That is confusing cause and effect. Because companies move their manufacturing operations to china it becomes harder to manufacture in the US. They did not initially move to China because of a lack of dometic skilled workers, but because of lower costs. The result of that move was, after a delay, the de-skilling of the US labor force, creating the lack of domestic skilled workers we have now. To recover from that would require a reverse migration of manufacturing activity which would, after a delay, create more skilled workers in the US.

Skills follow activity, they do not lead activity. You learn by doing.

If you want to develop good bridge building skills, then build a lot of bridges. As a result of that process, you will, after a delay, have a labor pool that knows how to do it well, and the bridges you build later on will be higher quality than the bridges you started out building.

You do not wait for the labor pool to sprout up like mushrooms spontaneously from the ground, so there are all these bridge builders standing around with nothing to do, and then you decide that you'll have them fill up a few rooms and and hire some of them to build a bridge.

It's not just a lack of domestic skilled workers. I'm not really sure there is much of a lack. It's just that US labor is so much more expensive compared to earning power. US workers can't pay other US workers.

Getting parts CNCed in China may be 10x less than the cost in the US, and materials are a tenth the cost as well (in small qty) as they haven't been transported yet. You can get roughly the same throughput in the US if you want to pay for it, but it will be vastly more expensive.

> US workers can't pay other US workers.

That is just logically false. It's not even a question of measurement, it is false by definition. The income paid to produce is by definition always sufficient to purchase the output that has been produced. But remember that income paid to the factors of production includes both labor and capital income, because both the owners of capital and the suppliers of labor purchase the products that are created by the combining of labor and capital to produce output.

What is unsustainable is running persistent trade deficits overseas. E.g. by allowing foreign capital inflows, we have allowed the foreign sector to distort prices in an unsustainable manner.

The buyer of US labor is the government and capital. Taxes on all US economic activity and coffers filled with worldwide profits are what purchases comparatively expensive US labor. This is why, e.g., most people can not afford new housing construction -- excess money has been dumped into it from the stimulus, driving costs up. Similar things have happened on a longer timescale for IT and engineering.

Take what I said with some restrictions, like "US workers can't afford skilled or semiskilled US labor" which is afaict true. I work in production automation, life sciences, and software; my hobby projects in these area are unfortunately quite expensive due to US labor costs. As much as possible I must avoid using US labor if I want to get anything done.

"Skills follow activity, they do not lead activity. You learn by doing."

Nicely put. Thanks for pointing that out. That really resonates for me as I think about my career and skillset. I'm where I am now because of building things with somewhat inferior skills (risky) at the start and growing my skills . I need to repeat that with new tools/processes now. It all seems obvious looking back.

...Perhaps another skill is having the foresight to see what will be needed in the next phase. I did it then, hopefully I'll be able to do it again. A bit like running a small company of one person. Where is the next investment made?

China - the populace - seem to be pretty good at this.

What does the west do? Tech is the only real growth industry left in the US. Right now 80% of the county slaves away in dead end jobs to cater to the remaining 20% white collar professional+capital class. That 20% seems like its going to get smaller :/

Eventually something has got to give in this country. Soon nothing will be left but a hollow husk.

And Nukes.

I remember right around 2000 George Will bloviated about how Russia was a third world nation by economy size, why do we treat them with such deference.

Psst George: They still have a LOT of nukes.

That might be us. A shell of a country with a failing economy, strong military, and huge number of nukes.

Of course right around then global warming might really start taking off and a billion or two people are starving and become refugees. Then we see what happened in the EU and Syria, but worldwide and 100x worse.

Could tech and manufacturing combine to become automated high-end tech?

Could robotics and aggressive automation of production lines make this shift? ...Or is it in fact more complex than it seems and the lead times for setting up these kinds of businesses too large to have a useful effect in the short/medium term?

The US manufacturing real output continues to increase and never really declined (briefly in the Great Recession but quickly restored). Manufacturing employment on the other hand continues to drop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_Sta...

Depends on the region. In the Midwest and southeast most towns have several “jobshops” that keep the local industry running.

As they say: "All art is derivative"

Have you an example of a western invention not based on existing technology?

Depends on what you mean by "existing technology". Do electronic devices using quantum effects in solid state materials count? There you have the whole semiconductor industry. What about exploiting the behavior of charge carriers in vacuum? There you have the whole vacuum tube industry. Etc. etc. Before these things existed, nothing even remotely similar was being utilized by human civilization in our technological ventures at the very least in these two cases (or at least nothing did that readily comes to my mind, but considering the physics involved, it seems unlikely).

> Do electronic devices using quantum effects in solid state materials count? There you have the whole semiconductor industry.

That was invented by Jagadish Chandra Bose in Bangladesh, who built working millimeter-wave radios using Schottky diodes in 01894. Of course, he didn't understand the quantum effects, but then, semiconductor diodes were in wide industrial use (mostly in the rich West) for decades before Shockley's Equation in 01949.

The quantum theory was largely a Western discovery during those 55 years, but also included significant contributions from non-Western people like Shinichiro Tomonaga, Yoshiro Nishina, Leo Esaki, Tsung-Dao Lee, Hideki Yukawa, and Hantaro Nagaoka, and of course since 01949 quantum theory has been a field of investigation dominated by non-Western people. As you may be aware, there have been significant improvements in solid-state electronics since 01949, including full-color LEDs that permit LED lighting (due to Shuji Nakamura) and the switch to MOSFETs (due to Mohammed Atalla and Dawon Kahng, who were not from the West but were in the West) which eliminated the power consumption barrier that restricted 01960s electronics to dozens of transistors on a chip.

China in particular has had a pretty bad couple of centuries, in between being invaded by the US, England, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Russia (twice), and Japan (three times), having two of the most ruinous civil wars in human history, and having the worst famine in human history. So it's been innovating a bit below par, though it seems to be doing okay now.

> What about exploiting the behavior of charge carriers in vacuum? There you have the whole vacuum tube industry.

It does seem that the whole cathode-ray thing was a Western discovery, but it was built on the Hindu ayurvedic techniques of mercury distillation that formed the basis for Arabic and then Western alchemy (necessary for the Sprengel pump, which was for decades the only source of a hard enough vacuum); also, building the apparatus drew on the Mesopotamian techniques of glassmaking, which are usually considered to hail from Asia Minor, though some believe they originated in Egypt.

(It's possible that the Hindus imported the techniques of mercury distillation from China, but that is far enough back that it's difficult to know. At any rate, the Europeans got them from the Arabs, who got them from the Hindus.)

> That was invented by Jagadish Chandra Bose in Bangladesh, who built working millimeter-wave radios using Schottky diodes in 01894.

The effect in question was discovered by a German two decades earlier: https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/semiconductor-...

> and of course since 01949 quantum theory has been a field of investigation dominated by non-Western people. As you may be aware, there have been significant improvements in solid-state electronics since 01949

Not quite sure how that matters for the question I was answering, which was emphatically NOT "is there a field of inventions historically wholly monopolized by the west". The question was for "AN example of a western invention not based on existing technology" - one would be sufficient.

> but it was built on the Hindu ayurvedic techniques of mercury distillation

?????? We're not talking about pseudoscience here.

> The effect in question was discovered by a German two decades earlier

Oh hey, you're right. So Bose only invented the use of the effect for radio, not the Schottky diode itself. I stand corrected.

> ?????? We're not talking about pseudoscience here.

Mercury distillation is not pseudoscience; like glassblowing, it was an existing technology that was a basis for the vacuum-tube age. Of course, if you trace any technology back, you will find that its origins are mixed with pseudoscience; Semmelweis promoted handwashing because he was convinced disease was caused by cadaveric particles, Priestley invented water carbonation because he was convinced scurvy was a carbonated water deficiency, etc. Naturally enough, mercury distillation seems to have been invented by people who were convinced that drinking mercury was good for you. They were wrong about that, but their distillation technology still works.

1) Chemistry and physics has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of ayurveda, and vice versa.

2) Even if somehow you could make the connection (which I still strongly doubt since I haven't seen the these Ancient Indian vacuum pumps in museums any more than I've seen a vimana in a museum), it still would be hardly relevant since it would be the same connection as between a car and a screwdriver. A screwdriver can be employed to assemble a car once you know what parts the car should comprise, but you'd most likely describe the resulting car as a thermodynamics-based device, or internal-combustion-heat-engine-based device, and not as a screwdriver-based device. Likewise, a vacuum pump utilizing mercury can be utilized to manufacture a vacuum tube, but most people would probably describe a triode as a electrostatics-based device, or as a thermionic-emission-based device, not as a mercury-vacuum-pump-based device, not matter where the mercury vacuum pump came from.

Probably you'll have a different perspective about the significance of screwdrivers once you learn a little more about the history of technology.

To correct one misreading on your part, though, my claim was that the technology of distillation was developed in India (or possibly China), not the Sprengel pump. I too would be very surprised to find a medieval Sprengel pump from India or anywhere else.

I'm curious: would you also be so foolish as to claim that chemistry and physics have nothing to do with the pseudosciences of phlogiston, numerology, astrology, and alchemy? How about the steady-state theory of cosmology?

A vacuum tube is not based on "distillation" of anything. It operates with charge carriers in vacuum, with no phase change of any masses involved, whereas distillation involves liquid/gas transitions so it can't possibly have anything to do with the operation of a vacuum tube which is based on an arrangement of solid electrodes in a vacuum and the flow of charge carriers between them. As for the history of technology, I'm moderately familiar with it and I don't see the relevance here. If absolutely everything you touch when creating something were relevant for the question of "Have you an example of a western invention not based on existing technology?", then not only would the answer be "there isn't any", but as a corollary, one would have to conclude that there is NO example of ANY invention from ANYWHERE that isn't based on existing technology. Clearly that doesn't seem to be the intended reading of that question.

You can't make a Sprengel pump without distilling your mercury (it doesn't work if the mercury sticks to the walls of the tubes and leaves crap all over them), and you can't make a vacuum tube without some kind of hard vacuum pump, and, as I pointed out above, the Sprengel pump was the only kind of hard vacuum pump available for decades. (I already explained all of this fairly clearly in previous comments, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28333304.) In fact, the invention of the Sprengel pump produced an explosion of inventions and discoveries, of which the so-called Edison effect was only one.

I do think that that there is no example of any invention from anywhere that isn't based on existing technology, including specifically existing technology invented on other continents, and my reading of the question was that it was intended to make precisely that point, thus concisely pointing out the ignorant fallacy at the heart of the original racist bullshit comment, "I can think of nothing unique, only modification of existing inventions."

Again,

1) the tools are traditionally not a part of the invention,

2) by referring to distillation as a prerequisite for the mercury vacuum pump operation, you're referring to a tool twice removed from the invention in question, and

3) even mercury distillation itself is not based on ayurveda anyway. It's based on physics.

I've commented further at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28360306.

> […] 01894 > […] 01949

Is there a specific esoteric or cabbalistic reason to prefix the number of bygone summers with a zero? Both make for invalid octadecimals and have broken my builtin parser.

I'm going with the lightning rod. Granted, metalworking was probably discovered somewhere in the Levant. But the "West" has only been defined by the Bosporus since about 1300.

Bonus: India - place-value numbers; China - paper money.