I think that post-Brexit Britain can do it, but the political will does not seem to be there... nobody in politics aside from Dominic Cummings mention it at all. There have been some improvements to help high talent immigration, but my impression is that it is mostly cultural. In the top ~50 US universities there is a strong entrepreneurial, builder focused attitude, while in the UK this does not exist outside of Imperial, Oxford and Cambridge. Society in general does not seem as interested in these things as the US.
The first companies that come to mind are OneWeb (which went bankrupt during covid and were narrowly saved by the British government thanks to Cummings), and I had a small section about them in the essay which I removed. The problem is that Starlink is already miles ahead. It is still an extremely valuable asset to the UK though.
The other is Dyson, but they recently moved their headquarters to Singapore, due in part to EU regulation.
And of course Rolls-Royce, their aerospace and nuclear power technology is very interesting.
I can't think of any others, obviously DeepMind but they are not hardware engineering.
I don't know much about Virgin but my impression is they're a bit of a joke. They have had many many problems and failed launches, and are so far behind other space companies while being in operation for much longer, so I doubt they can achieve more than limited success.
What did you think of the post overall, it's my first Substack post.
Having said that, if you were to ask me whether, as a Brit, I'd trade F1 for Space X, I'd have to think...
The story of why F1 has become so dominated by the UK is an interesting one. Post WW2 saw Britain with a preponderance of aircraft engineers and disused airstrips. The engineers made for good race car engineers, and the airstrips made for good racetracks. That made for a vibrant grassroots motorsport industry that still thrives to this day, and was the eco-system that gave birth to the rise of F1 success.
As to whether motorsport could lead to wider added value... well, it certainly used to. There are many road car technologies - from the humble rear view mirror, to disc brakes, through to advanced automated gearboxes - that were created or perfected in motorsport.
Why didn't this translate to success for British road car manufacturers? This is entirely down to the awful working culture in post-war British industry. Britain produced some amazingly innovative designs, potentially World beating cars, such as the Mini, the Land Rover, Jaguar XJ, Triumph Stag, and Rover SD1. But awful build quality, a militant strike-prone workforce, and ridiculous commercial decisions (they lost money on every Mini....) just destroyed the industry. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that if we had built these cars with a work culture similar to that of the Japanese, we'd live in a very different country now. The roads of the World wouldn't be full of Toyotas and BMWs, but Austins and Jaguars. It was a missed opportunity of historic proportions.
Anyway, sorry I've just remembered this is just a comment, so I'll end it! I hope to read more articles from you, this was great.
I didn't know that history. Certainly seems like (yet another) missed opportunity.
One can also be disapointed that we had all this aerospace engineering talent, and yet UK aviation is a shell compared to the days of the Concorde and de Havilland Comet!
> Their real value comes in the form of entertainment for millions of viewers and the 20 people who drive them, but it doesn’t exactly excuse the exorbitant cost.
Meh... That's like saying that just because several hundred million people watch the Super Bowl/World Cup/etc. and its ad revenues are similar to SpaceX's profit, it isn't relevant.
More subtly, you note "we are a nation of bankers and lawyers". Services are where the money is these days, and where world domination will come from. Now engineering *is* a service, but the manufacturing it feeds into is a highly-automated, low-skill, low-margin process, and it's becoming increasingly easy to outsource all that to middle-income countries.
The critical questions for the future is What are Britain's comparative advantages vs. the other countries of the world? and Where is the most value being added?
Mhm I mean that it isn't relevant technologically. F1 is completely irrelevant to any natsec concerns, unlike SpaceX/Starlink.
I'd disagree that services are where world domination comes from... at the end of the day the real world is determined by physical power, and that comes from technology, not services.
If the concern is about national security specifically, my go-to quote is from Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", "What does seem incontestable, however, is that in a long-drawn-out Great Power (and usually coalition) war, victory has repeatedly gone to the side with the more flourishing productive base--or, as the Spanish captains used to say, to him who has the last escudo."
But the crux of that is much more who has money than who has physical factories -- as long as one can buy the needed materiel. Certainly some care has to be taken to keep "critical" manufacturing capacity within the country or its tight allies, but manufacturing per se isn't a specific factor of geopolitical dominance.
The unintutitive part is that making physical things is becoming less and less important in the economy. A good summary is Mead https://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/01/30/life-after-blue-the-middle-class-will-beat-the-seven-trolls/ "The new jobs will be different from the old jobs, and this is one of the reasons many fear the economic transition we’re in. There are a lot of people on both the right and the left who think that in a country that doesn’t “make stuff” there won’t be any jobs. If it isn’t a widget that you can grab in your hand and do something with, it isn’t real. This is nonsense. Two hundred years ago people thought that the only real jobs involved growing food, and that people who made non-necessary consumer goods were engaged in a socially parasitic activity. Nobody in 1800 could have imagined the plethora of manufactured goods that gave people jobs once the industrial revolution took hold: mass produced Elvis on velvet portraits? Fuzzy dice to hang from car mirrors? Appetites change, but humanity’s hunger for novelty, diversion, convenience and status remains with us."
I think that post-Brexit Britain can do it, but the political will does not seem to be there... nobody in politics aside from Dominic Cummings mention it at all. There have been some improvements to help high talent immigration, but my impression is that it is mostly cultural. In the top ~50 US universities there is a strong entrepreneurial, builder focused attitude, while in the UK this does not exist outside of Imperial, Oxford and Cambridge. Society in general does not seem as interested in these things as the US.
The first companies that come to mind are OneWeb (which went bankrupt during covid and were narrowly saved by the British government thanks to Cummings), and I had a small section about them in the essay which I removed. The problem is that Starlink is already miles ahead. It is still an extremely valuable asset to the UK though.
The other is Dyson, but they recently moved their headquarters to Singapore, due in part to EU regulation.
And of course Rolls-Royce, their aerospace and nuclear power technology is very interesting.
I can't think of any others, obviously DeepMind but they are not hardware engineering.
I don't know much about Virgin but my impression is they're a bit of a joke. They have had many many problems and failed launches, and are so far behind other space companies while being in operation for much longer, so I doubt they can achieve more than limited success.
What did you think of the post overall, it's my first Substack post.
Photos by SpaceX and Hanson Lu on Unsplash.
Your the guy from Dominic Cummings Substack! I'm also a guy from there. Hello!
Hey how’s it going!
Great! I just wanted to network for "the day of reckoning".
We're also both in the top 5! Do you think we should like each others posts?
My email is gruffyddgozali@gmail.com
Sure.
It's me from the DC Substack. Do you want an invite to the Discord I set up?
Hiya, yes please!
I deleted the message but it should still be in your emails. if not let me know
Yeah I joined. Thanks.
My friend's daughter just graduated in mechanical engineering and interviewed for an F1 team. It's sad, isn't it?
It is :/
Tell her about your time in startups/Silicon Valley, might be inspiring for her to build things on her own!
I enjoyed this, thank you.
Having said that, if you were to ask me whether, as a Brit, I'd trade F1 for Space X, I'd have to think...
The story of why F1 has become so dominated by the UK is an interesting one. Post WW2 saw Britain with a preponderance of aircraft engineers and disused airstrips. The engineers made for good race car engineers, and the airstrips made for good racetracks. That made for a vibrant grassroots motorsport industry that still thrives to this day, and was the eco-system that gave birth to the rise of F1 success.
As to whether motorsport could lead to wider added value... well, it certainly used to. There are many road car technologies - from the humble rear view mirror, to disc brakes, through to advanced automated gearboxes - that were created or perfected in motorsport.
Why didn't this translate to success for British road car manufacturers? This is entirely down to the awful working culture in post-war British industry. Britain produced some amazingly innovative designs, potentially World beating cars, such as the Mini, the Land Rover, Jaguar XJ, Triumph Stag, and Rover SD1. But awful build quality, a militant strike-prone workforce, and ridiculous commercial decisions (they lost money on every Mini....) just destroyed the industry. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that if we had built these cars with a work culture similar to that of the Japanese, we'd live in a very different country now. The roads of the World wouldn't be full of Toyotas and BMWs, but Austins and Jaguars. It was a missed opportunity of historic proportions.
Anyway, sorry I've just remembered this is just a comment, so I'll end it! I hope to read more articles from you, this was great.
Lovely reply!
I didn't know that history. Certainly seems like (yet another) missed opportunity.
One can also be disapointed that we had all this aerospace engineering talent, and yet UK aviation is a shell compared to the days of the Concorde and de Havilland Comet!
> Their real value comes in the form of entertainment for millions of viewers and the 20 people who drive them, but it doesn’t exactly excuse the exorbitant cost.
Meh... That's like saying that just because several hundred million people watch the Super Bowl/World Cup/etc. and its ad revenues are similar to SpaceX's profit, it isn't relevant.
More subtly, you note "we are a nation of bankers and lawyers". Services are where the money is these days, and where world domination will come from. Now engineering *is* a service, but the manufacturing it feeds into is a highly-automated, low-skill, low-margin process, and it's becoming increasingly easy to outsource all that to middle-income countries.
The critical questions for the future is What are Britain's comparative advantages vs. the other countries of the world? and Where is the most value being added?
Mhm I mean that it isn't relevant technologically. F1 is completely irrelevant to any natsec concerns, unlike SpaceX/Starlink.
I'd disagree that services are where world domination comes from... at the end of the day the real world is determined by physical power, and that comes from technology, not services.
If the concern is about national security specifically, my go-to quote is from Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", "What does seem incontestable, however, is that in a long-drawn-out Great Power (and usually coalition) war, victory has repeatedly gone to the side with the more flourishing productive base--or, as the Spanish captains used to say, to him who has the last escudo."
But the crux of that is much more who has money than who has physical factories -- as long as one can buy the needed materiel. Certainly some care has to be taken to keep "critical" manufacturing capacity within the country or its tight allies, but manufacturing per se isn't a specific factor of geopolitical dominance.
The unintutitive part is that making physical things is becoming less and less important in the economy. A good summary is Mead https://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/01/30/life-after-blue-the-middle-class-will-beat-the-seven-trolls/ "The new jobs will be different from the old jobs, and this is one of the reasons many fear the economic transition we’re in. There are a lot of people on both the right and the left who think that in a country that doesn’t “make stuff” there won’t be any jobs. If it isn’t a widget that you can grab in your hand and do something with, it isn’t real. This is nonsense. Two hundred years ago people thought that the only real jobs involved growing food, and that people who made non-necessary consumer goods were engaged in a socially parasitic activity. Nobody in 1800 could have imagined the plethora of manufactured goods that gave people jobs once the industrial revolution took hold: mass produced Elvis on velvet portraits? Fuzzy dice to hang from car mirrors? Appetites change, but humanity’s hunger for novelty, diversion, convenience and status remains with us."