We buy local brands of shoes that are in inr 300-2000 range and that solves like 70% of the shoes market in India. From shoes to skippers to formal shoes to ladies heels and such. Then you gave INr 3000-8000 that are considered really really expensive.

Convert that to usd and you will see how much premium is being charged.

Perhaps. But does a subsidized industry retain competence, or retain incompetence? After all, if you're making a profit no matter what, what incentive is there to do well?

Many of the EU farming and fishing subsidies are to NOT produce anything.

That often depends on the structure of the subsidy.

"We will pay you 5 euros per kg of fish sold in supermarkets to consumers" is different from "We will pay you 500,000 euros a year to keep fishing".

There is a very reasonable argument in fisheries starting at least a century ago (and locally long before that), that we're looking at a partially renewable good - that it would be easy to cause an unsustainable population collapse with unrestricted harvesting, and so you should try and intervene in the market to sustain fish populations and stabilize harvests. Subsidies intended to do this are distinct from subsidies intended to keep fishermen employed fishing.

> If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money

I feel like money is overwhelmingly how we denominate value, effort, and agency in our society. Almost every time somebody says "You can't just throw money at the problem", they are arguing that we shouldn't even try that, contrary to all established reasoning about how society works.

There are diminishing returns to funding, but the people who use this expression are typically at a tiny fraction of where we would expect to hit them.

If you want to have a fishing industry because fish are your idealized heritage, then choose to subsidize it heavily either to continue to exist, and/or to expand it into waters and economies of scale where you can still fish profitably. Like the Japanese and the Chinese do, respectively.

You need to pay money to people who will put in effort and agency. You can't just throw money at random people and expect something useful to happen. Sometimes, the people who will make things happen if you throw money to them don't exist. Sometimes, you have to turn people into those people (which also costs money).

Money is something you give people so they can eat and stay warm while they do the thing you want. They still have to be doing the thing you want. Sometimes there's enough reputation and legal threats on the line that you can assume the person will do the thing just based on the fact they're taking money from you and not freaking out. Companies do things this way a lot - individuals not as much.

The abstraction is not the territory, and the idea that money denominates value is an abstraction... often we define "value" as "that for which money is exchanged", making the abstraction tautological, at no gain. This is often done by people who want to think the thing they're spending a lot of money on is very valuable, or want to make you think the thing you're spending a lot of money on is very valuable.

> You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas

This is exactly what Dr. L. J. Hart-Smith wrote in "Out-Sourced Profits – The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting", a paper from 2001 https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2014130646...

See also How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/, where the author asks, "In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain?"

Once you've outsourced everything except the management work, the organization forgets how to do the thing they're supposed to be managing.