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mapt | on: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
A lot of these complaints are not about an industry, but about late stage capitalism. About a failing society that privileges profits over social progress and material productivity because oligarchs and aristocracy own the institutions and are running this thing into the ground on base class instinct.

All these cool "save the world" school projects exist because the current people running the world are deciding what is and isn't a priority and haven't fixed the problem in question; When these students grow up and go on to work for those same people, we are shocked, shocked that it isn't to do more unprofitable school engineering projects.

Instead: Finance industry stuff. What we really need, and by we I mean the people in charge who are obsessively keeping score of imaginary numbers in an account.

HPsquared | parent | next
Government spending is 45% of GDP.
James_K | root | parent | next
Putting more layers of privatisation between the government and the service it provides will decrease the quality and increase the costs. Sewage is now in our rivers and we pay more for water. Trains are obscenely expensive compared to Europe. Energy is expensive. All of these things cost boatloads because we sold them off and drag the rest of the economy down with them. We wouldn't be spending so much today if we'd invested more in the past.
jltsiren | root | parent
And private spending is something like 200%. GDP is a measure of added value, not total spending/revenue.
wakawaka28 | parent | next
Capitalism is not the problem so much as policies that promote trade imbalances and outsourcing of jobs. If there are people somewhere willing to work for much less than you are, there are far fewer opportunities to do anything. It is not normal to get a ton of cheap imports forever, and a reversion to the mean is not a sign that capitalism is failing.

Unless the whole world was to demand the same standard of living (which is impossible), or global trade is limited, there will be nations where the wealth of the average person is on the decline.

HPsquared | root | parent
What we are seeing is a great levelling out of living standards across the world. Poor countries are unquestionably getting richer, while rich countries are stagnating and decaying. It's a period of readjustment, but self-limiting.
wakawaka28 | root | parent
There's no need for the West to stagnate like this. We could let the rest of the world develop itself while we continue to be self-sufficient. That requires tough decisions like choosing to limit imports of foreign goods and labor. But that is unfortunately not how it's going. Some people have been selling out their own countries for decades to make a quick buck, or perhaps to defend some economic theory that the plan with the highest cost efficiency is always the best.
gjsman-1000 | parent | next
Yeah, yeah, the meme copy-paste problem diagnosis, but what’s the solution?

Rebuild into socialism?

Rebuild into communism?

Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)?

How do you know that those systems won’t also have their own late stage failure? Case in point, the NHS right now.

(Edit, posting too fast: To the person below who suggested 90% tax rates; the US never had those rates. On paper they did, but they had more and larger exceptions than now, to the point the effective rate never exceeded 45% anyway. This is also why the massive cut was politically palatable - it was cutting the rates to closer reflect the reality. At no point did the US ever have anything close, or even half close, to 90% effective rates.)

mapt | root | parent | next
The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder most foul.

Your question is coupling a matter of our policy preference, our tactical planning to arrive at that preference, and a hypothetical predictive model. If like some supervillain I had come up with a satisfactory answer to all those questions I would have enacted it twenty minutes ago.

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rwmj | root | parent | next
Cracking down on monopolies and rentierism would be a good start. Followed by tying pension rises to worker's salaries. None of that is actually going to happen because of who votes combined with a government that's scared of its own shadow.
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nicoburns | root | parent | next
> but what’s the solution?

I strongly suspect it's a variant on capitalism that:

1. Recognises that some industries (utilities, healthcare, etc) are not well suited to market provision and are state funded. i.e. the sort social provisions that many of the nordic countries have.

2. Recognises that extreme wealth inequalities invalidate the key principle that capitalist economics is premised on (that the market value of a good or service closely approximates it's societal value) and therefore imposes much stronger progressive taxes on very high earners to effective cap how much wealth a single individual can control.

> early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)

High tax rates (90% in some cases) and all

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| root | parent | next
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dennis_jeeves2 | root | parent | next
>Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)?

I think this wouldn't be bad.

greenavocado | root | parent
In the case of the UK the solution in effect since the mid 2010s is increase taxation, replace the natives completely with someone more desperate, and suppress wages.
marbro | parent
Socialism isn't the solution, it's the problem. People deserve to be paid for work and the better the work that they do, the more they deserve to be paid, even though that can be much more than the average person earns.
deletedie | root | parent | next
You've essentially summarised a key Marxist critique of Capitalism.

What you've described - the need for people to have autonomy, value, and ownership over the work they do - is the core tenet of Marxism.

p_l | root | parent | next
That's a very marxist view on wages, actually...

Capitalism seeks rent from having capital, so the obvious optimization is to squash the ability to demand higher wages (original Marxist argument about "ownership of means of production" was how big capitalist controlled access to machines you needed to the work, thus being able to depress the wages)

insane_dreamer | root | parent
I don't think you understand socialism and capitalism.

Suppression of wages is very much a feature of capitalism (the company's mission is to acquire capital for shareholders; technology that lowers costs by reducing the need for labor, or reducing the payment for labor, is a goal); whereas socialism holds that those who do the work should benefit from their labor (workers should own the means of production).

A "socialist" company in the U.S. would be an employee-owned company or a co-op (like REI) though they would never call themselves that because Americans don't understand what socialism is (and have been taught that it's "evil").