Very soon after the US took a decade-long "procurement holiday", and we lost an enormous amount of manufacturing expertise.
Can we bring those jobs back? Sure, with a lot of tax money. Do we want to? I do - the value of "service economy" jobs is in free fall as companies replace white collar employees with LLMs.
The military benefited from the massive industrial base that supported this production - but it didn’t create it.
And now the loss of that domestic manufacturing base is largely why military production - and indeed, any kind of large-scale endeavor in the US, including construction - is slow and expensive.
If you trace out why Vantiva makes modems, it turns out that it's because all the patents for cable modems / coaxial carrier-network signal modulation and amplification were filed by RCA; GE bought RCA; and then GE divested its own + RCA's consumer-electronics businesses (including these patents!), selling that unit to Vantiva.
Presumably, cable modems were the kind of industry that only support a few big players, because there's not enough margin there after licensing costs are paid to patent-holders. The default winner of such a market would be a vertically-integrated player who holds those patents and can therefore make cable modems without licensing them.
That player was RCA (American); then GE (American); but is now Vantiva (French).
Vantiva released the cable-modem patents into a free IP sharing consortium kind of thing 15+ years ago now; but only once they already had an extremely dominant position in the space, with existing contracts with pretty much every ISP, such that they could be assured continued dominance even without the weight of licensing pressing down on all their competitors' backs.
Whenever I read about tech IP, I run into similar stories to this one. Some American company owned some tech innovation, but sold it to an overseas buyer some time in the late 80s / early 90s. And now it's not worth it to make that thing in America any more, because doing so would require licensing that IP from its current overseas owner.
(Perhaps, if America wants to be competitive, the government should encourage American firms with lots of free cash to [re-]acquire foreign companies that hold especially-valuable IP. Then, at least the IP incentives would lean in favor of vertical integration of manufacturing within the US.)
It's likely microchip development would have happened somewhere else without large US defense contracts. The industry was literally created by defense contracts for things like spy satellites, combat aircraft, and ICBMs.
Same with aerospace. The entire commercial aerospace industry exists because of bomber development in WW II, and all the engine tech since was initially developed and deployed in military aircraft. Carbon fiber, radar, fly-by-wire, plus the entire manufacturing process that produces aircraft that work the first time were all technologies developed or made practical to manufacture for the military. There's a reason passenger aircraft aren't manufactured in countries without a lot of military spending - companies like Boeing, Airbus, UAC, and Comac all depend on military contracts to pay development costs.
What constitutes high tech manufacturing is probably a bit different today. I would include sectors like exotic materials (superconductors, boutique alloys, and almost-here stuff like graphene and CNTs) and battery tech.
The question isn't, what are the absolute number of jobs in a given sector. The question is, what are the overall trends in productivity, robustness of supply chain, and relative competitiveness in the market.
Also, a major pet peeve of mine for over a decade now has been the lack of granularity in classifying "high tech" jobs.
Most studies use BLS codes, but those are extremely dated - they still treat a typist like a skilled worker and a machinist as a semi- or low-skilled worker.
In reality, aside from macro-level production stats and private sector signals such as dealflow, we have no idea about the rate of production in the US.
From personal experience, I doubt any "make in America" policy would lead to more jobs - most low and medium level assembly roles have been automation friendly for decades now (even in India you can buy and install a programmable soldering robot for roughly the same amount as a year's salary for an employee).
Most discourse is divorced from reality, I blame this on the lack of engineers in the policy space - most of us with those backgrounds would rather remain in the private sector, because an LA or think tank staffer salary ain't making rent in DC.
If you do not know the difference between AC or DC or what solder flux is, let alone further intricacies, you have no position making industrial policy or grand strategy for American manufacturing or engineering (this is a shot fired at you so called "Software Engineers" as well - Leetcode doesn't mean you understand how Infiniband works). But this principal also works in reverse w/ regards to policy matters imo.
This seems guaranteed to be false because at a minimum you’d have construction workers building manufacturing facilities. But I don’t think you meant it literally, which leads to my next point which is that even if moving a factory making X widget from (insert country here) resulted in a single job at the expense of any number of jobs in (insert country), I would deem that trade off to generally be worth it. Now as we add in prices and cost and all those things it means there’s a social cost to moving those jobs back, but often times the “jobs” angle is that moving production here or even to other western countries won’t create that many jobs, but even if it’s 1 it’s 1 more than before. I think it’s better and more important to think of the whole package of trade-offs instead of caring about number of jobs.
I think rebuilding domestic capacity is critical, but we should not oversell the amount of jobs that can potentially be created.
Light manufacturing will never return to America - it's already begun leaving China and half of India by 2019, and left Mexico in the 2000s.
"Manufacturing" is a very broad and overloaded term, and the type of manufacturing matters, and the kind of high value manufacturing needed for the US is both highly automatable AND high skilled.
Unless you are dealing with companies that supply to the military, you'll get poor workmanship and months long lead times. Might as well just give up or...
Just subcontract work to China. Sure, there is many crap suppliers, but once you find good ones, it's another league in very much every aspect. Parts take days to deliver, not months and are top quality.
I think many people don't realise that we are very much in the middle of shit creek and without a paddle.
This is true even if you deal with companies that supply to the military.
> Just subcontract work to China.
The thing that kills me is that dealing with China is so much easier than dealing with anywhere else.
Part of it seems to be an attitude thing. Like, if I shoot somebody in China an email, it will inevitably be answered within 24 hours, and more likely within 4.
Send an email to an EU or US company, and you're often (I'd say typically) going to wait days for a response. I've never seen that, not once, in dealing with a Chinese firm. What's more, if you're buying from their B2B megamarkets (like 1688.com) they almost always have live 24/7 customer service and procurement support available on chat.
The other part is that, if you know what you're doing, it's less risky. I was chatting with a French vineyard owner a couple of years ago. He was pulling white vines to plant more red varieties, because his best clients, the Chinese, preferred reds. He told me that dealing with China was easy -- they'd always pay in advance, and a handshake deal was always honored. Dealing with the US, in contrast, was a nightmare of legal quicksand, double-dealing, and Net-30 that always seemed to turn into Net-90.
The US... I'm sure we all know the story. So much bearacracu and crazy turnover. So many times I'm communicating with a partner and then things stall because that partner's liaison was suddenly gone. No backup to pick up the ball, no sense from anyone else on what this context really was. So at best it's weeks spent re-aligning on stuff previously discussed. Worst case you end up ghosted and your partnership silently dies (at least from my end. I'm sure higher up the law firms are being revved up).
There is also culturally just a lot of disdain here. Hyper-individualistic culture can make it hard to work together at times. Be it because of pride or because they are barely keeping themselves afloat. There's very little stability and it's long gotten to a point where the dysfunction reflects outwards, publicly on display. Especially these days with Vulture capitialists grabbing brands to pick off what remains instead of trying to turn a company around.
It's all a mess here.
To be fair, the current powers are trying to pretend we're rafting in a chocolate river, because we won a golden ticket and it's gonna make us rich. Whether that's on the adminsitration for lying or the people for believing, that's for the reader to place blame on.
But once you're having your parts heat-treated by one Chinese company, electroplated by another, and over-molded by a third, you really may as well move the whole production line there.
Yep. I've watched things for some time, and I think almost everyone is stuck in a "I was 20 years old and things were like X" mentality. Including their take on China capabilities.
Yes, China was the place you outsourced cheap BS that had horrible quality to 25 years ago for stupid cheap labor and materials.
Today? You are not outsourcing to save money, at least in the direct sense. You are outsourcing there because it may be the only place in the world that can get shit done for you in a reasonable time with a reasonable competency level.
And at this point? It's basically the entire value chain short of product marketing and branding for many products. All the technical design knowledge is located there for the most part, and operates at lightspeed compared to the US.
If we went to war it'd be over as soon as the weapons stockpiles got depleted - only one side has the capability to manufacturer at scale. And it's not even like a mismatch - it's an ability vs. complete inability.
When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2].
The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here):
1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI.
2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.
If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.
Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die."
Politicians who pitch “I match your worldview and will implement the simple fixes you want” outcompete “I think your worldview is incomplete and this is what you really want instead”, by a lot.
Some might be very crafty and believe the second while shouting like the first. Many will actually believe the simple solution can work though.
Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs.
We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot.
Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it.
Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.
And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
Interestingly, we favored China's manufacturing over Mexico's "maquilladoras," I think mostly over quality and cost issues due to corruption, lack of education and cartels.
30/hr for manufacturing is exactly why the US ceded its power to China over the decades. if we care about the economics, we're doomed as soon as China makes a move.
1. this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time. The contract is broken.
2. LCOL areas in the US still pay better than many other countrie's middle class jobs. That's why the solution for 30 years was to outsource, not to immigrate talent here to run factories. The US lacks many protections, but the bare minimum is paying federal minimum wage.
3. The thing about LCOL areas is that they lack the resources and funds to start such initiatives. What you're really asking for is for the government to invest 10's, 100's of billions of dollars into a project to create the factories, million more to bring in talent to run the factories in what are often less desirable areas, and then billions more to bring in talent in these still less desirable areas. Even with a supporting administration, this would be a difficult proposal.
Costs of Living to some extent are linked to how valuable that land is to begin with; hence, coastlines tend to have more value than arid midwestern desert or bumpy mountainous terrain.
We’re arguing over importing a massive underclass when 5 families control 50% of the wealth and 2 people have private space programs.
Let’s just tax the shit out of them, instead?
All of them took the feedback onboard and improved the quality of their systems (Continuous Improvement is a practice that was refined in Japan - Toyota)
There's nothing stopping any other country from doing the same.
But I wonder if the outcome is simply that we drop every known manufacturing technique on the floor and just start from scratch with current adjacent technologies. Basically kill the whole industry and reboot it again.
My sister was a petroleum geologist. She went into oil in the early 2000s because she saw the roughly 30,000 person shortfall of petroleum geologists that was about to happen as the baby boomers aged out of the profession, and was like "Well, they're going to need to hire new blood, that's good for me." And it worked great for about 5 years, she was paid a shit-ton of money because they couldn't get people. But then two layoffs later, what actually happened is that the entire oil industry and associated value chain is dying, and we're replacing it with electricity, solar, batteries, EVs, smart-grids, and a bunch of things that didn't exist in the early 2000s.
Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
Well that's the pitch they want to throw at you. Actual studies disagree.
>Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
I legitmately think we will hit General AI before we have anything close to this. We simply don't have the resources needed on an individual bases to faciliate everyone being a "factory worker at home".
If AI keeps improving, I am not so sure about that. Smart people may be able to quickly jump to senior skills. And what we view as senior skills at the moment may become useless.
If you are always on crutches and need the AI companion all the steps of the way, you basically offload the most important part of the work which is the whole cognitive work.
That "senior skill" is the debugging of complex systems that often interconnects in unusual ways, why? Because this might be a one off this might not be well documented, or even the code might not really point at the issue because it might be a subtle interplay of hardware and software.
Even if you are smart, it doesn't solve the problem that people still have to learn, and institutional knowledge is more important at times, because this might not be documented or easy to figure out, even with the greatest AI companion...
Because a country isn't a business. If a companies falls out, they move on to another company based on the market.
If a country falls out, we go to war and sanction everything. If you can't survive those sanctions, the war is lost before any blood is spilt. Or at least any blood spilt by foreign invaders; the citizens will burn down the country for you instead.
Also our airplanes suck, you could not possibly have picked a worse example of American heavy industry than the Boeing corporation.
There's only four things [Americans] do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
When I was a kid growing up in the post communist 90-00s, we were going nearly weekly to the cinema to watch the latest American movies: Blade, Shrek, Toy Story, The Matrix trilogy, LotR trilogy, American Pie, Batman trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Fast & Furious, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Scary Movie, Rush Hour, etc
We couldn't get enough of US entertainment, while now everyone here avoids the new US releases like the plague since it's only cash grabs injected with $CURRENT_DAY identity politics, diversity box ticking based on focus group testing, resulting in sterile, predictable, zero-humor, zero-edge, zero-creativity slop that's not even worth pirating.
Americans have no idea how much soft power they lost worldwide by forcing their identity politics and ideologies in entertainment. Japanese anime and Koran movies and TV shows now run rings around the US entertainment industry.
In contrast, "Maximally efficient is minimally robust."
Something that business intelligentsia propagates should be given extra scrutiny. Why should you assume that statement about core competencies is correct, a priori? We have lots of evidence that statement isn't true in general. And we have mountains of evidence that such statements tend to be more incorrect the longer a time horizon you account for.
Vertically integrated businesses aren't rare. Everybody loves being a fabless chip company--until an earthquake or a pandemic hits. Designing chips was not a core competency for Apple--until it was and suddenly you have the M1. GE outsourced water heater manufacturing and lost their core competency to design them. etc.
My favourite example from Adam Smith remains the nail maker. At the time, London factories were churning out iron nails by the bushel, whereas the provincial Scottish blacksmith was able to craft perhaps 10 in a day.
Is it so terrible that no one these days knows how to make nails? That our physical and mental capabilities are put to more productive ends?
That’s how I see these skill sets ‘lost’, national security related industries notwithstanding.
There is big support of these models from consulting world. If it doesn't work than it just means we need further micro components to make it work but never try back to integrated system.
When I was in aerospace management decided to move our fixture guy to a part time contractor instead of meeting him on his salary increase request. Almost every step of the factory other than some sub-assemblies were dependant on the fixtures, the fixtures needed to be constantly re-calibrated, etc. And there was no other fixture guy in the area. We fired like the most important person in the entire factory and hoped he'd stick around for part time contract work. I was no longer working there before it happened, but the first time a fixture needed calibration but he had other contract work, that whole section of the line is down at like $200,000 a day until he can come in. Like OK you scheduled him for the normal maintenance, but what happens when a forklift hits a fixture and he's off at some new clients site for 3 weeks? Or the AC goes out and the heat takes everything out of tolerance before you get it cooled off again.
And with JIT manufacturing having fixtures down throws off the schedule AND you don't have capacity to catch back up because you have capacity for the barest minimum you can get away with. These guys are very very important and yes it is terrible if we don't have their skills available on demand.
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XUZ3azgCNyawIQ5... [2] https://youtu.be/GDzBE6vz5r0 [3] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY
One example they gave, it used to be someone's job to load and unload the silicon wafers into the various etching phases. As time went on more and more of that manual work was replaced with automation. A floor with 50 workers became 25, then 10, then 1.
And, to be clear, this was absolutely a good thing for the product. So many yield issues were caused by manual processes.
The future of any manufacturing is that of high automation. That means low to no jobs. We aren't going back to an economy where a shoe factory employes 500 people.
What's particularly bleak, IMO, is society in the US revolves around work. Every job out there is being automated away. That's not a bad thing for quality, but what it means is there will be increasingly fewer jobs to go around.
A family friend was a chip designer for a large European company. Back in the 2000s he told me he saw the writing on the wall as they moved manufacturing to Asia.
He said he expected design to follow not long after, and sure enough some 5 or so years later he lost his job as they moved design department closer to the factories.
Perhaps it's different now, but as I recall he said there were advantages of chip designers being close to the chip manufacturing folks.
I also think there has been a bit of bias in trade schools towards learning manual processes because it is cheap. You can have a room full of students spend weeks learning to use a file to shape a small block of steel to precise dimensions. A $5 file and $10 of material is easier to supply than a $1XX,XXX computerize manufacturing machine that can process $XXX of material or more per day. But spending weeks to learn how to precision hand file is pretty well a waste of time for modern manufacturing.
I think that I have seen that this kind of "independence" has been a driving reason for China's strategies too. I don't think that it's necessarily a defence against a war, maybe more of an economic buffer, ensuring that China, and whomever follows the strategy is no longer dependent on any other entity for parts of their supply chain.
One of the things, too, that people seem to forget is that the West (in general) has neglected their manufacturing capability in favour of the "Asian Tigers" doing the work (Japan, Korea, Taiwan), China is just the current holder of the title (for how long is anyone's guess, Japan especially has endured a sustained stagnation of their economy over the last several decades).
Germany, for a while, was a strong manufacturer, and have (so far) been using the resulting economic position to their advantage inside the European Bloc. Perhaps that's the model that the USA (and others) should be looking toward?
That said, we can bring manufacturing back stateside which can be highly automated and have high value while employing workers at wages much better than their service-job counterparts.
In addition, we don't have the same population growth we had in the post-war years, so we don't need to produce millions upon millions of jobs. What we need to do is stem the job losses and increase output.
We can be a bigger version of Switzerland. Sure, things get more expensive, but by and large folks live better.
And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots. This is alone worth the effort.
Not with these constant layoffs and high turnover. We're not working like a country that wants to last long term.
I think we're at the point where more automation means more loss of work, as opposed to people moving into the new jobs created, for an ever larger portion of the population.
Yay. Men get to spill their blood over a country that won't even give them enough pay to cover rent. The robots are cushy at home making weapons to kill more men with. Very good thing.
> If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory, but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.
Yup, just automate out the construction industry while we're at it.
Sorry for the cynicism, but but somehow I don't think even with more houses that we're going to have Gen Z and Gen Alpha survive the way The Boomers and early Gen X did.
You can mortgage to profit when the asset is scarce.
It might well be true that we're never going to see the kind of employment in manufacturing that we used to, but a blanket "the jobs are not coming back" attitude doesn't match the data either.
When I buy an iPhone, a vacuum (robotic or handheld), a drone, a camera, a KitchenAid kettle, a silicone brush, an electric fan, a battery-electric drill, just about anything really -- the expensive models might say "designed in USA" but they'll still say "made in China". The US used to be the go-to place to make all of these categories of products. So I don't believe the only thing that's happened is that American factories set up robots, laid off the workers, and got more productive than ever.
(Automobiles probably could be, except for their powerful labour unions; automobile production has been highly automated since the 30s.)
As some point folks will discover that dollars do not actually equal physical goods. Exporting 100 F35s at $100m/ea is not the same value to a country under duress as the capability to manufacture $10B of random consumer goods. Nevermind the supply chain of that F35 is not remotely contained to domestic manufacturing.
It's hand-wavy financialization of America speak.
If you're buying jet engines
Edit: I looked it up, it’s a lot of things. Airplanes, military aircraft, helicopters, satellites, rockets, construction/agriculture equipment (Caterpillar, John Deere), ICE and EV cars, chips, medical equipment (MRI, CT scanners), lots of defense stuff, drugs and pharmaceutical, processed agri goods etc.
Will we? It appears to me that modern war works substantially like modern factories - you don't actually want a large mass of semiskilled workers to pull the levers, each of which can substitute for a different one on about five minutes' notice. You want relatively few, highly-trained specialists to instruct the ~~robots~~ drones. It is perhaps less true in war than in manufacturing, quantity still has that quality all its own, but it seems very unclear that just raw numbers of soldiers will be an important bottleneck as between Great Powers.
1. During Covid, medical supplies were in short supply, to the point where the US government was flying in individual airplanes from China full of N95 masks and face shields. The guy making the video knew that Alabama (where he lives) wouldn't be on the priority list for where the masks and face shields would get distributed. His community's initial response was to 3D print face shields and donate them to healthcare facilities, but they knew that they had to step up to actual manufacturing to produce the face shields in necessary volumes. He was only able to find a single aging technician in Alabama capable of producing injection molding tooling, which he then was able to use to mass produce enough face shields to supply Alabama and neighboring states. If that one guy had chosen to retire before Covid, they would have not been able to make the injection mold locally. At a time where global supply chains were massively disrupted, they would have been screwed.
2. When an American company gets their products made overseas, the factory overseas that manufactures the product owns the tooling. This means that they're able to fill your order during the day, then at night make exact clones of your product with lower quality materials and undercut you, and you have no recourse. He brings up an example of a local small business that had this happen to them. Even though they had a design patent, they needed their lawyer to continually send letters to get Amazon to take down no-name clones of their product (and then the seller would just pick a new random set of 6 characters to sell it under). If US companies have no choice but to get their products made in countries that don't care about IP, then we're not just giving up on manufacturing, we're also giving up on designing products in the US.
When he was trying to get the injection mold for his grill scrubber made, lots of companies in the US were willing to do the actual plastic manufacturing in the US, but could only get the injection mold tooling done in China. He brought up that in the past, an American company would build a machine and then ship it away to the developing world to be operated there. We've now reversed this, so the high-skill portion of manufacturing is done overseas and the only Americans involved are just pushing the buttons to operate the machine.
The dip in number of manufacturing employees corresponds time-wise to China joining WTO, and the massive CEO hype of shutting down US factories and moving them to China, rather than super-duper automation hitting the scene and automating the factories in place.
I have a suspicion that the displayed manufacturing output chart is in dollars, not amount of stuff, and that is likely bumped up by highly automated IC/chip manufacturing that is high cost/value, but low tonnage work.
Try to have a device made without sourcing parts of China. Maybe an assembled PCB. Maybe it's a tool of some sort. You will find that this is impossible, or much more expensive/worse experience than sourcing from China.
Now, imagine a scenario where China collapses. (In the broadest sense). Whether it's a war as you say, or any other scenario. Imagine this happens in a few decades, after we (The world) has committed to this path. We will have lost so much of the tools we build our civilization on, and it will take generations to get this tacit knowledge back.
What's good: We (humanity) can build things cheaper, and higher quality than ever before, thanks to China's exquisite, vertically-integrated, and automated manufacturing capabilities.
What's bad: We are putting our eggs in one basket.
If you really had an automation boom, this will show up as an increase in output. If there is no increase in output and an increase in demand, the prices/margins improve which might explain why producers are happy but they won’t be able to export their products; which they might not want to do as China has killed any possible margins.
Machines don’t take breaks, don’t need holidays, don’t get injured, and when deployed are more consistent and efficient.
Having people work in factories, and get paid is great in a vacuum. However this is a competitive economy, your competition is doing lights out manufacturing, and is making more consistent goods, cheaper, and faster.
And we’re getting better at building robots. The American debate is about 20 years late.
It's interesting that you mention this because most of the small-time inventors I've seen online in the electronics space either build things in their garage by hand or have them fabricated in China (or occasionally another poor country like Vietnam). Custom PCB production and assembly at places like JLCPCB and PCBWay (both in China) appears to be highly automated. But getting the same thing made in the US in smaller quantity is going to cost not a little bit more, but often ten times as much. And it will require "relationship building" with a job shop, rather than just uploading something to a website and paying for airmail delivery. And will likely have a longer lead time. To say nothing of the fact that most of the components you're buying are made in China anyway.
So it may be fine to manufacture a large run finished consumer product in the US, but it's very capital intensive. For new products that aren't attached to an existing massive corporation with domestic production capability, you basically have to outsource to be price competitive and do any kind of volume beyond your own garage. I would be love to be proven wrong and learn about other options in the US but when I looked around I wasn't too impressed.
Besides that, bringing everything back would surely raise prices quite substantially and we've seen how voters reacted to COVID inflation.
> Besides that, bringing everything back would surely raise prices quite substantially and we've seen how voters reacted to COVID inflation.
Agreed, but if both parties get behind it, I don’t think it would matter too much.
As I mentioned, the unemployment rate is already low. Looking at total population numbers is a fools errand since not every single person is able to work (or willing)
> it’s not like America can’t issue seasonal work permits or something
How does that fare against the anti-immigration i.e. "only Americans should work these jobs" sentiment?
> and plenty of folks who would come work here.
Agreed.
> but if both parties get behind it, I don’t think it would matter too much.
That's pretty hand wavey and doesn't address the very price sensitive culture that the US voter base has.
Similarly looking at the unemployment number (which is rising) doesn’t give you the full picture in this context, because full employment != efficient employment. Something like yea maybe we just have fewer Starbucks baristas or web developers and instead they go into manufacturing and construction. Starbucks responds by automating or closing some borderline profitable stores, or people stop buying Starbucks but spend more on an espresso machine or a TV made in the USA.
To rephrase maybe, I don’t disagree with your broader point, but I’m just not sure our population’s work efforts are being efficiently allocated. They’re focused on service sector economy generated positions (dating apps, coffee shops, clerical work - contrived examples), but we can change the mix-up and orientation of our economy. So you get less of some jobs and folks switch around some.
> How does that fare against the anti-immigration i.e. "only Americans should work these jobs" sentiment?
Idk, doesn’t seem to bother my neighbor having a new garage built with very clearly immigrant labor. I don’t care either, though I support secure borders and fair paths to immigration. I think how people generally feel about immigration is similar, though Trumpistan is just -particularly loud about the worst and dumbest aspects of it, whereas the vast majority of people aren’t that crazy. At least that has been my experience living in Ohio.
> That's pretty hand wavey and doesn't address the very price sensitive culture that the US voter base has
Well if both parties supported the approximate same position, voters would go to the ballot box and either pick the Republican version of it or the Democratic version of it. People can be lead to believe anything. War is peace, freedom is slavery, inflation is deflation, etc.
I won’t say it’s not hand-wavy, but politics is kind of hand-wavy sometimes isn’t it?
Well played.
Fun story, once upon a time I remember seeing a dating profile where they flat out gave a cashapp if you wanted to talk to them. Within 3 months somehow I discovered they worked at the same shop I did, and when I asked about their 'diffuser' they were more than happy to send me an amazon link to buy one, which was an affiliate link.
I'll be bold and suggest that the 'third rail' human capital problem that almost feels sidestepped by the Parent comment you're replying to (i.e. maybe that's what they are asking, but really is the question everyone should be asking,) is the question of how there will be enough jobs paying into the overall 'system' to sustain any of it.
> Even for agriculture or construction it’s not like America can’t issue seasonal work permits or something. We have plenty of levers there and plenty of folks who would come work here.
But those would be can kicks, and 'properly' implementing most of those levers would just increase the cost. On some level 'work permits' are a can-kick, we are saying we can't pay people inside our country enough to do the work which in itself indicates an imbalance somewhere.
> Agreed, but if both parties get behind it, I don’t think it would matter too much.
I feel like this ignores the second+ order effects. US Petrodollar hegemony has been for better or worse a sort of global constant despite Nixon Shock [0] and we IMO don't have the necessary infrastructure to handle another round of that, because this time around we've got way less manufacturing capacity to keep the circus running [1].
The biggest problem being, 'complacency via placation' has been too ingrained in folks for lots of reasons, and now we are in a situation where people aren't willing to give up simple things. I mean you imagine the reaction of your modern American[2] if they had to do something like deal with gas rations, let alone limitations on how much waste they could create...
[0] - I bet folks are watching what's going on with Yen Carry trade very closely
[1] - I will die on the hill that 'Ashtabula Cranks' are a benchmark of basic US Manufacturing capability tho.
[2] - I am, but also I saw what happened during covid
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART/
Many people and towns that lost work in the manufacturing shut downs still don't have replacement work, and I think part of that is we lost a lot of low-skilled labour work as the factories left.
Now a question would be, if the work does come back, will it be low skilled enough to be able to hire the same pool of people formerly employed?
If you look at the participation rate of people aged 25-54 it's near all time highs.
e.x. In the 90s there was a lot of 'culling' of older workers especially if they didn't embrace tech I know my father was forced into retirement despite being a fully capable worker (heck he did database consulting work for a transit system after the forced retirement, before he became a floral delivery driver.)
In his case, he wanted to retire, but honestly he tried to give me and my siblings a better life so the consulting and part time jobs were something to help pay off PLUS loans while also letting him and my mom be able to do vacations and the like.
But I'm also thinking about the factor of a lot of folks had a lot of hits.
Also 25-54 is such a rough demographic.... Lots of ways to just keep that metric clean FBOW.
The answer there is likely we're keeping them in school longer + filling downtime with school or social media or "extracurriculars". Alongside a growing NEET cohort that doesn't feel motivation to do anything or is disabled.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300036
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300012
As for 55+, I'd be very interested to see the relative age distribution within that pool over that period. I suspect there's a lot more 65+ within the pool now than when the rate was higher. That trend is set to grow.
If we spent time expanding and heck just properly maintaining our infrastructure we'd have plenty of blue collar jobs that pay well.
but infrastructure is an unspoken sin in modern america.
Small and mid-sized companies resist change. Convincing them to adopt even basic “data entry” automation can take months. Many prefer to keep friends or relatives on the payroll instead of modernizing. At the level of production lines or logistics functions, the resistance is stronger. The prevailing view is: “we have done it this way for decades, why change.”
I believe the future will not come from persuading reluctant incumbents. It will come from new manufacturing companies that start digital-first, with AI at their core. These firms will redeploy workers into higher-value roles, outpace legacy operators, and set a new standard for U.S. competitiveness.
Case in point - China. They started manufacturing companies mostly from 2000s, using slightly more modern tech than US did in 50s. Obviously, China has more efficiency and higher production capacity per (any normalized unit). Or, in financial services, in APAC, nobody uses checks, or even in Africa. Because they did not have to deal with legacy financial systems.
The opportunity is not to patch the old, but to build the new.
chrsw•9h ago
2. If we do, what cost are we willing to pay for it?
smitty1e•9h ago
johnnyanmac•6h ago
noosphr•8h ago
8note•8h ago
noosphr•8h ago
4gotunameagain•6m ago
pokstad•8h ago
bilbo0s•8h ago
In my view, the way forward is, unfortunately, automation. We can't bring that manufacturing back using the same labor basis as is used in Asia. Just to put that labor basis in perspective, we'd be looking at millions of jobs that the military would be funding through sub-contracts. We have to get some of that work done through industrial automation without creating jobs. We need to do that not only to make this sustainable, but really even to make this feasible at all.
Analemma_•8h ago
I recommend this quasi-review of Rivethead by Ben Hamper if you want a taste of what "manufacturing jobs" were actually like: a lot of people drinking themselves stupid to escape the monotony and utter lack of agency in their work. And this was at one of the Big Three automakers, supposedly the peak of what we're trying to return to! [0]
[0]: https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/96390732283/happy-la...
nemothekid•7h ago
I can't help but feel you are romanticizing manufacturing jobs. The vast number of manufacturing jobs that "give people purpose" are still here - those people just travel to china once a quarter.
The guy that stands at a station for 8 hours a day, stamping the same 4 bolts into a car frame does not have anymore "purpose" than a guy running around in an Amazon warehouse.
svaha1728•7h ago
SoftTalker•5h ago
geodel•5h ago
mrheosuper•6h ago
You think those factory workers have a better job ? Imagine sitting 8 hours a day, just screwing screw.
lettergram•8h ago
Sanctions weren’t effective on Russia because they had most of what they needed domestically and partner markets to sell those goods to.
When the US tried to impose sanctions on China, China called the bluff and blocked strategic materials. The US “trade deal” wasn’t much different than how it started.
In terms of willing to pay for it; what’s having a country worth? Because if a competing country can withhold resources you need, you’re effectively a junior partner.
Ultimately, reduce over seas benefits, tariff and offer tax write offs to build on shore. Then you’ll have better higher paying jobs and onshore manufacturing. More real GDP from goods will not have a negative impact or cost, it’s part of why Germany and Japan grew rapidly (they had tight import controls, to build a domestic industry).
Also, the majority of the country voted for Trump and this was his #1 issue. Like him or hate him, the desire for domestic protection is what elected him.
delecti•8h ago
lettergram•7h ago