[parados]

Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards).

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.

[dwayne_dibley]

'"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'.

[jack_tripper]

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

[zdragnar]

I don't know about the UK, but in the US this is only half true. Degree-requiring jobs still have better social status over trades and low/no skill work, at least from a "what do you want to be when you grow up" point of view.

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.

[bad_haircut72]

Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is. The cynic in me says price increases are about setting up class boundaries and pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations

[jack_tripper]

>The cynic in me says price increases are about setting up class boundaries and pushing people back into the necessary but less desirable factory/trade jobs of previous generations

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.

[mono442]

I can't speak for the whole Europie but in my experience those kind of jobs just don't really pay well. They kind of make sense when living in a cheaper area but I personally wouldn't imagine actually making ends meet from this kind of job in a capital city in my country.

[nradov]

European countries have used free college education as a technique to artificially hold down the youth unemployment rate. Full time students don't count as unemployed. The problem is eventually they graduate and then many still can't find a job, or they end up underemployed in a job that doesn't really require a college degree. At least they don't have huge student debts but this system is tremendously inefficient for the rest of society which has to pay the taxes.

[kakacik]

Not true for ie doctors... and generally your example is an outlier not valid for most Europe.

[variadix]

Government backed loans inflate demand. If banks had to consider the risk of repayment prices would come back to reality.

[nradov]

Colleges should be on the hook for a least a portion of defaulted student loans. That would give them a direct incentive to hold down tuition.

[tekla]

Government student loans made college prices effectively a made up number. If you can just make up a number and anyone can afford it because they're backed by the government, why wouldn't you just make the number go up?

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.

[boplicity]

Not every college has crazy tuition. The school I attended in 2000 to 2004 has kept pace with inflation generally. Annual tuition is now around $10k, which is a lot, but not unmanageable for many middle class families. I'm curious how this compares across universities throughout the U.S. Maybe the tuition story has bifurcated somewhat?

[johnnyanmac]

Tuition for my college in 2012-2016 was around 6k per year. A quick Google shows me this increased to 11k.

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.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is.

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.

[schmidtleonard]

Right, and it's worse when you remember that the people who voted for this knew exactly what they were doing because it's how they made their money in the real estate market: obtain property rights over inelastic supply, pump cheap debt into the counterparties, price spiral, laugh all the way to the bank.

We really are a society of ponzi schemes.

[nradov]

There's no class warfare grand conspiracy going on. Like any businesses, colleges charge more because they can. Customers have been willing to pay, and the availability of government subsidized student loans made those customers relatively price insensitive. That model is finally starting to break.

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...

[schmidtleonard]

"It's not a war because side X won" is truly one of the arguments of all time.

[boplicity]

The state school I went to 20+ years ago, by contrast, has around $10k in annual tuition, which isn't bad compared to a trade school. No mandatory housing/food costs either. I got a great education there and am still friends with some of my profs. I also got one of the least practical (for most people) degrees (creative writing), and turned it into a comfortable job for myself, though I recognize that's the exception and not the rule.

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.

[Theodores]

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 London lacks, hence the arrangement and relevance of London.

[lenerdenator]

> - 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 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.

[AppleBananaPie]

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.

[dijit]

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.

[pjc50]

That rather implies a society of subsistence farmers is the "most valuable", which is the one thing everyone in every society runs away from as fast as possible when technology prevents economic alternatives.

[dijit]

just because people don’t wanna do it doesn’t mean it’s not important.

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?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

IME the people who care about societal value more than monetary value either already have plenty of the latter or aren't going to be the ones doing the work.

[johnnyanmac]

Charity fails when the charitable can't even pay rent. Offer $40/hr to these "essential workers" and suddenly people will be charitable again.

[theptip]

Seems like you’ve smuggled in your conclusion with your definition of “highest value”?

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?

[mrguyorama]

>Using the normal definition (how many dollars we will pay for it)

Ah, pot calling kettle black!

The "normal" definition you claim is smuggling the equivalent of an entire cultural ideological framing.

[showerst]

Do we need more farmers, or for food to be more 'valued' in a monetary sense? The developed world is awash in affordable food. Even machine tools are incredibly cheap and accessible, the issues around those are related to where they're built and creating skilled labor to run them.

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.

[dijit]

ehhhh, lets be real. I’m a dyed in the wool meat eating junk eater.

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?

[pfdietz]

Why isn't it sustainable? All the inputs can be derived from non-fossil sources.

Maybe N2O emission? But I think that could be addressed technically.

[dijit]

Not sustainable due to the fossil-fuel laden garbage we feed to bovine stock.

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”

[_DeadFred_]

Huh? Nitrogen fertilizer is mostly derived from fossil fuels and has been since the 1900s food boom. Aren't phosphates mainly shipped from islands that build up huge stocks of bird poop? The inputs are all fossil fuel intensive.

[nine_k]

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

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.

[pas]

People change their diets to live longer, and in general medicine seems more valuable. People happily pay a lot for more QALYs.

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).

[DonHopkins]

What is the lowest value thing you can do with your life? Props comedian who destroys good food with a sledge hammer?

Bill Hicks on Gallagher and Carrot top

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJjgFcJ0DoQ

[dylan604]

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

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.

[dijit]

I think you missed my point.

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.

[tim333]

I'm not sure going into farming is even good for society at the moment. My dad was a farmer for a while and there was mostly a food surplus with the EU paying him to set aside land to control that. You do good for society by providing things it's short off.

[spookie]

You should take a look at the price of food after Russia launched their full scale invasion in Ukraine. A significant increase, 15% at its peak and lowering thereafter to about 5%. Still, it is above pandemic levels.

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.

[mrguyorama]

>Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is.

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.

[vablings]

Most of the food production in the United States has been moved over from small individual farmers to large corporations. Any time there is government policy that negatively hurts farmers there is a big push from the media to show small time farmers hurting but the biggest losers are actually the much larger corporations.

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

[lenkite]

> I don't believe that these were significantly contributory, from experience: The unions...

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)"

[michaelt]

> - 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.

[varispeed]

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.

[alt227]

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).

[varispeed]

It’s not capitalism in general; it’s the British flavour of it. In most capitalist countries, investing in the workforce is seen as a way to grow. In Britain, it’s seen as a threat to the social order. The class system turns economic policy into a tool of control.

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.

[alt227]

I dont agree with this at all. Look at other small countries with big production outputs like Japan. This is possible due to an incredibly high work ethic and skilled workforce. They still have the ruling class, and the big fat cat bosses that own all the companies. But the willingness of the population to work extraordinary hours with incredible precision is what makes it possible.

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.

[vablings]

As someone who was deeply integrated into the manufacturing industry the population is not lazy.

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.

[varispeed]

That argument explains symptoms, not causes. “The British are lazy” is a convenient myth told by people who spent decades dismantling the very conditions that make pride and skill possible.

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.

[bee_rider]

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…

[nradov]

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.

[BeFlatXIII]

Social promotion is the expected outcome of rewarding schools for graduation rates.

[orochimaaru]

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.

[eszed]

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.