Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding

> seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but problematic industries

That would only incentivize a brain drain. A good example of this is software engineering in UK, Germany, Canada, South Korea, and Japan, as SWE salaries in those countries are not significantly different compared to other vocations.

Also, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but they are one of the few industries left in the US that incentivizes NAND-to-Tetris level knowledge, and it did help subsidize the GPU buildout that made foundational models easier to train cost effectively.

You can't "command economy" innovation - it can only be nudged.

The solution I've seen most industrial planners use is provide tax holidays and subsidizes for targeted industries, as this helps reduce the upfront cost of hiring, and does give wiggle room to raise compensation. Linking that with production, timeline locks, or even tariffs tends to help force an ecosystem to develop - which is what Japan used to build their shipbuilding and automotive industries in the post-war era.

>It's sometimes hard to identify industries that should be supported,

It's sometimes controversial to claim this industry or that industry should be pursued at a national level, but this isn't the same thing as difficult. It's just that politics gets in the way.

And yes, shipbuilding should be one of those industries we pursue.

For that matter, I think you may have nailed the one industry we should punish.

Japan, Korea, and China kind of did this, but not via direct wage and salary controls. Window guidance is the informal practice where government/finance officials tell banks which industries to prefer for loans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_guidance

It only really works where capital markets are undeveloped or heavily restricted; and it does starve out the rest of the economy, which is bad for the not-chosen-few (e.g. South Korea's chaebols) and can also backfire if you end up being bad at picking winners.

The US was never a major commercial shipbuilding hub aside from during WW2 when manufacturing capacity was "reallocated" to shipbuilding. We were a very insular regional power that concentrated on our continent and some archipelagos with limited strategic value until WW2.

It was the UK that was the center of commercial shipbuilding before the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese took that mantle.

The US had a decent military shipbuilding industry, but they atrophed after the Cold War ended, and the incentive for naval warfare capacity receded until recently.

The US was never a commercial shipbuilding hub once the transition was made to metal ships. During the timber ship era, the huge quantities of quality lumber the US had meant that they were world class at shipbuilding, but metal ships? Not so much outside of direct production for the World Wars(1). I mean, the fact that the US passed the Jones Act in 1920 is a pretty strong signal that even then the US was not viable in commercial shipbuilding.

The US Navy, which has been tied for the largest or exclusively the largest in the world for over a century, meant that military shipbuilding was in a better state(2) but still not super competitive- few countries have ever bought the direct products of American yards- yards in the US mostly serve the USN and then sometimes the USN will transfer ships they don't need to other nations.

1: And even then, a whole lot of it was unskilled people learning by doing, and making mistakes.

2: There are many caveats, but it appears that British shipyards were probably more manpower efficient building warships than the US was in WW2. D.K. Brown discusses the evidence in _Nelson to Vanguard_. It's not perfectly clear- because hours were charged to contracts differently in the two countries, the fact that British ships charged fewer hours to a ship doesn't necessarily mean that they used fewer hours in actuality (while everyone counted laborers on a dock for hours, how do you handle hours spent doing accounts payable? Or material deliveries, or training? There are differences in how they were counted between countries, and Brown was unable to correct for them).

It is also true that the US produced warships faster chronologically, so it is possible that the US threw so many bodies at ship construction that they went past the point of manpower efficiency to get less time spent in the yards. But, overall, British shipbuilders seem to have been more manpower efficient than US yards during WW2, as far as warship production.

I'm just going off the article. Did you read it?

Japan had modern steel battleships in 1904. Dumdedum123 is talking about modern post-1930s shipBUILDING techniques involving prefab subassemblies.