Re: Guardian Almost Makes Sense

On 5/05/2025 2:01 am, john larkin wrote:

 which is shocking.
 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/02/american-reindustrialization-manufacturing

If a Guardian article almost makes sense to John Larkin, it has to have been dumbed down to an unusual extent.
It leaves out one point that is usually made - successful industrialisation depends on investing a lot of capital in making each industrial worker as productive as possible.
In England in the 1980's, Margaret Thatcher complained that English workers were less productive than their German counter-parts. Economists were able to demonstrate that if you controlled for capital investment per worker, English workers were actually more productive than their German counterparts where capital investment per head was the same.
This didn't make the English workers better - it just reflected the fact that UK employers only invested capital where it paid off particularly generously.
In America that capital investment was directed overseas, where the workers were cheaper.
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Bill Sloman, Sydney