On comparative advantage
Fact: every year, China produces six hundred thousand engineers
Fact: China has never once produced a single decent television game show
Doesn't this make you think there might be something very, very wrong about our officially announced educational priorities, if the object of said priorities is indeed "to remain competitive" in global markets with China?
Literally the first link on google is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udo67rB1yHQ
ReplyDeleteHow dare you suggest that this is not good television?
There's a weird fetish amongst both Old Lefties and Tory Fogies for making stuff.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet at the same time what I do, what you do, and what Meeja Nathans do are the biggest export earners, and massive examples of the UK being successful in ways that other places just aren't (even though I live in Oz and sell to clients who're mostly Yanks, the companies that commission me to do the work and take the money are Londonish).q
And also, whatever the absolute advantage, as a native English-speaking country and the land of Shakespeare and the Beatles, Britain clearly has a massive comparative advantage in the production of media services.
ReplyDelete(actually, probably our single most important national intangible asset is the commercial common law of England & Wales, over 500 years in the making and suited to nearly any contingency. This is not an insignificant reason why I am always nervy about the cry of "libel tourism" - in general, we have all done very well out of the attractiveness of our courts to foreigners).
Casually Googling around, it's surprisingly difficult to get data on format sales revenues at any level more disaggregated than BBC Worldwide, but pace Julian Glover, it seems very likely to me that Strictly Come Dancing is more than ten times as big as Sheffield Forgemasters and even Cash in the Attic possibly twice as big.
ReplyDeleteI agree, but I also think there's probably a meaningful overlap between the 'TV' and the engineering, in the sense that engineers divorced from a culture won't be as good at their jobs. Engineering is about selecting a nice solution from the viable solutions, and that's got a normative component to it: you need engineers with some clue as to what counts as good (and the confidence to choose it). In London's case, I don't think it's altogether coincidental that the Nathan Medias are only a city block away from the people working in and around Arup World of Fitzrovia.
ReplyDeleteYou could push this too far, of course, like Ford did when they opened a 'design studio' in a Richard Rogers building in Soho. The experiment folded after about a year, I think. But there, I wonder if the problem mightn't have been that Ford still had rooms full of CAD monkeys in Dagenham, or somewhere like that, and there was limited cooperation between the two groups. Isn't this your Coasean economics?
Actually, scratch that about the reason for the Ford design studio closing. I now reckon it's because its existence offended management.
ReplyDelete600k enginers lol and they cant even make a toy car with out lead paint. wtf.
ReplyDeleteNokia also tried to outsource its product strategy to a design firm in Soho and that didn't work out well. (Although surely the fact all their employees were gagging for iPhones should have clued management in quicker.)
ReplyDeleteWasn't SonyEricsson (which, I see to my mild surprise, still exists) based in London when it started, again presumably in a desperate attempt to attract Exciting New Ideas?
ReplyDeleteCharlie, it depends upon what you mean by engineering though. That's more product/industrial design (something incidentally that the UK is a world leader in). Its less true if you're designer a better suspension system.
ReplyDeleteAnd while comparative advantage and all that, the UK does have a long history of just pissing away industries we're really strong in. See the Games industry which may well be largely elsewhere within ten years. Or that matter our advantages in design/advertising, which are heavily dependent upon art schools, which are losing 60-80% of their funding...
SE was probably more about being handy for both Symbian* (which really was engineering) and Vodafone.
ReplyDelete*If you haven't read The Register's series of long form interviews about the history of Psion and Symbian, go read. Another example of the great British history of failure.
Alex,
ReplyDeletechanging subject slightly. Do you know anyone good on Nokia's current problems?
Apart from me? Try this story.
ReplyDeleteWell, I was thinking mainly of construction, which needs engineers, and which is a very large sector both here and elsewhere, and we do export quite a lot of construction expertise from the UK.
ReplyDeleteI'd also argue that there's a cultural component to suspension engineering. Cars get a reputation for the kinds of springs they have, which they wouldn't if people didn't care because there was only one correct way of doing it.
Alex, thanks. If you have time I'd love to know what you think... Maybe one for the blog?
ReplyDeleteCharlie, not convinced. Unless by culture you mean wider things like education, social status, etc. In which case yeah...
"Nokia also tried to outsource its product strategy to a design firm in Soho and that didn't work out well. (Although surely the fact all their employees were gagging for iPhones should have clued management in quicker.)"
ReplyDeleteThis is surely a failure of management rather than anything else?
Nokia's (current) competitive advantage is the ability to make crappy cheap phone for the 5 billion people in the world who can't afford an iPhone. That's an honest job, requiring good engineering skills, and Nokia appears to do it well.
BUT to pretend that that's not what you are doing, that by tarting up your POS with "design" you'll easily create something that appeals to the 1 billion with money, is just stupid.
@Cian,
ReplyDelete"Alex,
changing subject slightly. Do you know anyone good on Nokia's current problems?"
Are you aware of asymco.com?
His beat is Apple, rather than Nokia or mobile phones, but he has very insightful (and apparently honest and agenda-free) posts about everything that affects Apple (which obviously includes the mobile space and Nokia). He had an article a few days ago parsing the maiden speech of the new MS guy at Nokia and what it meant in real-world terms.
Cian: perilously close to violating my noncompete agreement. Actually, not perilously close - offering investment analysis and strategic consulting on the mobile industry on my blog would be to stampede over the noncompete like a herd of fascist camels.
ReplyDeleteWell I figured that was the case, which was why I didn't ask...
ReplyDeleteName99: err no. And anyone who's main focus is the iPhone, is not going to be somebody with a particular good understanding of the global phone industry. Or indeed somebody whose beat is the US, which is one of the world's most backward mobile markets.
Nokia make phones. Apple make luxury tablet computers that can also make phone calls. There is a difference, and its why Apple are always going to operate a small (if potentially highly profitable) niche. The future's in communication. Don't believe me, look at teenagers even in the US. Nokia used to own that, Blackberry definitely own that. Apple aren't even contenders.
@Charlie, from the link:
ReplyDelete"Ingeni didn't fit Chief Executive William Clay Ford Jr.'s "back-to-basics company philosophy," Mays told Ward's."
"Back to basics." Snicker. So Ford has adopted John Major's strategy. Brilliant. They probably got the same results as well, given that American automakers can't design for shit.