Richard Jones
@RichardALJones
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Professor of Materials Physics and Innovation Policy at the University of Manchester. Nanotechnology, polymer physics, regional economic growth.
Joined March 2010
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My long overview of the current state of UK science & innovation policy:
"Science and innovation policy for hard times: an overview of the UK’s Research and Development landscape"
is out as a
@TPIProductivity
Productivity Insights Paper:
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A reminder that the fundamental problem of the UK economy, predating Brexit & Covid, remains the collapse in productivity growth since the global financial crisis.
This underlies stagnant wage growth, struggles to fund public services adequately, & arguably our sour politics
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By 2030, all but one of UK's fleet of nuclear power stations will have closed down, but replacement plans delayed again, with "yet another competition to gather further evidence"
The inability of UK state to get anything done is verging on the pathological
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A sobering graph in the FT this morning. This is the real world consequence of poor productivity growth - a decade & a half of stagnant wage growth.
Nothing will change unless we do things differently.
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No sign of a recovery of productivity growth in latest UK figures.
This 15 yr long stagnation underlies all the UK's difficulties, stagnant wages, difficulty funding public services.
Why would we expect this to change, if we don't start doing things differently?
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Great graphic from
@jburnmurdoch
in the FT this morning.
Without London, the UK is a poor country, compared to the USA & NW Europe.
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Investors warn lack of availability of lab space in Oxford & Cambridge is driving companies to USA.
If more growth in Oxford & Cambridge politically unfeasible, we should build the innovation & skills systems in UK cities, like Manchester, that can grow
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The economic mess we're in was a long time building. Not, at root, caused by Ukraine war, pandemic, or even Brexit: weak economic growth has given us an economy without resilience to cope with these shocks.
Last decade & a half has seen worst GDP/capita growth in living memory
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"spending on capital projects and research and development would be the early targets for savings"
From a government that claims to put the need to restore the economy to growth above all else, difficult to imagine anything more counterproductive.
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No no no! It’s 50% of our *electricity*, not our energy. Majority of UK energy use is still directly burnt oil & gas, with ~80% of our total energy use fossil derived. The Dept of Energy should know this by now!!!
The UK is a world leader in renewables. Last year more than 50% of our energy came from low-carbon sources as we move towards
#netzero
emissions.
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Two points on today's GDP figures.
1. What matters for prosperity of individuals & sustainability of public services isn't GDP, but GDP per capita - worse than GDP, because of population growth
2. What matters isn't q-by-q growth number, but long term trend - which is terrible
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Important & rightly praised thread on why UK's problem is lack of demand for skilled people, not lack of supply. Result of chronic underinvestment in UK & resulting economic stagnation
Some important additional context: post-GFC divergence in economic performance between UK & USA
NEW: we need to talk about UK graduate wages, and the idea that Britain sends too many people to university.
American readers should stick around for the UK/US comparisons 👀
Let’s start with this: the UK graduate wage premium has fallen substantially over the last 25 years
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Does the UK's problem of stagnating productivity stem from 2008 & the global financial crisis, or were the roots of the malaise already in place earlier in the 2000's?
I increasingly suspect the latter.
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If the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine goes into widespread use, it will represent a coming of age for nanomedicine. The mRNA is formulated in a lipid nanoparticle, to protect it & allow it to enter the target cells. Not first nanomedicine in clinical use, but first really big impact.
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A naive person might think that if a country stops investing in the future, everything will seem fine for a decade or two, but then things might start falling apart...
(from )
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Personal news: I’m moving to
@OfficialUoM
, to be professor of materials physics and innovation policy. Looking forward to working with new colleagues in both science & policy, & continuing strong advocacy for science & innovation for productivity growth & regional rebalancing
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The UK's stagnation in agricultural productivity a reminder that developing & implementing new technology is important across whole economy.
R&D shouldn't just be about AI, quantum & nuclear fusion - in a successful modern economy, every sector should be a tech sector.
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Only in Soviet tractor factories is productivity the outcome of Stakhanovite hard graft.
Productivity should be the outcome of good organisation, high capital investment, & continual product & process innovation, creating products & services that people will pay good money for.
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Still no sign of recovery in UK labour productivity. This is the most fundamental issue facing the UK economy; if we don't do anything differently, there's no reason to expect things to change.
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Had a new hip. Hydroxyapatite coated stem, ceramic on ceramic. Yay for materials science.
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For thirty years, the developed world failed to invest in its future, with the UK by far the worst offender.
Living off one's capital is never a sustainable long-term strategy!
Important piece from
@MESandbu
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Here's the problem with the UK's "science superpower" rhetoric.
UK total R&D (2019) - £38.5 bn, 1.74% of GDP
China (2021) - £330 bn, 2.44% of GDP
Money isn't everything, but quantity has a quality all of its own...
China's spending on R&D reaches a new high in 2021, equal to 2.44% of GDP (vs 2.41% in 2020).
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Not one working engineer, technologist or scientist on Office for Students board. Extraordinary and telling omission.
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Not widely enough appreciated how much the UK is being left behind in the deployment of industrial robots.
Half a million new robots in factories across the world;
2,534 in the UK - fewer than Thailand.
(source )
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The overwhelming economic dominance of the UK by London is also bad for London.
If rest of the country (especially its big cities) were more prosperous, there'd be less need for big fiscal transfers, & London could keep more of the money it generates.
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The UK's productivity performance between 2010 & 2019 in international context: in the OECD, only Greece & Italy did worse.
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UK "least attractive" location for Oxford PV's factory, & it will list abroad (its pilot plant already in Germany).
Henry Snaith's discovery of organic perovskite solar cells was big UK science breakthrough, telling & depressing that it can't scale-up here
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This is why the idea "levelling up" was so important - the UK is poorer than its neighbours, because its big 2nd cities are economically much less productive than cities of similar size elsewhere.
I got the GDP/person data for all the OECD cities in The EU and the UK with more than a million residents. And then I removed Dublin (because the data's daft) and then I made this graph. And now I'll get back to reading British writing/opinions about our cities "pulling ahead".
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This data is conclusive proof that true levelling up is possible, and on reasonable timescales. It is a massive failure of UK policy that the former DDR has recovered from 40 yrs of communism faster than the English Midlands & North have recovered from 80's de-industrialisation.
The story is that Churchill ordered the destruction of Dresden by the RAF in retaliation for the destruction of Coventry by the Luftwaffe. Communism deepened the damage in Dresden after the war. But since German reunification, Dresden has caught up and overtaken Coventry.
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The USA's economy is about 8 times the size of the UK's, but it spends 60x as much on defence R&D as the UK.
The UK & France have similar sized economies & similar defence ambitions, but France spends 4x as much on defence R&D.
From this Nature article
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I've been writing a series of blogposts as an overview of where UK science & innovation policy has got to & the challenges it faces.
I planned a four part series, but it ended up being 8 long pieces
Thread with all links:
An index of issues in UK Science & Innovation Policy (1/9)
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V good of
@nature
to take our mind off current difficulties with some other upbeat cover stories
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The causes of the UK's productivity stagnation are undoubtedly complex & nuanced.
But it seems to me that UK's decision to give up on R&D in the 1990s, & rely instead on North Sea oil and a financial services bubble, might have more to do with it than generally recognised.
@Tom_Westgarth15
Dating the problem is important. UK R&D intensity fell at lot in mid-90's. Productivity growth stopped in the mid-2000s. Other stuff going on as well (I think mild Dutch disease from North Sea oil probably important too) but the time lag seems plausible for a connection.
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Where has UK's economic growth come from in last 20 years, & where will it come from in the future?
The story is told very clearly in a v interesting section of the Bank of England's latest Monetary Policy report, on the supply side.
A summary thread:
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A foundational paper for modern world - the invention of optical fibres
Without them, no internet, no on-demand video, no globalisation/dispersed supply chains
This won a Nobel Prize for Charles Kao, a HK Chinese scientist then working in STL in Essex, a now defunct corporate lab
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My last day at
@sheffielduni
(wfh of course), after 22 years. It's been a pleasure to work with colleagues in
@PhysicsShef
& across
@sheffielduni
in all my roles (inc. as HoD & PVC R&I), & I look forward to continuing connection thru many research collaborations & as an hon prof
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Quite a lot of discussion this week about the need for the UK to get serious about industrial strategy. Here's a (long) thread of links/threads on the subject...
A big prompt for this has been the changing international policy climate.
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The first part of my (possibly overambitious) attempt to give an overview of the many issues facing UK science and innovation policy right now: what are the big problems facing the nation that science and innovation can contribute to solving?
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The government not wrong in wanting to get the economy back to growth rates of the 2000's.
To do this, it needs to address drivers of productivity growth:
Innovation (including R&D), skills, infrastructure, reducing UK's regional productivity disparities
I welcome the new administration's emphasis on restoring the UK economy's GDP growth rate to the 2.5% pa we saw before the global financial crisis. The UK's (pre-pandemic) economy was about 15% smaller that it would have been had the 1965-2008 trend continued
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The UK's industrial policy for several decades was not to have an industrial policy. This was a deliberate choice, based on a set of assumptions about the economy & the world that have not aged well.
After Huawei, former GCHQ boss Robert Hannigan tells
@BBCr4today
a failure of industrial policy left us dependent on China. I’ve been covering this area for 25 years and from Marconi to ARM UK governments have stood by as our best tech firms have either failed or been sold
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Is the UK economy more R&D intensive than we’ve previously thought? Some very preliminary thoughts from me on the recent revisions of business R&D estimates from
@ONS
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The rusting cars and square steering wheels of the 1970’s are legendary - and yet…
Cumulative real GDP/capita growth over the decade that
@nickmacpherson2
ran the Treasury, with impeccable orthodoxy, was just 5%.
The economic turmoil of the 70's produced cumulative growth of 21%
Too right. In the end protectionism makes consumers and taxpayers worse off. Subsidising British Leyland and De Lorean in the 1970s and 1980s was not a happy experience. Better to focus on supporting innovation, skills and invetment.
#freetrade
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The economist John Cochrane watched the film "Free Solo" & wrote a blogpost about what the success of rock climbing teaches us about economic growth (h/t
@DianeCoyle1859
&
@TorstenBell
).
I'm not convinced, at some length, here (it's been a wet afternoon):
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If Sunak's hesitation about rejoining Horizon is simply a recognition that, 2 years after the TCA, financial terms need revisiting, fine.
If it reflects a desire by Treasury to micromanage the R&D budget, & an aversion to stable multi-year budget settlements, very much not fine.
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To get productivity & wages growing again, we need to rebuild innovation & R&D capacity outside London & the SE. My new paper suggests how to go about this, with more focus on translational research for health & low carbon energy:
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"Should Cambridge double in size?"
My blogpost: is it more politically & practically achievable to double the size of Cambridge, or increase productivity of Greater Manchester by 4.2%? (with same effect on UK economy)
& I suggest non-zero sum way forward.
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Comparing the recoveries of the UK & US economies from the global financial crisis & the pandemic.
It looks like there's starting to be a real divergence in the post-pandemic performance.
(Plot is real GDP per capita, indexed to the pre-GFC peak, semi-log plot)
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Very pleased to be joining the government's R&D Place Advisory Group. A good sign that Minister
@ASollowayUK
is chairing it personally.
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How's that productivity recovery going? Oh.
(5/7/2019 ONS data).
If we lived in a rational world, the collapse in productivity growth since the global financial crisis would be at the front of all political discussion, the origin of stagnate wage growth & sour politics
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Astonishing upward revision of estimated amount lost to fraud & error in R&D tax credit scheme: £1.13 billion in 20/21 (previous estimate £336 m)
Imagine what HM Treasury would think if the research councils lost £1 billion to fraud
Via
@RianCFFWhitton
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I'm still reading/listening to commentators asserting that the recent ONS upgrade to the UK's GDP figures puts our recent economic growth record in a much better light.
They don't, it's still dismal.
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Since "long-term plans" are back in vogue, a reminder of the fate of a previous "long-term plan"
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Important piece from
@dsmitheconomics
- productivity stagnation is UK's no 1 problem, direct cause of wage stagnation & difficulties funding public services adequately.
Long term industrial/regional strategy needed.
If we carry on doing the same things, we'll get the same result.
Great piece from
@dsmitheconomics
in the Sunday Times this morning. “The 8 things politicians should be talking about (but aren’t)”. Number 1 on the list? Productivity stagnation
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Here's the trajectory of UK govt R&D spending as announced in today's budget.
£22 bn target has been slipped from 24/25 to 26/27...
...but increases are real & substantial
...big jump between 2022 & 2023 - this front-loading needed to attract business investment needed for 2.4%
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I've just declined an invitation to speak at a for-profit conference in London, because they won't pay my travel expenses from Sheffield, & I don't see why I should find £200 to subsidise their business. Their reply enough to provoke me to
@tomforth
style militancy...
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In a long blogpost, I ask whether the transhumanists' dream of "uploading" their mind to a computer is possible (no).
http://t.co/TV923Etjfk
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As discussions about a possible bail-out of research universities continue, a reminder that for many unis, the surplus on overseas students is roughly same size as total block grants for research.
The UK's research system has been propped up by this cross subsidy, now at risk.
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It's 200 yards from the Department of Education
@educationgovuk
to the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
@beisgovuk
. It might as well be a million miles.
We won't solve our productivity problem unless we think about skills and innovation together.
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The prospect of two lost decades of pay stagnation, unprecedented in living memory. The underlying cause is the failure of the UK economy to return to productivity growth after the global financial crisis.
From our new report - the living standards crisis will stretch well beyond this winter into next year. Real earnings are forecast to continue falling until at least mid-2023, by which time all real pay growth since 2003 will have been wiped out
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Visualising the UK's place in the world:
share of value added in knowledge & technology intensive industries (aircraft; computer, electronic, optical products; pharma, R&D services; software & IT, electrical; IT services; machinery; medical instruments, auto, weapons)
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The Catapult Review is out!
Shorter version: they work, stop endlessly reviewing them.
(But: more collaboration with uni research base, stronger role driving regional clusters for levelling up, more involvement with skills at all levels, work on EDI)
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Here's the corresponding graph for productivity. As
@nigel_driffield
reminds us, "productivity isn't everything, but in the long run its almost everything".
@TPIProductivity
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The road from Alasteir Crowley to nanotechnology is direct, running through Jack Parsons and Richard Feynman. A true story, weird enough for
@MJohnHarrison
:
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Rolls-Royce job losses - many highly skilled engineers/data analysts - in a v. high productivity sector, illustrate the risk of permanent post-crisis scarring to the economy. Need to redeploy this talent & capacity in areas like low carbon innovation.
Derby is a very productive city. High R&D, advanced manufacturing, an economy more like German cities than most UK ones. The trickle out (more like a flow out) of money from that success makes Derbyshire and Leicestershire very prosperous. But basing so much on planes 'n trains?
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And, as I wrote back in 2019, "If new nuclear doesn’t get built, it will be fossil fuels, not renewables, that fill the gap"
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Great set of reflections on the UK’s deep problems of over-centralisation and regional economic disparities from
@ManchesterMill
Featuring deep insights from
@oldtrotter
@DianeCoyle1859
and
@emmerich_mike
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"The missing £4 billion: making R&D work for the whole UK".
A report by
@thomasforth
and me, published by
@nesta
today. Really grateful to
@JJenRae
for giving us the opportunity to work together on this project
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Pt 2 of my overview of big issues facing UK science & innovation policy:
- why 2.4%?
- the UK: good at research, bad at innovation - what's behind the cliché?
- is the productivity of science slowing down?
- on the geographies of science & innovation.
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How excited should we be about today's upward revision in the GDP figures?
Not very, in the context of a long view of economic growth in the UK, and its crisis of growth, now well into a second decade.
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The UK government published a new Innovation Strategy recently. It's a useful and interesting document, signalling another stage in what could be quite a radical reshaping of the UK's innovation system, but is not yet a strategy, I argue in my blogpost:
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It all comes down to productivity growth - or the lack of it. The UK's post GFC economic model is broken, and we have not yet come to terms with that.
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The BioNTech vaccine relies on entirely new technology, using the machinery of our bodies' own cells to make the antigen. I try to explain how mRNA molecules are packaged & delivered to achieve this here:
Nanomedicine comes of age with mRNA vaccines
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The UK’s top six productivity underperformers - just 6 industry sectors account for 60% of the UK's productivity crisis. My blogpost on the need for sector-by-sector level understanding of what's going on & why innovation is slowing
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For origins of today's 5G/Huawei tussle, look back to the death of the UK's electronics giant GEC, killed (with a big slice of the UK's R&D capacity) by a preference for making deals over developing better products.
@chakrabortty
in today's Guardian:
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Great to see Science Minister
@CSkidmoreUK
endorsing regional "levelling up" of R&D spend in context of overall doubling of public science budget - not North v South, but all parts of UK reaching their potential, driving up productivity & living standards
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A useful counterpoint to those who think that Europe can't do tech; underlines how powerful the Eindhoven deep tech cluster is.
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It's that time of year where I get my silly putty out, to demonstrate the marvellous phenomenon of viscoelasticity to my
@UoMMaterials
Materials Science students (action speeded up by x7680)...
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On the £22 billion target for UK government R&D - will the PM's ambitions for the UK to be a "science superpower" survive hard fiscal times? My blogpost:
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An industrial strategy to accelerate the development of plant-based meats sounds less glamorous than developing nuclear fusion, but it could be just as important in fighting climate change (and quite a bit cheaper), I argue in today's blogpost:
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A great thread shining light on just 1 part of the material base of future net zero economy - UK industrial strategy needs to pay much more attention to the speciality chemicals and materials that are where the value will be found in batteries, fuel cells, electrolysers, PV etc
Because the gritty reality of how batteries are made is often skirted over in most reports.
But the deeper you go the more fascinating it gets.
So before we get to the stuff u know about - the gigafactories & lithium mines - let's ponder this place. Why? It's the missing link..
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Very good to see ex-science minister
@SamGyimah
making the case for a better balance of R&D spending across the UK: 41% of public R&D goes to just 3 of the UK's 40 subregions.
Details in my blogpost "Making UKRI work for the whole UK":
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As GDP bounces back towards its pre-pandemic level, worth remembering how anaemic economic growth was over whole decade+ since global financial crisis. Recent growth in real GDP per capita worst of post-war period, including the notorious 1970's. Why not more politically salient?
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"What next for UK Industrial Strategy?" A blogpost in which I try to interpret some recent announcements from the government - and suggest that whatever the government decides about the future of industrial strategy, it needs to get on with it...
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Another example of the UK’s two decades of underinvestment (see also energy, transport).
If you stop investing for the future, you can seem to prosper for a while, but the future does eventually arrive…
We’ve built a political economy that institutionalises short-termism.
@mikelode1
@cllrbridget
the conflict between Cambridge’s local leaders and central government highlights the challenges the UK’s faces in delivering big building projects after decades of under-investment. UK hasn’t built a reservoir for 30 years! See this from
@theboysmithy
@ft
/7
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Good piece; like the author, I'm surprised & frustrated at the apparent lack of appreciation by the UK’s political and commentating classes (with honourable exceptions) of how serious the nation’s economic predicament has become.
Me writing in
@ForeignPolicy
on the growing disconnect between Britain's dominant elite-driven narrative of a successful, well-run economy & the reality as experienced by much of the country's population. The bigger this gap grows, the greater the risk of political instability.
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First outing on rock for my new ceramic & titanium hip. Seems to work
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Really pleased that my parents have just received their Covid vaccination. They report a painless, efficient, brisk but friendly process. So good that the most vulnerable are now being vaccinated, my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has made this possible.
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In a new report from
@nesta_uk
out today,
@jameswilsdon
& I argue that UK science & innovation policy is over-dominated by big biomedical science. We need to look again at balance of types of health-related research - and where we do it.
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When Prime Minister said in his speech:
"there are some days when wind & solar are delivering more than half our energy needs"
... it's not energy he's talking about, but electricity. Most of our energy still comes from burning fossil fuels.
V important to get this right.
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"Science and innovation policy for hard times: an overview of the UK’s Research and Development landscape"
A revised version of my blogpost series, now available as a (long) PDF, a
@TPIProductivity
Productivity Insights Paper:
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Another reminder that the UK's problem isn't that "robots are taking our jobs", but that UK industry isn't adopting new technology fast enough to stay competitive and drive productivity growth. From
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Given that energy cost and security is so much in the headlines now, it's worth remembering how much UK govts withdrew from energy R&D in the 80's & 90's. Good that it's rising again, but there's a lot of capacity & lost ground to make up.
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The UK has a serious productivity problem.
The solution will come through developing skills & innovation.
The govt formed an Industrial Strategy Council of experienced industrialists and experts, chaired by Andy Haldane, to tackle the problem.
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Important to remember that the productivity stagnation is not a recent phenomenon; it dates back to the global financial crisis - and its roots probably go back further.
No sign of a recovery of productivity growth in latest UK figures.
This 15 yr long stagnation underlies all the UK's difficulties, stagnant wages, difficulty funding public services.
Why would we expect this to change, if we don't start doing things differently?
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What would it mean to "level up" research spending across the UK? From my evidence to the Commons Science & Technology Select Committee
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A really interesting episode, highlighting the paradox that UK ranks as no 4 on the global innovation index, yet it's close to bottom of the leave on productivity growth.
V good discussion digging below the aggregate, highlighting both UK's strengths & weaknesses in innovation.
How well does the UK translate academic research into commercialised innovation?
@asvalero
from
@POID_LSE
discusses on
#productivitypuzzles
with
@GI_Index
's Sacha Wunsch-Vincent & TPI's
@bart_ark
.
Listen to the episode:
Subscribe:
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This is a v important point that tends to be forgotten in the towns vs cities argument. The UK's problem is not that cities like Manchester are booming, & towns like Wigan are left behind. It's that big cities outside London are underperforming & can't lift their hinterlands.
@resfoundation
This bit of our discussions I've got no worries about. For all the hype, Greater Manchester is a weak economy compared to Lyon, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Munich. Which I forget people don't know, but now make myself repeat. Which I did.
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Good critique of the "moonshot tendency" in industrial policy from
@chakrabortty
. Worth adding that the real "moonshot project" of 50s & 60s was to be able to land a nuclear weapon anywhere on earth's surface; actual moonshot a spin-off from that.
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75 years ago my grandfather, Len Jones, on parade in a PoW camp in Silesia, was told by the commander the war had ended, the Soviet Army was 5 miles east, the Americans 40 miles west, the gate was open, goodbye. He walked west (but didn't get back to Aberystwyth until August).
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Contrary to what some politicians would have us believe, not all foreign direct investment is good for a country.
This short thread makes a very important distinction between two types of FDI, as important for the UK as for France.
1/3
This article implies that there is a contradiction between France's encouraging foreigners to invest in France, and France's discouraging investors from buying French companies, but that's only true if both kinds of investment are the same.
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