I was just reading an article on a nuclear power plant built (in Norway?) recently that mentioned how it was a considerably more difficult/costly project due to the fact that there was not sufficient expertise left in the West since so few reactors had been built over the past decades....

An example closer to home, though perhaps not as stark, is the loss of expertise in various industries that have been outsourced. The US is a good example. This is one (of many) arguments against outsourcing your industry just because it's cheaper and increases the profits of the outsourcing company. The tradition and culture that allows a certain industry to flourish is interrupted and destroyed and rebuilding that is no small task.

I had a summer job one year working on space stuff. I was in the clean room and the first day they took me back there, white suit and all, and took some ball bearings off a wire rack. They were maybe a foot in diameter. My job that summer was to test to see which were the least noisy. (Basically, they rotated very slowly, and there was a phono needle resting on the outside with a strip chart measuring the vibration caused when balls hit each other, etc.) The best ones were going up.

They told me to be careful. These were the rejects from another project, but this project was legally required to use only US tech and the US no longer had the ability to manufacture bearings this large, since we had outsourced for some time and everyone who could do it got out of the business. So we needed these exact ones. (This was the late 70's.)

Yup, this is a massive strategic blunder of historical scale.

While the US and western countries are asleep at the switch and think that they are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, the Chinese have a 100- and 500- year plan and are exploiting our myopia for short-term profits to gain manufacturing expertise and military advantage. It may not be too late to reverse, but it is close.

It is really the result of not thinking ahead and letting the business lobbies have what they want today, instead of putting long-term strategic considerations first. Different incentives, different results, tragedy of the commons all over again.

An important factor here is not so much the business lobbies, but how we reward the decision-makers. CEOs make most of their money from short-term stock price numbers, something that also determines how long they last in their jobs. Combine that with declining CEO tenure [1] and the incentives are really clear: Do anything that will make the numbers look good in the 1-5 year time frame, get maximum money, and GTFO.

A lot of these problems would go away if CEOs were paid a modest amount of cash to live (say, $1m/year) and then the rest of their compensation was in stock that was locked up for at least 20 years.

[1] https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2019/ceo-...

A 100- and 500- year plan is ludicrous on it's face. They don't even credibly hit their 5 year plans a lot of the time. The idea of planning something so large and complex so far into the future seems like wishful thinking at best.

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

"No plan survives the first shot of the battle".

So, sure, the plans will likely not survive in any detail even a decade from now.

But the fact that they are making plans, attempting to understand the considerations of those future generations, understand what strategic goals need to be worked on now to help that, and more — this is critical.

I contrast, western politics and decision making tends to focus on considerations that are at best hot for the next election cycle.

And notice that the US is not now trying to return manufacturing home because of long-term plans, but because the people noticed that the bargain of cheap goods from China doesn't mean much when you exported the job. The fact that China now makes and has access to key components in some key military systems and that needs to be reversed barely enters the mind of the electorate.

> And notice that the US is not now trying to return manufacturing home because of long-term plans, but because the people noticed that the bargain of cheap goods from China doesn't mean much when you exported the job

Most of those jobs outside of a few narrow categories were lost to automation. We make more steel, aircrafts, and cars than ever but with far fewer people.

China's history of planning has led to tons of misallocation of resources, and I'm not sure I'd want to emulate that.

>>Most of those jobs outside of a few narrow categories were lost to automation.

Of course automation plays a part, but it is nothing like the whole story. China now has far greater capabilities to make critical components from chips to solar panels than is located here. Look what happens to our supply chain when supply is just reduced a bit. What do you think would happen to our economy in a conflict?

>>China's history of planning has led to tons of misallocation of resources, and I'm not sure I'd want to emulate that.

Of course we wouldn't want to emulate that; that's a strawman argument.

But to use that argument to avoid planning altogether is foolish. And yes, resources will APPEAR to be wasted. Keeping more than minimal capabilities immediately at hand is "inefficient".

This is the same as exercising and eating right to stay in good physical condition - no one needs to be able to lift weight and run fast for 99.99% of modern jobs. Yet it is a good idea for many reasons. By your argument, why bother to save for emergencies or tough times? That's inefficient - you should enjoy your full income right now - heck, go into debt too!. Also by your argument, we shouldn't plan to avoid technical debt - that's inefficient waste of programmer time - just write the first thing that comes to mind to deploy the feature.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Misses on short-term plans are a different concern to progress on a multi-century plan. Pig iron production might've missed its forecast for 2020, but it'd undeniable that China is building tremendous expertise in advanced manufacturing - and at a similar rate to that at which the west is shedding it.

Th narrative of "the west doesn't manufacture anything" is greatly oversold. The US makes more steel than it did 40 years ago, for example. Sure, we make fewer hairs and t-shirts, but it's natural for that stuff to chase lower labor costs. We're also an agricultural powerhouse.

Now, for sure we have fallen a bit behind in making chips, but that may change.

So we are the Romans. We can make swords and bread! We'll do great in WWIII!

Because we hit max depth, I'll respond to your bizarre fever dream about the Millennium Challenge and some hypothetical war with China. The only things that matters in a war between nuclear states is that both sides view it as too terrible to entertain. Nuclear subs mean that the US always has the option to deal a killing blow even if everything else fails. And if it comes to that, nothing else matters anyway, so why worry about it?

They can go on fancifully pretending to plan for 500 years from now, and we'll continue to innovate, live well by comparison, and at the end of the day there's relatively little reason for us to have a major conflict.

I mean I think you hit the nail on the head with nuclear, and I hope the war won't go nuclear. But the war will result in the complete impotence of the USA. China will become like the British empire: its influence will be everywhere. The USA will have no influence. In 50 years, at the outside, the USA will have a worse standard of living than China. China will out innovate us. Out sell us. Out market us. Out maneuver us. We've lost the Philippines, but that's ok because its far away. We'll keep saying that until Mexico is part of the Chinese empire.

The point is that the war wont go nuclear. It'll say conventional, and that's why we'll lose. We won't have the bottle to pull the trigger. Think you can bluff the Chinese? Lol. "Oh, we are really sorry that you aircraft carrier got sunk in an amazingly tragic accident involving our hypersonic missile test. That is terrible." "Ok, but this is the fifth time, if it happens again we'll nuke you, we swear."

Really the only conclusion I can form from the USA's willful inaction is that the politicians are already bought and paid for.

>and at the end of the day there's relatively little reason for us to have a major conflict

That's exactly what will be said in the USA. "Well, they've put missile bases on these man-made islands, but that's little reason to go to war." "Well, they've bought and paid for contracts that would previously go to US companies through bribery and corruption (or rather spending more on bribery and corruption than we did), but that's little reason to go to war." "Oh, they sunk a carrier and they're really sorry about it, but that's little reason to go to war".

One day the world will be China's, and the USA will have spent fifty years repeatedly, impotently, drawing lines in the sand.

Put another way: The Soviets had nukes, but by the 1980s we'd beaten them. Products all over the world had Made in USA written on them. US products, US money all over the world, protected by US military technology. Now swap Russia with USA, and USA with China, 1980 with 2040. 2030?

>>...at the end of the day there's relatively little reason for us to have a major conflict.

...at the end of today. <<FTFY

today, there is not, but autocratic regimes create their own reasons to have major conflicts. They are expansionist, and will keep at it until stopped. Moreover, the longer they are allowed to engage in bad behavior, the larger the conflict that will be required to fix the problem. CCP already has a long history with expansionist actions in Tibet, HK, Taiwan, the 9-dash line, is running concentration camps for Uyghurs, and working it's Belt and Road plan to capture poorer nations in debt traps. Yet their rhetoric is all about how the US is being the aggressor when it practices Freedom Of Navigation exercises in international waters, or is "interfering in internal affairs" by working w/Taiwan.

They will not let these topics go until they win, and they will always find new excuses to expand. Their excuses for current expansion are 100% bullsh*t, why would you expect them to not make new ones when convenient? It's their standard mode of operating.

If you think this will somehow end by itself, you make many wrong assumptions about how autocracies work, or you know something that no one else does about how to stop this, and should share it in the interest of world peace.

That's ridiculous. We're churning out new ideas in biotech, medicine, media, finance, automobiles, airplanes, batteries, some solar stuff, and on and on. We have a huge, dynamic economy that does a lot of things really well. We've uncovered some major issues in the last two years but we've done better I think than one might have expected under the circumstances. I think in particular the rapid development and production of multiple vaccines in record time displays our capacity to innovate and manufacture complex goods.

It's impossible to know what's coming in the distant future, but it doesn't feel like any of our problems are insurmountable.

When WWIII happens it wont matter how many weapons you have at the start of the war. What will count is how fast you can make more weapons. That's all that matters. The war ends one one side runs out of weapons (or soldiers but China has a bit of a lead there). We can't even make new cars when supply from China is reduced. If you think having aircraft carriers is going to matter then you've not been paying attention. [1] The future is technology. Technology requires chip manufacture. That happens about 100 miles off China's coast, or rather, in China's opinion, on a Chinese owned island 100 miles off the mainland.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

We are actually getting quite behind on some of that stuff that you mentioned. Boeing is a shell of it's former self, having been hollowed out by the financial types, and can't launch a new aircraft without killing hundreds or a new spacecraft without an order of magnitude more time and money vs SpaceX. China absolutely leads the world in solar cell production, and of course most critical microchip production is offshore.

WWII was won largely on American manufacturing prowess. As the war started in Europe, we had a grand total of 39 tanks. But American manufacturing might was focused on the war effort. Liberty ships launched at a rate of two every three days. 25-35K tanks rolled off the US assembly lines every year, while the Germans could produce only 3K, 5K, 11K, and 18K in 1941-44, respectively. Etc., etc, etc.

However, right now, the US produces barely any microchips, which are pretty much critical to every technology.

Worse yet, having a shortage of conventional technology, such as smart weapons shortens the time to the point where the choice becomes to escalate to nukes or lose.

But thank you for providing a fine example of the "it'll be fine" sort of myopia that brought us to this mess -- it always feels nice to look at our advantages and think everything else is a tail risk. But when the tail risk happens, it's over.

It isn't myopia at all to think that near term conventional large-scale nation-state warfare is unlikely. I'm well aware that industrial giants of the last half century aren't as dynamic as they once were, but it hardly matters. We have tons of talent and capacity, it isn't unlikely for newer and better companies to be built.

The only important thing where we seem to be at a serious disadvantage is in chip fab, but there are several companies looking to break ground on new facilities in the US in the next few years.

Trying to hand-wring over an unlikely war seems unproductive. There are two major powers today, and we have an extant model in living memory for how to keep tensions below a critical level. The Chinese plan to compete with the West via the Belt and Road initiative seems unlikely to lead to anything other than economic conflict.

Belt & road, ya, that isn't a big threat yet, but the ongoing relentless expansionism is a real threat. They have never stopped, and barely slowed down.

Sure, continued appeasement can 'keep the peace'. But it will be at the cost of sacrificing Taiwan and everythign in the 9-dashed line to the fate of Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs. And then whatever else nearby that they will decide to fabricate a claim for. And so forth, and so forth, and so forth.

That is the bargain that authoritarians always strike - constantly cheating around the edges - what's mine is mine and what's yours is up for grabs.

So, people not thinking strongly or long term can argue that "it's unlikely", "it's not worth a conflict", etc. Meanwhile more territory and people fall under authoritarian control.

If it is unlikely, it is because people want to keep their heads in the sand and appease instead of make current conflict. It's a fools game

>It is really the result of not thinking ahead and letting the business lobbies have what they want today

There's a tendency in the West to airbrush history, and pretend that the opening to China was just a result of business lobbies. There was an intentional policy decision based on 'liberalization through trade' theory, which managed to be one of the most disastrous theories out there (far more disastrous than 2000-era US WoT policies). This was pushed by politicians and academics, and up until the oughts businesses were more reacting to the policy as creating it.

YES, this is definitely a huge factor that I failed to mention - the concept that economic free(ish) markets are incompatible with authoritarianism and would lead to political freedom.

From a BBC article yesterday [0]:

"Indeed the US trade representative responsible for negotiating China's WTO deal, Charlene Barshefsky, told a Washington International Trade Association panel this week that China's economic model "somewhat disproved" the Western view that "you can't have an innovative society, and political control""

I can sort of see how the idea took hold, as the previous large authoritarian states in USSR and CCP had so dramatically and consistently underperformed (to be polite) the democracies that it would seem that the converse would be true, that economic freedom would force democracy.

So, ya, it would seem like a good hypothesis, but I sure wouldn't bet a lot on it without solid testing.

Yet, the political leaders all turned out to be fools and bet the entire future of democracy itself on that notion.

Then, combine that with the MBA idea that the only thing important is the ideas and management and trifling things like manufacturing can be outsourced to their cheapest locale and that manufacturing know-how, innovation, and supply chain control don't matter, and we've come to the brink of destroying the free world.

Now, we have a historical fight on our hands to recover from these blunders.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59610019