The loss of hardware manufacturing expertise also harms the quality of software engineering, in turn, at least from my understanding. If there are fewer ‘hardware guys’ for software guys to talk to about optimizing performance and such, it makes it more necessary to add layers of abstraction.

University research is often optimized to bring in more government funding rather than usable work. If the PR that comes out of the labs results in more grants, then it’s a success. Actually producing usable stuff tends to require the market process to provide objective information about real conditions.

The entire ‘knowledge economy’ pitch is a way to make the loss of competitiveness seem to be a huge ‘win’ for Western culture. It’s the corporate-governmental version of giving the loser a trophy because he tried really hard. Not only is the capital stock being depleted, but the stock of knowledge also.

The loss of manufacturing also has knock on effects. First, it obviously leads to loss of related skills, which make it more difficult to build factories even if you want to. Loss of skills leads to the cost of manufacturing going up, since cost of training goes up. But it also gradually leads to a loss of secondary knowledge, so that investors, those providing services to manufacturers, etc, have skilsets that are rendered irrelevant as the manufacturing world changes and they have less access to experts ‘on the ground’. The dream of a ‘knowledge economy’ is a short term vision, where expertise left over from when Western countries were leaders in engineering and manufacturing appears to be freed from real world constraints for a time, everyone profits wildly, but eventually they’re faced with the problem that new developments are happening in Korea and China and they can’t keep on top of it. With each new generation of technology, Western companies relying on, or providing services to, Asian companies become less and less relevant.

I think few people realise how bad the situation is. Companies like HP began by outsourcing manufacturing but now they outsource everything. They essentially buy ODM equipment in Taiwan and put an HP logo on it. Many American companies are now little more than a brand name. Eventually the brands will be sold off too (as has happened in the UK). Then you’re just left with capital, but you have to wonder how long investments will remain sound when nobody has access to foreign companies or relevant expertise. American companies tend to make a big deal of the innovation happening in their labs. That kind of stuff usually amounts to little more than PR though. Moreover, a lot of it is indirectly subsidised by the government. They bring in projects from academia. Google’s self-driving car was originally a project at Stanford. Boston Dynamics, the robotics company they recently purchased, was DARPA funded. A lot of this stuff is just bringing in whole teams of researchers and their projects from universities and then putting the company logo on it. I’m skeptical whether these kinds of prestige projects will bear real fruit; they have a terrible track record. Even when they work, it tends not to be the host company that benefits.

I don’t share the disdain for either the bourgeoisie nor the workers. I’m also largely anti-intellectual — we tend to be pretty solidly opposed to both rule-by-prole, rule-by-bourgeois, and rule-by-priest here at SM. If you’d like to talk about this more, you should send me an email @ henrydampier@gmail.com

When these declined during the twentieth century, large numbers of villages essentially were made redundant. In the earlier part of the century, prior to Thatcher, people would simply find employment in factories or would commute to mines elsewhere. When the coal mines were finally wiped out in the eighties, much of the indigenous industry had been completely destroyed – there were no jobs for them to enter. This isn’t a problem for clerks, bureaucrats and other middle-management types, but for less intelligent working class people there are practically no jobs for them. These people are not particularly suited to working in supermarkets and service industries. So you end up with this permanently unemployed lumpen-proletariat Chav class kept alive by money from the south-east of England.

When you combine this with the sexual and cultural revolution, the destruction of education and marriage &c., you end up with a horrible situation. People forget that half of the population has an IQ below 100. If you take Britain, about 14% of a white population of 50 million has an IQ of between 70 and 85. That’s 7 million people with an IQ which debars them from anything other than manual work. The equivalent figure would be about 28 million in the USA. These people would do very well at agricultural labour, but that doesn’t exist anymore.

Here is the problem in a nutshell. Because of what is essentially (and explicitly in many cases) a compulsory public education system that caters to people from all walks of life with all sorts of aspirations, goals, and dreams or a lack thereof, the people churned out by high schools are essentially jacks of no trade.

If you go to the son of the average carpenter today, he will be able to tell you some of the elements in the periodic table, how to play softball, some very basic algebra, the plot of Lord of the Flies, and the definition of latitude, but he will likely have a very mediocre knowledge of carpentry.

In the Traditional world, a carpenter’s son would have been totally ignorant of the personally useless information above, but you can bet he would know woodwork inside and out.

You do not become an expert in ANY field by going to school. Public school prepares you for Trivial Pursuit, not a career to support yourself and a family. This is especially true when now you have to compete with foreign workers used to a much more basic standard of living, the product of wretched globalism. Returning to a system of scholastics, family businesses, and guilds would revive a working class. As for what currently passes as ‘education’, high school diplomas and maybe 80% of college degrees aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.