You'll also see people doing complex repairs of mobile phones sitting on a stool on the sidewalk. The level of skill and access to tools/spare parts that is endemic there is completely different than the US.
Do you think China has not?
Ignoring how we define "serious", they do have an industrial policy. You just may not agree with the wisdom of the outcomes wrought by the regulatory regime. I don't know how you ever compete with the developing world that has a surplus of people and comparatively lax regulatory framework for everything from labor to the environment.
The policy is to move all the dirty work to someone else's back yard. It seems to work as long as the shipping lanes stay open and the other economies have something to gain (room to grow and raise standards of living).
Whose policy? Like, which politicians and what exactly is their policy?
Because that sounds more like the kind of thing people say they are trying to do, while hiding the fact that they are doing something different.
>Production offshoring, also known as physical restructuring, of established products involves relocation of physical manufacturing processes overseas,[22] usually to a lower-cost destination or one with fewer regulatory restrictions. >Physical restructuring arrived when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) made it easier for manufacturers to shift production facilities from the US to Mexico. >This trend later shifted to China, which offered cheap prices through very low wage rates, few workers' rights laws, a fixed currency pegged to the US dollar, (currently fixed to a basket of economies) cheap loans, cheap land, and factories for new companies, few environmental regulations, and huge economies of scale based on cities with populations over a million workers dedicated to producing a single kind of product. However, many companies are reluctant to move high value-added production of leading-edge products to China because of lax enforcement of intellectual property laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshoring#Production_offshori...
https://theweek.com/articles/486362/where-americas-jobs-went
https://www.economist.com/media/globalexecutive/outsourcing_...
I have lived in the Bay Area my entire adult life. We used to have Halted/HSC, we used to have Weird Stuff. We used to have Triangle Machinery Co in Santa Clara. Now everything is gone.
I think it’s great that we built a semiconductor manufacturing plant. That’s important for strategic manufacturing. But we’ve so thoroughly destroyed our manufacturing base, let the factories rot, and financialized property value that the “weird place with random electronics” can no longer even afford to do business. Starbucks makes more money, so in it goes.
US politicians love to shout about manufacturing. “Manufacturing jobs jobs economy growth.” But these people DO NOT understand how things get made. They have no serious industrial policy. They do not know the value of a high speed train connecting manufacturing centers. And even if they did, the entire apparatus of our government is set up to stop it.
Manufacturing workers need education. They need housing, transit, health care, maternity and sick leave. They need secure jobs and extra income that allows them time off to take classes to learn new skills.
I’m glad we passed the inflation reduction act, and the CHIPS act. We need that investment. But it’s going to take much more than that to “bring manufacturing back” and I’ve have seen time and time again that we do not have the vision or capability to move in the ways that would be required.
I hope manufacturing comes back. We desperately need it. But I’m quite frustrated that despite some marginal progress, the serious changes we need are not on the horizon nor seemingly beyond it.