Ironically, those numbers were cooked up by counting Intel as manufacturing and over-weighting its success with a hedonic multiplier:

https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...

Idk what a hedonic multiplier is, but my understanding of that article is that production numbers measure the real $ value of output, not the actual quantity, making the production index misleading (e.g., if the US manufactured totally stopped except to make 1 computer chip costing $100 trillion, then manufacturing would seem to shoot up, even as it actually collapsed.)

If that's correct, then it's interesting: we're making few, valuable items now, rather than many, cheap items. It follows that automation isn't a drive towards cheaper production, but more a drive towards higher quality goods that simply require machines to make.

But it all takes me back to my point: from a geopolitical perspective, being good at highly-differentiated, tech-intensive, difficult-to-execute manufacturing is a great position. It's just a disaster from an employment perspective, because to get there, we traded away all our labor-intensive manufacturing.

Hedonic multiplier is the idea that a CPU that's twice as good should count for twice the GDP even if it doesn't actually sell for that. It's a strategy for overweighting our strengths in those manufacturing indices by confusing the relationship between money and value.

Intel was the lynchpin of this lie. We are in a thread about Intel becoming non-competitive at highly-differentiated, tech-intensive, difficult-to-execute manufacturing.

No, that is not a great geopolitical position to be in.