Take any product that you actually produce well in Scotland for X Euros per unit in M months, scale production down by 99.9%, wait 20 years for them to lay everybody off, sell off all the factories, start relying on more and more stockpiled or imported parts and overseas labor, sell off important subsidiaries, and just generally become a shell of an industry.
Now build another one using domestic labor and parts, demanding competitive bids and constant redesigns and calling executives into the legislature to harangue them for failures and tell them the budget is closed for this year because of their delays, and now tell me what coefficient I have to tack on to N and M.
Garbage in. Garbage out.
Our institutions and organizations are bad because they're running on bad morals, bad culture and bad people. If these institutions were not staffed with bad people with bad morals peddling bad organizational culture, they would no so readily produce bad results.
The bureaucrat cooking up the absurd rules, the academic writing the conclusion of some study to lead the bureaucrat to that conclusion, the politician doing the haranguing, the executive shipping it all overseas knowing it's not a long term solution, they all either a) believe in what they're doing b) know it's bullshit and don't care as long as the paychecks don't bounce. And these organizations adopt rules and policies that result in just about anyone who isn't one of those two types washing out or becoming one before they're senior enough to do anything about it.
This is only exacerbated when those projects you're trying to do become massively over budget and late. People decry it as a waste and a failure, leading to any hard won knowledge being lost yet again as those projects gets scrapped and all the people making it lose their jobs.
You don't get good making things if you only try once every 30 years, you get better by continually doing that thing, passing the hard won knowledge down through the workforce by training incoming people not from hiring "experts" and expecting everyone to be up to speed on project #1 immediately.
ROK found it easier to become world-class in building power reactors from zero than the US, UK, France and Germany has found it to re-build their capability after a decade (or more) of not constructing any power reactors. And that's true for a lot of these post-industrial industries. It is a lot harder to rebuild once lost than to build the first time.
Russia never stopped producing reactors after Chernobyl, because the USSR was a command economy and the Five Year Plan said that they needed to build a reactor here right now, and so the workers kept working even after the disaster, and now they are one of the few countries that can still deliver nuclear reactors. Note that this is NOT an endorsement of a command economy.
But I agree it's a good question, how much inefficiency can you accept to revive a branch of industry, how long do you have to wait before you decide to throw the towel ?
"Originally intended to come into service in 2018 and 2019 respectively, both ferries have been delayed by over five years, and costs have more than quadrupled to £460 million"
The Scottish government tried to do what commentators here are saying is the "right thing", maintaining the last gasp of a dying shipbuilding industry, but it turns out that part of the reason they were dying was not actually being able to build ships on time and under budget.
How do you tell the difference between "maintaining a strategic industry" and "throwing taxpayer money into a lossmaking business with nothing to show for it"?
> In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise
By "wise" you mean "expensive", right? Ships of all sizes require continuous maintenance to remain seaworthy.