> 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.

When you have the blueprint of what to build with a large export market ready to buy, it's easier to plan an economy.

Modern economies, unfortunately, don't have that. The capital markets are already mature. What ventures left are uncertain. When governments pick winners there, the pie really doesn't grow.

Well regulated fair markets remain the best system in history to find a way forward to grow the pie.

Unfortunately, regulators have a habit of becoming captured by winners. The markets become no longer fair. Then real growth stagnates.

Nothing works forever.

I mean, the simple answer is that people in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China are all poorer than the US and EU. Japan had decades to catch up and failed to do so. The laissez-faire approach gave people happy, low-stress, and materially rich lives.

Now, we're in a new era where national industrial capacity will at times take precedence over quality of life, and we have to make tradeoffs. But frankly it wasn't obvious that would happen again — China's policies over the past decade made it a reality.

> all the Asian miracles-- Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore-- involved heavy and widespread state intervention.

Hong Kong didn’t. Counter example disproves rule.

It’s really not surprising that people followed a successful model, given that people are fashion followers. See how there was so little variation in COVID response across countries.

This!

Until you've visited an actual shipyard, you won't realize how much it sucks as a workplace

There's a reason the moment Japan became a developed country, shipbuilding left for South Korea, and then when SK became developed, it left for China. Now it's leaving for Philippines (Japan), Indonesia (SK), India (SK, UAE), and Vietnam (SK, UAE) after the Korean and Japanese players got pushed out of China.

  1 China
  2 South Korea
  3 Japan
  4 Philippines
  5 Italy
  6 France
  7 Germany
  8 Finland
  9 Taiwan
  10 Russia

I think the biggest issue is that shipbuilding sucks as a business. Unless you are a large company with many shipyards, you are producing a small number of ships every year, and the ships take a long time to build. Any particular shipyard will likely have gaps between orders due to a number of essentially random factors. If you can't transfer the workers to other shipyards, you have to lay them off. And then you may have hard time getting new orders or hiring the people back once you have work for them.

If you are from a country with some shipbuilding, you've probably seen the same news cycle repeat from decade to decade. A shipyard gets a big lucrative order. It delivers a fancy new ship. This repeats for a while. Then the shipyard is in financial trouble, as there are no new orders. People get laid off, but the shipyard goes bankrupt anyway. And then some foreign company buys it, and the cycle starts again.

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