in a maTTer of days…

Anyone else not able to post this video to Facebook? Surprise surprise!

Don’t panic folks. All the money that’s gone to the super rich over the past 30 years is bound to start ‘trickling down’ to the rest of society any time now. That’s how it works, y’know.

Manufacturing as a share of GDP is barely any lower in the UK than the US: in both countries, it’s around 13%.

(the original video is basically right, but Sunny’s commentary on the UK isn’t).

I’m bidding for some capital gains now on ebay

” What”s wrong with our business? We are losing money”

” Well it seems we are spending to much, even though our customer base and revenue have increased year on year since 1980 our spending model is still taking us into the red, we need to adjust our business model to one in-line with reality and the capital we have to function with.

” What”s wrong with our government? We don’t seem to have enough money”

“Well we just need to tax more people……”

Rather amusing it starts off asking the question “what’s wrong with our economy” then goes on to spend the rest of the video talking about the problems of the most inefficient leaching organization based in any economy that adds zero to the economy…. i wonder what the economy would look like if those super rich had not stepped foot in that land, im sure the government could have just printed money out of thin air to employ people and pretend its productive instead of taxing it.

John’s said what i was going to, the UK is one of the leading manufacturing countries in the world and iirc has higher per capita manufacturing output than the US.

What JohnB and MattGB said.

As a portion of the economy the manufacturings about the same in UK and US: both higher than France.

And I do like the last line “a strong middle class”. I look forward to Sunny campaigning for just that, a strong middle class.

Tim W

Oh, do come along. You know as well as I do that the term ‘middle class’ in the US just refers to the class of people who are on roughly middle incomes; the equivalent in the UK would be workers on, say. £10,000 – £30,000 a year (i.e. the vast bulk of working people). It doesn’t refer to the Daily Mail ‘middle classes’ of professionals in the top 10% of earners.

As can be seen from this chart US manufacturing doubled in size in terms of output, while employment in the sector declined by a third. A UK chart would show a similar pattern. Getting more from less is generally considered good. However, quite rightly workers think about jobs not output or GDP.

http://mercatus.org/publication/us-manufacturing-output-vs-jobs-1975

The likes of Babcock is a good example of the type of structural change in the UK economy and why we should not have a fetish over who is classified as manufacturing.

” In 2000 Babcock took the strategic decision to move away from manufacturing towards maintaining and supporting the critical equipment and infrastructure of customers. In 2002 Babcock was reclassified on the London Stock Exchange from Engineering to Support Services. ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babcock_International_Group

Babcock did not cease to exist, they were just reclassified as services. Still employing thousands and generating billions in revenue. The firms that have thrived or will thrive are those who got out of low-tech and low-value manufacturing and moved up the value scale. The ones who went bust are those who could not adapt.

As the Evan Davis documentary points out we still produce, but what we produce is different to what we used to produce. The textile industry is not coming back and neither is a large-scale coal extraction industry. A large shipbuilding industry was doomed because we did not have the required deep ports in the same place as the yards. Nobody lives there and as a consequence there is no infrastructure in the areas in the UK suitable for deep ports. Pretty easy to then see that steel making would decline without shipbuilding and coal. So whether we want to or not we need to produce in higher value sectors.

As said, workers do not think in terms of output and GDP, they care about jobs. If we have problems with long term unemployment of those who would previously have been absorbed by manufacturing/industrial firms beyond just the temporary frictional unemployment we need to look at why. The economy for a number of reasons is currently depressed so unemployment is elevated. However, it will not always be depressed and we will still have long-term unemployment. We really do not need to worry about the type of workers who lose their job and get another one a few months later.

Instead of fetishing about manufacturing we need to concentrate on why the long term unemployed can’t get a job in the economy. We can’t create an economy for them, they need to have something that an employer wants. Investment in green energy is often cited as activist industrial policy and I agree green energy has an attractive future. However, those firms really will not be employing the long-term unemployed. Most of the energy firms are high-tech requiring skills that the long-term unemployed do not have.

Hi-tech, high value jobs may be considered desirable, but a CPU can only design a house, it ca’nt build it in the physical world, anymore than it can counsel a victim of crime, or prepare, cook and serve a meal. One day, maybe the boffins will create a machine that can do all those jobs, to the same standard or better than a human being, but the question I ask is; “should we do it, just because we can?” If the high value jobs become the only jobs, you end up with a shitload of people who are, quite simply, surplus to requirements. What do they do, mill about aimlessly, with no actual jobs to undertake, therefore no income to spend on all the freetime they would have? Technology is only limited by the boundary of human imagination, but just because the boundary exists, does’nt mean we have to breach it at all points.