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Comment by Oxidation | Hacker News Reader

> The UK no longer makes anything.

The Tories are almost exclusively responsible for that. With education and long-term industrial policy, there could have been an enormous high-tech manufacturing sector underpinned by an educated workforce to replace the older primary industries like coal mining and "low secondary" like bulk steel.

These policies should have started in the early 80s, but instead at that time they started slashing and selling.

Germany has a lot of faults policy-wise, but they somehow managed to keep manufacturing despite spending trillions on reunification right in middle.

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>Germany has a lot of faults policy-wise, but they somehow managed to keep manufacturing despite spending trillions on reunification right in middle.

To be fair Germany's manufacturing sector has no secret sauce that Germany invented, but is a sector that managed to survive mostly due to cheap energy from Russian gas, which is now gone, and is highly dependent on a constant stream of mass migration keeping wages in manufacturing low and therefore the cost of German exports competitive.

I didn't say it was miracle (or "secret sauce", as it now reads), it was a result of decades of deliberate (and pretty ruthless, geopolitically speaking) policy. Which wasn't something the UK was somehow innately incapable of.

One of the biggest German policy failures will probably turn out to be the lack of investment in nuclear power to underpin the next 50 years. Maybe their solar and wind efforts will be sufficient, or a battery revolution will fortuitously save the situation, but I have doubts.

Nope. Germany most definitely has a secret sauce: the education system. It is structured very differently from the UK system with a heavy emphasis on high levels of technical skills. Cheap Russian gas has nothing to do with it. But it sure helps of course.

And respect for engineering as a discipline. Tell a German that an engineer came to install your internet cable and they'll look at you like you've grown a second head. Actual quote: "what could be wrong with it that needs an engineer to come out?"

Meanwhile, someone British who heard I studied engineering: "are you going to do TV repair?"

Yep agree. You can measure how well a nation is doing by how it treats technical skills. The finance industry that the UK is so proud of is actually a negative thing for the nations prosperity overall. It looks good on paper but creates very little real value.

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