> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture
That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.
The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.
Of course, the government could weigh in, could incentivize, could subsidize, could propagandize, etc, to encourage us to actually build domestic industries. But that would be a titantic course reversal that would take decades of cultural change.
Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.
I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.
I think R&D for tax reasons needs to be changed, we had so many tech advancements used to this day from Bell Labs. Now only Microsoft, Google, Apple etc can afford to do R&D and so all the innovation is essentially only worth while to them if they can profit from it.
Granted I do think if you build something innovative you should be able to monetize it, but it takes investing a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money.
From a statistical point of view, that's probably to be expected. Kind of like how open umbrellas get rained on more.
When a hard-to-hire minority gives way to a big growth in the workforce, by definition the majority arrive after the change.
I’ll also challenge the assumption that these companies only do R&D if it’s immediately profitable. For example, Microsoft and Google both are investing heavily in quantum computers despite the fact that it’s unclear that that is a profitable endeavor (or profitable to be the ones putting the upfront capital so early). Google also has the X moonshot lab that is trying to do similar things to Bell Labs. I think there’s just a lot of romanticism of the golden age when developments were relatively easier because we hadn’t exhausted the low hanging fruit of applied quantum and material sciences.
Lasers? Information theory? Transistors?? Silicon tech in general? If you think hype-&-wishful-thinking-driven Google now or ever can be compared with Bell Labs.. you might just be a recent immigrant. The atmosphere at BL, I'm told, was way different. More an indefinite excitement (what can we do with quantum??) rather than the definite, closely guarded, superstition of Thiel ("quantum computing is the next big secret!!")
(Or maybe it's just that old subdued Jewish atheism of the East Coast vs the neurotic ambitious religiosity of California!)
I'm less biased against your low-hanging fruit framework.. still, I suspect that a rival framework based on the minimal attention paid to teaching undergrads at American universities would surpass it. I.e. materials science knowledge base has been spreading only about as quickly as the Baumol cost disease
2 other issues,
Even if there are low-hanging fruits in STEMM (of which I think there are still aplenty), infotech and especially advertising fruits are thought to be strewn all over the floor.
With AI, both thinkers & doers get into this weird emo haze of hubris+laziness, expecting neuro-furniture rearrangement to turn magically into paradigm shifts
They have to invest in the innovation. Investor returns for most other companies are based on copy and paste.
(I regret to inform you that HN are still withholding my comment upvote privileges)
*Because the gender of their founder is Kind Inventor
Patents do not work - because the rule of law does not exists without the international order and goverments have a tendency to trade away such cases for protection of big players.
But you have to take out a copy of the patent in EVERY country you want protection. Most companies don't do this and then whine about copies.
And lest someone whose never done it says they don't work: note how diligently generic drug companies wait for patents to expire.
2) An of course it doesn't prevent IP violations - Eurocopter (now Airbus helicopters) had to spend millions to enforce their patents against the thieves* at Bell helicopter.
https://www.bananaip.com/intellepedia/bell-helicopter-v-euro...
* not my preferred choice of words, but its the tone on this forum.
> The court held that the landing gear certified and sold by Bell Helicopter on its Model 429 helicopter, namely the Production Gear, does not infringe the Eurocopter patent. The court invalidated all but one claim of Eurocopter’s patent. Bell Helicopter is, therefore, free to continue all use and sales of its Model 429 helicopter with its existing landing gear.
So it doesn't infringe and they can continue to use the landing gear. But then
> In addition to awarding to Eurocopter damages and punitive damages, the judge also issued an injunction enjoining Bell from manufacturing, using, or selling the infringing landing gear, and also ordered Bell to destroy all infringing landing gears in its possession.
What? I'm clearly missing something here.
I would actually consider this to be an desirable side effect: if you want governments to enforce your monopoly using their state authority, you better pay for this really well. :-)
However. Bell Labs did it, so what sort of humility existed then that (mostly) does not exist now?!?
("Unintentionally moderate"[1-2] business thinkers like PG/YC partners do it all the time)
Wonder if hubris is necessary for continued survival of the economy.
>Have to be an asshole or something
[2] https://archive.today/latest/coralcap.co/2022/02/why-japanes...
There are numerous examples of whole competencies were transferred to a foreign partner, leaving only sales and marketing in the US. TV's for example, gone by 2000, leaving only a swirl of patent walls to further prevent them from coming back. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2014/10/22/america...
And research? DEC WRL, Bell Labs, Xerox Parc ... Which corp has the gumption to fund any of that again? They'd rather pad the current quarter than invest in the next.
(I'd assume Amazon & Microsoft are too clever, too well-run for their own good/our eptification)
A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when forgiving the loans is considered taxable income, and you would have people screaming about "abusive" companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right after they give you $200k worth of training.
Because it would be very easy to abuse. It would be oh-so-easy to give an employee training worth $200k - in the company's estimate - and then force them to stick around for years.
"But nobody made them agree to that!"
Sure, and nobody makes anyone take on a bad loan from a shady car dealership, or a bad mortgage sold by the same people who tanked the economy, etc., etc.
And to amplify your point just a bit, if the alternative is losing your healthcare and possibly going homeless, what does "agreeing" even mean anymore?
And...why are people immediately quitting to work somewhere else? Your idea of addressing the problem is by saddling employees with debt and forcing them into literal wage slavery rather than fixing the problem of companies not paying people enough to stay.
50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but the first set of training should have paid for itself before you’re offering the next.
Why not?
> 50k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but is hardly a major risk.
"Pay 50k for training and then pay a salary bump" is more expensive than "just pay a salary bump to the person the competitor was a sucker enough to pay 50k to train", so how does that work?
Nope. Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care.
Companies do all kinds of objectively dumb things due to poor incentives.
How does that change the number from the perspective of the employee?
The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years. The problem is, the employee who has just received $50k in training will take whichever job pays more, so the employer who paid the $50k has to offer the same salary as the one who didn't. And then who is going to pay the $50k when they could get the employee that someone else paid the money to train, for the same salary?
No, you generally need more than 1 set of training over 40 years.
Bob’s been with you for 6 years but you’re about to make him redundant and pay unemployment insurance. Meanwhile you’re looking at 10k of onboarding costs for a new role. Suddenly 10k or possibly significantly more worth of training is saving you money and getting you an employee who is dependable and already knows the business. Yet you almost never see this happening because it’s just got to be cheaper to get someone else to pay for training.
As to stealing employees from companies that just did 5-15k or whatever worth of training, they have onboarding costs and on top of that need to offer more money to get someone to swap jobs. Convincing people to swap jobs is really expensive unless the other company is paying significantly under market rates so don’t do that after you just trained someone.
Could you please inform my managers who keep pestering me about career growth of this shift so I could just focus on the work? ktnx
But I'm sure what you're describing is common in the general case.
Maybe only tangentially related to your post, but this has been on my mind a lot lately. After many years of doing all kinds of tech and business consulting gigs, I decided to somewhat specialize over the last 3 years and have been spending some time on LinkedIn this year.
What I can't figure out is how (arbitrary percentage) 30% of the people I follow do any work when they are on LinkedIn posting/commenting on posts _all_ day.
It's not much different in other industries though, so many layers of subcontracting to finally get to a potentially illegal immigrant that does the actual work.
Managers should facilitate training to improve employee productivity and help prepare them for a promotion. But that isn't really the same as career growth.
On the contrary, from the 40s to the 70s (possibly well into the 80s) the corporation was heavily invested in your career. Employees were expected to dedicate their lives to the firm, and the firm, in turn, was expected to take care of them. This "free-for-all" employment model is fairly recent.
Edit - added source (1993): https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/employers-employees-no-...
Career growth has always been a shared responsibility between employees and employers. In white-collar fields--especially medicine and engineering--education has long been frontloaded, with formal schooling as the main on-ramp.
Blue-collar jobs, by contrast, have relied more on trade schools, mentorship, and hands-on training. These pathways have steadily eroded since the 1980s.
Much of this traces back to the Open Door Policy with China and the broader Free Trade Agreements that followed. These moved massive segments of industry offshore--along with the structures that once incentivized long-term employee development through education and skill-building.
Revitalizing domestic industry could reintroduce competition among employers, which in turn could restore the pre-1990s incentives for long-term investment in the workforce.
Of course, in the end it doesn't really matter, it is all Orwellian anyway.
(So the same sort of mercenary treatment that employees get)
Buildings are often leased and are therefore not capital at all.
That's right - by keeping output constant (e.g. through automation) while reducing capital!
A huge part of her job is recruiting and hiring. Part of her pitch is proactive career development.
Paraphrasing: I want you to join our team. I also understand that this job is just one stop on your journey. While you're here, what can I do to help you get the skills and experience you want for your next job?
Consequently, she has a HUGE network, built over decades. Something comes up and she knows just the right person. She has her pick of new opportunities.
Wouldn't you love to have her as your boss?
I've had precisely 2 bosses in my career that had any impulse for nurturing, mentoring, career development. Whereas I've tried to be that kind of boss, given the limits of our current system.
Your mentors are your peers at work which can include your manager. Career growth is the accumulation of both knowledge and experience which is beneficial to both parties so I dont understand how those are misaligned unless fraud is involved.
I don't know how you could believe that career growth interests are aligned between employees and their managers. For the majority of employees, their optimal career path will involve changing companies at some point. This is generally not in their current manager's best interest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698197 ("The best advice I ever got was from a mentor who told me: Your network is your net worth but only if you give more than you take.")
It was otherwise. And is IS otherwise in many other rich countries, as well as not-so-rich ones.
In these places, the employer-employee relationship is more of a relationship and less of a transaction to be reassessed every morning.
If you don't believe it, because you've never seen it, then you are probably American, probably young. And seeing other possibilities is a good reason to study (modern!) history, and to travel.
In criminal enterprise drug mules and prostitutes often subscribe to this business model. Drug mules will transport drugs as part of an illegal enterprise and are paid by criminal organizations that have vested interest in the successful completion of the logistical services provided by the drug mules. Likewise, in some geographies prostitutes will voluntarily pay pimps a percentage of their earnings in exchange for physical security and those pimps stake the value of their services on the success and reputation of the services they provide to their prostitute agents.
You also have to understand most of the software industry loves to bitch and cry about all these problems they see in hiring and practicing and yet don't really want any of these problems to be solved.
This is it. Aside from manufacturing, most recent AI startups are almost universally aligned in the desire to use it to reduce headcount. It's plastered all over their landing pages as a selling point: "use our product and you won't have to hire people."
Business culture is eating its own young and hollowing out the future with such empty goals and sales points.
I'm skeptical of actual results. There are a lot of layoffs attributed to AI but far fewer cases of increased sales attributed to it.
it's not eating its own young. It's externalizing the costs.
And it's understandable, because the cost of employees are perhaps the largest line item in the budget.
We can go back to stakeholder capitalism.
Unless a stakeholder can become a stakeholder without putting in risk capital of course.
Yup!
Do you have a stake in whether the people in your community work unsafe jobs for poverty wages?
Yup!
From Claude:
"Stakeholder capitalism is a model where businesses focus on serving the interests of all parties affected by the company's operations - including employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. The core belief is that companies should create value for all stakeholders, not just investors.
Shareholder supremacy, on the other hand, is a model where a company's primary or sole purpose is to maximize returns for its shareholders. This view, popularized by economist Milton Friedman in the 1970s, holds that businesses have no social responsibility beyond making profits for their owners while following the law."
Shareholder supremacy is a recent meme and it's wildly, obviously antisocial.
'We just don't want to employ people' is a gross simplification. We do want to employ people, and lack of skilled labor is a serious problem which has hampered business growth for years,
The first unspoken problem is that very few young people want to live where many factories are located. I can't blame them. I certainly jump through hoops to live in an area well removed from the industry I work in but not everyone has this luxury.
The second is psychological. How many kids do you know who are ready to commit to a future of 35+ years of factory work in their early twenties, even with reasonable pay. This influences manufacturer's hiring practices because of the 'skilled' labor thing. Putting time and resources into training employees when there is a high probability they will make a career change within 3 years isn't really acceptable.
This is HN, so I don't know if this resonates but as a thought experiment, would you take a welding/machine operation/technician position for 25 - 45 USD/hr (based on experience)? Overtime gets you 1.5 base rate and health insurance + dental + 401k is part of the deal. All you need is a GED, proof of eligibility to work in the United States and the ability to pass a physical + drug screen on hiring. After that, no one cares what you do on your own time if you show up, do your job and don't get in an industrial accident. Caveat, you have move away from anything remotely like a 'cultural center' but you do have racial diversity. Also, you will probably be able to afford a house, but it won't be anything grand or anywhere terribly interesting.
There is a dearth of applicants for jobs exactly like what I've posted. Why don't people take them?
It's pay. It's always pay.
You gave a range so I'm guessing the lower end is starting out, why take that when nearly every entry level job, with far less demand, pays about the same?
Start your pay at $45/hr and people will flood in. If they aren't, it's because the factory is too remote for population to get to. Put that factory in any mid to large midwestern city and it'll be flooded with applicants.
How do I know? About an hour south of Louisville, Amazon keeps building giant warehouses and hiring workers, and people fight over those jobs. They don't pay half of that.
Indeed.
I attended an injection molding conference and one of the panel discussions was about the poor state of hiring and retention. I stayed expecting to hear the standard complaints about the fact that injection molding was considered "obsolete" (really?), the pipeline was too weak so wages were out of hand and there was too much churn. I was interested in which companies were hiring off the people so much that it warranted a panel session.
Then I heard the complaints of what their primary competitor was: Amazon warehouses. They were losing injection molding workers to freakin' Amazon floor jobs!
I lost it and lit off on an absolute rant about how if a company couldn't keep their employees from joining one of the objectively worst employers in the country then they absolutely deserved to go bankrupt.
I, very suddenly, made both a bunch of friends and a bunch of enemies that day.
This is for things like process workers in Petro/chemical plants, mechanics for assembly or machining, painters, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, all kinds of stuff. The government also subsidizes the apprentice program so it's very cheap to train young workers.
The people who choose this path generally end up pretty well off, being able to buy a house or apartment by like mid to late twenties and make even more later.
Making employees replaceable cogs is what industrialization was completely about. It's what happened during globalization. Think about all those seniors who lost their jobs when the factory went overseas. That was successful in large part because the distinction between a junior and a senior is not that great.
There would be some exceptions here for management and execs, but we are not talking about them here.
No it wouldn't, because a senior worker wouldn't be around to say things like "oh yes we use a jig under this circumstance that we keep over here <points>". Every business has ton of institutional knowledge like that.
To be clear, I'm not actually disagreeing with your point, I do think it's important to have those people. But companies felt otherwise.
We've had decades of large companies laying people off (effectively) without warning, and the lessons of "don't trust an employer" are... fairly well understood by a lot of folks. If I had the promise of working some place for, say, 20 years, with a statistically 0% chance of being let go because someone wanted to goose the quarterly numbers to get their bonus... yeah, I'd have gone for it years ago. Even 25 years ago, that wasn't much of an option with most companies. Lean/Kaizen/JIT were all big movements by the 90s and ability to ramp down headcount was a requirement for most companies.
Where does 'skilled' labor for specific types of manufacturing processes come from? High school? With slashed budgets and worsening teacher/student ratios?
Businesses could step up and create environments that people competed to work at - pay decently, invest in their workers and community - but that requires a commitment to stick with the people and community even in the lean times. And most companies don't want to, or more likely simply can't, operate that way.
30 years ago I considered positions like that. Some of my family and friends did, and were there for years - decades in some cases. I don't think there's many of those left any more.
I've always been associated with mid-size (< 500 million/yr) where much of that 'wisdom' sounded good but didn't work out so well in practice. Sadly for the consulting folks, it isn't actually possible to lean out an entire supply chain and still maintain the ability to respond to market fluctuations. Being lower on that food chain, if you lay off reliable operators/maintenance during something like the COVID slump then you are screwed when business comes back because you can't rehire/train fast enough to fill orders that are needed 'next month'.
I'm not part of the target population but my guess is that a large factor has to do with people's tendency to go down the path of life that is most similar to the path they've already tread. If you grew up in a 'cultural center' it's less of a paradigm shift to take the crappy job around the corner rather than move somewhere slightly more remote to start a new career even if in the long run it could actually lead to a more decent life.
Most jobs are wholly unsustainable. You have to job hop every couple of years to keep up with inflation because God knows you're not getting a raise that keeps you comfortable.
This has led to churn and brain drain and the slow collapse of US domestic business.
It's not that people don't want to work, it's that wages have fallen so far behind the cost of living that it's financial suicide to stay in any one job. Even with all the traps like employer sponsored healthcare, most people just can't afford to be paid the pittance most businesses are willing to pay.
This is a deep societal illness in the US. We've glorified and deified the concept of greed to the point where even talking about income inequality and the unimaginable concentration of wealth is just anathema. It's seeped into the everyday consciousness in the form of "I'm the only one that matters, fuck absolutely everyone else"
I genuinely believe that America will never, ever recover until we address this. We will always be this sick and broken country until the state entirely collapses or we get our shit together and address income inequality.
I have some real serious doubts that we'll ever get there, but it's easy to be pessimistic.
This makes me think that it at least as much to do with high (unrealistic?) employee expectations as business stinginess.
Yes, indeed, in the US even a poor person is relatively wealthier than someone in a war-torn African country. But humans are social creatures. We compare ourselves not with "the poor kids in Africa", but with the business owner in the adjacent zip code.
As for "unrealistic" expectations: why do business owners expect to take an unrealistic percentage off the top of everyone's labor? What made them worthy of such a huge amount?
The US manufacturing sector is about half the size of China's in terms of value-add, but it's much smaller by any other measure. The US has focussed on high-value verticals like aerospace and pharmaceuticals, where intellectual property provides a deep moat and secure profit margins. That kind of manufacturing doesn't produce mass employment for semi-skilled or unskilled workers, but it does create lots of skilled jobs that are very well paid by global standards.
That's entirely rational from an economic perspective, but it means that US manufacturing is wholly reliant on imports of lower-value materials and commodity parts.
A Chinese manufacturer of machine tools can buy pretty much all of their inputs domestically, because China has a really deep supply chain. They're really only dependent on imports of a handful of raw materials and leading-edge semiconductors. Their US counterparts - we're really just talking about Haas and Hurco - are assembling a bunch of Chinese-made components onto an American casting. To my knowledge, there are no US manufacturers of linear rails, ballscrews or servo motors.
If the US wants to start making that stuff, it's faced with two very hard problems. Firstly, that it'd have to essentially re-run the industrial revolution to build up the capacity to do it; secondly, that either a lot of Americans would have to be willing to work for very low wages, or lots of Americans would have to pay an awful lot more in tax to subsidise those jobs.
It's worth bearing in mind that China is busy moving in the opposite direction - they're investing massively in automation and moving up the value chain as quickly as possible. They're facing the threat of political unrest on a scale they haven't seen since 1989, because of the enormous number of highly-educated young people who are underemployed in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs.
Lots of Americans want to bring back mass manufacturing employment, but very few of them actually want to work in a factory. You can't resolve that contradiction through sheer political will.
It's not even aerospace and pharmaceuticals. Any manufacturing that comes back onshore will not employ massive amounts of people.
They will automate it. Which, to be fair, will help employ some Americans. But it won't be employing them to work 9-5 in a factory. It will be used to employ Americans to build and maintain the machines building the product.
Which is about to take a huge nosedive, as both Europe and China pull back on buying critical systems from the US. And can you blame them?
There's an excellent youtube series (by a Finnish ex-military officer) on the likely impact of recent events on US arms sales to Europe. They do have choices!
Trump and Musk's threats to invade and blackmail (e.g. by cutting off Starlink) will be felt long after they're both gone.
I have worked US manufacturing and manufacturing R&D for most of my career: pharmaceutical, microelectronics, materials, aerospace, etc. The US is awesome at manufacturing when we want to be.
One problem is that "modern MBA/business philosophy" views manufacturing and manufacturing employees as a cost center and there is so much emphasis on maximizing gross margin to increase shareholder value.
So business leaders scrutinize the hell out of anything that increases the cost of their cost centers:
- employee training & development? hell with that.
- Increasing pay to retain good employees in manufacturing? Why? isn't everything mostly automated?
- manufacturing technology development? Not unless you can show a clear and massive net present value on the investment... and, then, the answer is still no for no good reason. I have pitched internal manufacturing development investments where we conservatively estimated ~50% internal rate of return and the projects still didn't get funded.
There is also a belief that outsourcing is easy and business people are often horrible at predicting and assessing the total cost of outsourcing. I have been on teams doing "insource vs. outsource" trade studies and the amount of costs and risks that MBA decision makers don't think about in these situations really surprised me initially... but now I'm use to it.
Anyhow... the US (and Europe for that matter) can absolutely increase manufacturing. It is not "difficult"... but it would be a slow process. I think it is important to differentiate between difficulty and speed.
I think you're exactly right there.
>> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture
> That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world.
I want to quibble with that a little bit. I don't have the numbers, but relative position matters too. The US could be "second-largest manufacturer in the world" if it only manufactures Dixie cups, other countries manufacture nothing, and China manufactures everything else.
My understanding is Chinese output is so huge, that even if the US had maintained steady or modestly growing manufacturing output from the 70s or whatever, it would be dwarfed by China.
The difference is China has something like 10x the number of workers in manufacturing and can efficiently take on smaller or custom work.
---
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/global-manufacturing-scor...
Our biggest exporter is Boeing and sure Boeing produces commercial aircraft but their position has a lot to do with inertia as the accountant leadership of Boeing is doing their best to destroy Boeing by nickel-and-diming every aspect with a complex web of outsourcing that will fall apart the second there is any disruption in international trade.
What China has now is the infrastructure and ecosystem to manufacture. You need some tiny screws made of titanium? Well, there's a factory that produces that down the street.
The best financial years Puerto Rico had ended when the tax incentives to be there went away. It's a real shame. Puerto Rico was #1 in production, above the US and Japan. You could buy something made in Puerto Rico and you knew it was a high quality product. Its much harder to gain back that level of quality once you've effectively killed such a culture, I can only imagine the detriment in Japan if they lost their work culture and how much harder it would be for them to regain it.
There are too goddamned many stacks to expect that your best hire is going to already have used everything you’re using. There are people who have used everything, but you’re mostly going to be hiring flakes if you look for those, not Right Tool for the Job types.
Sure, but we don't manufacture the things that are typically made in 3rd world countries and the lead time to build that infrastructure is years, and generally would result in us moving down the tech tree ladder from being a consumer economy to a manufacturing economy with all of the negatives associated with that.
It’s the sort of attitude that infected Boeing and resulted in taking them from the peak of aviation to an embarrassment. Because they don’t know how to lubricate doors or tighten screws.
Building things is hard, and requires significant technology and skills among a lot of people. A service based economy inherently looses that technology and skill.
Tim Cook interviewed and said China isn’t the low cost labor anymore it once was. China has become the place that knows how to manufacture things, especially electronics.
I agree with the unhealthy society and your statement got me thinking. In regards to health what happens when global trade is shut down and a country can not make it's own pharmaceuticals for example? About 64% of people in the US over age 18 are on prescription drugs. Some of those drugs have really dangerous rebound effects if one suddenly stops taking them. Some of those effects can be deadly, especially blood pressure drugs. Most of those drugs come from China, some from India. How quickly can each country start manufacturing and distributing it's own prescription drugs? Would that cause a quick adjustment to the culture or is that not enough?
I got back from "AI Overview": Approximately 64.8% of adults in the United States report taking prescription medication at some point in the past 12 months. This figure is based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The key phrase here is "at some point". I guess a huge amount of it is a very short 1-3 week dose of antibiotics.
"Approximately 51.2% of Americans with hypertension (high blood pressure) are currently taking medication to lower their blood pressure."
That is not a temporary thing. Most of those people will be on drugs the rest of their unnatural lives. So when the availability of said drugs is gone, 51.2% of Americans will go into full rebound and their BP will spike for several days to weeks. Their risk of stroke and heart attack will go off the charts as any ER doctor can attest to. What should we do for those poor souls?
CDC says:
Percent of people using at least one prescription drug in the past 30 days: 49.9% (2017-March 2020)
Percent of people using three or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days: 24.7% (2017-March 2020)
Percent of persons using five or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days: 13.5% (2017-March 2020)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm
It is coincidentally close to 51.2%, but not the same statement.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/pharmaceutical-tariffs-ho...
Just need to make steady progress each year with incentives that encourage large leaps in progress.
I don't think it's just that. We manufacture, but we aren't great at the entire chain. China is much better are specialized tooling, etc. We have definitely lost a lot of knowledge in critical parts of the chain.
That’s a misleading oversimplification. While it’s true we haven’t stopped manufacturing, we did offshore a massive portion of it--especially after the Open Door Policy with China and subsequent free trade agreements. That shift didn’t just change where things are made; it fundamentally altered corporate incentives. Once production moved overseas, the need to invest in domestic labor--training, benefits, long-term employment--shrank accordingly.
As an European, there have been many decades since the last time when I have seen any competitive "made in USA" product that is intended to be sold to individuals.
There are products that I buy, which have been designed in USA, e.g. computer CPUs, but none of them have also been made in USA.
When I was young, it was very different, there were many "made in USA" products that could compete with those made elsewhere.
And since every major corporation is behaving like this, even if a CEO wanted to give a shit about the country, they can't do anything about it because someone else will be more cutthroat than them and eat their lunch.
I thought that the human resources department made that obvious.
It seems great cause it’s simple and gives a nice simple answer to “what’s capitalism” and “how to make effective companies”. That intellectual (existential?) laziness is costly long term however.
The idea that “labor is cheaper elsewhere” is simply a neutral statement of economics is wrong — “lower living standards” is not just a economic measure, it’s a political statement about the value of labor and labor conditions. The US and by extension the “western capitalist world” has been exploiting labor since day 0 with chattel then later globally slavery.
The reason Japan was the biggest manufacturer exporting to the US post war, is because the SCAP forcibly rewrote their constitution to be explicitly capitalist. Read “Understanding Defeat” for detailed proof of the 7 year occupation of Japan, explicity to destroy any semblance of Japanese imperial/keretzu culture, and replace it with explicitly capitalist structure. To be fair to MacArthur, they did suggest labor practices, like unionization, but it was a thin veneer suggestion, not forced into cooperatives and syndicates.
China moved into that position post 70s, because Japanese labor began getting “more expensive.” Nixon and Kissinger saw an opportunity to exploit “cheap” labor because there were no protections for workers or environmental protections - so “opening up china,” plus the Nixon shock and floating of interest rates allowed for global capital flight to low cost slave-like conditions. This is why labor and productivity began to separate in 1971, there was a “global south” that now could be exploited.
NAFTA made Mexico and the southern americas the agricultural slave countries etc…starting in the 90s, and on and on just moving the slave-wage ball until there’s nowhere else to exploit.
It’s not a conspiracy to demonstrate that capital will move wherever it needs to in order to exploit “arbitrage opportunities.” Its good business/MBA capitalism 101.
Just like #2 in Austin powers said:
> Dr. Evil, I've spent 30 years of my life turning this two-bit evil empire into a world-class multinational. I was going to have a cover story in "Forbes". But you, like an idiot, wanted to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore. It's only corporations.
I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics.
There's places where producing A, whatever A is, is economically more efficient for countless reasons (energy prices, logistics, talent, bureaucracy, cost of labor, etc).
That's not gonna change with whatever investment you want or tariff you put.
But the thing I find more absurd, of all, is that I'd expect HN users to be aware that USA has thrived in the sector economy while offloading things that made more sense to be done elsewhere.
I'd expect HN users to understand that the very positive trade balances like Japan's, Italy's or Germany's run are meaningless and don't make your country richer.
Yet I'm surrounded by users ideologically rushing into some delusional autarchic dystopia of fixing american manufacturing for the sake of it.
I don't see a difference. If we want local industry, we must address the global geo economics.
US manufacturing accomplishes higher prices and US only reach.
(The suicide rate at Foxconn is lower than average for China.)
I'm not sure this is a meaningful point of differentiation.
- Aramark
- Avis
- IBM
- JCPenney
- Kmart
- McDonald's
- Nintendo
- Sprint
- Starbucks
- Verizon
- Walmart
- Wendy's
- Whole Foods/Amazon
Literally forced labor camps. Of course, the PRC denies these allegations, but it certainly seems like there's some forced labor due to the numerous reports across many years of a variety of forced labor operations from these camps.
Apparently 63% are serving life terms, 27% more than 20 years.
Doesn't seem worse than China's attempt to iron out a seditious, violent sub-culture that was actually detonating bombs amongst civilians? Most seem to have closed, so the maximum term < 10 years.
Neither are good ideas IMHO - but one way worse than the other? Come now.
Inmates in any prison in the US ostensibly have gone through due process and were convicted of their crimes. You can argue about whether the US justice system is truly fair, but it's (at least in historic years) certainly more fair than rounding up large portions of a specific ethnic minority for 'reeducation'.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...
If we want to strengthen America (military & economy) immigration reform is needed! This could be unpopular but such reform could be ...those who want to come here must serve in our armed forces for x amount of years and can bring two to four family members here that are able to start working and contributing to the economy immediately (pay taxes). Rounding up and getting of rid of these eager want to be Americans when we have adversaries with larger armies and we bang the drum on beefing up defense (and our economy) doesn't make sense to me.
The Roman way started to fail when they moved to the foederati model, where there would be units of, say, only Goths under a Gothic commander. That proved dangerous.
But one has to be careful: while their military was diverse, it wasn't really made of immigrants. It was simply built out of very diverse local ethnicities that were settled in the same place for centuries. Which means, for example, that when the Kaiser fought against the Turks, everyone involved regardless of language had an incentive to fight, because their own homes and freedom were at stake.
Personally this concept is a more humane one then rounding/exiling want to be Americans in which the majority are not criminals! No they are hard workers coming here for a better life, why not give that to them and in return they "Make America Even Stronger!" ;-). That's what the current admin wants beef up defense, yet to me with immigration they are taking the wrong approach!
You say it's a bad idea, so it's a bad idea for an American citizen to join the armed forces too?
This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.
Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.
> If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last
Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.
> 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated
Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's chicken tax trucks all over again.
> This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen
Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen so far. The budget is yet to come.
> If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.
This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.
(also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers, crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal migration control of hukou combined with media control?)
It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point.
But the administration attack is so ridiculously egregious and demands an even worse, government-imposed ideological alignment, that making logical arguments in this environment feels almost pointless.
Unfortunately this is the culmination of social media as a controversy machine, that promotes the worst arguments.
> ideological purity tests like required DEI statements
Example?
There's a controversy industry that cherry picks the worst examples of student-politics excess in these regards and then carefully conflates it with university policy.
As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients from the website, etc.
Diversity statements were widely suspected of being a smokescreen for racial preferences. Much like the "personality score" Harvard used to curate its desired racial makeup in its student admissions.
A total of 993 applications were received, of which 893 met basic qualifications. The LSI Committee conducted a first review and evaluated candidates based solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion. Only candidates that met a high standard in this area were advanced for further review, narrowing the pool down to 214 for serious consideration.
If you don't know, you're just spreading urban legends and ghost stories.
Do you have any substantial criticism of the factual claims made here? Or are you just insisting that this is a misinterpretation, without any evidence?
That's the problem with all the DEI hysterics - it's never given any intellectual rigor. Instead, it's all profoundly mid men telling each other ghost stories.
* UC Berkeley received 893 qualified applications
* Of those applicants, 679 were eliminated solely because their diversity statements were deemed inadequate.
If someone seeks to disprove the claim that 76% of applicants were rejected based on their diversity statements, they can find alternate figures for the numerator and denominator and offer reasons why their numbers are more authoritative.
> That's the problem with all the DEI hysterics - it's never given any intellectual rigor. Instead, it's all profoundly mid men telling each other ghost stories.
3 out of the four companies I've worked at engaged in explicit discrimination on the basis of gender. As in, alternate interview pipelines where women got multiple chances to pass coding interviews where men got one. And one company even augmented that approach with outright withholding a portion of headcount for "diverse" applicants (which was defined as women and URM men, and in practice women made up over 95% of "diverse" applicants).
If you haven't been witnessed to discriminatory DEI practices, that's fortunate for you. But that's not been the experience of many people. DEI is widely perceived as a dogwhistle for discrimination, because it often is used to refer to discriminatory hiring practices, and I don't think condescension is a way to convince people otherwise.
As I said, the entire DEI thing smacks of hysteria and paranoia. Frankly, DEI programs do very little, in general.
I have seen a lot of guys overvalue their skills and undervalue others and then blame "DEI" instead of their own mediocrity.
The companies hiring had gender quotas to meet, so this was one field where they filled a lot of their quota. Our class was exactly 50% men, 50% women. I worked my ass off, we were graded 1-6 where 6 is best and I had all 6es except one 5 in one class.
Everyone applied for apprenticeships to Statoil (now Equinor) and from our class they hired one guy with literally perfect grades, and nearly all the girls. Over 80% of the girls were accepted, girls with a grade average of 4.2 compared to my 5.9 got the job. I didn't and neither did any of the other guys in the class except one.
But I think I was also a beneficiary of DEI, because my boss once told me I couldn't quit because I was the only representative of my race in our department.
I hear all these arguments about how DEI is misrepresented, it's all about making sure everyone feels welcome at the workplace and people aren't discriminated against for their appearance, name, background, etc. It's about introducing diversity of thought to challenge the status quo and avoid group think (good luck expressing any moderately conservative opinion at any of these places though). It's also marketed as making the workforce better reflect the customer base so as to create better products for all. I am completely supportive of those aspirations and feel that DEI programs have done more harm than good in advancing them.
Many people quietly become upset when they see the comparatively mild practices like I have described. They start to wonder if they're going to be targeted unfairly during the next round of layoffs so some manger can help to improve their team's diversity score. They wonder if it's going to be more difficult for them or their kids to get a job. They don't like how any criticism of these programs is silenced and/or dismissed as racism/sexism/fascism/etc. Resentment builds, our society becomes more polarized, extremist views become more palletable, and they take their frustrations out at the ballot box.
Honestly, probably rightly, because mediocre was previous the acceptable status quo, and now they have talented competition.
> They wonder if it's going to be more difficult for them or their kids to get a job
I see. So....only certain kinds of people are entitled to jobs? Those other kinds of people don't struggle with needing jobs or having kids?
Gosh. Sure can't understand why you immediately followed up that statement with a highly defensive one about being "silenced" by being called racist or sexist lmao.
I stated factual observations of how I observed DEI being implemented, and some insight into how some perceive and react to them negatively. You're attempting to dismiss that with hypotheticals about the talent of the employees and the candidates, both of which you have no basis to make any claims about.
> So....only certain kinds of people are entitled to jobs? Those other kinds of people don't struggle with needing jobs or having kids?
This was not what was stated or implied. You do not get to take a sentence out of context, misrepresent it, and then attack your own misrepresentation.
Everyone deserves the dignity to be gainfully employed without being discriminated against based on their identity. The programs I described are explicitly designed to give advantages to some groups over others.
What has it lead to? There's some who become demoralized and resentful because they perceive their opportunities are going to be limited by their group membership. This is independent of whether these programs are actually affecting hiring decisions or not, the perception matters. It's also led to doubts when a diverse candidate does succeed. The emergence of the DEI hire meme is leveraged to downplay the accomplishments of diverse candidates.
> Gosh. Sure can't understand why you immediately followed up that statement with a highly defensive one about being "silenced" by being called racist or sexist lmao.
The misdirection to color my criticism of DEI as racist/sexist precisely proves my point. It's a tactic to silence opposition to an ideological viewpoint rather than confronting it.
Of course. The point of this kind of propaganda is to have you reacting so negatively and emotionally that you don't examine the claims calmly and rationally. Emotions > facts. If no-one appalled, then it isn't doing its job.
The other issue is that many of these schools have not been expanding enrolment numbers to population growth. Less seats per-capita mean more exclusivity over time.
Get rid of them both (DEI and legacy admissions) and the government should create a policy that those endowments need to be used to expand the size of the schools.
I literally linked an article in my comment that had an overview, but here is a more specific one that addresses diversity statements in particular:
https://reason.com/2022/09/30/mandated-diversity-statement-d...
> As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients from the website, etc.
This is literally my exact point. There absolutely should be a rational place that denounces both these diversity statement ideological requirements and the egregious memory-holing that the current administration is implementing.
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-statement-use-di...
https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/05/07/massachusetts-institute...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/us/harvard-diversity-stat...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/diversity-statements-u...
https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/diversity-statements-are-g...
Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...
More examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692945
There is no requirement on the race of the applicants.
If you look at one example of the actual assessment criteria [1], merely teaching without discrimination or exclusion earns the lowest possible score.
[1] Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement (for example, "I always invite and welcome students from all backgrounds to participate in my research lab, and in fact have mentored several women." - https://web.archive.org/web/20200302212643/https://ofew.berk...
The instructions make it pretty clear what you need to write. This seems reasonable to me as PART of a total application, but not as the gate to get into the review process.
But again, this is not the same as a quota.
> Basically these are statements where you note that you support teaching all kids
Do you really feel today's university professors need to write an essay saying they support teaching everyone?
> will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class has an inclusive environment
Again, say someone is teaching calculus, what does this exactly mean?
It's absolutely makes sense to me that a university has policies in place to ensure classrooms are inclusive and that discrimination does not occur. But these statements are nonsense.
Any policies to "ensure classrooms are inclusive" are going to be decried by some people who say that it's "unfair" for whatever reason. Because when you have a class or classes of people who have been discriminated against for centuries, who are at the bottom of the heap, they don't just magically gain parity with other classes, in terms of being able to take advantage of equal opportunity (the promise) simply because they're no longer legally discriminated against. It takes active policies, not just passive ones, for inclusivity to take root. (Once it's taken root, in time those policies may no longer be necessary.)
Yes, actually. Having it be a very explicit part of the job is a good thing. Because a lot of people absolutely need to be told.
It's why we have sexual harassment training. A lot of people don't need it, a few sociopaths will do whatever they want, but a lot of people do, in fact, need to be told to keep their hands to themselves. It really does make a difference.
>> will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class has an inclusive environment
> Again, say someone is teaching calculus, what does this exactly mean?
I honestly got a chuckle out of this, because this is the most STEMlordy thing I've heard in a while.
I'm going to presume you're male, because you'd know why if you'd been the only female in a physics or math class and made uncomfortable and singled out because of it. Often by guys assuming you're a DEI and didn't earn your spot.
Of course you don't need this.
I went to school in south Atlanta, where both student body and teaching staff tended to be overwhelmingly Black. The school had a policy of hiring a certain percentage of non-Black teachers, including white teachers, and it had programs designed specifically to attract students from white and Hispanic communities.
The goal was not to give non-Black students and teachers a leg up; it was to promote diversity and ensure students graduated ready to meet all kinds of different people in the workplace. These policies were popular and uncontroversial, at least while I was there — though I dare say they would be deemed illegal now.
Your comment evoking a victim complex on the other hand I find a far more annoying element of online discourse.
So often when I write a comment I find responses either missing the point, laser focusing on something offhand/tangential I wrote, or imbuing my post with a viewpoint I didn't make. Sometimes the fault is mine, sometimes the fault of the responder.
I state where I'm coming from not as some sort of "tribal identifier", but simply to add clarity, and to stave off misdirected responses that I can find annoying.
FWIW, that was my original approach, and I thought that the worst excesses of "wokeism" were just caricatures that the right was using to paint all on the left with a broad brush, so I was pretty dismayed when, over time, I felt that a lot of this "race first" thinking had infested many areas of elite universities. Many university professors (ones who would not have in any way identified with being "on the right") who I deeply respect have spoken out about this, sometimes at great professional cost.
You can't stake out a position without getting called some name somebody invented to denigrate that position. Welcome to modern politics on the internet.
Over time, China also developed mid/high level skills, complemented their low-skill production offering with it and now competes in new industries, new tech, etc.
So...to compete with China, the country with 4x the US-population, the solution is that low-skill labor needs to return to US....?
Shouldn't instead the focus be to again foster mid/high-skill labor, moving the part that is offshored again towards low-skill labor...?
It's not impossible to build back, but it would require long term stable policies to favor it at more levels than just tariffs.
(tariffs do nothing to address labor shortages in healthcare, teaching, and other domestic service based sectors, for example)
Trying to “Bring Back” Manufacturing Jobs Is a Fool’s Errand - https://www.cato.org/blog/trying-bring-back-manufacturing-jo... - April 21st, 2025
But the conversation here has he orthogonal goal of being competitive with China as well. I can assure you just paying everyone living wages is one of the main reasons why we are not competitive with China. It’s the main reason why China is beating us today.
So paying everyone living wages doesn’t really do anything to solve the problem because the products created by people who are paid living wages are by definition more expensive due to labor costs.
What tariffs do is they allow us to pay people living wages and sell expensive products and still be competitive because products from China are tariffed to be the same price.
They aren't though. In America, "Paying living wages" always means "pay way more", because America underpays labour and overcharges for literally everything (products, services, basic cost of living -- every product on American soil has a insane profit margin on it)
In China, "Paying living wages" doesn't necessarily mean "pay labor more", because they have stronger control over pricing and margins, so it often actually means "make orgs charge way less".
You end up with Chinese folks living in a major city in China, with a 2bed apartment that costs $200USD/month, and a meal out cost $2USD/each, cars that start at like $6k, and they get paid $5USD/hr, but they feel like they're living well, despite only making around $640USD/month, because they can save 10% of their income each month, and have like 40% of their income as discretionary spending, and still get to own their apartment.
But in the US, a 2bed apartment in a big city like that costs at least $2,000/month or more, a meal out there costs at least $20/each, and a basic starter car starts at like $26k, so you can pay someone in a ostensibly-"high labor cost" job of $20/hr, and they feel like their constantly underwater, and have zero chance of ever owning a home, because they only have like 20% of their income as discretionary spending, and they can't save anything at all. (and that's before we even mention differences like how you don't have to worry about being hit with a crazy bill for an ER visit or an Ambulance in China, but Americans have to worry about that 24/7/365).
(It's the same reason many American's dream of getting a job in Europe and leaving the US, because despite making less money-on-paper, you get to generate more real wealth and do so with less life risk and life stress)
The Factories and the labor pool and the infrastructure being absent in the US is hard to solve for, of course -- but it isn't even the hardest part of any of this. The American view of capitalism would have to be completely rewritten to be more diverse, more equitable, and more inclusive to Americans who do actual labor, before Americans could be anywhere close to competitive with most of these Chinese industries.
In fact exploitation is the reason why they are the way they are now.
Our nation's prosperity is a very recent phenomenon.
My argument is that this isn't possible. Well let me rephrase that. It is possible but you need to inflict some form of pain to get it going. Tariffs is one way to do this.
I don't think the four year presidency is enough to do this. You need to do this for at least 2 decades.
Tariffs don't do that necessarily. Maybe a tariff applied to a specific strategically important product or industry, could achieve that. Basically you are then subsidizing an important sector of the economy in a way that is economically inefficient and will make us all poorer in favor of some other interest like national security. The kinds of tariffs applied by the Trump administration cannot even achieve price competitiveness because price is nowhere in their extremely dumb equation. They cannot achieve national security because they are applied to inputs and outputs. They cannot achieve anything useful. They can only make us all poorer.
No, just no.
There is a high variance in job qualities beyond pay.
Work hours, over time, outside vs. office jobs, repetitive Vs. varied, physical and psychological impact, etc.
The important part is having a job, that you enjoy, and that allows you to live comfortably while saving for the future. It can be in IT, sales, management, maintenance, whatever - but some people will rather leave a more tangible, visceral, and physical difference in their work at the end of the day, and their preference does not make it a worse job.
No, those are not only preferences, they also have objective health impacts.
Working nights typically decreases life expectancy.
One of the foundations of conservatism is the priority of hierarchy over effectiveness. In a conservative culture it doesn't matter how well things work as long as the right people in charge.
We're seeing the limit of this now, where it's literally more important to maintain hierarchy by denying facts and rationality than to "lose face" by admitting that power isn't absolute.
You can't run a modern country like this. You can't plan for the future, make effective decisions, govern, have a working legal system, build housing, create health care - anything at all - when all decisions are made according to the whims of a despot.
Power and resources - including wealth - have to be distributed. Or at least there has to be the illusion they're somewhat distributed. Anything else guarantees terminal contraction and decay.
Instead, the offshore-destinations kept offering more and more services in the value-chain, until the entire skillset to actually create the low-skill labor processes to offshore was replaced with "let the offshore company manage".
See a list of leading US companies that are off of being king of the hill - Boeing, GE, Intel, ... leading industrial US companies continually divested from manufacturing, or shorted long term investment, not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't profitable enough in the moment. It took decades, and many dividends and stock growth was taken in the middle, but the shortfall manifests in time.
Uber still hasn't managed to make a net profit over its lifetime as a company, by the way.
I agree with the rest of your comment, though. The US public markets reward creative accounting and mortgaging the future for quarterly gains. GE and Jack Welch are a great historical example.
I also think a significant influence on the Fed was a financialized business community demanding 0% interest.
It doesn't - if you look at the situation in real terms, the amount of resources available to invest is about the same (probably shrinking because some are diverted to people who aren't creditworthy and consume them). So the major effect of artificially low interest rates is to add a whole heap of artificially supported highly wasteful companies to the mix.
All that changes is the market started rewarding people with access to credit instead of people who were responsible and effective. The credit people aren't particularly capable and it'd be better if they had been forced out.
US businesses were free to do the same over the past low interest environment, but we did not have the same incentives, not inclinations in terms of prevailing business strategic appetite for factories. In contrast, for big tech, there was interest and appetite for it and significant capability with protective moats were built - but one could argue that software based tech moats may be faster to bypass.
This is the one upside of chaos monkey crashing the economy. They aren't going to be able to drive rates back to zero in the next four years.
>Many US business elected to chase short term growth, and short term and higher margins and minimize long term investments.
I would like to add that this was due to the influence of Milton Friedman. He put the emphasis on shareholder returns being the most important, without considering the survival of the company itself.
Yes, more evolved financial markets provided easier access capital, but, as it so happens in those types of situations, access to capital and enjoyment of said (liquid/financial) capital became a target in itself, the rest of society didn't matter. In fact, the whole (Western) society was moulded around (liquid/financial) capital, it became its raison d'être.
We don’t want the Chinese making high value goods at slightly lower prices. We want Americans making high value goods and we want to push cheap stuff as cheap as possible. Next step is enforcing environmental rules on Chinese goods and requiring escrow of the funds to pay the Chinese in American accounts until the goods are inspected and pass.
Not disagree with your main points, but labor inputs are still very much a huge part of product costs, and often the biggest driver of where to build a new factory when a company is scaling up. Companies aim to build their new factories wherever there's a sufficient pool of cheap labor with the necessary skills.
Of course, even where labor cost is truly inconsequential, you would still do that as all the correlations that come alongside cheap labor are still very attractive to manufacturing.
IMHO it still is. There are tasks, especially in assembly, that for now require humans to do because robots can't match our dexterity. Stuff like mounting through-hole components like a cable from the battery compartment to the main PCB. That's a few seconds worth of time, and you need barely more than a few days worth of training to get a worker up to speed - a low-skill job. China, Thailand, Vietnam and a bunch of other places have an ample supply of people coming out of utter poverty, which means the pressure on wages is massive - a Chinese worker on average earns about 13200 dollars a year [1], an American worker is 3x-4x that amount and more if the shop is unionized. And on top of that, Chinese workers work 996, American or European workers have much MUCH more employee rights.
The problem is, low-skill employment opportunities are going down and down because automation gets better. For now, China can compete because Chinese workers are cheaper than machines... but once that changes, it's going to get nasty.
> The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor in product costs.
There's soft factors as well. Stuff like workplace safety/OSHA regulations, environmental regulations... Silicon Valley is a bunch of Superfund sites from decades of toxic emissions. China? They barely have regulations in place, and other sweatshop countries are even worse.
The core problem we're talking about anyway is that a certain percentage of any population is just, plain and simple, dumb as rocks. Over half the US population is barely literate [2]. No matter how good your education systems are, no matter how much money you invest into equality in schools, no matter how much you protect them from stuff like lead - they are dumb, will remain dumb, and probably their children will also remain dumb. In ye olde times you put them on farms, meatpacking or in factories so they had gainful employment... but that all went away, and now we got hordes of utterly dumb people with no hope of ever getting smart and, crucially, no hope of ever getting a meaningful job.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/743509/china-average-yea...
[2] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
Assuming there is no embargo by then.
The obvious answer is this:
1. it doesn't matter if our t-shirts are made in Bangladesh.
2. it does matter if our stuff is made in an enemy nation (china).
3. U.S. labor is too expensive to move back to mass manufacturing the way we used to do it, c.f. baumol's cost disease.
4. offshoring and illegal labor have suppressed investment in automation and manufacturing technology for decades, which will be painful to undo.
The sensible outcome of these facts is
1. Focus on moving everything out of china to other cheap countries with reasonable levels of human capital.
2. Focus on re-shoring critical industries.
3. Launch moonshot investments into robotics and automation. Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.
4. Invest in large-scale roll-out of SMR energy so we have reliable power for this new industrial build.
I do disagree somewhat with point 4. I think this is frequently overstated:
Building and operating automated factories is just as wage-dependent as anything else (just the coefficients are a bit smaller). You still need engineers, construction crews, supervisors, repair crews, etc. (and those could all be doing something more profitable as well).
You can see this very clearly in the EU, where there is a pretty smooth wage-gradient, and even the super highly automated automotive manufacturing has moved down that gradient towards Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, despite language/culture barriers.
> Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.
I think a decent sized manufacturing industry is a realistic goal long term. But longer term US global supremacy in it is not even a realistic goal to begin with, because not only are you gonna fight against the wage gradient now, you are also gonna face the fact that the US is only ~5% global population, and manufacturing will naturally drift towards the very biggest markets for its goods, which the US probably won't be in half a century or so, simply because of demographics and economical growth in China/India generally.
Absent sufficient jobs, or some other arrangement for the masses that provides both material comfort and some sense of purpose, you'll never get to the automation because you will likely have a revolution first.
Though after this administration I'm not sure we'll have any allies left.
Just goes to show the administration isn't working with facts and doing the hard-nosed analysis required to drive effective policy.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=manufacturing%3Bou...
You're mistaking the rhetoric he uses to sell this idiocy to the rest of the country for a good-faith argument.
I would not object to a tariff on shitty IoT devices, with the level determined by things like if the default password is "admin".
Apparently the US doesn't need allies anymore against China...
I'm looking at the first chart, "Manufacturing Sector: Real Sectoral Output for All Workers" [1]. It grew until Q2 2000, when it was at 97.2. In Q4 2024 it was at 98.6. And let's not ignore how almost all leading semiconductor manufacturing (which are in and required for nearly everything) has moved to East Asia.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHMFG
Labor Productivity (Output per Hour) for All Workers
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
agreed but Trump just gutted the CHIPS act for no other reason than because it was enacted by Biden (the typical "undo everything the last prez did" just like Trump 1.0).
You can argue that Intel is a badly run company, not worth saving etc etc, but if want to save US manufacturing, then Intel, and its ecosystem, would be the first place to start. Otherwise, TSMC, Samsung and China (still playing second-fiddle but investing billions to catch up) will dominate. Certainly better than trying to keep coal plants open.
Ideology aside it's really hard to find _any_ rational thought behind these moves.
This may be more accurate than you realize. Both Democrat and old Republican party rhetoric and policies were pro-globalization/offshoring, with the occasional exception such as CHIPS (and corn subsidies). It's not surprising nobody believed they were changing direction, if for every "we're bringing semiconductors back", they heard ten "your car is German your phone is Chinese your tacos are Mexican, how dare you interfere with glorious Free Trade!"
If you check the transcript of the confirmation hearing for the current Commerce secretary, practically every Senator brags about their state’s CHIPS funded R&D hub. Lots of growth in small and medium businesses there. And CHIPS incentive funding played a huge role in bringing the new TSMC fab in Arizona
https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/jobs/2024/04/...
I don’t believe that cost centers are a good example of returning manufacturing onshore. Or an example of a state using federal funding well.
Cost centers are not a good investment for federal funding, without a clear path to paying back our taxed dollars.
Can you elaborate on this? It was my understanding a company only pays taxes on profit. So isn't the revenue that goes into R&D effectively taxed at 0%, since at that point it's not yet profit? I.e. only dividend payouts get taxed.
The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards to bringing manufacturing back. China had it easy because they had most of what you could want; a huge labor force that could upskill to manufacturing (the rural poor population), cheap labor (kind of an extension to point 1 but also includes their lower COL and wage expectations over all), and low environmental barriers.
To bring manufacturing back to the US is a way harder lift; we have a lot tighter labor market, if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they leave. We (well I at least don't enjoy the idea of going back to when rivers caught fire on the regular) don't want to strip environmental protections back to a level to make it cheap to dispose of waste. The best targets are low labor, high price, high skill goods, like, I don't know, chip manufacturing!
I saw a headline yesterday that says there are more pets than children in Japan. How long until this is true in the US? The truth of the matter is that there is no workforce left in the United States, and will be less of one by the time manufacturing does spin up. In WWII, the Army was happy at how many of the young men there had come from farms and were familiar with using/driving heavy equipment, how many knew some welding, etc. Then after the war, that translated right back into mnufacturing there these now older men were familiar with "making things". They could do actual labor. How well will the part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers and Dollar General shelf stockers do on the assembly line?
>if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they leave.
If we could bring back manufacturing, then we would need to restructure our society such that those jobs lesser/menial jobs could go undone (or be automated). But we can't really bring it back, and they will bring in others on any number of weird visas no one has really heard of to do the lesser/menial jobs which are the only ones left. The people who set this in motion aren't even just retired, they're already dead of old age and there's nothing anyone can do about what's coming.
I know a lot of people in the Bay Area with serious fabrication skills (mainly applied to art), who would love to have a stable job using those skills in a factory setting, but who are constantly looking for gig work instead.
There were two different fabrication jobs I nearly took the last time I was looking for work. I have what amounts to a second job as a creative producer and art fabricator, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so I need a day job. All else being equal, if factory work was enough to pay the bills, I’d choose that over a full time job with a heavy mental load.
It’s easy to dismiss factory work as menial, but like, seriously watch Starbucks baristas working during a morning rush, when there are tons of mobile app orders and also tons of people in line. It’s an assembly line. Different technical skills, but similar structure and pace. And at least in a factory you can sit down.
tl;dr I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce, and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
Possibly. But they can't change the attitudes that created them from childhood up. The barista that complains on r/antiwork that their manager is a douche and that they're taking another mental health day because standing upright is too challenging for an hour at a stretch isn't going to like mandatory overtime spot welding or manning the torque wrench. Can they be taught to do it? Yeh, probably, theoretically at least. Supposing they don't get out because they'd rather be scrolling on a phone.
I can foresee this, it's not prophecy... just common sense. But I suppose other people need to run the experiment and see the results for themselves.
Out of high school, I must have worked 4 or 5 factory jobs (even in the early 1990s that was drying up), and so I have some idea what this is like. It's not a long-form media article for me. I don't think it's menial. When I use that word, I'm talking about the person at the cash register at Dollar Tree, or the job where you scrub the toilets at Wendy's.
>I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce,
Maybe. But I'm not understating its size, or the demographic projections that say it's shrinking quickly.
>and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
They'd be great. But you can't just make a magic wand and have them appear, and if you could you'd never fill the positions.
There were a lot of slower manufacturing on-shoring incentives during the Biden administration that would have presumably continued under the Harris administration. Mainly around green energy and electric vehicle manufacturing incentives - which have successfully resulted in new auto, battery, and supply chain factories being built mostly in red states - and semiconductor manufacturing. The Biden administration also maintained and increased tariffs on specific types of products coming from China including EVs.
So I don't think your categorization of the two choices Americans were given is quite accurate.
Biden's infrastructure and funding bills were basically doing exactly this, and their foreign policy largely aligned with this goal as well.
I was not a huge Biden fan early in his presidency (Breaking the rail union strike and the complete lackluster response to actually prosecuting criminality in the outgoing admin were not my desired policies - democrats are markedly too corporatist in general).
But his infrastructure bills were sorely needed practical steps to doing a lot of good for a lot of folks in the US. There's a reason so many politicians then tried to take credit for them (incl Trump).
On the other hand, keep manufacturing outside of US for cheaper labor to keep price low and having bigger margin. It's an easy choice to make.
And again this is not a US specific problem, it's almost all of countries nowadays have a massive wealth gap that makes people racing to the bottom of living / working standard.
People had the exact same concerns and fears when electronics manufacturing started shifting to Japan like 50 years ago-- they went in the same way up the value chain that China did, and they started losing a lot of the industry with rising wages, too, exactly like what we see with China => Vietnam/Indonesia/... nowadays.
I think 90% of the whole political debate about the economy is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic local wealth inequality-- poor countries lifting themselves up by manufacturing stuff for low wages is how the whole system is actually supposed to work from my perspective; describing that as "ripping off the American people" is completely unhinged, misinformed self-delusion to me.
When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate is really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII happens?
Manufacturing capability and capacity is an incredibly precious resource if you find yourself in a large scale war, and there is growing concern (realistic or not) that America has given it away/lost it. It makes no difference in peaceful times, but there is growing belief that the era of peace is coming to an end.
In fact, if you take a higher level view of what is going on, like the wanting to annex Canada and Greenland, it seems the entire motivation for it all is preparing for the possibility of war with Russia (and China).
I'm not buying that whole argument. At all. Because this looks too much like a "lets find favorable talking points for the middling plans we already put in motion"-exercise.
Can you honestly argue that current economic policy and decisionmaking was mainly driven by strategic military interests and planning, as opposed to Trump being a big fan of tariffs as a concept?
Because I don't think you can. And I think we don't need more than a glance at the liberation day proposals to identify this; if the aim was to war-proof US supply chains, then you would expect a big focus on military relevance of tariffed goods, coupled with long term investments into defense-relevant local industry and a glut of defense-spending in general.
Instead we got blanket tariffs that were so ill-conceived, they mostly had to be rolled back/suspended the next day, and generally pretty much no apparent guiding focus or much thought at all.
Concerning possible war: Russia is not a credible military opponent to the US and is not gonna be one within decades, either. Their land army basically got stopped by a country a fifth of their size on mainly donated (and frequently old) western equipment, and the Russian Navy embarassed itself even worse.
China is a somewhat credible opponent, but what would they even go to war over that would actually affect the US? Panama? They might be more serious about taking Taiwan back, but I honestly doubt that the US would involve itself in that business too much anyway; considering how the whole support for the Ukraine, whose territorial integrity it formally agreed on to protect, amounted to some military hand-me-downs and a bit of intel sharing (no longer even that from what I know?), I would NOT hold my breath waiting for US carriers in a Taiwan invasion...
Let's not forget that Trump and his clown show are now attempting to bully Ukraine into paying the full, inflated to the max, US government contractor price for the new versions of those hand-me-downs. Partly because that was how the accounting was done - very often, $X of "military aid to Ukraine" = $X spent on a new weapon for US military to replace the decades old weapon to be sent to Ukraine.
Well, like we established in a discussion here yesterday, argument only takes place if you don't know. It is the mind's way to explore and learn. So, yes, obviously I could as I don't have enough information to know for sure. If I did, there would be nothing argue about, now would there? I'd already know everything there is to know. It would be a pointless endeavour.
But I don't think an argument is what you are actually looking for. It seems you're simply looking for someone to do free work for you. As great as that may sound to you, there is no reason for anyone else to cater to that. For the sake of good faith, I'll spare you anything more that would be serving to me.
Excuse me, but I am old enough to remember Biden's program such as CHIPS, a slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry.
America had the choice. It chose wrong. Are Americans going to assume the consequences of their choices or are they going to lie to themselves they weren't given the choice? That last option would fit more with the "character" of the America nowadays, the one who voted Trump: make mistakes and blame someone else for it.
I have seen this in my own country when mega corps build highly automated data centres that only employ a few local cleaners and security guards.
The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between industry and government, which is incompatible with democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years where the new administration begins to tear down everything the previous administration did because they serve different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.
It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work. Even TSMC Arizona had to bring half the workers from Taiwan, and it's not like they're making tchotchkes.
If you want to kick-start manufacturing, you're gonna have to attract people somehow initially, either through more money, or free education/training, etc
The message of "we're gonna find some way to undo some of the damage of off shoring and find some way to put heavy industry back to work" has been included in one way or another in every presidential candidates platform at least as far back as Obama's first term.
The specifics change from party to party and candidate to candidate but this isn't a new thing. The common man has been clamoring for some sort of change from the status quo for the better part of a generation now. It's only recently that the situation has become such a priority that elections are won or lost on it.
I fully expect that whatever administration comes next will continue on the path of on-shoring, if perhaps in a more reasonable way.
>It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work
The people who actually run manufacturing and heavy industry really resent the current off-shoring status quo. They only do it because the sum total of other policy pushed by short sighted wall street financiers and/or environmental/labor advocates makes it the only viable option. I think they'd be happy to come back if doing so was financially viable, they just want it to be predictable (something current policy making surely isn't, lol) so they can plan around it because investments in those industries are made on decades long timelines.
I think we're at the point now where there's the political will to let the punch press eat some fingers to keep the factory open.
A good example is the general global approach to Net Zero. It's slow, methodical, science based, negotiated.
But if anyone brings up planning for 2050 it's usually in the context of "It's all bullshit, politicians are crap, they're just lying to you and kicking the can down the road till they retire" (and if you scratch the surface you'll have even chance that the person saying that has been radicalised into not even believing there's a problem to be solved).
But only the US is in and out of the Paris agreement etc.
And the global approach to net zero is not global, nor is it binding, it's more of a gentlemen's agreement bet which is basically worthless. Ideologically it sounds good, the issues are always when the tires hit the road, and then some spanners get thrown in on top: wars, pandemics, revolutions, natural disasters, political feuds, etc.
So yeah, outside of bubbles of privileged mid-upper class people in safe rich countries, nobody gives a crap about what's gonna happen in 2050 when they can't pay next month's rent/mortgage or their car doesn't start and their bank balance is red.
Capitalism got us chasing next quarter returns at the expense of what's gonna happen in 2050, so we'll be kicking the can down the road until everything falls apart, first very slowly, and then very suddenly.
It is irrelevant what other countries do.
What matters is whether or not other countries and industries trust that a country has sufficient stability to do business in and with. If there are actual or perceived signals that suggest chaos, rational people will not be interested to be tethered to that dispensation.
I think this is because China is an autocracy, so they can make long-term plans. Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does is no place for that, and that's not limited to the new administration.
There isn't anything physically stopping America from doing what China is doing. We literally did it first (in modernity)! Albeit for too short a time before the robber barons and foreign interests retook control.
> Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does
It's not "robber barons" etc. It's just two very different worldviews existing in one place that cause big swings in policy when the other one is elected.
I believe Lee Kuan Yew said "In China, you can't change the government but you can change the policy. In America you can change the government but you can't change the policy", referring to the postwar neoliberal / Deng era.
I'm not a fan of industrial policy or the chips act, but it seems to be just the choice you are asking for.
On the other hand, I am a believer in the idea that voters get the government they deserve. So maybe we deserve this.
What do Democrats have to do with Republican candidates in a Republican primary?
Addressing the primaries, no one was beating Trump, it has nothing to do with his closest but still far distant challenger being a woman.
The reason there aren't many women in the Republican party isn't the voters, its that not many women likes right wing politics no matter where in the world you are.
Are you talking about Harris? I'm pretty sure she wasn't in the republican primaries so that isn't who the previous comment was talking about.
I believe the comparison is absolute production, not per person. Anything else would be odd. Considering China has 4x the capita of US it would mean that in absolute terms China is producing 8x the energy of the US. In reality it seems to be roughly 2x (although both sources are a bit outdated):
US 2023: 4.18 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity from utility-scale generators. Additionally, small-scale solar photovoltaic systems contributed around 73.62 billion kWh 1.
China 2021: 8.53 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity
--
But the staggering difference is how much of the electricity is attributed to the Industrial sector:
China: 70% (~6 trillion kWh)
US: 26% (~1 trillion kWh)
So overall China allocates 6x the electricity to production compared to US...
They are rapidly moving to renewable with grid scale BESS auctions avg $66-68/kw they are likely to have electricity prices at $0.01-0.02 over the next few years. I think it will be extremely tough to compete with China in manufacturing unless there is huge investment in renewable and storage systems to keep electricity prices competitive with China who are going to move on from coal over the next decade.
It used to be that the Chinese economy was based on just cheap labor. It's now increasingly based on cheap energy and automation. Replicating that elsewhere needs to start with modernizing energy infrastructure. Without that, there is no chance of competing. Manufacturing is energy intensive. So, cheap energy is indeed a key enabler.
The cost per kwh is a good one to call out. I think the medium term target for that should be < 1 cent per kwh. Effectively it trends to zero because there is very little marginal with solar, wind, and batteries other than the depreciation of infrastructure, equipment, etc. over time.
Original article definitely said "per person".
China allocates much more to industry and/because it allocates much less to personal consumption. Especially things like air conditioning. US per person consumption is still 2x that of EU average.
Yes, not your fault, I believe the AUTHOR meant to compare absolute production.
> China allocates much more to industry and/because it allocates much less to personal consumption
Let's not fall into the same hole: In relative terms, US residential is more than 2x of China's residential power use, but that's relative to the much larger production use. In absolute terms their residential power-allocation is not that different actually:
CN: 15% (1.2 trillion kWh)
US: 35% (1.46 trillion kWh)
Now, on a per-capita basis the difference is staggering, as China consumes 20% less to serve 4x the population...
Since 2000 they've gone from 10% of final energy being electricity to nearly 26% while the US has been basically flat around 23% and they are both predicted to grow (or not grow) at roughly the same in the next few years.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/energy-and-materials/our...
[2] SVG...! https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/energy%...
Sales tax as implemented in the US is not as tax efficient as VAT due to the impact of sales taxation on intermediate transactions during manufacturing. VAT only taxes the incrementally the value added at each transaction) whereas sales tax applies to the entire value at each stage.
VAT has basically the same effect as sales taxes with a much more complicated tax incidence.
Crime really is much lower than it was a decade ago. People have more money, societal trust is higher. Drug use in clubs has always been a thing, but China differs from the USA in that their is no social support at all for addicts (so they either get clean with help from their family or they die).
They've become anti-China youtubers serving the hungry China-hating audience on how China is bad and a paper tiger.
Instead watch this guy (https://www.youtube.com/@Awakening_Richard). I'm not saying he's unbiased, either, but he's thoughtful and I think he brings insight into how the Chinese intelligentsia thinks about how the world works.
But back to your point - it's oft repeated that Chinese population decline will destroy China in the long run and poverty in Chinese society.
He made a video on this exact issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdRH7aPWGGc
The TLDR version is that about half of the Chinese population lives in desperate poverty (and are economically invisible), and just a couple decades ago 90+% of Chinese lived like this. One cannot bring about a transformation into an industrialized wealthy lifestyle overnight, but coming from the experience of the past decades, the Chinese have been remarkably effective in this, and the following decades will see these people lifted up to modern societal standards as well.
By this alone, one can conservatively expect a doubling of Chinese GDP, as there will be twice as many consumers and laborers who consume and work at the level of the current workforce.
This also means that China has a huge and high marginal utility domestic demand for goods, and even if sanctioned, they wont run of people to sell to.
That the official line from the CCP was that China had no drug problems, no prostitution, a variety of other things†, and that there were no gay people in China; That these were all Western ailments.
Urban China is a panopticon state not only digitally, but culturally. Housing is much tighter than the US, walls thinner. Your underwear is hung out to dry in clear view. "Privacy" in terms of politeness norms mostly consists of pretending you don't see or hear a thing. Neighbors generally know a lot about what each other are doing. 7% of the population are Party members, and in Marxist-Leninist systems this connotes something closer to earning a military officer commission; The Party is not trivial to apply to, the Party is strictly regimented, Party rules are held above and before the civil law, Party members are expected to be informers and have a strict lawful-good orientation from the perspective of the regime. Penalties for commerce in illicit drugs are even more extreme than the US, and due process is not bound by the same presumptions.
There are lots of factors conspiring against the sort of informal US inner city street drug distribution being as big of a deal in China.
Disclaimer: All my information is more than a decade out of date, and was only ever a thin slice of opinions from mostly Westerners in some first tier cities.
† From an academic paper: "2 The Six Evils are prostitution, drugs, selling women and children, pornography, gambling, and feudal superstition. Criminal gangs, or triads, are often counted as a seventh evil. These vices represent impediments to modernization and throwbacks to social problems that were present prior to the Communist takeover. Elevation of a problem to an "evil" symbolizes that the Beijing regime will mount a "campaign" or "struggle" against it."
Reminds me of a book I read years ago about the Soviet Union. Officially prostitution didn't exist there either, so there were no laws on the books about it. Enforcement usually was around various "antisocial" laws and usually for the street-walkers. Crime in general was mostly fine, so long as it wasn't a threat to the state, against well-connected people, or otherwise visible.
No wonder Russia got so bad after the strong state dissipated.
If only... (source: am Chinese)
America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace.
China will soon have the ability to take Taiwan and Korea and Japan. If that happens it's game over for any American interests and perhaps democracy as a whole.
Wargames[0] paint a grim picture of an upcoming conflict between China and America over Taiwan with the US barely winning at a great cost including the loss of many ships, aircraft, and the depletion of missile stocks.
The Chinese have a naval production of 260 times that of America and account for an ungodly amount of global steel production so they'll be able to bounce back faster than the US can. With a lead time for producing American missiles measured in months and years it will be just a matter of time before they take the countries in the region that are critical to American manufacturing if they're so inclined.
[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
What makes you confident that this could ever work on a longer term? The US is only ~5% of people globally, and I would expect any industrial/technological lead to melt over the years unless there is a monumental, continuous difference in spending (like what the US military did since WW2).
But I see no indication that you can keep that situation stable over the long term, and I honestly think that attempts like the current tariff approach don't help one bit in the long run while having massive harmful side effects (price inflation, loss of planning stability/soft power/productivity).
It at least stands a fighting chance if it wasn't the case that this alliance is being destroyed before our eyes.
I will admit that even an integrated alliance cannot push around China in the way it could decades ago.
> America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace.
Low value manufacturing has been disappearing from the US for decades and arguably the US -- up until the recent turmoil -- has continued to maintain its hegemony.
America is the only country with the military capacity to take on China, and Europe isn't going to get up to speed in time to defend Taiwan.
It must be America out of necessity not preference.
Apparel, shoes, things you might find in a big box store -- zero sense. Low value manufacturing - leave it to China, Vietnam, India.
Jet engines? Advanced polymer materials? Batteries? All make sense! CHIPS act was intended to accelerate US IC R&D and manufacturing...which was cancelled.
And the boots, the uniforms, the helmets?
I am concerned that the United States does not have the industrial capacity or institutional knowledge to make relatively simple but essential things for war.
In a protracted conflict with China will the US have the industrial capacity to produce enough ammunition? Does the US have a sufficient stockpile of ammunition to buy enough time to scale up the industrial capacity to manufacture more ammunition? Are there enough skilled people in the US who can teach more people to become skilled in this endeavour in time?
Does the US even have enough industrial capacity to produce enough iron, aluminum, nickel, copper and other such things to do this?
It is specifically "US hegemony" and not "western democracy hegemony" because the US is so extraordinarily powerful in economy and military.
Interests/culture with other democracies aligns well enough (and the power differential is large enough!) that US leadership is tolerated/supported.
But Canada, EU, Australia, Japan are NOT vasall states: If interests would clash and/or the US lose a lot of its relative power, those would cease being majority supporters and push for domestic interests instead.
Calling them "fairweather friends" might be too cynical but I think it's much more accurate than considering them integral parts of the US hegemony.
The United Kingdom of England and Scotland didn't exist until 1707, and even that was sans-Ireland until 1800.
And yet, even with the biggest empire the world had ever known, WW1 could only be won with the support of another huge empire (France) and the subsequent arrival of the USA; shortly after this, most of Ireland became semi-independent.
WW2 was "won", again with huge support, but a pyrrhic victory from the UK's point of view, and India soon after became independent. The Suez Crisis was 1956, and showed that the old empires of the UK (and France, Union française) were no longer economically hegemonic — even when working together — and the US had replaced them in this role.
Looking into the future, there's no way to guess. The more tech advances, the easier it becomes for a single person to cause enormous, world-altering impacts: hackers are already relevant on the geopolitical stage; there's good reason to think that quality of life is directly related to how much energy a person can process, but once you have sufficient energy per-capita, it's not hard to use a cyclotron to brute-force the purification of weapons grade uranium, or to transmute depleted uranium into plutonium; simple genetic manipulation has been a standard technique for first year biology students for at least two decades, and can be done in a home lab, and at some point we will have risks from someone trying to use this for evil rather than decorative bioluminescence. All these things can topple a hegemon that spends its tomorrows looking at yesterday's battlefield.
If an authoritarian country like China achieves hegemony the continued existence of democracy is at risk.
I want to live in a democratic world, not an authoritarian one.
America's democracy is a flawed one but of the two choices -- American hegemony or Chinese hegemony it is the best path to a flourishing global liberal democracy.
Can you foresee Chinese hegemony leading to increased democracy, individual property rights, due process, and rule of law?
My fear is that people will look at China's might and economic success and conclude that democracy is overrated.
If you don't -- Chinese hegemony and the path it will lead the world down is the one for you.
If you do -- Then American hegemony with all its flaws is something worth fighting for.
One note, some of the things you’ve listed has been proven as “mostly on paper, once people get their way, mental gymnastics will overcome the reason” in the past month. For a bastion of “freedom and democracy”, it’s really not looking like one from outside.
Stop and think about this for a moment -- do you think that China doesn't spread authoritarianism across the globe because they don't want to or simply because they can't do it yet?
Also, I am Canadian, but I could also be Panamanian, or Danish. Maybe it would be different if I were Taiwanese or Vietnamese or Japanese, but, China is far away and playing nice, and America is close and not.
They were really close to not existing. France stopped existing, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, all stopped existing. China, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, New Guinea, Guam, East Timor, and Nauru all stopped existing.
They all most definitely did not stop existing.
Also I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when you say the United Kingdom came really close to not existing.
Battle of Britain, Battle of France?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France
>They all most definitely did not stop existing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-occupied_Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territories_acquired_b...
You didn't study WW2 in high school? It monumentally shaped the current world order.
To pick another example, Singapore was a crown colony before the war, then they were occupied by Japan during WW2, then they were a single nation with what is now Malaysia, then in the 1960s they two countries became independent from each other. They didn't under any reasonable reading of the situation cease to exist and they also have never been a hegemon of any kind.
So what's your criteria for existing, dirt in the same place? Their governments were dissolved. That means they don't exist anymore. Does the confederacy exist since the boarders are the same and the dirt is in the same place? I would argue not.
>Also lots of countries you listed definitely don't meet any sort of reasonable definition of "hegemon".
I agree, just pointing out countries that no longer existed.
This argument is based on experiences in WWII, i.e. the previous war. You need to be cautious about basing military doctrine on the previous war. I’m not sure the next war will be won by churning out aircraft carriers.
If not aircraft carriers then what sort of physical objects do you think will critical in winning the next major war?
"subduing the enemy without fighting," is the epitome of strategic thinking in his book, The Art of War. This means achieving victory through cunning, deception, and maneuvering, rather than through direct confrontation and bloodshed"
They are increasing their military knowing that US military costs 4+x as much. It might be 4x better so don't fight. Just bankrupt the US. Trump wants a $1T military budget next year.
Why would China want to conquer the West? Buying what it wants is cheaper than an uncertain military battle fought with Nukes.
Naval routes? Just negotiate and use money instead; it'll be cheaper than war.
Brainpower? Just offer higher salaries to come work in China.
Taiwan is a tiny island smaller than Florida with only 20m people.
2) Political legitimacy - successful unification would be a nationalist victory for the CCP
3) Strategic importance - key geographic asset. It lies in the first island chain, a line of US-aligned territories that can potentially restrict China's naval access to the Pacific. Control over Taiwan gives China more leverage over sea lanes critical to global trade and security influence in East Asia
4) Economic, technology bonus points - Taiwan is a global tech powerhouse, especially in semiconductors. TSMC is the world's leading chipmaker.
5) Global power dynamics - unification would weaken US influence in the region
3 as I said, they can just negotiate and throw money at the problem; it's cheaper than fighting a war.
4 they can already buy hardware from them and was doing so just fine before US stepped in. DeepSeek seemed to do fine and China may likely surpass Western AI development in the near future
5 I don't see how that's the case when the US has very little presence in TW compared to SK or JP. Taiwan is a hair on a gorilla's right knee.
They do see Taiwan as an internal matter, that's the problem they don't recognize this sovereignty and don't like or understand Democracy. It's like Russia with Ukraine but they'll also claim Taiwan isn't a country because even most western nations technically don't recognize them. It makes me think we made a mistake not recognizing Taiwan as it's own country back in the 90s when China was less powerful.
If you don't believe the rational I sketched, informed by analyses such as that by the Council of Foreign Relations[1], you can also learn more by reading directly from China's Mission in the EU about the China One principle: http://eu.china-mission.gov.cn/eng/more/20220812Taiwan/20220...
[1] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-relations-tens...
If you want a semi-serious example, check the "Taiwan #1" gaming video on YouTube for a taste of Chinese nationalism.
Read certain declarations by Chinese ambassadors in Europe for more serious nationalistic takes.
This is the main reason.
I'll charitably assume you meant first time in post-war history.
USA as "The Global leader" didn't emerge until after Europe was ravaged first by The Great War and then WWII.
No-one was looking toward the USA for leadership during The Great Game. Even by the time of the outbreak of WW1, the size of the USA's army was very small, half the size of the British army, which was itself considered small compared to the French and German armies.
US foreign policy was still inward looking, protectionist and isolationist until it could no longer ignore the case for war.
The foreign power projection really didn't kick into gear until 1945 onward and the determination not to let too much of the world fall to communist ideas.
If we had the same requirements here in the US it would likely become the same.
Most corporations will wait it out. Corporations that have an established interest (like Big Tech) will bribe Trump to get the exemptions they need to continue their business. Everybody else will have to decide how much they will want to depend on such an openly corrupt system. There industries that see no problem in dealing with corrupt regimes.
Output in the US has been flat for some time, while China has been on a steady rate of climb for several decades.
American companies? Register for EU tax system?
I can buy from anyone in the US and worldwide for that matter, and as long as they're willing to figure out shipping they don't need to register anywhere, I can handle taxes myself when receiving.
What "AI" did they use to write this?
It says "to sell into Europe" not "to buy from Europe". In first case I, the EU buyer, owe VAT.
In second case whoever buys may be owed a VAT rebate. But it's not selling any more.
Individuals (sole traders, contractors etc) can claim VAT rebates. You don’t have to have a lawyer or an accountant if you’re prepared to figure out the rules yourself.
1. They are not high enough: Correct. Raise them more.
2. America's industrial supply chain is weak: That is why we need to bring the factories and resource extraction home.
3. We don't know how to make it: Perhaps we can steal the IP like China? We will figure it out.
4. The effective cost of labor in the US is higher than is looks: Then raise the tariffs higher.
5. We don't have the infrastructure to manufacture: You have to build it first, This will get cheaper and easier as we continue to bring industry home.
6. Made in America will take time: Blaming permitting time and Bureaucracy is a ridiculous excuse. The federal government can override all state and local requirements here. Its a choice to slow projects down.
7. Uncertainty and Complexity around tariffs: Democrats will have a hard time undoing progress if there is movement to reshore industry. War over Taiwan seems basically inevitable and this will harden resolve.
8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing: Most (well a very large and non-negligible percent of) Americans are going to loose their jobs because of AI. Most of us hate our jobs already, manufacturing will pay better. There are always endless service industries...like delivering food, if they do not like supervising a robotics controlled factory. It is disingenuous to imagine a return of American manufacturing without Huge AI and robotics investments. More factories will be lights out than the alternative. The jobs will be in servicing the robots, computer systems and quality control. We aren't talking Rosie the Riveter and the author must know it.
9. The labor does not exist to make good products: This is why there must be some discrimination over tariffs and why they should not be a simple even percentage. We can choose to bring back GPU manufacturing but pass on fast fashion. And during the process of negotiation we can give up those industries we do not want in exchange for support of a China embargo.
10. Automation will not save us: The author cannot imagine a world where manufacturing is not motivated by global trade. They fail to understand that it does not matter how much more productive China is when protectionist policies prevent trade. The goal is to get America to a place where it can manufacture everything it NEEDS on its own.
11. Americans file lawsuits: Good- this will increase the quality of goods we enjoy and we can get past the disposable foreign garbage that floods our markets. 12. enforcement will be uneven and manipulated: so get on board and help to improve it, stop undermining the attempt to help this country.
13. tariff policies structured in wrong way: Really not a terrible idea to have a disparity in tariff between input goods and finished goods but it is a half measure. We need the entire supply chain from resource harvesting, to tooling, to components to final finished manufacturing if we want to ensure national security in a world post-NATO.
14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball: Was there serious consequence to MJ trying his hand at baseball? We got through COVID. We have survived massive supply disruptions and the market has been pumping as hard as ever. If you are not currently retired it is absurd to worry about fluctuations in the stock market. And if you are, you likely invested in companies that sold out America.
That is just incredibly stupid. The only country that tries to do this is the hellhole known as North Korea and even they fail. No country is an island and doing this will just ensure America becomes a third world country or worse
In other words, people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/845917ed-41a5-449f-946f-70263adba...
From the piece: "The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who’ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you’d know how hard the work is."
[1] https://www.agriculturedive.com/news/agriculture-shifts-farm...
[2] https://www.terrainag.com/insights/examining-the-economic-cr...
[3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor
[4] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_BE5KPp18
[6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/there-are-a-...
I do find it interesting that a lot of these same people are against raising the minimum wage because "it will bankrupt all the businesses" but somehow think that bringing manufacturing for the goods they buy back to the US won't do the same. At best, going from off-shore labor costs of say $15/day to $15/hour (minimum for US workers) is an 8x multiplier and will somehow magically work but a 1.5 multiplier on minimum wage is just untenable for any business.
Honestly, it is mostly an emotional response around "fairness". They don't want others getting a "raise" when they don't "deserve it". However, everything they get is 1000% deserved. The greatest trick the rich ever pulled was convincing the middle class that all their woes are the fault of the poor. The political comic of "That foreigner wants your cookie!" captures it pretty well (imo).
It's not much different than how a young child will blame anyone else for something that's gone wrong / they got caught doing. Maybe our society should do a better job promoting responsibility and allowing parents to offer oppertunities for children to be responsible; instead of infantalizing everyone entirely until some magical number has passed and suddenly they're an adult who was never previously empowered to be responsible.
As others have pointed out, this is not a contradiction. (Read their reply.)
However, the question of 'Do YOU want to work in a factory?' is heavily influenced by the fact that we don't see factory work as a high-paying career, or a career at all. Part of the solution to the factory problem is enhancing the value proposition for the employees.
I am ambivalent toward tariffs, but the idea is that if we make foreign products more expensive then the higher price of domestic goods becomes more palatable by comparison. If paying domestic workers more raises the price of domestic goods, and if people are willing to pay that price for whatever reason, you will start to see growth in manufacturing.
It's also silly to reject long-term goals simply because achieving them is difficult.
We ran this experiment for decades. It turns out that Americans are not willing to pay the higher prices, which led to our manufacturing consolidating around higher-value items.
This notion that we should move Americans from high-productivity jobs to lower-productivity jobs, and that such move will somehow enhance our prosperity is nutty. Lower-productivity jobs mean less income for workers, means less income in the system, means lower prosperity for all Americans. Moving tens of millions Americans to higher-productivity jobs while maintaining relatively low unemployment has to be seen as one of the economic success stories of the modern age.
Separately, Americans do not feel like this happened. That's a different discussion, about allocation of wealth. Our poorest states have higher GDPs per capita than many "rich" western EU countries. Mississippi has a higher GDP per capita than the UK. The difference is that the US has designed a system where every citizen lives a precarious existence, potentially a few months from destitution while other rich countries have not done that. We are allowed to make different choices in the US if we don't like this outcome.
But did we run that experiment while foreign alternatives were nearly or equally expensive? That's the real test, and whether foolish or not that's what they are trying to do with tariffs.
> Lower-productivity jobs mean less income for workers
Are you suggesting former factory workers all became scientists and engineers? If that's true then fantastic. But I'd like to see evidence that what they are doing now is somehow more productive.
> Our poorest states have higher GDPs per capita than many "rich" western EU countries.
Is the result of that a higher median income, or is it a reflection of a higher wealth inequality?
Tariffs will have to go a lot higher than 145% for this to be a relevant question. US labor (and now due to tariffs, raw materials) costs are so much higher that frequently even doubling the import price would not make US cost-competitive.
> Are you suggesting former factory workers all became scientists and engineers?
No, I am suggesting that those people currently work in jobs that support higher productivity of the overall labor force, and that higher productivity creates the conditions necessary for increased prosperity for Americans.
Let's take QA for example as something that is often thought of as lower-skilled (but which is not) job that a hypothetical former factory worker could retrain to do. A person could QA a T-shirt or QA the Netflix app. The Netflix QA impacts more flow of money than a T-shirt QA, and so supports higher income for everyone working at Netflix than those working in a T-shirt factory. It is not possible for a person to manually QA enough shirts to have a similar economic impact as QAing the Netflix app.
Or compare the typical factory worker to a profession that is often denigrated in the US: retail. A factory worker making cutlery or light bulbs will generate less money for the economy than the average Costco employee[1].
Or look at a company that moves these goods around, like UPS. $360k revenue per employee @ 21% gross margin.
> Is the result of that a higher median income, or is it a reflection of a higher wealth inequality?
This is the continued choice of the US polity to not use our wealth to improve our common good. We instead choose to allocate it in ways that are markedly different from other rich and developing nations. So a high-productivity state with a higher GDP per capita than the UK is "poor" because our chosen combination of labor laws, tax laws, etc. are designed to produce that outcome. There used to be robust debate about the best way to make our economy less anxiety-inducing for individuals, but that discourse ended and everybody pretty much accepts that this is how it has to be. Nonetheless, we are allowed to choose differently.
1 - Costco produces close to $100k of gross profit per employee. This is multiples of the prevailing wage even in rich countries in Western Europe, much less countries like China.
The good news is that we don't need to calculate the value of an employee, because the market itself makes it loud and clear: wages. The higher the wages, the higher the value. In any sane company, the less valuable an individual is to the bottom line, the less they get paid.
So then, if the wages of a factory job start to eclipse that of other fields, that's all the evidence we need of higher productivity/value/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
Netflix famously fired all their QA people and requires their devs to do test automation.
https://explore.jobs.netflix.net/careers/job/790301756355-qa...
Not the OP, but poor as used here seems to refer to average quality of life , quality of infrastructure, etc.
> Is the result of that a higher median income, or is it a reflection of a higher wealth inequality?
Higher wealth inequality leading to stretched public services and infrastructure, which lead to lower quality of life , despite higher nominal GDP per capita.
You are probably much better off being a poor person in Spain (33k GDP/capita) vs Mississippi (40k GDP per capita), because at least you don't need to worry about the cost of healthcare.
You're more likely (but still very unlikely) to get extremely rich in the US though, although probably not in Mississippi.
Healthcare, childcare, education, retirement are all big expensive things the US does incredibly poorly.
Why would you need to pay them more? Remove their legal ability to organize, cripple their social safety net, and they will either work or die.
I'm not advocating for that, but it does seem to be the path we're deliberately taking.
Very soon we'll be forced to make shoes and other things behind bars. No trial needed, just indefinite detention.
Its always easy to expect other people to make sacrifices working these jobs, while imagining you and your kids working office desk jobs.
I absolutely would work a factory job if it paid 100k+ and meant owning a home someday.
Instead I got 100k student loans and make 60k at a desk and I'll never have a life outside of work because I simply can't afford it.
I'll be 35 this year after 12 years of working and just starting to have a positive net worth.
American dream my ass.
If they are literally stamping parts together on an assembly line then I guess yeah it's not going to pay 100k.
That is not going to happen.
Currently less than 20% of Americans work in factories. All those 80% need to want is that the 20% of people who want to work in factories can do so.
From TFA:
> When I first went to China as a naive 24 year old, I told my supplier I was going to “work a day in his factory!” I lasted 4 hours.
And then I remembered, oh yeah, the Great Depression happened when he was young and he was let go from his bank job — the bank folded. When the decent paying factory job at an auto assembly plant eventually came along he probably jumped at it.
"But if factory wages are good then products will be expensive"
No, because the wages for the factory worker is less than 1% of a products shelf price.
Misinterpretation of data.
> The other day I saw the results of a poll [1] where 80% of Americans thought the country would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. However, only 20% of Americans thought that they would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. It was surprisingly bipartisan.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/a-look-at-manufacturing-jo...
Compared to the current percentage of people employed in manufacturing (9.9% - 12,759,129 / 128,718,060), there are **more** Americans that would like to move into manufacturing, not less.
People want to be sure that their success is protected and they love telling other people what they should do.
I agree with that sentiment. I would be better off if more of you, just not me, worked in factories instead of trying to compete with me for my non-factory work.
1. https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk
2. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
It's hard to quantify. E.g. the CHIPS act is a strategic thing in case TSMC is disrupted for some reason. How valuable is insurance? How much useful work (and skill) do you ship overseas in exchange for promissory notes[0]?
[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/tariffs-saving-and-invest...
What do you think the odds are that the CHIPS act will make the US capable of building TSMC-level chips?
Calculating the value of an insurance isn't complex. First, you calculate (1) the cost of the insurance, then (2) a rough idea of the probability that you'll need it, and (3) the cost of the insured-against-event occurring.
The problem here is that no one in their right mind believes the CHIPS act will make the US capable of producing chips on par with those of TSMC, so it's not actually an insurance. More like a political show — see, we doing something!
That doesn’t mean people who work jobs in the former category deserve ridicule or disrespect. But the distinction is important because finding workers to fill an unskilled role is just a matter of finding said able-bodied person, while for the latter you need some kind of system of education, training and/or apprenticeship (either explicitly or effectively) to be set up and functioning to even have an industry that depends on those jobs.
Not everything is some silly game of political fighting through language. Some things we actually need terms distinguishing “this” from “that” so we can have real world conversations about them.
Working as a doctor takes 10 years of higher education on top of secondary school.
Calling McDonald's "unskilled labor" seems quite fair to me.
He hates the idea of people getting ahead in life with anything but the most extreme back breaking labor. That’s why he’s hardcore MAGA and makes such a big deal about trying to shit on folks who do desk jobs.
Fuck him, fuck his show, fuck the “good parts” where he tries to show you that being a garbage man is hard. If it’s really that skilled, the market will pay it as such.
Tech isn't winding down; tech, as the sector that draws the most investment based on long-term development, had the biggest response to tight monetary policy designed to slow the entire economy down, but that response demonstrates that tech is where most of the marginal dollar goes.
> Manufacturing could prepare us for the next wave, whatever that might be.
Trying to work our way down the raw materials -> manufacturing -> finance/services ladder that countries usually try to work their way up for maximum prosperity in globalized trade isn't going to prepare us for anything other than lasting economic decline. And why would “manufacturing”—which you can't build generically, but only by specific, usually impossible to reallocate to a different use that isn't closely similar without sacrificing most of the value, major capital investments in particular subareas of manufacturing, prepare us for anything else even ignoring that we’d have to regress to do it?
The American production machine (aka manufacturing) is a major component of what won WWII.
Just because we ended the era of cheap money to try and stop runaway inflation doesn't mean the tech boom is winding down.
Look at everything that's happening with gene editing, in physics, with the jwst, with LLMs and robotics and computer vision, with alt energy sources, batteries, in material sciences, etc.
I mean this is such a myopic take. We are in just now in an era where people are now capable of finding needles in needlestacks.
You are confusing easily manipulated economic vibes that feel bad right now with the rapid approach of a complete overhaul of the human experience.
The U.S. has basically supported the strip mining of our economy by value sucking predatory investment firms. There is a reason why China have more robotics per capita in their factories than we do and it has to do with a complete failure in strategic thinking, long term planning and ultimately a hatred for our youth.
These are tidal waves compared to the tech boom tsunami we experienced in the last 25+ years: enabling rapid communication of every human on the planet and democratizing access (anyone can create a app/website/etc to enable other people to communicate/make money/etc).
> where people are now capable of finding needles in needlestacks
Yes, exactly. all that is left is going after hard problems that impact the long tail.
I haven't met any injection molding shops in the US that do a huge amount of specialty parts like toys. The industry tries to get as many medical device jobs as possible.
Of course, the 3d printers themselves are probably being made in China.
Parent was making it clear what they do not want, for the US to become a vassal state of China.
Who cares about defense capabilities 10 or 50 years down the line? Lots of people in West had a good run outsourcing everything. But once there's nothing else to outsource and IP to sell... It's not gonna be pretty.
Next generations in West will have to work very hard to recover from this mess.
Have you ever heard any concrete strategies and plans regarding food security?
Wouldn't there be policies about how many calories should be produced in what form, how long can it be stored, what would a local ramp up look like if there was a global catastrophe?
What percentage of agriculture is really relevant to food security?
Those are just empty words so farmers can get their subsidies and go on to produce more industrial rapeseed oil.
The problem with agriculture is you can't really „ramp up“ it on a whim. That's why you need to keep it going and you can't just kick start your food production when outside suppliers start to blackmail you.
Sure. But how much tax money do you want to throw at entire industries to hide the basic fact that wages are lower elsewhere? Where do you want to take the labor away from? And where do you draw the essential/wasted subsidies boundary line?
Because in my view, Trump tariffs just ignore those very basic questions and don't even attempt to answer them.
It's perfectly reasonable IMO to throw 20 billion a year to agriculture, because that is a very essential sector. But doing the same for the textile industry? Ore/Oil refining? Steelworks? Chemical plants?
I don't wanna subsidies 20 non-essential industries just so that some former fast-food worker can assemble overpriced shoes inside the US (and labor demand from all those industries would drive up wages/costs in the fast-food sector, too, thanks to the Baumol effect).
I'm not against nurturing some important local industries, but Trump tariffs are a complete failure at achieving that IMO.
IMO the global economy eventually self-levels. Either you go up the chain so far that you eventually go off the rails by being unable to make basic stuff. And eventually being eaten by more hungry people with the basic skills. Or you keep yourself down by forcing yourself to not loose basic skills. Former gives you a short moment of glory with a high price for future generations. Later forces people to be more ascetic if that's the right word.
But I don't see the point in throwing billions of dollars from taxes at this industry just to make all those shoes here-- that is stupid (because the jobs that would create are not gonna be very desirable, they are gonna drive up costs all over by competing for labor, and that kind of protectionism is gonna invite retaliation).
The situation is very similar for a lot of industries.
I also think it is extremely unhealthy to baby an industry long-term by isolating it from competition like this.
I'd be totally on board if there was like 20% unemployment in the US, and this was a short term plan to give those people work/income.
But that's not it. This is in my view really bad policy driven by emotional arguments, and actual numbers, expected outcomes and historical precedent (for "I know better than market economies what ought to be produced") all heavily weight against this.
I'm very confident right now that the whole "20%ish tariffs for everyone to balance trade deficit with everyone" approach is gonna be walked back or lead to abysmal outcomes, and people should have realized that from the start.
We have far more shoes than we need.
> the jobs that would create are not gonna be very desirable, they are gonna drive up costs all over
Only because our government is run by billionaires. Elect politicians that care about the median American and this problem can be resolved quickly.
> I also think it is extremely unhealthy to baby an industry long-term by isolating it from competition like this.
This “babying” you mention results in decent working conditions and guaranteed jobs for Americans. It’s a trade off I think is worth it, as your proposal disproportionately benefits the 1%.
> I know better than market economies what ought to be produced
Have you looked at the astronomical surplus of useless goods we have here? Those come at the cost of labor that could be put towards jobs that benefit all Americans (building more homes, cheaper childcare, cheaper food, etc). Again you’re arguing for a status quo that is designed to grow the wealth gap and make billionaires richer. Essentially trickle down economics.
High profits and jobs people want also don't exactly go hand-in-hand.
EDIT: no sorry wasn't a secret project. it was a consortium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithograph...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Any discussion of "bringing back manufacturing" that doesn't mention government spending or social programs to educate and upskill the population is not genuine. The current leadership are fools and ideologs who will only hasten the decline, which might actually be better globally if it lowers emissions. Time will tell I guess.
It's still far from played out, but right now they're solidly on the road to Russia 2.0, with decades-long trends pointing that way.
People in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and so on probably would use the word graceful to describe the USSR's end.
(And yes I know Poland wasn't part of the USSR but it was a satelite state).
Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine shindig and my statement would still hold.
In absolute terms it's one of the harshest death tolls in the last decades. It's far from a joke. Though for completeness, AIDS was also going on there and it's hard to tell from the stats the proportion of impact
Boris Yeltsin in Aug 1991 called for "Russian Federation to reserve the right to review its borders with any adjacent republic" [0]. Yeltsin did that for a couple of weeks - until Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine's last Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and Republic of Ukraine's first president) said he will not support Yeltsin in dissolving USSR. By then the Baltics were already independent countries, but Yeltsin still needed Ukraine's Belarus' and Kazakhstan's support to get rid of Gorbachev.
So Yeltsin acquiesced the borders at that time, four months followed up with the Belovezha Accords and USSR dissolved without a fight a couple of weeks later.
I think what we see today is are some repressed conflicts being fought out in the open.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/world/soviet-turmoil-yelt... - free to read with NYT registration
It may seem that way because the countries within Western Europe that had done the empires are now stable and prosperous but what about the countries of Africa and Asia? The ones who had been part of those same empires of Western Europe?
If you talk to people in these countries of Africa and Asia I think you would find that people there would strongly dispute the idea that the empires of Western Europe ended in any way that could be called "graceful"
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
It's a really complicated manoeuvre even if you're not actively trying to shoot yourself in the foot. Eg Domestic factors (automation, corporate offshoring decisions, etc) also contributed to manufacturing job loss. A weaker dollar would probably help, but isn't a silver bullet.
The main article for this post goes into this in a lot of detail.
What the US got in return was cheap goods and a whole lot of debt. What the world got was stability. The US is no longer interested in subsidizing the global order.
The current discussion re: “bringing back manufacturing” is making the mistake that everyone always makes when Trump is involved: taking him at his word. The point isn’t to bring back all manufacturing. The point is to profit off of imports. Some manufacturing will return — whatever is high value added and benefits primary from cheap shipping internally - but nobody thinks that Americans are going to sew t-shirts.
Also, those who are looking for an American decline as comeuppance for being unkind to allies are going to be sorely disappointed. The US has everything it needs to be self sufficient, and no matter how batshit crazy the leadership is, it’s still — still — the safest place to park capital, still the largest consumer market by far (more than twice China), has a stable demographic and a middle class country to its south that brings in lower cost workers as needed. Not to mention being totally energy independent, bordered on two sides by oceans and with more potential port coastline than the rest of the world combined… and also holding the virtually all of the world's supply of high-purity quartz, which is a requirement for semiconductor production.
This theory doesn't really explain what was going on at tremendous expense in Iraq, Afghanistan or even all those years ago in Vietnam.
If there is a decline, I expect it to be in internal security and the transition from high-trust to low-trust society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
They each had longer runs than we’ve had.
My pet theory is lead. From 1950 to 1980 we birthed a leaded generation [1]. Today, up to 60% of American voters were born before 1975 [2]. (Voters born between 1950 and 1980 came into the majority in the 1990s and should fall into the minority by 2028, but only barely. So in summary: Iraq War, Financial Crisis, Covid and Trump 47. It won’t be until the 2040s when truly unleaded voters, those born after 2000, command a majority.)
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35254913/#&gid=article-figur...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-changing...
I mean, we have half of Africa shooting themselves in the foot over and over for our own benefit. And every time it looks like an African nation is going to do something about it, some counter-military force appears out of nowhere (with US arms?) and some important political heads are assassinated.
This isn't a conspiracy theory, either. The destabilization of world governments done by our government to our benefit is well recorded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_imperialism#Strategy
Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, are locations that are directly under US control. The entire western hemisphere is within our sphere of control, and a huge chunk of the planet was either directly aligned with us (EU, AUS/UK) or was compliant for fear of regime change.
The country itself was founded on the destruction of dozens of civilizations, a victory so total you don't even consider it as part of US imperial conquest. I can't believe I even have to explain this to people on here my God.
I’m not denying the existence of American imperialism entirely, but let’s be real about its scope compared to old school empires.
China and others are clearly demonstrating the power of capitalism with state support. The US is too busy infighting and keeping capitalism and politics separate (small government, let the market decide etc). You wouldn't find enough employees that want to work in manufacturing; you'd need millions to even try and get close to what China is doing.
Now I'm not actually OK with what China is doing, the paragraphs about worker conditions were quite telling. But I will recognize that it gives them the upper hand in manufacturing that the US hasn't had since the 50's.
(meta: I'm gonna have to specify "the 1950's soon" don't I?)
Should be "50s" and "1950s". Sorry, I usually don't do this but I otherwise liked your comment and thought you might want to know.
This is actually an excellent reason for tariffs. If we can't beat them at their game because it goes against our principles, then just don't buy their stuff.
The tariffs most certainly will dissipate but we can't discount the chance that they may be replaced with actual written in law voted on by congress and signed by the president taxes that have similar but much more durable effects.
Manufacturing and heavy industry really hates off-shoring. They only do it because the sum total of other policy makes it the only viable option. I can see them taking a decent haircut in pursuit of some longer term goal.
Political suicide to roll back tax breaks if they are primarily for the <$150k earners, like trump wants.
What tax breaks has he aimed at these people beyond some of the overtime and tipping (which is expected to only equate to about $2K)?
Instead:
>The largest tax cuts would accrue to the highest-income families, the Treasury said.
> Household in the top 5% — who earn more than $450,000 a year, roughly — are the “biggest winners,” according to a July 2024 analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. They’d get over 45% of the benefits of extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it said.
> A Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis on the impacts of the broad Republican tax plan had a similar finding.
> The bottom 80% of income earners would get 29% of the total value of proposed tax cuts in 2026, according to the Wharton analysis, issued Thursday. The top 10% would get 56% of the value, it said.
I don't know what news source you trust, but if you google it, he stated it back in March.
What he says is almost irrelevant to what he actually does most of the time. He 'says' he wants to lower taxes on the lower income folks, but the tax bill he actually passed was essentially a handout to wealthy and businesses. He 'says' he wants to bring back manufacturing, but the reality is his tariff actions do nothing of the sort.
> According to Lutnick’s interview with CBS News, Trump’s tax policy goal is to remove federal income taxes for individuals earning under $150,000 annually.
(omitted some of the other bullet points around tariff funding and tip exemption)
> While Lutnick later walked back the certainty of these plans, he clarified that the proposal is aspirational and depends on the ability to balance the federal budget.
I have serious doubts about the likelihood of a Trump proposal that even his Commerce Secretary says are "aspirational". Then again, the other part of Trump is that sometimes he does whatever he wants, regardless of what his Secretaries have said or known (witness the tariffs being paused mid hearing, leading to a Republican politician frantically swiping at his iPad in the middle of his testimony about the value of keeping the tariffs despite widespread market uncertainty).
Trump and Sanders aren't opposites, they're next door neighbors with a common goal and mostly superficial disagreements like whether tax cuts or stimulus checks are better hand out approaches. They both want to trash trade deals and both want tariffs. If you are perplexed as many where why so many Bernie bros voted Trump over Hillary in 2016, this is the answer.
They are both blue-collar presidents, and both want to inflict damage onto the elite. The problem is that the elite are the system, their health is a function of the economies health, so it's a "buckle-in" moment when someone comes in who wants to rough up the elite.
Its a terrible state and situation to invest in a business doesn't benefit anyone. My hometown had a large cultural center built by the mayor, he couldn't run for reelection again, new mayor is elected, completely ignores the whole thing was built and lets it rot. Everything is only done for an election cycle, the next cycle could bring something else entirely.
Its terrible to live in a place like this, Americans have no idea how bad this is going to be for the country.
To compete with that the entire pipeline from raw materials through components and final product needs to be reproduced and its taken China 40+ years to build up to this capacity and capability.
I think its something more countries should consider and do for certain pipelines but we are in a world with vast international trade and the winner(cheapest) takes most of the trade so whatever it is needs to be worth while within country.
I fully, 100% expect this to happen, at least to Greenland and a real chance of this happening to Canada.
Canada and the US have been to court multiple times over NAFTA violations (sometimes Canada is at fault admittedly).
https://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-com...
2. Profits.
3. Refined products can be exported to countries that don't have refinement capabilities. Not just the US and China. This gives Canada better trade leverage.
4. Security. A big one that's emerged in the last few weeks.
I don't see either Poilievre or Carney talking about this which is disappointing but not unexpected.
The incredible part is USA exported that entire sector to China.
Or they wanted access to sell to the Chinese market and they did whatever it took to get it.
> Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has. In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
It's an actual joke to present something with such a derogatory view of the median American worker with no data to back it up. Most of America's "labor class" is in fact Mexican, the country with the highest annual hours worked per year. Secondly hours worked does not relate directly to productivity. American workers are the most productive in the world. [1]
More importantly, _we don't manufacture like this anymore, even in China_. Doing "acrobatics" on the factory floor is now obsolete. Much of what's said here fails to acknowledge that we would _not_ build our supply chains the same way as China does. China had a surplus of human labor (one that's facing an impending demographic crisis) and so used human labor in ways modern western countries would not and do not.[2]
[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/01/the-countries-where-... [2] https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robotics-race...
Reproducing these supply chains is more possible than this article states. Doing it via destroying our economy however will not work.
Do we sacrifice a democracy for the dollar? If not, is our economy annihilated? We have no credible alternative to reshoring for this reason alone.
I've got some bad news for you.
What democracy? Whose democracy?
Trump just blamed Zelensky for the war in Ukraine again. The entire administration keeps saying they will make Canada the 51st state and "destroy canada economically". They want to take Greenland by force. I don't think America cares much about democracy anymore, only dollars. China will take Taiwan and US will will keep buying chips like they always did.
Anymore? Arguably, the US never did. Ask, for example, the people living in Caribbean or Latin American countries what happened when they elected leaders that the US disliked.
Or Iran. Or Italy. Or Congo. And so on.
Or ask the Indonesians about the mass killings in their country in 1965-1966, supported by the US. Around 500,000 people died, though some estimates put the number of deaths at 1,000,000. Ask the Filipinos about how the US propped up their military dictatorship back in the 1970s-1980s.
I could keep going, but I think you get the point. The US has never been sincerely interested in democracy -- only strategically. The illusion that the US cared about democracy was a primarily Western luxury.
I don't think it's a good idea to assign Trump's beliefs, or those of his administration, to America as a whole. Any more, frankly, than it's a good idea to assign those of his opposition to the country as a whole.
As a historical point, the US never had a problem with Taiwan being handed back to China at the end of WWII, since it is what happened. Again, this is all just a tool against the communists and then against China's increasing power as a whole.
If that Russia equivalent invades an Ukraine equivalent, despite both instances being considered unthinkably crazy, what are we going to do? Or, what will China do, to us?
The US needs to bring back manufacturing for strategic reasons and in strategic areas.
And it needs to have the capability to scale up manufacturing in response to emergencies.
But also, importantly, the US doesn't need to do this by onshoring all manufacturing. Near shoring and friend shoring will have to be extremely important components of adding these capabilities, and unfortunately, teh actions the US is taking will likely hurt nearshoring and friendshoring and will end up making the US less strategically capable in manufacturing even if it's able to reshore a significant amount of manufacturing.
Manufacturing is skilled, well-paid labor that requires commitment, attention, and care. That is why there's a shortage of labor--not because of wages.
In theory. In practice the numbers are way lower.
As some one who has done quite a big time in India IT services firms, have lots of war stories, our Delivery manager would often tell us if US managers only knew adjusted for regular all nighters, whole week on-call hell weeks. Development phases where teams would be working days at stretch in office. The actual per hour rate of an engineer in India is at best $1 - $5 an hour. You just can't bill the customer that way.
Only reason why this even works is India is still poor and people work for anything.
Im sure, adjust for everything(in real practice) manufacturing hourly wages in China aren't all that different and wouldn't be surprised if they are at something like $1 per hour, or something such.
Americans have little idea how much affluence and luxury their ordinary citizen has. Most of the world would do anything even to be poor in the US.
Fair enough to say nobody in the US is signing up to work a hellish factory job for $1/hr anytime soon.
Chinese finds it cheaper to pay people to do it.
America will find it cheaper to build robots to do it.
Then when no one has a job America will revert back to paying people to do it.
Life will always find a way to balance everything out.
The policy should be collaboration with China. 50/50 state subsidized joint ventures with Chinese corporations on EVs, raw materials refining, solar panels and batteries, etc. At the same time, a gradual and predictable tariff in those targeted areas. All of this, with the explicit consent and collaboration with the Chinese government. You could kill 2 birds with one stone and focus these policies on green energy and energy independence -- lessening the effects of climate change.
That is what you would do, if you really cared about bringing manufacturing back.
As of today, there is absolutely no off-ramp. The Dem policy is basically trump lite with respect to China. We are moving in lockstep towards making them a geopolitical adversary, and for what?
But yes in general, if we want to re-industrialize, we need to move the collaboration into the physical world and out of the financial world.
Too bad a large portion of our electorate is brainwashed by propaganda and/or completely out to lunch.
he knows a lot about manufacturing but weirdly not much about labor. very unsubstantiated, derogatory comment.
it gets worse!
> In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
> Chinese workers are much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
> And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
like the fuck? where are your sources? this sounds like some ignorant shit to say
This post is basically correct. The Chinese will accept being exploited way harder than we will! Good going communism!
This shit is why I will resist Marxist bullshit with all of my fiber forever. Fucking barracks communist no matter how hard they try to claim “nah we don’t support that”.
If only there was some framework to organize workers against exploitation... maybe even the workers of the world could unite?
I think you're overlooking that, say, giving out a 10-year loan for a small business is exactly "holding an asset" (holding a bond issued by said small business for 10 years). For the benefit of everyone involved.
In the 1990s there were numerous manufacturing plants in the US (two on the South Hill of Ithaca alone) that were found to be contaminated with solvents like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene
People thought it was great stuff, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get cutting grease off things after you turn them on a lathe and vapor de-greasing makes it go away just like that.
China has some of the most advanced agriculture on the planet including a "vertical farm" that can sell straw mushrooms for about $2 a pack where they are super-proud that humans only touch them with a forklift. (Contrast that to the labor-intensive mushroom farms of Pennsylvania where somebody cuts each one with a knife.)
We are pretty omnivorous (I think mealworms start with "meal") and my obsession with anime and Japan has turned into serious sinophilia but my wife and I are hesitant to eat "Chinese Food" grown in China because of widespread environment contamination, I mean they've been building up heavy metal stocks ever since Emperor Qin Shi Huang poisoned himself with mercury.
It used to be a thing that people were importing massive quantities of baby formula to China because they didn't trust locally manufactured stuff.
You know sinophilia means "love of China", and that anime and Japan are not Chinese, right?
Yes, but they're culturally related. Anywhere where people write with Chinese characters or used to write with Chinese characters has legends about nine-tailed foxes, for instance. The intelligentsia had access to Chinese literature and this diffused into the public imagination. [1]
For me it started out with being willing to enjoy media in an unfamiliar language (first Japanese) that gradually became familiar. Then playing the Japanese game Dynasty Warriors that got me thinking about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and about the characters and the place names and other old Chinese stories like Journey to the West and pretty soon I am enjoying Chinese pop culture about old stories and new stories of the fantastic and even learning some Chinese, getting curious about Chinese mobile games that aren't known at all in the west because Chinese people cosplay as characters from them, etc. (At the university where I work I overhear conversations in Chinese almost every day)
Yes, Japan is a different culture which I still enjoy and appreciate, but for me it was also a gateway to China. [2] I was an anime fan for 30 years but in the last 3 years I've had the same kind of giddy feelings for Chinese pop culture that I had about anime at the beginning and of course that means I'm going to buy a whole fish and eat it with my family because my son's Chinese friend suggests it.
Lately I've been playing the Japanese game Dynasty Warriors Origins which has both Chinese and English voices and find it strange on one hand to hear legendary Chinese heroes speaking Japanese which I mostly understand and then listen intently to the Chinese which to me is still a wall of unfamiliar syllables where I struggle to pick out proper names and an occasional word or phrase -- but I have a great time trying!
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinosphere
[2] ... and it goes the other way, China's pop culture is inspired by Japan (I think it's funny that many Chinese games like Azur Lane use Japanese voices in the west because they know the kind of person likely to play that kind of game knows phrases like suki da! and has an emotional feel for Japanese even if they aren't fluent in it)
He's been telling me this, for years. It's not a secret. The information has been out there, for ages. I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this.
Why would you assume they don't understand? Every time they're questioned about the tariffs the narrative shifts. We have a trade deficit, we're getting ripped off, we want to bring back domestic manufacturing jobs, we'll automate them with robotics and AI, we're playing hardball to negotiate a better trade deal and get rid of fentanyl, it's a matter of national security, an economic emergency, the dollar is overvalued.
You cannot trust a word from them. If you want to understand why they're doing something you must look only at incentives and outcomes. My current analysis is that there's some internal conflict, but the overall push for tariffs comes from a desire to crash the economy and use the downturn to consolidate wealth and power.
Given the timescale any solution will require cooperation across political parties. You can’t start something that will get undone in four years.
Then accept it won’t make much difference to the inhabitants of bumfuck USA. Automation is what took their jobs.
Start at the top of the food chain and gradually work down. If America can make cars but not car tyres then implement gradually increasing tariffs on imported tyres. 1% this year, 2% next and so on. Pretty soon you have a car tyre industry again.
Know when to stop, just like it doesn’t make sense for a banker to clean their own house it doesn’t make sense for a rich country to be making tee shirts.
Of course this won’t happen because of the American political system.
If automation took those jobs then why aren't all those automated factories in USA?
They’re an environmental nightmare and very, very thin margins.
>They’re an environmental nightmare and very, very thin margins.
Which is an argument for consuming less tyres. It doesn't really have much to do with where you make them other than perhaps it is better to make them in a country with stronger environmental regulations.
By acting against China that means I applaud moving manufacturing to Vietnam. I want to help Botswana grow - and I wish there were more countries in Africa I could name that seem to be on a good path (I cannot name the majority of countries in Africa, the ones I can are because they are in the news for bad things happening. I'm not even sure Botswana - I mostly know about them because last time I brought up Africa someone from there said their country was an exception).
Overall the world is better off with a lot of trade. Comparative advantage is real. There are things I can do that I don't want to become good at. However we also need to be aware that not everyone in the world is the friend of freedom and some must be cut off lest they grow. Nobody is perfect though, so you can't cut off everyone.
(Source - worked in int'l remittances w/ African receiving countries)
it is a hard problem
and
last time I brought up Africa someone from there said their country was an exception
Making what are essentially strategic decisions in this "shoot from the hip" fashion is what lands us repeatedly in these situations. By way of illustration, let me try one from the 1980's out on you:
"By acting against Iran that means I applaud men like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden"
(In fairness to the americans who made that colossal blunder, I'll assume that, to them, it seemed a good idea at the time. They were simply not long term thinkers. So no one ever asked, "Hmm, what comes next though?")
We, as a people, need to start thinking a bit further ahead than the ends of our noses.
I see exactly zero point in repeating the example of China again. Why would the outcome be different? Vietnam is another Communist pseudo-dictatorship. Why is this one so different that it won't support Russia?
Vietnam has been at war with China in the recent past. Today China is claiming seas that the US and internal law both call Vietnam's territorial waters - though currently they are not at war. Thus even if Vietnam doesn't move in a good direction, just keeping them where they are (as opposed to supporting China) is useful if only because all indications today are China will start a war in the future. (again nobody knows if they will, but they are preparing as if they will)
Nothing prevents anyone from making moves 20 years from now that are bad. All we can do today is encourage those who seem to be moving for the better. We have no clue how things will turn out. Even when we make what in hindsight now looks like a bad decision, we have no idea how it would have been if we had done something different.
Just like China did? They had a whole phase of economic liberalization and opening trade.
>Nothing prevents anyone from making moves 20 years from now that are bad.
Vietnam is literally another communist pseudo-dictatorship. Their place in the world is obviously far more ambiguous than that of e.g. England. The idea of shifting manufacturing to Vietnam because you do not like the positions of China is just absurd.
>All we can do today is encourage those who seem to be moving for the better.
Why should the US not focus on supporting long term allies who aren't communist single party states?
we should of course support most of europe which usualy has better government. Likewise the other countries in America - both north and south. And so on for anywhere else we can find friends. I an not a Trump fan even if once in a while he does something I support
As has happened with China? When they opened up trade and became part of a global economy their nationalistic ambitions stopped and they ceased to support dictatorships like Russia. Also their political system opened up and they morphed from a uniparty communist country to a liberal democracy. Oh wait, the exact opposite happened on all accounts.
You didn't answer my question. Why would Vietnam be any different? Why should the US help build their economy so that they can do the exact same thing as China did. Your theory of how this works is disproven by reality. You can not make a country a liberal democracy by opening up trade with them. It failed with China, it failed with Russia.
It worked with South Korea, and Taiwan. (Japan and Germany, but they were on the losing side of a war with us which is a confounding factor). It is by no means perfect, but I've yet to see anyone suggest something else that has any chance of working.
Japan and Germany did not get convinced by the virtues of liberal democracy and free trade. They were both forcibly converted under US occupation.
They were by all means military dictatorships, just not communist.
Why does there need to be corruption and abuse?
Why do they have to expose their workers to pollution?
As far as I know, none of those things are required for manufacturing.
That’s why strong regulations are actually important (not something that businesses want to hear -until a “shortcutter” starts to eat their lunch).
Bloc building. Europe has countries which do lots of manufacturing. Use those to gradually reduce reliance on China by slowly restricting Chinese access to the Bloc market and build up supply chains inside the Bloc.
Making everything in the US can not be done without a very severe decline in living standards.
>Is doing nothing acceptable?
How high is your desire to learn Chinese?
Trump's tariffs would theoretically rebalance trade on the long term, albeit in a highly destructive manner. But the more diplomatic solutions as proposed by other commentators like Catherine Tai, Yanis Varoufakis or Michael Pettis would be the introduction of capital controls to stem the demand for US treasuries, or better, the reintroduction of Keynes' proposal of the International Clearing Union back in 1945. The ICU's role would be to actively balance global trade surpluses via the international currency bancor, of which would have fixed control of FX rates rather than relying on FX markets to punish surplus nations and help deficit nations respectively. As for nations outside the Union, they would just get treated similar to the USSR.
If the US sees it as a threat and wants to do something it should maybe look to what China has done. Because tbh what Trump did re Tariffs is pretty close to "nothing" all things considered.
They won't though because as soon as you have someone saying "look, let's just put together a staged plan so that in, say, five years we'll produce X% more electronics domestically..." you'll have a Republican shrieking about "five year plans" and how the USA is becoming communist
If you're going to talk wars, then .. US military manufacturing is still the world leader yet again. Plus the nukes.
This bizzare "we'll bring back manufacturing and be ready all the time" thing seems to imagine you'll just turn the local widget maker over to knocking out high temperature stealth composites for hypersonic missiles real quick.
Which is of course the story of a lot of American manufacturing: it's hard to get a hobby run of PCBs because all the PCB makers are optimized for large orders for defence procurement (and the clearance, supply line and stuff requirements that brings).
Curious why you are surprised at incompetence being unable to understand complexity.
This has been a pretty sobering reminder to anyone that, in fact, there is no such thing.
Fix health care - socialism isn't the only answer despite what many hear will say.
Fix school - it shouldn't be all sit at your desk but that is what we get. Bring back gym class. Make kids get practical experience building the things they designed (that is shop class). Math could be fun - but most teachers don't believe it themselves, and so they haven't a hope of passing that on to students.
You've said re healthcare that "socialism isn't the answer" - assuming you mean "I don't want a single-payer or free-at-the-point-of-use system" then I'm not sure what is the answer then. They've currently got some of the worst health outcomes on the planet despite spending amongst the most per-capita. They can either try more privatisation or maybe give something like Medicare For All a shot...
And re "fix school" you seem to suggest that shop class needs to be more widespread and maths teachers just need to be more enthusiastic? If the idea is to give kids more options then things like making sure that there are widely available apprenticeship programs and technical colleges to develop these skills, as well as strong (dare I say, union) jobs waiting for them when they complete their training.
And re maths teachers, if it's anything like the UK I suspect that teachers are being expected to do more with less at every stage of schooling. They handle more kids per class with fewer teaching assistants available. They need to handle more diverse lessons than before because there are insufficient PE teachers, Music teachers, Drama teachers etc). They're having a tougher time with kids behaviourally due to the rise of social media and a broader economic decline that causes a whole host of social issues that end up being schools' problem. Having poor school system is a symptom of greater societal problems, you don't fix schools without solving those (sidenote: you also don't solve those by pointing the finger at vulnerable communities like immigrants and LGBTQ+). Telling maths teachers to be a bit more enthusiastic doesn't fix any of that, it just makes the maths teachers hate their job a bit more.
i'm not suggesting enthusiastic math teachers is all we need: lack of enthusism is a sympton of a problem but fixing symptoms isn't enough. Likewise I'm not sure shop class is the answer - but schools are leaving a lot of people out by not having them.
the us has a great school system overall but it needs to be better.
I dunno what to tell you man, it sounds like you're a true believer on this. I reckon everyone who has undergone a healthcare bankruptcy (a uniquely American thing, btw) or could not get treated be cause they couldn't afford it was a true believer before they were let down.
It is really of no consequence to me which you choose, I don't live there and it's looking likely I'll probably skip even visiting let alone consider moving there in future.
I am not desputing that we spend far too much for what we get. I am desputing the solution.
Healthcare and schools are both important and hard problems. Most people with ideas have bad ideas IMHO.
My friend is watching his business get ready to die. His wife is still the CEO, and she's losing her shit. They're not alone. There's thousands and thousands of similar operations, all over the US, that will have to shut down, if something doesn't give.
I guess the mega-rich oligarchs think this is great, but they don't employ the majority of Americans.
I wonder where they were on election day, when they had a choice. The record of business owners voting D is .. not great.
That's the optimistic POV at least imo.
Because of the embarrassment that is meant to be our government, DoE hasn't paid for a contract completed in December (including physical goods), and DoD has silently stopped all of the R&D contracts we've been applying for.
We're about a week or three away from bankruptcy.
Our only foreign vendors are for PCBs and a particular type of motor. US PCB fabs are and have always been vastly more expensive and really don't do small scale runs at any sort of reasonable price. The motors? No one makes them domestically.
I'd gripe more, but this administration simply doesn't care about little guys like us. US small business are going to start dropping like flies soon.
No.
The shareholder class underestimates it.
A lot of Americans realize that it's going to be hard, which is why we should have made an example out of the first guy to profit off of sending manufacturing off to the shores of a geopolitical rival.
America suffers from a flattened income curve. There are many many more people earning $100k+ today than in 1960 (inflation adjusted). America has an envy problem first, equality problem second, spoiled child problem third.
You can cut out the top 10% of earners in the country and it still wouldn't do much to change the situation for those in the <60% earning percentiles.
To put it short; the reason you cannot afford a home isn't because of Bezos, Musk, and Blakrock. It's because the other bidders have STEM masters degrees and dual income high paying jobs, and probably a few hints of financial literacy thrown in too.
When one person holds the wealth equivalent to the total yearly economic output of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, yes, it's going to introduce distortions, even if only because the people who actually do the labor under those people are being paid less in order to better fund the equities that make up the wealth of that person.
And that's before getting into the other problems with the housing supply.
No, that's where you have it backwards they are being paid more. That's the exact reason why they are buying that house when you say "who the fuck can afford that".
Ironically, they are also the ones being exploited the most by the top 1%.
An amazon warehouse sorter will never create or do anything that makes amazon much more money than what they are paid. They get $18/hr for producing $21/hr of value, doing the same static task all day everyday. Amazons "profit margin" on these workers is almost nothing.
The lead cloud architect though gets paid $350k/yr, but can design a single change that will make amazon $30-40 million/yr. The profit margin on them is insane. And they are the ones outbidding everyday people on things, driving up costs.
Back 60 years ago, everyone was much more clumped around the same (lower) income, so the houses where smaller and the prices more amenable to more people.
Unless we're just here to repeat canards from the 1990s given by financiers which explained why it was good to shut down the main employers for entire towns.
There are localized problems - and it's all very similar to the post-Thatcher UK - but you cannot be serious in imagining that employment would magically return to the exact spots it left. In fact that's one of the sub-problems OP talks about: so you want a US Shenzen. Where are you going to put it?
(UK equivalent: we're discussing keeping Scunthorpe blast furnaces open, so that we can have a "secure" supply of "domestic" steel .. made entirely from imported ingredients. Because the mines the plant was built to refine are empty)
Areas gutted, jobs lost and some lesser number of jobs with less benefits and pay created elsewhere.
So many political ideas seem to only be allowed to be discussed if you can add a garnish of racism or xenophobia to them.
Whereas when states that aren't behaving that way lose jobs, factories and industries to Mexico or China they're all "hey WTF" over it because they actually cared and didn't want that economic activity driven off.
Then later moved all 787 production there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24544139 https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/09/09/44441906/the-dea...
While the main articles seemed to have a good riddance tone, the HN comment section seemed to be more restricted in that view.
>It's hard to believe that the current Boeing leadership will turn things around with even less focus on quality and talented workers. Feels like they should be moving back towards engineering driven approaches.
What if a war erupts? Suddenly the US cannot produce a lot of essential stuff - I think Covid was a good example of that happening.
Of course the question is can this be done and what will be the price if so.
I believe we should scale up manufacturing in the US for different reasons.
But I'm also a realist. If war erupts between China and the US, then anyone in the US or China still alive 4 weeks after the start of hostilities will have more pressing concerns than worrying about where things are manufactured. Again, just the reality.
We shouldn't plan on the basis of end of the world scenarios. Rather we should plan on the assumption that we want to confer maximum benefit on the US in likely non-apocalyptic future timelines.
A realist would prepare for the worst
No real need for us to make economic or investment preparations for that eventuality. It does us no good in the life we do have to say, "Well, I can't invest in the US because in the worst case, non of our secret weapons function fully, Russia blows us away, and all my real estate and manufacturing investments go up in smoke." We'd sit around never improving anything, because it will all go away in the worst case.
Best to assume it won't go away because we won't go to war with Russia or China, (or even maybe the EU nowadays? Who knows?). Anyway, we should make investment decisions on the "we aren't gonna go to war" basis. If war happens, well, we're dead and all the investments are destroyed anyway so.. yeah.. nothing you can do. Can't even get out of the continental US in 15 minutes, so you can't even save yourself let alone your investments.
Two of his points: "Industrial supply chain is weak" and "We don't know how to make it" are exactly the same. >all the factories which make the needed components are in Asia, >because they know how to make the best semiconductors in the world.
But this is looking at the problem and then missing the point: If I decide to start mfg. IPhone in the US, I can't because there are no suppliers.
As long as nothing changes, there will continue to be no suppliers.
If I HAVE to mfg the IPhone in the US, at first I will import due to no supplier but someone will make a local supplier because they can undercut my importer.
a generation of kids that never lost all their work because they didn't hit ctrl+s at the correct moment is now trying to run things
Producing t-shirts, window fans, or toilet brushes is not high value work. The slice of value available to convert to currency for the worker is very tiny. So you end up having to play games with the economy which inevitably will blow up in someone's face. $60 t-shirts so we can pretend that the value in a t-shirt is much more than it is, so we artificially make t-shirt manufacturing competitive with, say, automobile manufacturing.
If it actually costs $60 (really more like $25 for made-in-America t-shirts I’ve bought) to make a t-shirt, with environmental regulations and human costs accounted for, then isn’t that the actual cost of a t-shirt? And they were artificially cheap at $10 for imported ones due to ignoring externalities? In that case, producing these simple products is actually a bit more valuable than you suggest.
Maybe a part of the $15 difference is in marketing.
You can run the numbers many different ways, but the important point is low value production is always about volume.
You can't put a monetary value on a t-shirt, because people will buy them anyways. Who is to say that t-shirts aren't $60? People only think that t-shirts are "low value" because we have offshored the labor and are used to very low prices. Meanwhile I bet most Americans can't even sew.
Observationally I fear there is a lack of nuance in discussing "bringing back manufacturing" (really re-expanding) to the U.S.
I fear the lack of nuance is due to bias based on not liking the guy in the red tie or the other guy that's in a blue tie so there's just blinders about whether or not a particular policy will achieve a particular stated goal.
The next thing I see is it just lumping manufacturing all into one bucket.
Take manufacturing smartphones. Because the U.S. doesn't assemble iPhones the U.S. appears to be bad at manufacturing? No, I think it's just not good at assembling iPhones.
Just looking at numbers, sure the U.S. steel production is dwarfed by China but globally it's still a major producer. And there's no discussion of quality.
Look at oil & gas. I'm pretty sure the U.S. both produces the raw material and refined product at a significant amount globally.
Plastic manufacturing. I toured a bottle manufacturing plant last summer. It's primary a customer was Limited Brands (Victoria Secret)
It built molds. It upgraded factory equipment roughly every 8 years (increasing production & reducing labor costs). Why was it able to manufacturer bottles in the U.S. even it's selling at a higher price? Because it's primary customer was essentially down the street. That is, apparently the cost to not import across the globe more than offset the cost to manufacture here.
I understand that's just an example and I'm trusting the information from that company was reliable.
But first I think we need to be honest about how much manufacturing is here and what type. Then discuss which policies are likely to achieve goals we may have in mind.
I think there's merit to manufacturing semiconductors and batteries here. But we need to also be aware that while manufacturing may bring jobs, an increasing amount of labor will be automated.
Seems much better to look seriously at the manufacturing we still have (as you say, it's considerable), where we can expand on that, and where we're lacking and need to rebuild.
Once the military needs are met, I don't care what we make, just that we need good jobs for people who are not able to handle more complex jobs.
If manufacturing becomes more efficient at using labor from automation that seems like that would lower the number of available jobs wouldn't it?
Unless consumption grows with the increase in output so that more factories are needed to meet the demand?
If you need 1000 cars and automation takes it down to 10 people from 100 people before, where are those 90 other people to get jobs?
Unless you grow the need for cars to 10000.
Simplification I know, but I am confused at how manufacturing is supposed to endlessly support a large "less-complex task" labor supply while simultaneously providing a good standard of living?
we also need education reform so that those people get the education needed to do more complex tasks insteade of droping out. What this looks like I don't really know.
There surely can't over a billion factory workers in a population of 1.4 billion. I looked up a population pyramid, and let's say 100% of the population aged 15-64 is employed at a factory job, that's ~70% of the population which is only 985 million people.
The transition period is currently already underway due to the tariffs. An unintented consequences is that the big players in commerce(Nike, All Big brand names...) no longer have a monopoly due to China relaxing the regulation on it's factories to disclose for which brands they manufacture products.
Now that the everyday person knows that they can also buy products from the same factories at a fraction of what they used to pay. They will do that. So the middleman will slowly fade out unless they can compete with... Robotics and AI.
The other consequences of the shift in this consumption dynamic is that it behaves in a downward fashion on inflation. People's incomes did not increase but they can now purchase more with their incomes. Jackets that used to be advertised as 200/300/400 dollars now can be bought for $20/$30 directly from the middlemen in China and get shipped to the US since they are under the $800 dollar limit.
This is actually a win win for all US residents. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Beyond the obvious skilled labor there’s supply chain network, maintenance, townships and supporting system around them.
And all of this needs human labor which is taken from somewhere else. How do you incentivize them? Just throwing money at the problem won’t solve it either. Because more often than not it’ll attract charlatans who will promise the sky, take the money and move away.
Where I live it is close to impossible to even get a Dog House approved and built.
The regulatory apparatus has to be rewired.
And then what happens when a new administration comes along 4-8 years down the line and decides to abandon some of those initiatives?
That has its own issues.
Not sure if it's still the case, but the Yangtze River used to be one of the most polluted water bodies on earth.
I'm not sure exactly what the correct middle ground looks like. I do know that there are signs of a good system.
There can be no bribes in the system. All permits must have a clearly defined fee that is small and clearly covers the inspectors salary and no more. The vast majority of cases when you want to build it should be 30 minutes from applying for the permit to it being granted. The rules are clearly written up and so it isn't hard to look up the law and write up a permit that cannot be refused.
There are only rarely hearings. You have the right to do what you want on your property. If your neighbor doesn't like it for the most part they should have bought your property so you couldn't. You don't however have the right to let pollution escape your property - pollution isn't just things like chemicals, but also noise. In rural areas, or around airports we also give you rights to sun, wind, and airspace - in cities though you don't get to demand your garden isn't shaded. You don't get to tell someone what color to paint to use. You don't get to force any amount of parking (either minimum of maximum). You can't enforce building space (square foot, height). You don't get to tell someone not to run a business. You do get to require fire code such that any fire will not spread to your building, and if you want fire protection (which if you don't have you need to ensure smoke from an accidental fire won't affect the neighbors) the fire department can demand some additional features.
There is probably a lot more, and the above isn't quite correct either, but it at least gives a place to state the debate from.
Robotics automation is a tradeoff to gain efficiency at the expense of flexibility, with a large upfront cost.
Of course there are a lot variables in the above. As time goes one automation gets better. You can buy cheap robots for some common operations, and a good engineer with good CAD can run various automated analysis to ensure fit and then export to the robot and build even a single part cheaper than the human - amortizing the cost of the robot over thousands of different single parts made this way. However as the widget gets more complex you reach the point where humans are needed. In some cases you just have humans to take the parts off of one machine and put them into the next, but it is still humans. We can automate even that, but often the robot to do that would cost more than a human for 10 years.
You're saying it like it's a bad thing.
Wouldn't it be better we have automation in the west, instead of sweat shops in the east?
Sounds more like China has an exploited educated class/lack of oppurtunity than America has bad education.
Plenty of American workers can multiply in their heads and diligently perform there work. These people work in white collar jobs though, not in factories snapping together phone cases for 12 hours a day.
The author isn't totally wrong here, Americas bottom tier labor pool sucks, but they miss the bigger picture when comparing Chinese and American workers. China has skilled workers doing unskilled work. That's why they are so good. That's also why bringing manufacturing to the US will be so hard. Ain't nobody wanna get a degree so they can work a hot factory floor all day.
Factories can be air conditioned.
> America would be better off if more Americans works in manufacturing than they do today. Agree 80%/Disagree 20%
> I would be better off if I worked in a factory instead of my current field of work. Agree 25%/Disagree 73%
[0] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-08/Globalizat...
BTW we don't talk enough about the gigantic loophole in the thirteenth amendment: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [emphasis added]
I've got bad news for you, then. https://www.vox.com/2018/8/24/17768438/national-prison-strik...
It'll be easier to teach folks hard work, it's very difficult to change a culture when 1. A huge sector of our legal system geared towards it 2. People can easily get rich off of it.
The points are correct but rather than bring “all manufacturing back”, the goal should be to aim for an 80:20 or 70:30. And it will still take decades, but at least with a far better chance of success.
For companies that rely on a global supply chain, manufacturing and even raw materials should aim for mostly global but a guaranteed 20 to 30% local.
It’s one way to offset a real market problem, where unchecked market forces drives all production offshore or “nearshore; leaving the nation vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.
For essentials like grains, I’d even argue that the nation should opt for an 70:30. It’d be insane for us to offshore the majority of production.
To paraphrase Kennedy: "We choose to [bring back manufacturing]. We choose to [bring back manufacturing] in this [or the next] decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
We will do it, and we will win, whatever that means.
What in the modern situation suggests the comparable level of diligence in approach to the goal? The fact that both goals are far-reaching does not suggest comparability of approaches to the solution.
Changing the way society/economy operates is nowhere near "building X," whatever X is, whether it's something hard like a bomb or a collider.
> We will do it, and we will win, whatever that means.
How do you know that you haven't won already? Shouldn't the end goal be clear? In the case of Kennedy you're referring to, criteria and motivation were clear.
--
To a non-US bystander, your comment sounds like a no-thinking patriotic slogan. The details of the article are such that you can take any argument and bring it into discussion in order to show its irrelevance. But we're discussing slogans irrelevant to the situation and belief in the win, even though the win is not defined.
These are the questions people need to ask themselves. We both know what the answer is.
/sarcasm, or summary of other discourse in this thread?
You seem to assume that once manufacturing has been brought back it would somehow be internationally competitive. I don't see how that's possible.
Maybe I didn't get your point.
They're still correct though that there are plenty of good reasons why we don't do manufacturing in the US right now, and tariffs do absolutely nothing to change that reality, they just artificially make the alternative worse at significant expense to consumers.
Even after considering the alternate pathway called ROC[tm]-- after all you may argue Morris Chang et al gave up lifestyles-- & I hear Rationalistic Daoism is having a resurgence on the mainland (vs Confucianism)--
Because (sadly) it's all still about morale & spiritualThere seems to be no actual plan to actually bring back manufacturing (this would require different tariffs, loans, tax accounting rules, etc). And there seems to be no targeting of china (everywhere is being tariffed, allies and enemies, strategic suppliers and places with no trade with the USA etc)
Let me add some thoughts:
1) Capacity, not cost, is the main driver for nearshoring. All things being equal, a manufacturer would rather produce a product in the US than overseas. The cost of modern products is mostly parts & material, not labor. When you add logistcs expenses, the theoretical cost advantage of overseas vs local is not that great. Remember:the people on the other side of the border are capitalists too! They want to keep most of the surplus of nearshoring to themselves! The problem is that there simply is no capacity, both in facilities and especially in people.
2) What matters even more than capacity is the first derivative of capacity. In other words: how quickly can I spin up a new factory if I win a big deal? How quickly can I spin one down if the client goes away? How long will it take me to get a permit to connect my new factory to the highway? In the US, these costs and timelines are massive. Real estate, permitting, hiring. There is an order of magnitude difference here, in cost and time.
3) The labor problems are real. I don't want to disparage the american workers I work with, because they are amazing. Truly fantastic craftsmen. But they are hard to find. You'd be surprised how many people show up who can't read or can't read a tape measure. How hard it is to find people that want to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. By contrast, in our overseas facility we have qualified workers literally showing up at our gate every day asking for work.
In other words, the root cause problems with american manufacturing are—-surprise surprise!--the same problems as with other parts of the US that are in decay:
- Disfunctional local government, especially around permitting, construction, housing and transit
- Disfunctional education & healthcare systems.
- A lack of strategic investment in infrastructure (rail, highways)
- A social safety net that is totally out of whack, with a high cost burden for employers & employees, with little to no immediate quality-of-life benefits for the working population
Tariffs solve exactly zero of those probems!
Even then, materials & parts dominate.
Competition is extremely high initially, products will be ridiculed for being expensive and low quality. Companies will fail and go bankrupt, workers will suffer from that.
"Bringing manufacturing back" is a path of pain, not a way to fast economic success. There is no way to change that, tariffs will certainly not change it. Are Americans ready to leave their office job and work overtime in factories and engineering departments? No, automation will not do this for you, you are competing with a country which knows far more about automation than you do. To compete with them you need to be better and cheaper.
Lastly look how Germany struggles, right now. Their industry is in large parts starting to loose any competitive edge and will continue to do, unless very significant cuts are made somewhere. You can not keep the same living standards while someone is doing twice your work for half your costs.
The main show-stopper to them is the lack of working knowledge about precision tooling manufacturing.
For example, some of the best power machine tools in the world came from Germany and from Bridgeport, CT between 1910 and 1965. There are/were moderately large, 1 micron runout milling machines such as Moore No. 2 and No. 3. These things generally aren't made anymore and not many people know the tricks and processes to make similar or equivalent machines that make other tools and machines. Like that the unshielded body heat of an operator can swing the runout of a precision machine in an otherwise climate-controlled environment.
"There is no duty drawback for exporting. In the past, even in the United States, if you imported something and then exported it, the tariff you paid on the import would be refunded to you. They got rid of that..."
My understanding was that duty drawback—where import duties are refunded if the imported items or their components are later exported—is still broadly available in the U.S., though with certain exceptions (like steel/aluminum tariffs under Section 232 or trade within USMCA countries).
Is he referring specifically to recent tariff changes or targeted exceptions rather than a general elimination? Or has there been a broader policy shift I'm missing?
We build about 100 SM-6 missiles a year. How long does this last against a peer? 12 hours?
I don't know if tariffs are the best way to do this but some manufacturing must come back one way or another.
The only sane way to bring back manufacturing is investments like the chips act.
Think about it this way, you are a widget manufacturer trying to place a new factory. You could put it in say Canada and enjoy cheap imports and exports of your product globally. It's cheap to produce and easy to sell.
Or you could place it in the US, but now you are looking at a minimum 10% tax on importing the resources you need. On top of that, a significant portion of the world (especially the richest nations) are tacking on an addition 10% or more tax on your product because it came from the US.
Would you build a factory in the US? Maybe if you can source everything in the US and you are fine with your primary market being only the US. Otherwise, it's a bad business move.
When talking about something like semiconductors, global access is really important to be profitable. Low or no tariffs and the proximity to China and other raw resources powerhouses is a major reason why so much of the semiconductor industry is in Asia.
It is really that hard. Look what happened in Arizona. TSCM brought the most complex semiconductor chip making supply chains to the US on a vacant piece of land in NW Phoenix in about 4 years. And it wasn't just TSMC that invested in the Arizona site, but also companies like Linde ($600M), APS ($100M), Sunlit Chemical ($100M), Air Liquide ($60M), and Chang Chun ($300M).
Maybe others can comment, but are semiconductor chips the most complex thing to manufacture in the world? Not sure but the Arizona TSMC supply chain proves it can be done.
This is the big difference between a tariff regime that is credible in such a way that the business community can plan investment around it, and the current one that has mostly just caused chaos and confusion.
But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children.
How we get that level of prosperity back? That's the people really want. Tariffs are simply a means to that end.
I wish people would stop writing articles about 100% criticizing tariffs and instead write articles 50% about criticizing tariffs and 50% brainstorming alternative solutions to achieve the same objective.
Work to do what?
> But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children.
Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or manufacturing?
> How do we get that level of prosperity back?
Better pay for the jobs people actually work. Reducing inequality by preventing the richest 0.1% from capturing all the massive gains in wealth the US has seen over the past few decades. Removing regulations that prevent the country from building housing and therefore driving up housing costs. Switching to a healthcare model in nearly any of the comparable developed countries almost all of which deliver better healthcare at half the cost. Not expecting everyone to be able to live a completely unsustainable suburban life. Having the government support children's upbringing by paying for high quality education, instituting rules and regulations that require mandatory paid maternity/paternity leave, etc.
Lost of poorer countries manage to do this and more just fine. The US is far richer than most of those countries.
Very little of this has to do with manufacturing jobs falling from 18mm to 13mm.
Bring back manufacturing, and make the US economy work better for workers.
> Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or manufacturing?
Because usually the best-paying jobs were in factories, especially if you didn't have a college degree. A lot of towns in the Rust Belt were economically dependent on a local factory -- think cars or steelmaking. Often, part of the reason these factories were so high paying is because the jobs were unionized.
Companies moved overseas to save money on that expensive labor.
Now, companies have all the negotiation leverage. "If you unionize / demand higher pay, we'll move operations overseas" is a real and credible threat, as countless companies have already done it.
Tariffs are supposed to make operating overseas more expensive. Undo the economic justification for moving the jobs overseas and they will come back.
This takes away the companies' negotiation leverage. The "If you unionize / demand higher pay, we'll move operations overseas" threat isn't credible if everyone knows overseas manufacturing is super expensive due to tariffs.
I grew up in the Rust Belt and I'm old enough to properly remember when some of those factories were still operating. I saw with my own eyes what used to be a respectable blue-collar community decay into an economic wasteland. The drugs are getting bad. A lot of people have lost hope. Young ambitious folks see no reason to stay here.
The problem and its underlying factors are so obvious to me that I'm constantly amazed to see well-informed, intelligent people who don't seem to understand it.
Do you understand that labor is priced into the cost of the product? Who is going to buy all of these American products made by highly paid unionized workers?
I understand the Rust Belt situation sucks, but people can’t afford to buy everyday consumer goods made with American labor. I’m wearing an American made pair of shoes right now that is 20-30x more expensive than a pair of shoes from Walmart, and even ‘less expensive’ US made shoes like Red Wing are 10-15x as expensive. Now imagine paying 10-30x more for everything, it’s not sustainable.
A job that pays a living wage!
I am reminded of when the great offshoring started and everyone was looking down on poorer folks for shopping at Walmart because it was filled with cheap junk and they should know better than to buy that stuff(when in reality it's all they could afford since their good job was gone...).
Seemingly, this is going to magically happen? Where are the programs to make sure this does happen? Erecting tariffs is one thing, but having an actual plan and executing on said plan is another. So far, all I see is rising prices and looming threats of job cuts due to slow downs which stem from increased costs, and there is nothing coming to buffer that.
Let alone, the investment capital isn't moving in this direction. As of this writing, the general posture of the Republican donor class is 'wait and see how long the tariffs last' not 'lets invest in American industry again'
>Because usually the best-paying jobs were in factories, especially if you didn't have a college degree. A lot of towns in the Rust Belt were economically dependent on a local factory -- think cars or steelmaking. Often, part of the reason these factories were so high paying is because the jobs were unionized.
Emphasis mine. Do you believe that the modern Republican party is pro union? Do you really think they won't undermine organized labor even if jobs come back in some form? Even though the modern Democratic party have a spotty history on labor issues, the Republicans have shown for 40 years to be the anti labor party. They rarely - if ever - pass legislation that is pro labor. This administration isn't proving to be different in that regard either, and it wasn't different the first time around.
>I grew up in the Rust Belt and I'm old enough to properly remember when some of those factories were still operating. I saw with my own eyes what used to be a respectable blue-collar community decay into an economic wasteland.
So did I. Hallowed home town and all. One of the poorest in the state I grew up. You know what else never happened? Sustained public policy to help these areas. There were largely no programs to help transition workers from one industry to another. We don't have comprehensive safety nets and retraining / re-education programs for workers. We lack all of that. Why aren't we starting by implementing those programs? Its rather wishful thinking that bringing manufacturing back to the US, that it will end up in these same areas to begin with, because manufacturing is very different than it used to be. I doubt most of these areas would be good places to re-build manufacturing capacity in the US. What manufacturing is done here is already concentrated in the South which precludes huge chunks of the traditional rust belt.
Given the improvements in cameras and computer vision and AI and robotics, there is no reason to think this won't accelerate. A long long time ago, labor was cheap and resources were expensive. Today, the opposite is true. Keynes predicted in the 50s that we would be working 15 hour work weeks. The reason he was "wrong" was that he underestimated our insatiable human greed. We all want more. Average house size in the 50s was < 1200 sq ft. Today it is 2400+. Each kid must have their own room that is 12x12!! (I grew up with 4 boys in a 10x10, lol). Each kid must get a new $200 bat each year for little league, etc. We want a higher standard of living for ourselves and our kids. This is understandable but we forget our role in the never ending chase.
It’s so simple it hurts. Stop the ruling class hoarding all the wealth.
Top tax bracket used to be 94%.
Have a VERY steep wealth tax, an inheritance tax and whatever else is needed. The fact individuals exist with many hundreds of millions of dollars while so many in the same society are struggling so bad is a disgrace.
1. win a world war that destroys the economy of every other country in the world for a decade.
2. destroy about the past 50 years of technology and all knowledge of how manufacture it.
3. Kill 90% of people over retirement age to lower demand for housing, healthcare costs, and retirement benefits.
In the modern world with modern technology there's a lot less productive work out there for people without specialized education. We could do a better job of training more people for trades jobs (e.g. plumbers, electricians etc), and removing college requirements from some professions (e.g. med school and law school could probably be college level education rather than post college) but anyone saying that we're going back is just lying.
> How do we get that level of prosperity back?
The issue is that this is a false premise. The house sucked. Only 1/3rd of American families had a single car at the time, and the cars sucked. We can go on and on about everything else. Not to mention the social environment at the time sucked.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the issues Americans face. But tariffs with a shifting set of sanewashed justifications are just Not It.
Like what is unique about factory work that allows for this? I’ve heard stuff like this so much and I just do not believe it. Is anyone working in a factory in the USA today able to buy a home and have a stay at home spouse on a single income?
So... here goes: rather than proclaiming a "housing crisis", maybe we're seeing the end of an exceptional period of "housing affordability". (A similar analysis of Europe and Asia applies, piecemeal.)
As such, if we want to re-enter into a new period of housing affordability, we need to ask ourselves what we plan to give up and/or trade for that?
For WW2, it was millions of lives and worldwide devastation. It seems like we'd need a complete re-evaluation of the way wealth, family structures, and social safety nets work in order to vastly expand housing. (In the US.)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-much-will-home-equity-level...
The last time that I know of housing losing values was 2008 before that, it was 1991
I think this problem is much, much, much harder than most people think. Almost every single society — except for Japan, AFAICT — is getting hit by this issue, but each in their own, novel way, that covers every possible "obvious" solution.
By making everyone poorer. Seriously.
You are competing with your fellow citizens for those things. This was true even back then.
Right now, today, it has never been easier to make a lot of money working. So you need to compete with people in that environment. You need to be able to outbid those people for that beautiful home you want. In an environment of lots of educated and skilled workers getting skilled salaries for doing vary valuable work. That's where the bar is.
We can lower the bar back to blue-collar-high-school-diploma, but then we need to also sacrifice all those high earning college degree jobs.
Not going to happen.
And something they're not going to get. Manufacturing is going to be heavily automated. The money is going to continue to funnel into a small portion of the population.
When was that last really true? 1971?
Back then cars and homes and essentials were relatively cheap and TVs and flying were expensive. Today it's flipped. TVs are cheap, phones are cheap. Essentials, like housing, are expensive.
And perhaps more importantly, do you have any idea what rent currently is costing? As a fraction of median income?
This is an avocado toast argument.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/america
It doesn't make you wrong, but you're also not right.
Out of all examples one could pick, this is the worst, as Corning Gorilla glass is actually made in the USA (Kentucky), and used by all other manufacturers.
1. https://vendettasportsmedia.com/michael-jordan-wasnt-that-ba...
He was that bad at baseball compared how good he was a basketball.
The article seemed correct IMHO,
> What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball? He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player in the minor leagues. 2 years later, he was back to playing basketball.
What a mess this country is in.
I agree with just about everything in the blog post, except, the underlying Michael Jordan baseball analogy example. Does the analogy hold if we swap Michael Jordan for let's say... Bo Jackson? He really was very good at a number of sports before his hip injury.
"America" doesn't underestimate or overestimate things. People do. So which American people underestimate the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back? Name names, or it didn't happen.
Someone may be able to pay workers $300/month and make them work the "996 working hour system"[1], but if they then have to mark up the end product by 100%, the disparity between local and global price to consumers narrows.
Let me make a national security argument: China will move against Taiwan. Chinese ambitions do not stop there. They want Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and many more nations as their new territories.
We saw international trade cut off in WW1 and again in WW2. It will happen again, and soon.
We are better off with an incremental step-down in trade from tariffs than a sudden cut-off. That is what Donald Trump's tariffs are doing.
The VAST majority of what is wrong with our society (political and obviously economic) can be traced to this. It's the expectation that every economic endeavor must show a return on investment - forever. That every entity must strive to optimize the bottom line every day of its existence. Optimizing for growth above all else crushes and consumes everything.
Increasing local manufacturing will only create more opportunities for people to be indentured to a company that literally hates their existence.
A company is forced to build here in the U.S. and people are supposed to rejoice they now have another option for their lives to simply be tolerated and disposable?
"A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely."
Why would anyone want to go back to an economy that can be run by a third worlders? What is our competitive advantage then?
Economics works when the people do the things they are most efficient at. If a person in China can make iPhones for cheaper than an American, LET THEM. Our citizens should be designing them instead, because that's what we train our citizens to do.
Trump and the Republicans really do think of our citizens as third worlders performing manual labor like we were oxen.
Personally, I think we need to focus on making things like homes more affordable. This would go a long way toward alleviating people's feeling of being trapped.
It's definitely less of a factor compared to money, but I can't help wonder if in addition to being able to afford stuff, it's the idea that there used to be a "default" path that carried some sort of dignity. Dirty jobs have never been outright glamorous, but there's still a kind of respect that American society confers upon "traditional" industrial work - think the classic image of the humble American coal miner, factory worker, or farmer. "It ain't much, but it's honest work." I think the thought is that however you did in school and in the upper-class-employment rat race, anyone could find a stable, respectable, long-term job - probably even get trained on the job - in an industry that really matters, that does useful stuff for the country.
Now? If you fail to jump through all the office-job hoops of picking a fancy field, getting a degree, finding internships, dressing up nice, keeping a clean record, acing job interviews, etc. Or if those fancy jobs just aren't hiring near you. What are the "default" job options most people are left with? Working retail at Walmart? Putting fries in the bag at McDonalds? Janitorial? Driving a truck? Doordashing burritos?
Obviously the main thing the lack of stability and decent pay in these jobs, but when it comes to public perception and fantasizing, like you said, I wonder if a part of it is just that these service sector jobs feel... shittier. Less important for society.
See the hundreds of thousands of people in US that have died from opioid overdoses. 50% of the US population, specifically those living outside major metro areas, experienced a slow collapse (over decades) that was not unlike the fall of the Soviet Union.
A country should have _some_ semblance of what it is to truly source, manufacture, and produce the lifestyle that's made possible in the country. When the top 15-20% become completely disconnected from the other 80% working menial service jobs because the core manufacturing has been outsourced to outside the country, it will come back to bite you.
"Man must feel the sweat on his own brow" or at least have an appreciation for what makes this possible. Your comment essentially implies that you feel that you are above or should be disconnected from this reality, which is dangerous.
Globalist trade promoters are just short-term wishful / magical thinkers. It's magical thinking that you can create this social and economic imbalance via outsourcing it to the other side of the globe, without consequences over the long run. It's wishful thinking that there are enough upper middle class jobs / lifestyle for everyone that took Calculus.
Offshoring has produced a world where we can buy cheap trinkets but where many, many, americans live precariously, have little to no stability, and work more than one job to make ends meet. What Americans really want is more control over their lives and "bringing back manufacturing" is a sort of short-hand for that ideal.
I think bringing back some manufacturing may help, but in the end Americans need to learn that what they really want is more power to shape their lives and that they will need to wrest that power back from a system which has leaned ever more towards market control of the allocation of time, energy, and labor.
The poorly educated need a livelihood too. If the economy is healthier for global trade (I think it is), then some way must be found of destributing its benefits to the demographics who got hit. Otherwise you get revolution or populism.
Telling an unemployed factory worker to send their kids to college doesn't help. Doesn't help the factory worker, and doesn't help kids who see education and middle class jobs as about as unreal as the idea of becoming a famous influencer or kingpin drug dealer.
Also the US is already the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world.
i didn't understand it myself until I developed a hardware system and computed the margins, hassle, etc - manual labor/assembly/mfg is not what a developed economy relies on and its asinine to pretend it is.
I don't know how the current American dynamism movement has picked up the steam it has
Why does it cost us 10X more to build half as much? It's not all wage differences. It's that we don't have a large talent pool of builders. When you make things -- physical things in the real world -- you learn things about the nature of reality that cannot be learned from books or computers.
It literally harms industry because anyone relying on that hyper niche part now has to pay more (because American mfg, let's face it - is not efficient) and deal with subpar quality as opposed to higher quality foreign parts.
I hate it say it, but come on man - people aren't buying American cars globally because the Japanese and even Germans can do it better. That's free market economics, either get better at making cars or focus on making things that we can do better like iPhones and Macbooks - not try to artificially defend an industry we suck at by forcing people to deal with shittier subpar products.
Maybe I'm being unreasonable, I don't know.
You are the one who thinks of the work as below you, that it should be moved out of sight so we can stop caring and make it someone else’s problem.
You may think a farm worker deserves $500,000,000 a year, but that won't matter until someone else decides to pay them that.
Ultimately, it's OK to say some things are more valuable than others, including the value of your labor.
If you believe this statement, then you must be supportive of open borders.
People in China might be more efficient at doing local US service jobs. Whose to say we dont let them do it?
Imagine how bad the US economy would be if we had tariffs and border controls between states.
Lord man... there's a whole mass of humanity who don't want to fart in an office chair all day, or lay around collecting the dole.
What we have instead is a nation straddled with debt and useless degrees. While the counties like China do “theirs world” work produce smarter and more capable workforce all while doing the mundane work too.
I think your view also vastly underestimates the number of not so smart people that exist in America. This is no knock on them, but people in tech bubbles get to walk around in a society where the average person they interact with has a far above average IQ. So for those who don’t balance red/black trees and find shortest paths with dijkstra's algorithm need jobs too.
On top of that you forgot something I am sure you have yelled many times, diversity. Remember when it was a strength? It’s not good for any nation to be completely void of entire industries. Having factories next to the tech will germinate the thinking minds with new problems to solve.
But even more to the point. China is doing amazing things, and they were we let do the manufacturing. So we always have a strong evidence that letting others might not be the best idea.
"I'm a first generation American..."
People were going bananas about 10% inflation and the price of eggs before the election. They're not ready to 2X all consumer goods prices.
Automation is what took the jobs away.
To fix housing all you need to do is build more homes. America has plenty of land for that.
Kirk
Not too long ago it was "common knowledge" that the Chinese couldn't do advanced stuff, now it's "common knowledge" you can't do advanced stuff without the Chinese.
Nothing is impossible (at least in this area). If someone says it's impossible, they're really saying "I don't wanna do it."
Yes, America too could build out this capability by aggressively investing in it for a couple of decades.
Back to the article, I'm no expert on tariffs, but explaining things to people and trying to understand where they "are" (I'm a social worker, so this is SW-speak) are two things I've spent my policy career doing. If I hear one more quilter (I make and sell one-of-a-kind quilts) say that the solution to the high price of quilting fabric (because of tariffs) is returning manufacturing to the US and Trump is our savior for recognizing this, well, I don't know what I'm going to do other than share the link to this blog.
This means that nobody will even start moving production back yet, they will pay lip-service, do the minimum to get along for this term, and hope for the best for the next one.
The wise thing to do is to at least make steps in the direction of on-shoring or at least make your plans and investments compatible with it.
The tldr of that post is: - To be really good at making robots, you need to iterate fast
- To iterate fast, you need all component manufacturers nearby (or you’ll be wasting weeks shipping parts from somewhere else)
- To be really competitive at manufacturing, you need to be good at robotics.
- If you’re missing all of these pieces, it will be hard to catch up with (say) China, which has been exponentially growing in every possible aspect of manufacturing for decades. Not only do we not have strong manufacturing, but we don’t have strong robotics companies, don’t have many of our own robotics components companies, and don’t even have much in terms of raw materials. Whereas China has been investing heavily in every single one of these areas.
Bringing manufacturing back means investing in all aspects of the supply chains which lead to technical innovation in manufacturing, which is really hard to do when the supply chain is set up to pull from our current competitor.
Economists are full of bs. They keep framing everything as impossible and when something good happens later, going against all their predictions, they call it a miracle... Maybe these economists are just projecting by assuming everyone else is just as incompetent as they are.
Of course if society was made up only of economists, we'd still be living in caves, worrying about the difficulty of bringing firewood back to the cave.
It's difficult to address the giant article full of misrepresentations point by point. It's tough to see it up at the top of HN. Wish that I could do something to correct the misinformation that is being disseminated.
This person has a vested interest. They manufacture cheap crap in China (or Vietnam, I don't care) for American kids to suck on. What more do you need to know?
This is what I have the most problem with. As I said above:
"For instance, there are plenty of tool and die makers left in the USA, plenty of injection molding machines. I have personally seen them and met the tool and die makers as well as the machines making the molds.".
The reality is that there are many injection molding machines in the USA making weapons, medical devices, electronics enclosures and connectors, car and airplane parts, and other high margin products, not kids toys. And it's a lie to say that tooling, molds, and tool and die makers and shops aren't widely available in the States. They just don't want to pay more for them, and are therefore disseminating propaganda to the contrary.
And, I have also spent time in China, I have toured the factories there, I know what I am talking about as well.
Ah, those were the days.
The era of making up tall tales about the supposed value of money via all sorts of futures and stocks and financial instruments the feeble mind can scarely understand cannot be over soon enough.
The value of money manifests when its exchange for physical goods.
If the Communist fairy waved her magic wand about and distributedall the wealth of the rich to every american equally, half of the people would decide to buy a new car with their newfound wealth next day, only to find out the supply of cars hasn't increased.
There'd be like 10% more cars sold, with people bidding over each other to actually get access to that supply, which would trigger massive inflation in practical terms, revealing the emperor had no clothes all along.
>You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
>Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
>Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations. These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own eyes.
Really? How does he know if someone is on disability? How he know many of these are not seen in China? If they aren't then why aren't they? I don't think it is as simple as work ethic.
This.
What I don't understand is, why would people even want the US dollar and its service industry if we can't produce sufficiently any more? And what about future conflicts in the world? The US can't even produce enough saline solution or disinfectant wipes, let along active pharmaceutical ingredients? Did people see what China goods we tariff on? We tariff China for advanced materials, electronics, machineries, and etc, yet China tariffs on our raw materials and agricultural goods. And we think the US can maintain its wealth by behaving like a colony of China? When there's a conflict between us and China, what do we do? Beg them for the life essentials? And we keep yelling to punish Russia and help Ukraine to win the war and we should, but with what? We can't even out produce artillery shells faster and cheaper than Russia, or drones faster and cheaper than China. Admiral Yamamoto used to say that he saw so many factories and chimneys in Philadelphia that he knew that those industries could turn into efficient war machines if Japan ever declared war on the US. Would he be able to say the same today?
As for what we can, wasn't the US a manufacturing powerhouse until early 2000s? BTW, the US is still a manufacturing powerhouse in some sectors, but we just can't make things cheap enough with good quality because we pretty much destroyed our light industry. Didn't China have nothing and it was heavy investment from the western world that helped China grow so fast and so rapidly? Then, why can't we shift investment back to the US and bring our key industries back? We kept talking about technical difficulties, yet we ignore the necessity of the matter.
The iphone, while impressive, is not the end all be all of American manufacturing. The major goal is to bring back tool makers and increase industrial density.
>Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
>In China, there are no people who are too fat to work.
This is obviously just dumb anti-american propaganda. Since this article isn't written in good faith it's not worth my time to debunk point by point.
wtf is the plan for the 5-10 years in between?
Globalization is a fact of the world today and the best path to better lives for everyone is through mutual cooperation and policies that lift all boats.
Trump's goals and attempts to change this are foolhardy.
Everything wrong and right with the author's thesis. Our present day high-end manufacturing, agriculture, and innovation are already facing the steepest tariffs from a broad range of countries. The uneven playing field extends to IP theft, heavily subsidised and protected industries abroad and other forms of unfair competition like port traffic manipulation or burdensome legislation.
The author think that "targeted tariffs" would have a different effect from what we see now with trade war and retaliatory threats, market instability and uncertainty. This is false, but also ultimately harmful to our "agricultural drone industry". It's hard to have a niche industry without the larger picture, and it's hard to have "drones" without knowing how to manufacture constituent parts and having a reliable domestic supply chain for such. A domestically sourced supply chain encourages innovation and adaptation to immediate customer demands and goods can arrive in days or hours instead of weeks or months. Innovative requests to parts makers aren't immediately harvested by Chinese industrial spies and knowledge and technological advantage can remain local for longer, allowing for time to progress again before others can catch up.
Encouraging lazy and unoriginal drone manufacture in moated "made in USA" assembly lines is precisely the low-end type of job that "no one wants to do" and will inevitably produce the least capable drones the least efficiently or profitably. Our manufacturing and industrial capacity needs to be the world's best and most cost competitive because nothing else will do.
Only automation can save American industry. There will be "fewer" jobs but they will require skill and training. Robot management and supervision and repair and update and retooling will all require a large labor force. Creating robots and the software they run on will continue to be an important and large sector of the software industry. But manufacturing is only about jobs in the way that having a healthy agriculture industry is "about jobs", hardly at all.
Manufacturing real goods is the difference between servility and freedom given that modern war in the nuclear age also entails producing billions of tonnes of metal and blowing it up in distant countries, and could require replacing percentages of the global shipping tonnage that would be destroyed in a major conflict. It requires manufacturing thousands of substation transformers and the aa systems to defend them.
If we had invested strategically into a variety of heavy and light industries over the past 30 years, we almost certainly would have invented better processes and formulae for making things than we currently possess. We could have more globally competitive steel, even more advanced finished products and the knowledge and experience to "make anything better and more profitably than anyone". Industrial production and manufacturing make up roughly 15% of US GDP today. "Bringing back manufacturing" might increase that number significantly but it's hard to see how or why it would need to be more than 30% outside of wartime. That wouldn't even require a doubling of the jobs involved because much of this would have to be automated.
I agree with the author's emphasis on education and "fixing" things being critical in the execution of any kind of industrial renaissance. If the tariff fight lowers tariffs globally, that is a small move in the right direction of leveling the playing field and rewarding domestic producers who are globally competitive.
This, without even considering for a moment that China is 4+ times the US.
1- Tariffs will bring some manufacturing back to the US. The before/after tariff pricing presented in the article is fiction- price points cannot simply be doubled, consumers will reject it, pricing is extremely complicated and sensitive, Apple would have already had the iPhone set at $616 if they believed that was an attainable price for the volume. Apple is among the most profitable companies in the world, in part thanks to their mastery of labor exploitation.
2- Weak industrial supply chain- we have an incredible supply chain and industry can hop right on. Trains, planes, and automobiles galore. Extremely adaptive and we have plenty of room to expand. Auto manufacturers dont seem to mind building in the US, slightly more complicated than the toys that Molson sells.
3- We dont know how to make it: some things sure, most things: yes we do. We do have some additional capacity building required but this is not some crazy challenge. The beautiful thing about it is that, for the stuff we cant make easily, we can just pay the tax and keep in motion. It becomes a simple optimization calculation.
4- effective cost of labor- this is a challenge for sure but it has significant upside implications for American labor and the American lower and middle class. Again, this is a simple optimization. He points to all the fraud in the American system and the slave-like conditions of the Chinese system as if those are things things that shouldn't be addressed / barriers to entry for US? US needs lots of improvements that should be addressed not matter what.
5- Infrastructure- I seriously doubt the electricity stats but accepting it at face value, we have endless gas and sunlight in the west, US can adapt here as well. China notably does NOT have endless gas supplies.
6- Made in America will take time- OK? I am here for it!
7- Uncertainty- I would love to see them permanent. But locking in some wins from 4 years of America-first, modernized manufacturing base will go a long way.
8- Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing- why is that something you get to declare and presume? I think Americans will love job opportunities.
9- The labor does exist, we are just paying them to not work. it's an epidemic and circular problem. A bigger current issue is that we also dont have enough jobs to put low skilled workers to work. We need more low-ish complexity but reliable jobs.
And so on...
Here's another example: a market that has been completely dominated by China: consumer drones. Believe me when I say this, I hate DJI and while I have one, I refuse to use it because of all the security implications. How many European and US companies are competing with them? Quite a few actually but the big names off the top of my head are Parrot and Skydio. I own both a Parrot and a Skydio and the quality of both is amazing. Yet they are still barely keeping up with DJI and at 5x the cost despite the demand - DJI still holds 90% of the market share. I can justify the price because of my privacy concerns but that's 1/1000 people. For most people it's always going to be a trade-off between price and quality+privacy.
If you want to enforce all that through tariffs, just put 5000% tariffs so that the local manufacturing cost will be the same as the cheap import and you solved the problem. How many people will be willing to spend 100 bucks for a pair of socks? That's a different story. The soviet union attempted something similar for several decades while trying to copy western technology. Anyone that knows a bit of history can tell you how that ended. Spoilers: not a success story.
I feel like we in the US have a horrible split evaluation of ourselves: either we're supreme or we're doomed. Both sides of that split are emotional states, not useful facts.
The problem isn’t that we don’t know this: it’s that the person making the decisions rejects the idea of needing to make a detailed plan, or even understand the situation well enough to recognize the problems a plan would need to address.
House prices are at an all time high. Cost of living is becoming unbearable. So, $25 dollar menial jobs are scoffed at, because of inflation. Inflation is due to out of control printing/spending and government debt. Debt is due to big government, capitalist greed and oligarchy. Capitalist greed is due to economies of scale when offshoring. Oligarchy and big government is due to an entrenched lobby system. Lobby system is due to the cost of electioneering and bad decisions by successive governments.
It goes on and on.
Root cause: Systemic rot. Diagnosis: Failing empire Prognosis: UK (if the fall is managed)
It’s a stereotype. Asian tiger moms. Asians are good at math. Math competitions, test scores. Quantitative metrics everywhere point to a worth ethic that is viciously high.
My conclusion of course is derived from quantitative evidence from general populations and iq scores by country. When I mentioned Cupertino I did it only to say that all the quantitative evidence happens to align with my anecdotal experience.
Respectfully, I think it's you that needs to do a bit more reading. I might be wrong about any of this stuff; I'm not an expert. But I'm pretty sure the first Google search result you find for "IQ by country" isn't going to rebut me effectively.
You said IQ by country doesn't exist. And i said, IQ is so pervasive it fucking does. You also referenced something completely off topic. Some random book claiming that because that random book is invalid the whole concept of IQ by country doesn't exist which is absolutely wrong.
>Respectfully, I think it's you that needs to do a bit more reading. I might be wrong about any of this stuff; I'm not an expert. But I'm pretty sure the first Google search result you find for "IQ by country" isn't going to rebut me effectively.
I'm well versed enough in IQ to know that even the first link on google is good enough to refute you. You don't have to believe me, but you can always do your own research to find out I'm right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v5t4OQM&list=PL_K7XH1AIG... this can help
And no, your logic about how any diagnostic can be "ranked" obviously does not hold; it doesn't even make sense. But we've reached the point on the thread where you're trying to axiomatically derive your own psychometrics, so we can probably wrap it up here.
The reason we need manufacturing is because the middle class is decimated. None of us tech workers feel it because we don’t live in neighborhoods that have been decimated by it. We have all benefitted from globalization immensely but we don’t have neighbors, families or friends that have been destroyed by it.
Too many people say it will take “years” to get factories operational. That’s why Elon is there. He knows and has done this, to point out which regulations need to be axed in order to improve the time to market for new factories. Trump will listen to him and get rid of any regulation that doesn’t make sense, or even regulations that do make sense but take too much time. For better or worse factory building will be faster over the next 3 years.
Now that we have these greenfields for new manufacturing opportunities, instead of standing there with your arms crossed, shaking your head why the idea won’t work, how can you take advantage of this new opportunity to get rich?
Blue collar workers were the first to push for globalization, because they suddenly could afford a lifestyle that used to require the salary corresponding to a couple of steps upper in the corporate ladder. A blue collar salary suddenly could provide for many more amenities... til the salary was no more!
Everyone wants manufacturing back, but only for the products they can produce, because everyone still wants to buy at Chinese prices.
Furthermore, the regulations that most stand in the way of cheap manufacturing are environmental regulations, and good luck with that! We have got used to breathe clean air, and I feel most people still love clean air more than they hate globalization.
The irony now about Chinese goods is that those of us that can afford it avoid them as much as possible. I check every product that I buy on Amazon to make sure they aren’t made in China because they could be sending me poisoned goods.
Maybe they didn't with their words, but they surely did with their money!
The jobs left first, then the blue collar workers bought stuff from Walmart.
Now you have the middle class who used to deride that cheap shit hooked on it, talking about how they can get next day from Amazon, Temu and Ali.
This is your opinion. I have not judged anybody.
My point is that cheap imports were welcome by everyone, especially by those who had the least purchasing power.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act and https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/11/24195811/biden-ev-factory...
Of course, the voters wanted something else.
In two years of course it won't matter.
It's a very thinly veiled protection racket. People do tend to repeat the plays that they know.
This post is specifically about Industrial Policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy
But other effective interventions are anti-trust and demand-inducing regulation (e.g. people want to fly because they know it's safe).
Markets do not mean that an Industrial strategy / Industrial policy is not needed.
Markets respond to incentives created by such a strategy.
What you might call capitalists very much plan. They don't believe in central planning where one "guy" makes a plans and everyone else implements them, but they do plan.
I've just sat through a long meeting with lots of Jiras and Q2 objectives. Trust me, there's planning. Lots of planning.
Subscribe to ground news so that you know what historically a news sources biases are.
Remember the JFK "We choose to go to the moon" speech?
(I wonder how many of this defeatist articles are financed by China somehow).