Re:Money Pours into New Fabs and Facilities
by roenxi on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @05:23AM
(#38924435)
In this context does it really make sense to measure the output in dollars? The major reason why China has been doing so well in the last 50 years is a dollar of manufacturing in China goes further than in the US.
Just going by Taylor's response sibling to this comment; he says a PCB in the US cost $500 and China $15 - that is more than an order of magnitude efficiency improvement moving to China. $2.5T wouldn't be much to crow about with that sort of productivity gap, because that would be equivalent to less than $250B in China. Presumably PCBs are an extreme case, but it goes to show that a dollar figure doesn't tell us much about the actual capabilities of the US manufacturing sector.
Given the struggles the US has had with energy [0], down 22% from their peak, it is suspicious that manufacturing is at all time highs. Something got squeezed really hard since the 70s in real terms.
Just going by Taylor's response sibling to this comment; he says a PCB in the US cost $500 and China $15 - that is more than an order of magnitude efficiency improvement moving to China. $2.5T wouldn't be much to crow about with that sort of productivity gap, because that would be equivalent to less than $250B in China. Presumably PCBs are an extreme case, but it goes to show that a dollar figure doesn't tell us much about the actual capabilities of the US manufacturing sector.
Given the struggles the US has had with energy [0], down 22% from their peak, it is suspicious that manufacturing is at all time highs. Something got squeezed really hard since the 70s in real terms.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...