries didn't care much for the former other than historic reasons, but like the latter for obvious reasons (add £ to GDP).
That's changing due to "sovereignty". You can't build a satellite without metal profiles, wiring, tubes etc. Which requires manufacturing capacity for those. Which requires steel/alu/copper smelters & plastic extruders. Which requires plastic & thus a chemical industry.
This whole 'sovereign movement' is about keeping/bringing back capabilities across the stack which are deemed critical (like steel).
But I suspect there are few (if any) countries that have these dependency chains mapped out in detail.
>in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
Are you confusing the lack of effective interventions with "neglect"? Nearly every administration in the past decade had some sort of an industrial policy, but even though they failed to bring manufacturing back to britain, that doesn't mean "neglect". It just means the forces of globalization is too strong.
The economist is pravda for the global globalist class.
It's not at all surprising that they're hostile to the idea of a nation doing anything to take its fate into its own hands when it comes to supply chains etc.
The Economist is a mouthpiece for the money power, specifically the banking interests of the Rothschild and Cadbury families. The idea of making money by making things (as opposed to arbitrage) is anathema to them.
They're pro free trade against government intervention. That's not the same as "making things ... is anathema to them". They're for planning reform in uk, to help build infrastructure and homes, for instance.
It is candid about the negatives of off-shoring. It certainly does have its back foot in economic orthodoxy, but a mouthpiece for the Rothschilds? Read three editions and see if you still think so.
>As long as the reform is to cut taxes for the rich
Source? Strangely "tax" only has one hit within the wikipedia article, and it's not about tax cuts. If it's really such an important part of their editorial stance, you should update the article.
Right, which is why the first part of my comment, before mentioning wikipedia at all is "Source?". Wikipedia might be biased, but it's a good starting point. Likewise, it's very hard to take you seriously when all you can do is complain about how wikipedia is biased/astroturfed, but can't provide any sources to contradict the wikipedia article, yet are willing to take a random commenter at face value.
> look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it.
"look at China" what ? Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ?
Remember what is often said when Mr Trump talks about bringing tech manufacturing back to the US ....
Yes great idea Mr Trump. But even with the most generously optimistic figures, due to the lack of available workforce and space the US could only ever provide the capacity equivalent to one Chinese manufacturing town of which the Chinese have dozens.
> Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ?
British thinking seems to be that because we won the Opium War we should just expect a country with 20 times our population and a vast land area to be poorer, both per capita and in total, than our island, forever.
I think you're ascribing intent to a stochastic outcome.
China's rise comes because it acquired, from inauspicious beginnings, competence at planning an economy.
Britain's decline relative to China comes because it is a democracy - which is to say, vacillating.
Britain has been particularly callow over the part decade, because we indulged ourselves in a bunfight about Brexit to the exclusion of all other concerns. This created a purge of ministerial talent and a sequence of governments primarily occupied with propping themselves up. Elections have been fought on Get Brexit Done and I Would Have A Pint With That Man, not on policy.
The entire edifice is deeply stupid, but it is a stupidity orthogonal to questions of industrial policy. Ministers haven't been in post long enough to reveal any strategy about such.
In a microcosm, the compulsory land purchases were done for HS2 and it was as on-track as infrastructure projects get, when Sunak cancelled half of it, writing off the sunk costs but crippling the long-term value of the project. Meanwhile, China laid more track than the test of the world combined, because it has the will to make large long-term investments.
> and the US federally owns tons of land it can create manufacturing cities out of
Ok, being generous and accepting your point at face value ....
What about the people staffing those manufacturing cities ? Is the state creating them too ?
I seem to recall reading somewhere that – at most – the US could "find" 200,000 people for new manufacturing plants.
Sounds about right to me, no ?
I think even with a generous mind the US would struggle to "find" much more than that, let alone getting to or exceeding 1 million which is the value you would need for seriously thinking about >1 manufacturing city.
The US labor force participation rate is currently at a relatively low level. There is plenty of surplus labor available with the right economic incentives.
Then why does my link specifically have a "25-54 Yrs" qualification, and has a totally different shape compared to the first link? The difference between the two is stark, 21.8 percentage points. Do you really think there's that many people willing to work between 18-25 and 54+?
> Do you really think there's that many people willing to work between 18-25 and 54+?
And willing to work long hours at the minimum-wage rates required for US-based manufacturing ....
P.S. 18-25 and 54+ ... its actually 16–25 and 54+ I don't think you'll find many 16–18 year olds biting your arm off for a job in manufacturing either...
The average does not represent the entry level wage, which is closer to minimum wage in some states. Why would you risk losing an appendage in a factory machine if you can fold t-shirts for the same pay?
If you did read the paper, you'd have noticed that people who slept more regularly in this research were also wealthier, and more physically active. They did say they adjusted for these variables, but who knows. Maybe they didn't adjust them enough, maybe there are more covariates they didn't consider.
I don't know if they can have controls for "specific activity that changes their sleep schedule".
In the past few years I went from having relaxed 11AM daily meetings to rigid 8AM meetings, and my sleep has suffered immensely. But nothing else in my life has changed, so it wouldn't show up in my socioeconomic data.
I guess it just seems extremely obvious to me that people who live a predictable-enough life to sleep and wake at the same time every day are less likely to face mortality than people with schedules so chaotic they sleep at different times regularly. It’s still good science to do, but without a solid cause or two, I don’t think anything helpful is actually being revealed by this study, at least from a layman’s perspective.
I don’t know anything about the specifics of this case. I do know there are lots of bad doctors. Doctors routinely make mistakes or overlook things, especially relatively trivial things like this.
I don’t know what people think you learn in medical school that makes you an infallible source of health knowledge.
Doctors do overlook simple natural solutions. This is because of how evidence-based medicine works.
The problem is not with evidence-based medicine itself, but with how the evidence is generated. The gold standard of medical evidence--a large, randomized, double-blind clinical trial--is extraordinarily expensive. In practice, much of this research is funded by private industry, which must have a reasonable expectation of earning a return on its investment. That naturally directs research toward treatments that can be patented, commercialized, and sold at a profit.
This creates a structural blind spot. Many naturally occurring compounds cannot be patented in their natural form, making it difficult to justify the enormous cost of conducting the kind of trials that modern medicine demands. As a result, potentially useful natural therapies often remain under-studied, not because they have been proven ineffective, but because the economic incentives to investigate them are weak.
This is the reason your doctor is much more likely prescribe Ambien CR than to suggest trying magnesium supplements.
Trained doctors pushed opiates and benzos on me when they were very much not needed and in both cases led to dependancies and horrific withdrawals. I'm sure many others can chime in with their own similar experiences. Medical professionals are incredibly crucial to the wellbeing of society, but they have also been responsible for much suffering because they are human just like us.
Do you know they’re wrong? Please don’t invoke Dunning Kruger like this, it’s cliché and also wrong to do. There’s no indicator for whatever it is Dunning & Kruger showed, you cannot know if it applies to a single person. Their main plot showed a positive correlation between confidence and competence. Their paper has problems, their methodology has been rightly questioned, and some attempts to reproduce have failed. Plus keep in mind that, ironically, for people who are intimately familiar with the debate over DK, using it to essentially name-call someone backfires and has the opposite of the intended effect, it makes the name caller look confidently ignorant.
The claim is anecdotal and entirely possible that it's a placebo effect. But the author is making it sound like a definitive root cause to their issue. This is so typical of the software dev community.
Placebo Effect is not Dunning Kruger. Making incorrect assumptions or having incorrect beliefs is not Dunning Kruger either.
Possible is not certain. So if it’s not a placebo effect? If the author found a solution that is in fact a better root cause fix for themselves than sleeping pills? What does that make their comment? What does it make yours?
> This is so typical of the software dev community.
IMO this is a worse assumption with less evidence than the one you’re complaining about, and it’s pure unsupported assumption and far more likely to be wrong. Distrust of doctors and “western medicine” is common enough to hear it all the time, I know more non-devs than devs who carry such beliefs. Unless you have statistics on devs compared to the general population, your personal sampling is entirely anecdotal, and biased.
Those invoking Dunning-Kruger are, with high probability, an instance of just that :) (also, see the comment below that touches upon the many gaps in the original paper, which is at this point just garbage invoked by midwits). Finally, there’s a thing called heterogeneous treatment effects, which really is hard to detect at medical research scale … and placebo effects, if they help with the underlying issue without breaking the bank, and still helpful.
Doctors simply don’t treat things well that are not classified as a particular disease. If you want to get stronger or more fit, you may well be better off asking your local bro than your PCP.
Sleep is sadly in the same category. If you don’t have sleep apnea, and you want to get treated for sleep, you will be offered any number of pharmaceuticals, all of which are terrible. Better advice comes from other people dealing with sleep issues in this case.
Doctors generally aren't trained in systemic level thinking, probably because given how complex the body is any such broad connections can only be "intuitive" rather than rigorous, more an art than a science.
This is probably the only reason why "naturopaths" and other "holistic" doctors are still in business, because they'll actually bother to consider a broader picture of a symptom as hinting at some structural imbalance rather than solely treating the symptom as a localized issue to resolve.
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