The Composite Index of National Capability as a Measure of Russian Power

Recently considering the matter of the international balance of power--and in particular the military-industrial balance between Russia and NATO--I had occasion to think about differing ways of approaching the matter, like Correlates of War project founder David J. Singer's Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) and its formula for measuring national power. Simply put, this adds up a country's shares of the world's population, urban population, defense spending, military personnel, iron and steel production and energy consumption and divides the result by six to get a numerical score.

As the great weight accorded steel and iron production, and energy consumption, suggests, it is an old measure reflective of a different economic world than most of us regard ourselves as now inhabiting, but it is still much used--and it has Russia looking more formidable than many would guess. After all, Russia's steel output approached twice that of manufacturing heavyweight Germany (72 million vs. 39 million tons), while its production of iron was at least as great (8 million tons of direct reduced iron to Germany's 500,000, and 51 million tons of pig iron to Germany's 25 million). Russia also consumed more than two-and-a-half times as much energy as Germany (773 million tons of oil equivalent vs. Germany's 273 million, which even in per capita terms works out to about 60 percent more energy consumption in a country almost twice as populous).

The result is that one might expect to see that Russia is at least twice as big an industrial power as Germany, and thus an industrial superpower by any reasonable measure, ranking as even an aggregate producer after only the much more populous China and the U.S. (and in America's case, behind it by rather less than was ever the case for the whole of the Soviet Union in the Cold War era). However, when one goes by the United Nations' statistics what one finds is that Germany's manufacturing value added was in 2019 almost four times that of Russia ($738 billion to $204 billion in current dollars), with the divergence greater when one considers medium and high-tech manufacturing--Germany's output being in the vicinity of nine times' Russia's. In the area of machinery and transport equipment Germany outproduced Russia by a factor of eleven or so when value added is the standard, and in terms of the number of vehicles produced, by a factor of almost three (4.7 million to 1.7 million vehicles), while, reverting once more to current dollar figures, just a few years ago Germany was actually outproducing Russia by a factor of twenty-seven in the particularly exacting area of machine tools.

Altogether this adds up not to the profile of a Big Three superpower, but rather one on the level of Mexico or Turkey.

Of course, none of that is to deny that Russia has capacities Germany lacks, and of course Mexico and Turkey lack, and indeed virtually every state on Earth but the U.S. lacks--in aerospace, for example. But the overall situation is nevertheless profoundly different than one might expect, with much of Russia's admittedly high steel production simply exported to foreign markets, rather than being used to make goods "higher up the value chain."

"But what about the energy consumption?" one may ask. Alas, those accustomed to such figures are likely to have noticed that a country with particularly cold weather; difficult transport due to long distances, terrain (e.g. limited water transport choices) or both; a high economic reliance on economic activity that may be energy-intensive but fairly "far down" the value chain, like raw materials processing; a high reliance of its industry of whatever type on older plant and infrastructure; and, due to richness in fossil fuels, comparative profligacy with them; is apt to have a much more energy-intensive economy per unit of GDP. And as close examination of the matter demonstrates, Russia is no exception to the pattern (according to one calculation consuming fifty percent more than the none-too-efficient U.S., and twice as much as the more efficient European states).

The result is that, if one accepts the other data cited here as a basis for sound calculation, this would appear a case where the old formula, for all its uses, misleads greatly.

German Defense Policy: Two Major Stories

A couple of weeks ago Der Spiegel broke a story about the German government's new "Operational Guidelines for the Armed Forces" document. Pretty much ignored in the English-speaking press, and especially the American press (in spite of its obvious significance) it specifically calls for a break from the post-Cold War German (and European) norm of emphasizing lighter forces for brisk out-of-area interventions to large combat forces in the NATO area for resisting major attack.

This sounded to me like a shift to something more like the Cold War-era sizing and structure of its forces.

Just to see how big a shift this would be consider the West German armed forces pre-reunification. These approached a half million personnel, with an army of over 300,000 organized into a dozen divisions, ten of them "heavies," and six of those armored. These were backed up by 700,000 reservists.

Today's German army is more like 60,000, with three divisions. Two of them are officially "armored" divisions, but only if one uses the term loosely--combining the armored assets of the two getting you at best only one underpowered armored division. Meanwhile the reserves are down by 99 percent. The result is that if they were totally mobilized you would have, instead of an army of 1 million, a mere 70,000 personnel.

Especially given the operational deficiencies of the German armed forces as they exist now (at least, assuming the reports of low readiness, decrepit facilities, etc. are not just a ploy by officers and industrialists and right-wingers angling for a bigger defense budget), the need to replace aging equipment with very expensive new stuff (F-35s to replace Tornados), plans for pricey new strategic capabilities (anti-ballistic missiles do not come cheap), and grand R & D programs (like Europe's own sixth-generation fighter), it seemed to me that there was a significant gap between even the announced increase of German defense spending, and any serious expansion of the German armed forces.

Moreover, now it seems that the budgetary increase announced back in February will not be forthcoming.

Under that aforementioned announcement the defense budget was supposed to be ramped up to 2 percent of GDP by 2023, while the government this year committed to a 100 billion euro "one-off" supplement to that projected spending (the equivalent of an extra 2.5 percent). However, the 2 percent target has officially been kicked down the road (to 2025 if one pays the spokesman's "cautious optimism" any heed), while that 100 billion euros, the value of which has already been eroded by the plummeting of the euro's value and plain old inflation so that it is already worth less than it was in February, is, if committed, far from actually being used.

Thus far it seems this failure to use the money is not for lack of interest on the part of the government. Instead the principals are giving everyone the old runaround that makes so many the world over hold bureaucrats and politicians in contempt, with the Defense and Finance Ministries each sniveling that "it's the other ministry's fault," all as some bizarrely accuse German industry of failing to move more briskly. ("Is it up to the industry to increase capacity first, or should the government have placed orders more quickly?" asks Deutsche Welle's Ben Knight--while I ask "Since when were profit-making private companies supposed to sacrifice their bottom lines to enlarging capacity in anticipation of orders that might or might not come?")

Of course, one may suspect more than that is going on. I have yet to see mention of the continent's energy woes as a possible factor in slowing the "rearmament" process, or the broader problems manufacturers generally are having with their supply chains post-COVID and post-war, or the way in which rising labor strife and inflation and interest rates and looming recession (so grave that some are speaking of a threat of deindustrialization!) may make business leerier of moving ahead here without bottom line-protecting guarantees. However, it seems implausible that such are not posing some problems for these plans--just as it is by no means implausible that the government would not rush to publicize them. And nor would the media, connecting the dots rarely ever having been a strength of theirs.

* The 100 billion euro commitment was announced as equivalent to $113 billion. Now it is down to $105 billion, while the U.S. dollar has itself lost perhaps 7 percent of its purchasing power between the announcement and the time of this writing (assuming the inflation rate observed in March-October 2022 holds) so that the sum may already amount to 13 percent less in real terms than it did in February. All the signs point to its losing a good deal more of its real value before all the money is spent.

The British Tempest Fighter: An Update

Today Prime Minister Rishi Sunak paid a visit to RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire and officially announced the "Global Combat Air Programme."

That announcement did not offer any great surprises regarding the countries involved, the capabilities of the aircraft, or the schedule for the aircraft's development and deployment. It is a tri-national program bringing the British government together with its Italian and Japanese counterparts for the purpose of developing "a next-generation jet enhanced by a network of capabilities such as uncrewed aircraft, advanced sensors, cutting-edge weapons and innovative data systems." The developmental process is to be underway by 2025, the plane to fly by 2035 and replace the Typhoon when it retires (at some unspecified date).

Still, I do have the following four observations to offer:

#1. Hearing about Italy and Japan as partners at this stage raises the question of that fourth country oft-mentioned in discussion of the project, Sweden. Perhaps the Swedish government is still interested, but for the time being it would appear to not be a full-fledged participant.

#2. The details given confirm the sketchiness of the vision for the aircraft. The statement said that the three countries "will now work intensively to establish the core platform concept and set up the structures needed to deliver this massive defence project, ready to launch the development phase in 2025" (emphasis added). So basically the "core platform concept" does not actually exist yet.

#3. The details also confirm the lowered expectations for sixth-generation fighters compared with what we were hearing circa 2010. As the statement reminded us, where once we were told such aircraft would be "optionally manned" now they are expected to be manned aircraft which merely fly with accompanying drones (the aforementioned "uncrewed aircraft"). And finally,

#4. The Prime Minister's remark that the "partnership we have announced today with Italy and Japan . . . underlin[es] that the security of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions are indivisible" recalled the British government's announcement of a "tilt to the Indo-Pacific" as the focus of its military planning (its naval dispositions, etc.) in its 2021 defense review, and seemed to affirm that tilt even in the face of recent events (i.e. the war in Eastern Europe). In so doing it makes an interesting contrast with, if Der Spiegel's report about the new German "Operational Guidelines for the Armed Forces" is accurate, Germany's moving in the opposite direction, away from the out-of-area focus which prevailed through the Cold War, and toward an emphasis on large combat forces for in-area operations, and particularly large-scale, conventional conflict to repel attack by another state.

The implications of all this seem to me to warrant some serious consideration from those who comment on these matters.

I wonder if we will actually see any.

The Economic Outlook and the Prospects for Automation

In reconsidering the hugely influential 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne study The Future of Employment it is worth remembering the contrast between what the study's authors were supposed to have said according to its publicity, and what the actual study said. The press (and those commentators who took their understanding of the study from it, which included a great many "experts" who probably could have understood the report but were too lazy to read it) took it to mean that half of the country would be out of work by the 2030s. What the report really said was that, according to the authors' method of evaluating the matter (which undeniably contained a great many highly uncertain assumptions that can now seem optimistic, entailed unavoidable simplifications in its task assessment that seem wide open to question, and produced a number of projections that frankly struck me as odd) half of the country's jobs had a two-thirds chance of proving to be automatable in principle over an unspecified period of time that may well be a decade or two--a very different and much more modest claim indeed. After all, even if they were right about the in-principle feasibility of that automation being there, the perceived or actual cost-effectiveness of automating particular tasks, the problems of fitting a task into the larger functioning of an industrial or commercial enterprise, customer attitudes, the inclination to let others take the lead and see how they do, the hesitation to invest in the newest and latest when one already has a working set-up, etc., etc., etc. would slow down the practical engineering and implementation of the possibility.

Moreover, the broader macroeconomic situation would count for a lot. A situation of slow economic growth and frequent and severe recession, high unemployment and underemployment, slight and ineffectual annoyance to employers from government regulation or organized labor, mean a "disciplined," low-wage work force--workers being that much cheaper and easier to employ, and automation having to be that much more cost-effective to be an attractive option than if growth is brisk and steady, the job market tight, standards with regard to labor conditions stringent, workers assertive, wages high. Likewise a situation where it is easier and more attractive to try and make money speculating on assets like stock or real estate is one where investors have that much less incentive to put their money toward some R & D project promising a better robot.

Which of those scenarios sounds more like the economy we have known these past decades? And, all other things being equal, expect in the decades to come?

Considering the obvious answers to those question I find myself wondering how much further we might have come in different circumstances--and suspecting that, all other things again being equal, we will progress much less swiftly in this important area than we might be able to do in other circumstances.

The Rise of the (Industrial) Robots: Pondering the Latest Statistics

As the pandemic reminded everyone the world's economy is still far from being thoroughly automated--or even automatable--with the hype about progress in this area in the years before the pandemic, and the hype about some rush to automate in the wake of the disruption, both a stark contrast with the little changed reality of 2022.
A glance at the statistics supplied by the International Federation of Robotics this very week makes the point. In 2021 the world still had just one industrial robot for every seventy manufacturing workers.

Still, if we are far away from that world some long for and others fear in which robots will relieve us of drudgery and put us out of our jobs it is still the case that the use of robots is rapidly increasing in this area--for if one robot for every seventy workers does not sound terribly impressive, it is a near doubling of "robot density" in six years' time. (The figure had been 1 per 150 manufacturing workers in 2015.)

Moreover, this global average conceals significant disparities. At last report Russia had perhaps 1 robot for every 1600 workers, and even Britain just 1 for every 100. But in the U.S. the figure was more like 1 for every 36, in China 1 for every 31, in Germany and Japan 1 for every 25--while in South Korea (an outlier here as in so many other areas) it is 1 for every 10.

Indeed, as this list suggests one can already argue for the "robot/worker" ratio in industry as a useful index of a country's level of industrialization, and especially how much high-capital, high-tech, high-productivity manufacturing it does (it being no accident that fields like cars and electronics are especially robot-intensive). And it seems a safe bet that, even if the progress in automation continues to run far behind the extravagant claims of fashionable futurists about how far it will go, how fast, it seems a safe enough bet that that index's usefulness will only grow in the coming years.

As Britain Approaches a New Round of Austerity Let's Look Back at the Old . . .

My study of the neoliberal turn in British economic and social policy since Thatcher's time took the story only up to the brink of the Great Recession--which broke out fifteen years ago.

The period before had plenty of pain--but I suspect that what happened afterward made a great many positively nostalgic for the earlier era.

I have a fuller account of that decade of "austerity" (2010-2019), with the requisite citation, here. In lieu of that consider these highlights:

* A significant increase in the Value Added Tax, to 20 percent. (By contrast the VAT was 17.5 percent pre-crisis, and while the top income tax bracket was raised from 40 to 50 percent, swiftly knocked back down to 45 percent. Meanwhile they actually cut the Corporate Tax from 28 to 19 percent.)

* Significant changes in Social Security. Two major welfare reform acts (2012 and 2016, the latter amending the former) replaced a large number of the social safety net's former benefits with a less accessible and less generous system of Universal Credit, and Personal Independence Payments, while other benefits were likewise eliminated, or made less generous or accessible (as with the elimination of the Council Tax Benefit that helped low-income persons pay their local tax bill, or the introduction of means-testing for Child Benefit). There was also repeated capping and freezing of Social Security more broadly.

* Austerity (as well as privatization) in the National Health Service, not least at the level of funding increases--likewise, held to below the inflation rate, and so working out to real cuts over time, as hospitals coped with an aging population's higher demand for medical care, and paying for those Private Finance Initiatives a certain prior government treated in the manner of a simpleton who thinks credit cards mean "Buy Now, Pay Never."

* The continuation of the movement away from tuition-free university attendance toward an American-style system of paying for higher education, with the cap on tuition raised from the £3225 it had been under Gordon Brown to over three times as much (£9250 pounds at present).

* The continued raising of the state pension age (66 for men and women as of 2020, with the raising of the age to 67 brought forward a decade in each case, from 2036 to 2026).

* The sharp reduction of government investment in housing (at the level of both the number of units and investment per unit) as "social" housing is marginalized (rather than being a main product of the program, "only to be supported in exceptional cases").

* Deep reductions in funding for public programs ranging from legal aid, to regulators providing consumer protection (the Food Standards Agency suffering a 51 percent cut in 2009-2019) and environmental protection (i.e. Natural England and the Environmental Agency).

* The across-the-board capping and freezing of public sector worker pay (which, apart from affecting the performance of the above duties, affects the incomes of the one-sixth of the British labor force which is part of this category), producing a long-term decline in median wages among such persons as doctors, teachers and police officers.

* The reduction of central government support to local councils (by 60 percent in 2010-2020 according to the Local Government Association), which have had to depend more heavily on their own resources --with the result higher council-set taxes (and a heavier reliance on sales, fees and charges), along with a significant drop in per capita spending (taxes up 8 percent and per capita spending down 23 percent according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies). Additionally, even as "statutory duties" received increased emphasis, the diminution of resources generally led to significant cuts to the most "protected" services, such as social care. (Social care saw a 10 percent drop in spending even as there was a 20 percent+ rise in the number of elderly, and the gap may have played a part in some 120,000 "excess deaths" by 2017 alone.) Meanwhile other services were cut still more steeply (with regulatory services and transport and culture and recreation subject to cuts of over 40 percent, and housing of over 50 percent).

And of course, while we consider all that remember the "synergies" that combined to make these cuts more painful (like the fact that Council Tax Benefits were cut just as Council Tax went up, or how the fact that public libraries were being closed down in record numbers meant that people who needed libraries for computer access and help with their applications for UC did not have them).

Of course, all that was before the pandemic, its own even sharper recession, the energy and broader price shocks of 2021-2022, Britain's having the kind of old-style currency crisis out of which the British right made a legend when it happened back in '76, and, under the third British government in as many months, a new round of austerity coming that, we are told by Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (whose valuable work I cited above, and not for the first time), will mean "the largest fall in real household disposable income per head (4.3%) since the late 1940s" in 2023, and the year after that, "the second-largest fall (2.8%)." Indeed, "[a]verage household income per head is due to be the same in 2027-28 as it was in 2018-19, and 31% below where it would have been if the pre-2008 trend had continued"--or, as Johnson's colleague Tom Waters observed, "if we'd kept to trend, we'd be 47% richer. Imagine your income being 47% higher!"

If people aren't already nostalgic for the pre-Recession era, lousy as it was, they may--after Rishi Sunak's "austerity on steroids"--well find themselves thinking warmly of the '00s.

Or even the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad '10s.

Keir Starmer and the Ten Pledges

A politician's presenting a leftish platform with the intent of outflanking an opponent who is actually more leftish, or winning over vacillating leftist voters, and then in the spirit of "adults-in-the-room," "electability"-minded pragmatism dispensing with that platform, has been Standard Operating Procedure for center-left parties through the neoliberal era.

What distinguishes Keir Starmer's conduct in regard to said platform--his ten pledges--is how quickly and brazenly he ditched his pledges, which underlines the centrist ideologue's stance in regard to such matters.

I think the relevant bits can be boiled down to three principles, namely:

1. Politics is for professionals--and the general public is unfit to judge what professionals do beyond casting its vote for one of the (two) candidates presented it on the ballot on election day, without whining about how little they differ because from a centrist standpoint that's a feature, not a bug. (Yay, consensus!)

2. Politics is a pragmatic activity, not an ethical activity--and so complaining about a politician's breaking promises out of bounds is simple-minded, unrealistic and illegitimate. And finally, in line with the extension of this principle not only to the methods of politicians but the content of politics,

3. Politics should be civil rather than ideological--making the left and its principles inherently illegitimate, and anything done to defeat it, like making and breaking a bunch of lefty promises, not just acceptable, but a duty for a responsible, electable, adult-in-the-room politician who, as he constantly says, WANTS TO BE PRIME MINISTER!

Of course, not everyone feels the same way about all of this--and it is not for nothing that, in 2022, Starmer eschews Tony Blair's blatant disrespect for Old Labour and open disdain for talk about class and inequality, blending his centrist positions with gestures toward something more leftward, which on close inspection proves to be radical rhetoric, not radical policies (Starmer banging on about the 1 percent as if he were some Occupy Wall Street activist, and then proving himself New Labour to the core).

Robot Density in Russia

Not long ago I had occasion to consider Russia's manufacturing base relative to that of the West--and concluded that while the country is important as a producer of certain commodities, and has real strengths in some exacting areas, as a whole its manufacturing output looks like that of a developing country on the Mexico-Turkey level, and fairly unevenly at that, in part as a result of its unique history (with areas of world-caliber consequences offset by areas of extreme weakness).

While my conclusion was initially based on per capita manufacturing output, and on Russia's production and consumption of steel, machine tools and semiconductors (and I might add, on the contrast between Russia's status in aerospace and Russia's status in information technology), I have more recently had occasion to think about the installation of industrial robots--and in particular about "robot density"--as a useful metric in this area.

As it happened, when surveying the data (mainly with Britain in mind) I noticed that Russia is not even listed among the major users--who tended to at least be in the area of 200 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2021 (with the U.S. closing on 300, and China past that mark), with the most highly industrialized states in cases having much more, especially to the extent that they have robust, high-capital, high-productivity, high-tech sectors like autos and electronics (Germany and Japan both having about 400, and South Korea 1,000, per 10,000 workers).

Looking elsewhere for a Russian figure I did not find one for 2021, but I did find one for 2019.

The figure was six. Six robots per ten thousand workers.

Assuming Russian industry sustained the growth rate seen in the prior two years (it was four in 2017, translating to a 23 percent a year growth rate--proportionally rather faster than China in the same period), this would have worked out to no more than ten robots in 2021. Had it added as many new units per worker as China, it would have still been in the 30-40 range.

Going by this figure (which is probably wildly overoptimistic; even the 10-robots-per-10,000 workers may be overoptimistic for all I know, given the obstacles to the country's investment in the technology) Russia's robot density would still have been not only a very small fraction that of the U.S. or China, let alone that of a Korea, but well below the average for the planet as a whole (the global mean about 141 robots per worker in 2021), far behind even the weakest of the major industrialized powers (Britain having not much more than 100 robots per 10,000 workers at last count), and only where Mexico is (somewhere around forty robots per 10,000 workers). The result is that this, too, seems to support the reading of Russia's economy as still well behind that of the advanced industrialized countries, especially in these critical areas.

A Note on the NATO-Russia Military-Industrial balance

In reading up on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict I have found myself thinking about the claims some, outside the mainstream media but commanding considerable audiences (to go by the sales of their books, the comment threads on their blog posts, the measure of attention they get in certain corners of the Web), have made along the lines of a deindustrialized U.S. and NATO are weaker, and Russia stronger, in the military-industrial sphere than is generally reported by the conventional metrics, and usually assumed--which seem to have had traction with the war's dragging as it has, reports of massive and disproportionate Ukrainian casualties, and claims about NATO stocks of weaponry being depleted by transfers to Ukraine to help it with what is only a relatively limited conflict. (Indeed, Emmanuel Todd, who has long been a skeptic of the claims regarding U.S. economic strength and the substance of "post-industrial" economies generally, has recently added his voice to those already arguing this position.)

Given my long interest in the failings of the conventional wisdom regarding economic life--which are many and severe--the essential claim got my attention (the more in as I have so recently been attentive to the question of deindustrialization in countries like the U.S. and Britain specifically). And I have since tried to take a systematic look at the available data to check it (which you can find, with all the figures and all the footnotes, here).

Short version: that look persuaded me that some display an exaggerated view of Russia's weaknesses (all too familiar from, and not implausibly an extension of, the disdain that characterized so much writing about Russia in the Cold War era). As the supply shocks of this year remind all, the country's economy is not reducible to a giant "gas station," but a producer of numerous essential commodities of other kinds, not just foodstuffs but manufactured goods as well, among them crucial agricultural inputs like fertilizer, and metals (the country recently the world's second greatest steel exporter, in 2020 putting over 30 million tons on the international market). The country also has its undeniable strengths in some demanding industrial areas, like aerospace and defense generally.

Still, the kinds of goods Russia exports, and the overall numbers regarding Russian production (certainly per capita output numbers), seem to me indicative of a developing country, broadly on a level with Mexico or Turkey, albeit with significant "legacy" strengths from the Soviet era (with aerospace-defense the outstanding example). And sure enough the disparity in resources between NATO and Russia is gigantic--with NATO having an 11 to 1 edge in GDP (that's if we go by PPP-adjusted figures; it's more like 24-to-1 if we don't). Of course, some call out GDP as decreasingly meaningful in today's world (certainly Todd makes his case on these grounds), but going by value added the gap is a no less formidable 24-to-1 in manufacturing output, with an assessment of their consumption of critical inputs suggesting some substance to the figure. NATO's steel use is 5 or 6-to-1 Russia's by tonnage, its machine tool consumption greater by a 12-to-1 margin and its consumption of semiconductors perhaps two hundred times Russia's--while in the latter areas the production gap is greater, with NATO recently outproducing Russia 60-to-1 in machine tools, and Russian semiconductor production so marginal that any quantitative comparison risks exaggerating Russia's strength. (Reportedly Russia's biggest and most advanced producer is now producing 65 nanometer chips--the stuff of 2004-2007.)

One may add that the disparity between Russia and any one NATO country are smaller, but even all by itself the U.S has immense advantages--at least twice Russia's population and four times its GDP by even the most favorable measures, and for all the reality of its deindustrialization, by itself has eleven times Russia's manufacturing output (and far, far more in critical areas like microchip production).

Of course, that said no conflict is wholly and simply reducible to the output of the two sides--this one less than most, given the extensiveness and complexity of international involvement, and the dangers of escalation. But all the same--and again, even acknowledging the trend of economic life in the U.S. and other advanced industrial nations--any notion of the Western economies having so thoroughly hollowed out as to leave them at a disadvantage facing Russia (for that matter, at anything but a considerable advantage to Russia) seems simply unsupportable on the basis of the available information, while those taking that line, if bringing some justified skepticism to the conversation, offer no alternative foundation for their conclusions.

Keir Starmer's Bloviating and Britain's Robot Density: A Note

Ours is not a great age for oratory, least of all in the political sphere. Still, having had occasion to close-read the remarks of Keir Starmer these past couple of years, the attention accorded his speech to the Confederation of British Industry made it seem reasonable to take up the sure-to-be-dismaying task of perusing the official transcript.

As I had grown to expect with any major statement from Starmer the reading experience mostly consisted of suffering through another recitation of the same New Labour vintage 2022 clichés he uttered in the Labour Party Conference keynote back in September. "Aspiration" and a "fair chance" for people to "succeed." "Partnership" of government with business. Supply-side economics, but "modern" and somehow not "trickle-down" but rather a "New Deal for working people." Yada yada yada, one may say--except that I can't get over Starmer's expecting anyone in 2022 to take seriously the idea that British investors are just itching to pour money into "green" manufacturing and will happily do so if the British government, incidentally while balancing books in extreme disarray, arranges a bit of that "education"/job training for the country's "skill and application"-lacking proles that '90s-era neoliberals always sang as the solution to every problem, and likewise arranges for there to be a few more psychiatrists to aid with their mental health "issues," as if that were all that was holding the country back from the "march of the makers" supposed to lead to some Promised Land of a high-productivity, high-wage economy--and the rescue of the planet to boot! (In reality, thus do Climate Change Action Plans turn instead into natural gas bridges that go on and on what seems like forever to . . . well, we'll find out sometime--and, as the centrists applaud their sniveling about "the art of the possible" as "adults in the room"-caliber "leadership," get reduced to mere footnotes in recountings of the history when anyone bothers to actually write any.)

Still, amid all that a couple of details did catch my eye.

One was Starmer's enlarging a bit on the plan for a British sovereign wealth fund he mentioned in passing in the keynote address. He says that his government would "use it to manage risk on the critical investments we need to become a green growth superpower. But also--to create spill-over opportunities for businesses and supply chains right across the country in manufacturing and services." (It's still hazy in the extreme--the more in as, in line with New Labour tradition and yet more of the rhetoric he is adding to the stock of cliché by way of repeating so much of it from prior speeches--he insists that "sound money . . . come first," and the government not only have every policy "fully costed" but "reduce debt as a share of our economy," even if "this means . . . we won't be able to do . . . good Labour things . . . as quickly as we might like." Still, it's a little more than we got the last time.)

Another, more surprising bit, was his reference to Britain's "robot density," Starmer remarking that "Britain has fewer industrial robots than almost every comparable countries. We're behind Germany, France, Spain, Slovenia, Slovakia, Belgium--it's a long list."

This being a political speech and Starmer having much else to get to he gave no details (not his forte, anyway), but information on the situation he referenced has been easy to find.

According to the International Federation of Robotics (the main source of statistics of this kind) Britain has a hundred robots per ten thousand workers--which is below average for the world as a whole (the norm 126 per 10,000), never mind the advanced industrial countries.

Where the Group of Seven (G-7) advanced industrial countries are concerned this is about half the figure for Canada (178), France (194) and Italy (224), about two-fifths that of the U.S. (255), and a quarter that of Germany (371) and Japan (390).

Not to be neglected are the figures for the newer industrializers. If China's manufacturing output remains a long way from that of the G-7 it is on par with that of the more advanced states in this important area--with nearly the robot density of the U.S. (246), and Taiwan's figure about the same (248), Hong Kong's a little higher (275), Singapore's more impressive still (605), and South Korea in this way as in so many others, an outlier, with more than twice the robot density of any G-7 member, and about nine times the robot density of Britain (932). Nine.

Considering all this in light of other metrics, like per capita manufacturing output (which has South Korea and Germany and Japan at the top of the list, the U.S. some way down from there, Italy below that, and Britain at the bottom of the advanced country list, so far down China is coming up fast in its rear-view mirror), it seems to me that there is a broad consistency here, affirming that robot density is a meaningful indicator of a country's industrial investment, capability, dynamism. This seems to be reinforced by the fact that investment in robotics is hardly even across the range of industries most evident in high-tech, high-capital sectors. The automotive sector is at the forefront, and electronics not far behind.

The fact that Germany, Japan and South Korea are particularly formidable in those areas (and Britain, to put it mildly, is less so) seems to me to be far from irrelevant to the outcome.

Significant, too, is the fact that if the number of British robot installations is growing, and not by a little either, the country's position in 2020 suggested its falling further behind rather than closing the gap, with all that implies about what these years have meant for investment in a British manufacturing base long starved of it (and what the odds are for any more such investment, in or out of any "Green Prosperity Plan").