Spot on!Nearholmer wrote: ↑10 Apr 2024, 1:00pmAll true, and as I said a few posts back, the best we can expect of politicians is that they do things to create a climate/environment that makes that more, rather than less, likely, and at the moment I don’t believe they are. I honestly think that the actions of government over the past decade or more have undermined, not improved, our chances of prosperity.Action needed by entrepreneurs and innovators that create wealth that can get taxed to pay for the pensions health and welfare we all need at some time or another.
Something else to bear in mind though is that truly groundbreaking innovations, what amount to new technologies or major advances of technology, are very rare, so although having an environment which encourages them is vital, that alone won’t guarantee bread on the table in the near term, or indeed for the future; it maximises probability, but doesn’t guarantee.
To put bread on the table, we also need to be producing things using already available technology, and to be doing that we need to be part of a trading bloc with a market-size that matches modern production methods and the ways of multinational corporations, and to have an education system to underpin that, instead of trying to operate from outside of a large bloc-market, on the back of a distinctly flakey education system.
Final thought for the moment: we must be careful not to get stuck in a sort of Victorian paradigm of what “making things” means, a mental picture of big physical objects emerging from a factory with tall chimneys. “Making things” can also mean software-based systems (which is why HMG periodically gets interested in the positive side of AI, for instance), biotech, pharmaceuticals etc., and oddly enough it can also mean educating foreigners in return for a fee (which the UK is actually pretty good at, despite neglecting its own).
EDIT:- and when we make nurses and doctors pay for their own training and suppress their salaries to such low levels what chance anyone else?