This hard to explain for me, as somebody faring from Russia, a country super hostile to entrepreneurs.

From one side just any place in US, or EU, are 100000% better deal for people doing business on paper, yet you keep running in the overall "systemic apathy" towards boring businesses like manufacturing.

You all get all the welcome if you are doing something relatable to people making social elites like some hot shot VC business, and have a personal image of Musk Elon. You feel the entirety of society is ready to flex, and mold itself around you.

Now, try to come to some "high society" event, and complain that some absurd accounting law effectively shutting down your manufacturing business... People will not even look at you, if not trying to snub you.

You feel some kind of unease, or friction.

If I were to be in Russia, I will just know that bureaucrats are bastards, I will bare with them, and go doing my business later like if nothing happened. The negativity ends there.

In the West... But in the West, the most of the obstacle course only begins when you already pass the red tape. You will keep having to deal with the same impassionate attitude with your own employees, your professional community, every lawyer/banker/mba dominated circle be it a client, or a supplier.

While bad guys in Russia will hit you on the head, and take your money one way or another, the "bad" guys in the West will just say "we don't need you, your business, and your money, go away."

Sometimes when I read History, I wonder why the hell people at the time didn't see the obvious threats that were looming over them. Actually there's always some guys that see what's coming and tell, but nobody cares and a lot of time passes whith plenty of opportunities to correct the course.

Then comes the war or an empire falls.

There was a narrative that was pushed by Davos and others that advanced economies should be structured around services. I talked to economics students in Manchester at some point and they sneered at me, when I argued that Germany was in a much better place compared to most places in Europe because it hadn’t lost all of its industrial base. They called that thinking backward. One other reason I can think of is that a large majority of decision makers in Europe and US are non-technical and/or even openly hostile to practical aspects of industry. So everything operates with multiple levels of indirection between stakeholders and technical people.

US/EU sold out to cheaper prices in China partly due to currency manipulation and partly due to the fault of their own (meaning capitalistic incentives, no regulations, international trade agreements, etc.).

Further they did so with the presumption that China will shed off its authoritarian tones as it grows. That didn't pan out as well.

I would say your assessment of this situation is pretty spot on - we need to ask Why and what led to centralization of manufacturing specifically.

Hit tech industries are limited by the number of educated people in the population available to support them, so they operate at the whims of citizens and the education system.

If countries want to expand their silicon design and manufacturing capabilities, then they need to somehow get their citizens to study the relevant fields necessary to grow such industries.

American university graduates tend towards degrees related to business or healthcare. I'm not sure how countries like China, Korea, and Japan manage to graduate so many technical people.

Part of the issue is chicken-and-egg. It's hard to get a job in the field of chip design / manufacturing because there just aren't that many of those jobs available in the USA, outside of a few key regions.

A lot of it is labor costs. There's also the fact that there are other, more lucrative industries for American industry to chase. Everything has tradeoffs. I don't know if I would say industry left the US due to a failure of any kind. This is kind of the definition of an economic comparative advantage.

Not true at all, labour costs only make few percents of high value goods you import from third world countries.

Even if they were to go up tenfold, it will not make that much of difference.

People who moan about labour costs making any difference to modern manufacturing are just keeping regurgitating a myth.

In fact, trained manufacturing labour costs in coastal China are now significantly passing that of US averages, and even more so of US flyover states.

I'd guess that most manufactured goods have a margin of a few percentage points.

Labor cost are way lower in southern and eastern europe.

I think the decline of the industrial economy in the US is substantially down to the US government effectively subsidizing foreign manufacturing with seignorage (dollar printing) profits.

Optimizing for quarterly returns means nobody plans for 10 or 25 years into the future. You won't get a bonus for planning ahead.