"The most obvious common factor in explaining the UK’s miserable trajectory is that it represents the accumulated consequences of a sustained failure to invest."
Maybe there are too many rent seekers in power.
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-184-nostalgia-for...
If you consider the chart for two seconds, you realise that it also shows very high investment in Europe...and did Europe have a huge investment boom like the US over the past ten years? No.
It is substantially more nuanced than this. You need to look at the structure of financial markets, how research is converted into revenue, and how this gets balanced politically.
Investment is just capital balance + domestic savings, and the latter is just your trade balance. Investment in the US has held up despite running a huge deficit because they are importing capital. Comparing that situation with Europe, which cannot import capital on a large scale because of their banking situation, is misleading.
Just generally, the UK has more than enough basic research and has always done so. The problem has been that we have no institution like Stanford that excels in applying this research, and we lack the financial structure to enable this even if we did. More public investment won't make the slightest difference, it didn't in the 60/70s and it won't now.
Also, the productivity charts are classic. Everyone knows they are misleading, Richard Jones has said the chart is misleading (he also, suspiciously, uses 2009 as the break). Productivity growth has slowed globally, and (ironically as Tooze says later but doesn't connect to the above) we made the decision to destroy our own banking sector. There is no world in which productivity growth continued to be 2+%. It is all so silly.
This has been the problem since I was a kid; we make good inventions, but we're bad at exploiting them.
Research universities nowadays have incubators; but I think helping inventors exploit their ideas should be a function of central government.
It cannot be a function of central govt (although the level of govt support for early-stage businesses is overwhelming). Ironically, the UK has actually tried this several times: one after WW2, then again in the 60/70s...didn't work either time.
Again, the fundamental thing is: do you want to start a business? Or are you happy to sit in your university tithing the rest of the population? You see this in the private sector too, the default position of most execs is to maximise the options package and check out.
I'm not talking about throwing money at start-ups at all. Such an agency could run on a shoestring, if it could influence other government agencies like the Patent Office, drafters of bills, committee members and so on.
I don't care much for the idea that inventors must also be entrepreneurs, or be doomed to failure. Ideally, inventors and entrepreneurs partner-up; but entrepreneurs are pirates, and inventors partner-up at their peril. I guess that's the benefit of having both roles in the same person.
None of anything relating to the Patent Office or Parliament is relevant. You do need to throw money at it...that is how you convince academics not to do other things with their time. All of them have the option of just teaching, taking three months holiday a year, and collecting a decent salary.
Right, that is the problem, you need both sides in one person. In the UK, there is no comprehensive education. When you are 15, you get put into maths/sciences or english/arts. So no-one who becomes an academic is interested in anything else at all (and PHd/assistant work is usually extremely underpaid, as in £17k/year...so almost everyone who has any other potential leaves before then). Where they have tried to bring someone else in, the academic will almost always assume that it is all a capitalist hoax/trick, and they are being swindled...it is an insurmountable psychological barrier for most people, so it does have to be both sides in one person (the UK is not like the US, you think academics in the US are left-wing, in the US they would be called communists...the culture of enterprise is non-existent).
Again, the only places that I am aware of that have gotten over this are Manchester and Sheffield. Both second-tier institutions but they gathered academics who were able to understand the commercial application of inventions, and got large companies involved in working closely with these people so they could get on the right path (Manchester with graphene, Sheffield with an manufacturing process institute). You also see the same thing in Oxford/Cambridge but it is far more diffuse (and has far more people from outside the UK) and limited to pharma, some kinds of tech (i.e. ARM).
"For Tooze, this Marx – the ‘empirical’ Marx – anticipates his own brand of grounded contemporary history" (1)
But "Ultra-Marxist" surely doesn't fit. I see him as social democrat and as devoted Keynesian.
I have not read his books, but think I should. He seems to be one of the most creative intellectuals and historians at the moment.
Tooze is one of the most famous Marxist historians in the world. Iirc, he used to go to all the Marxist historian conferences (Historical Materialism, he writes for New Left Review, etc.)
Wages of Destruction is one of the best economic history books of the 20th century. Everything after that isn't good. I would read more about what historical Marxists believe. If you actually read what he is saying very carefully, you would realise that his view of how economic growth occurs is significantly different to the one that exists in reality. Part of that is empiricism (Marxists were the arch empiricists, they viewed their theories as grounded in a deep understanding of statistics and data...this is obviously ridiculous in retrospect but this view of "scientific Marxism" was pervasive at the time).
If you don't know much about economic history, I would read Mokyr/McCloskey, anything that has a vaguely coherent account of how economic growth actually occurs.
Lately Adam Tooze has been writing too much, his Javelin Chartbook post on Substack for example is ridiculous. But probably everyone has bad days.
I lived in West Berlin before and after the fall of the Wall and picked up quite a bit about Marxism / Historical Materialism. As far as I see, Tooze is miles away from orthodox Marxism.
Tooze knows both Europe and the US well and he has the historical knowledge, so I take his analyses seriously, e.g. (1).
But here I do not see a marxist anti-imperialist either.
On the contrary, he seems to be enthusiastic about the war of the good West, however many human lives it may cost.
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/04/us-len...
Btw, I strongly suspect you still do not understand the difference between historical and political Marxism (nothing to do with "the war of the good West"...just read about historiography) but if you just consider the theme of Wages of Destruction, it should be extremely obvious to you that Tooze is a historical materialist (again though, I would consider whether you know enough about historiography and economics to understand the nuances of these points i.e. if you didn't study economic history to postgrad level, then you likely do not).
You are telling me I am wrong because you lived in Berlin? Only on HN -> Sounds like you're the one showing off buddy.
(I do not claim understanding marxism, it's a vast field und marxists enjoy fighting each other. I actually took a marxism course in university - it mainly convinced me that Marx' economic theory is wrong (labour theory of value) and that this smart guy Sraffa in Cambridge could not fix it (or fixed it to death))