AHC: Much better British Economy

As others have said 1957 is pretty late in the day making it a rather hard challenge. If you'd said 1945, or even 1947, it would be somewhat easier. Case in point, I can't remember the exact numbers but didn't the UK spend large amounts of their US dollars purchasing tobacco in the post-war period? I can remember reading someone referring to it as money 'going up in smoke' and being rather surprised at how much it was. One solution would be to invest heavily in Rhodesia to expand their tobacco industry sooner, as a member of the sterling area wouldn't need to make purchases using valuable dollars. I'm sure there were probably other instances like this where efficiencies and better spending could have been made.


Dear god, yes. The Marshall Plan was the biggest missed opportunity in this country ever. All too often manufacturing companies ate the seed corn instead of using the money to revamp their machinery. I remember that the Financial Times was still using printing presses from before the First World War in its old HQ, Bracken House, in the 1970’s.
What the governments should have done was spend aid money to rebuild infrastructure and help encourage the modernisation of industry - Germany
did a very smart thing when they created their Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau. Instead it mostly seems to have been spent covering yearly governmental operating costs so once it was gone it was gone.


Well with two of the best universities in the world and an active defense industry, I cant think of why they couldnt have built a tech ecosystem to compete with Silicon Valley or a booming pharma/biotech industry.
Basically some very poor decisions in the late-WWII and early post-war government periods. Short version is that the government took secrecy over Bletchley Park and Colossus way too seriously and shot itself in the foot whilst in the US they organised a symposium and pushed the new knowledge out to various university professors and experts. The US government also spent large amounts of money on computers for both civil and military needs which helped fund the initial development of the industry, IIRC the government was IBM's major source of income in its early period. You also had the problems that whilst the US industry had a much larger potential market and generally coalesced into a few larger companies allowing them advantages of economies of scale in the UK the government was fairly reticent and the industry stayed divided between too many small companies when they really should have amalgamated into just two or three much sooner than eventually happened.

As for the pharmaceuticals and biotech industry I'd actually say that the UK does rather well in them, off the top of my head GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca are both in the global top 10 of pharmaceutical companies. I'm sure that there are other British leaders out there in the smaller more niche areas as well.
 
Basically some very poor decisions in the late-WWII and early post-war government periods. Short version is that the government took secrecy over Bletchley Park and Colossus way too seriously and shot itself in the foot whilst in the US they organised a symposium and pushed the new knowledge out to various university professors and experts. The US government also spent large amounts of money on computers for both civil and military needs which helped fund the initial development of the industry, IIRC the government was IBM's major source of income in its early period. You also had the problems that whilst the US industry had a much larger potential market and generally coalesced into a few larger companies allowing them advantages of economies of scale in the UK the government was fairly reticent and the industry stayed divided between too many small companies when they really should have amalgamated into just two or three much sooner than eventually happened.

As for the pharmaceuticals and biotech industry I'd actually say that the UK does rather well in them, off the top of my head GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca are both in the global top 10 of pharmaceutical companies. I'm sure that there are other British leaders out there in the smaller more niche areas as well.

The Brits are ok in pharma with Astra and Glaxo but its influence isnt nearly pervasive enough to meet the OP.

As to tech, Intel made the first microprocessor as part of development F-14 program. So, even if one though they missed the first generation, there were still opportunities. ARM, the leading designer of wireless chips is based in the UK and they were founded in 1990. ARM designs are the IP for every processor in a cellphone and tablet these days. Further, the Dutch have a meaningful presence in semis with Philips and ASML, a semiconductor manufacturing company. I am unaware of any advantages inherent the Dutch had in this area.

Finally, the government didnt need to actively plan any of these activities, even though it would have helped. IBM, Hewlett, and the first processors were heavily influenced by government/defense work. But Microsoft, Apple, and much of the software developed in the 80s, 90s, and 00's had nothing to do with government or defense. Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, Priceline.com, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo....

Oxford and Cambridge dont develop engineers or mathematicians?
 
As others have said 1957 is pretty late in the day making it a rather hard challenge. If you'd said 1945, or even 1947, it would be somewhat easier. Case in point, I can't remember the exact numbers but didn't the UK spend large amounts of their US dollars purchasing tobacco in the post-war period? I can remember reading someone referring to it as money 'going up in smoke' and being rather surprised at how much it was. One solution would be to invest heavily in Rhodesia to expand their tobacco industry sooner, as a member of the sterling area wouldn't need to make purchases using valuable dollars.

The Argentine example suggests that import substitution is not the way forward for the UK, nor is trading with Rhodesia at the expense of trading with other developed nations.
 
Well Britain can't grow tobacco domestically itself, if they have to import it then better to buy it from someone that you can pay for it in sterling rather than scarce US dollars surely?
 
But that's pretty much exactly what you had 1945-1970s, and then stagflation came along and destroyed the Keynesian consensus.
The Keynesian approach as advertised was a relatively straightforward way to tame and moderate the ups and downs of the business cycle.

Then with stagflation in 1979(?) we had high inflation and unemployment at the same time, something which wasn't supposed to happen. I say, there are more interesting ways for an animal to be unhealthy, than healthy.
 
I wonder how much of the damage to the British economy was done by the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which caused the price of urban land to rocket until it is now hundreds of times what it is in typical US cities.
 
Those dirty fair wage paying bastards

Having owned a Triumph bike and MG Midget, something needed to be done with both build quality, that was atrocious.

Add that ontop of old, poor designs, there is no surprise why the Japanese did well with their products, killing UK exports around the globe.

And it's not a Union bash, just the UK Auto Unions.

Germany showed how Unions could work with Management
 
Having owned a Triumph bike and MG Midget, something needed to be done with both build quality, that was atrocious. Add that ontop of old, poor designs, there is no surprise why the Japanese did well with their products, killing UK exports around the globe.
Part of the problem was that with the US having a booming domestic demand and not much interest in exporting, the continent - Germany, Italy, and to a lesser extent France - plus Japan bombed to buggery, for about the first ten or fifteen years post-war the British automotive industry didn't really have much in the way of competition. If you don't have anyone to keep you on your toes it generally leads to complacency.
 
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