But that's not really the point. The point is, look at those numbers sans semiconductors and you see a pretty scary decline in manufacturing output.

It is totally fair to point out that this has been a strategic choice to focus on profitable industries, and that that's even a good thing. That's sort of the point here: the choice has been made, semiconductors are now a key industry for the US manufacturing sector, and AFAICT we don't have any plans for what would replace semiconductors.

IDK if we have a healthy amount of manufacturing output, but it's pretty clear that losing leadership in semiconductor manufacturing would be quite bad for the USA.

Not at all: https://www.nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/2019-united-sta...

Semiconductor manufacturing is a component of the second-largest US manufacturing bucket in 2017, and was only #8 of the top 10 manufacturing buckets for job growth in 2018. It is certainly an important sector for economic and strategic reasons, but you are significantly overstating its importance.

But I'm not talking about jobs, at all. The US needs a robust manufacturing sector so that it remains economically competitive. Figuring out how to translate that economic competitiveness into material benefits for individuals is a separate problem. Confusing the two is itself a risk to our economic competitiveness. (To make this point is a somewhat hyperbolic way: if the goal is jobs, build a canal through the center of the country. Using spoons.)

Also, I think the manufacturing output numbers alone miss something important from my original post. Losing semiconductor manufacturing as a core competency also threatens the most profitable and important components of the US services sector.

Why, then, did you ignore the other chart I pointed out that specifically dealt with the economic value?

> Also, I think the manufacturing output numbers alone miss something important from my original post. Losing semiconductor manufacturing as a core competency also threatens the most profitable and important components of the US services sector.

I agree that losing this competency would be damaging. I disagree that it represents a threat. The threat is the continued consolidation of certain types of semiconductor manufacturing into an ever-shrinking pool of companies. While it would be slightly better if that pool were partly concentrated in the US, the size and diversity of that pool is a much bigger issue than where its members are located.

The only other chart lists "Computer and electronic products" as the second-largest manufacturing sector, which seems to confirm my assertion that semiconductors have been an important source of growth. It's the second largest category and has had annualized real growth rates 2x+ the rest US manufacturing for decades.

I don't see any breakdown of semiconductors/not-semiconductors for that category, and this is a 2017 snapshot as opposed to longitudinal data, so it's hard to say anything more specific using the data you linked to.

> The threat is the continued consolidation of certain types of semiconductor manufacturing into an ever-shrinking pool of companies. While it would be slightly better if that pool were partly concentrated in the US, the size and diversity of that pool is a much bigger issue than where its members are located.

Sure, I agree. (Caveat of course that geopolitical diversity matters too. N separate SOEs would increase diversity in a way that wouldn't be particularly helpful to the USA, for example.)

In any case, this is actually something I more-or-less agree with, and hence the last sentence of my original post.

It also causes a huge vulnerability.

as the developing world improves their standard of living, so does the same decrease for people in the developed world, because these developing nations are no longer dependent on the developed one's.

It was always just a question of time with globalization in effect.

personally, i think that this is a good thing though. we in the developed world have been living unsustainable lives for generations, living off of the developing nations.

though thats most definitely not the only reason why everything has been getting harder for the working population. automation, higher efficiency, extreme concentration of wealth and more do their part in the current situation as well.

>According to a study by consulting firm McKinsey & Company, 76 percent of China’s urban population will be considered middle class by 2022. In 2000, just 4 percent of the urban population was considered middle class.

https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-middle-class-is-explo...

Meanwhile, in America:

>Fewer millennials in 2019 are middle class compared to baby boomers when they were in their 20s

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-the-middle-class-is-sh...

Also, valuearb is kind of right. Except that the right solution is more efficient onshore manufacturing, not offshoring.

Of course it does. They do have that extra trillion people to bring the average down.

However, moving the manufacturing jobs from here to there has certainly raised their average standard of living while reducing our own.

The unemployed here are not better off.

In addition, a Walmart cashier, Starbucks barista or Uber driver does not have the same standard of living that a UAW member once did.

People are, on average, worse off than the preceding generations, all in the name of higher profit margins for the few.

>Across Western Europe and North America, the middle class is shrinking, according to a new report by the OECD. With each new generation, a smaller share of the population find themselves earning middle incomes.

When the Baby Boomers, who were born between 1943 and 1964, were in their twenties, some 68% were in middle-income households. Only 60% of Millennials, who were born between 1983 and 2002, could say the same at a similar time in their lives.

https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generat...

You need to research a bit more what is behind these digits.

A lot of funny accounting where companies which haven't manufactured literally anything on US soil for decades somehow manage to accrue billions in "manufacturing output"

Slight refinement: it’s a barbell: production of low value goods that are not worth shipping has remained, e.g. paper. But that’s just damning.

The only examples I can think of right now where we are genuinely number one is high priced low volume boutique aerospace (SpaceX and other new space companies, satellites, experimental military aircraft, electric planes, etc.) and of course weapons.

We can manufacture decent cars, but at least half of this is under the direction and management of overseas companies like Toyota and Nissan. US car companies have been on the ropes for decades.

We seem to be losing the bulk of aerospace, generation turbines, electronics, chips, medical devices, power equipment, materials, ... ?

Seeing graphs like this makes me wonder if I am living in the late days of the USSR when I'm sure many optimistic graphs were published by Pravda.

As for medical devices and tech, the US probably creates more new drugs and treatments than the rest of the world combined. when's the last time china, india or russia made a break through in medecine? When's the last time the US did? Last year?

It will be the same story for jet engines, Chinese improvement is very rapid. It was the same story for every rising power so far, there is no real reason that China will never be able to build a jet engine, and no reason that they will never be able to run a fab (and indeed, they are accelerating quite fast).

They have started to deploy the WS-10 Taihang engine for their J-10 fighter, but the performance of this engine is markedly worse than comparable Western engines. Military grade engines are hard!

Even the US relied on foreign jet engines for a time, although you won't hear about it a lot - for example, an absolutely huge amount of engineers were hired from AVRO in Canada after the development of the superior Iroquois engine (which had by quite a margin the highest nominal thrust as well as the highest) as well as other Orenda engines, and their work was absolutely instrumental to the US becoming superior to the USSR in jet engine technology. I don't know if this is publicly available information, so you might have to trust me on it, but I guarantee you even the US had a 20+ year period where it had to steal engineers and tech in order to jumpstart it's lead, which is exactly what we are seeing with China.

So say they iron out the kinks in the WS-15 (though odds are they'll settle for the WS-10). They then have a roughly 1990s era engine, when the US will be deploying Adaptive Cycle Engines etc.

As far as adaptive cycle engines, China is also already researching them. They also have a lead in supersonic combustion as of today.

This view is rampant throughout this thread and I keep wondering why South Korea is omitted. I thought SK semiconductor tech was comparable the US and Taiwan?

But beyond SK I cannot think of any other countries with competitive fabs.

Also only a tangent but I really believe that deal where TSMC is going to put a N7 fab in the USA is either going to get restructured into something way smaller or never ever going to happen.

2015.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/tu/facts/

(PS. This took less than 30 seconds to find and confirm).

(PS. This took me most of a minute of reading the link you provided).

Russia invented and built and then sold to the USA the RD-180 rocket engines that are used for the first stage of the American Atlas V launch vehicle.

Which the USA will no doubt "reverse engineer" soon :)

The OP needs to get out more often.

SpaceX, a privately-held American company, is the only source of innovation in rocketry at the present time. Their reusable launch platform plays in its own league; everything else is steam power, Falcon is internal combustion.

That's just a fact. Unlike insisting that China, Russia, India are incapable of innovation more generally, which is risible.

My vague impression, in fact, is that jet turbines are quite a bit more difficult to manufacture than rocket engines, even if the latter are thought of as 'higher tech'.

I'm fairly certain we'll discover, in the next ten years, that China is quite capable of making cutting-edge computer chips, and just hadn't gotten around to it yet.

I've never shared my countrymen's obsession with insisting on being 'the greatest'. This country is great in its own right, along many dimensions; it is, in fact, right at the cutting edge for medicine and CPUs; denigrating the work of other nations only detracts from this.

My impression is that “real” rocket engines include a jet engine just to pump fuel. They have many other pieces as well.

Not that a modern high-bypass turbofan is simple, but don’t discount the complexity of rocket science.

As true today as when it was written!

We're also really good at manufacturing houses and food. Besides cars, houses, and food actually representing a good chunk of physical things we buy, more of our spending is moving towards software/information in which we have a crazy lead.

I see it as manufacturing was displaced by an even more value adding industry. Though certainly it isn't good for our national security to be relying so much on imports for physical goods.

Tesla does, after all, manufacture cars — it doesn’t just write software that goes into cars made by others.

If not, The 1997 number would be ~$2,200B, after adjusting. That would still only be a slight decline.

Or is it the other way around? Manufacturing is declining, and services are growing because they're the only jobs left for former manufacturing employees?