Americans fantasize about factory work because, at that time in America, you could afford a home without a two-income family. Life was "easier" for many people.

Personally, I think we need to focus on making things like homes more affordable. This would go a long way toward alleviating people's feeling of being trapped.

> Life was "easier" for many people.

It's definitely less of a factor compared to money, but I can't help wonder if in addition to being able to afford stuff, it's the idea that there used to be a "default" path that carried some sort of dignity. Dirty jobs have never been outright glamorous, but there's still a kind of respect that American society confers upon "traditional" industrial work - think the classic image of the humble American coal miner, factory worker, or farmer. "It ain't much, but it's honest work." I think the thought is that however you did in school and in the upper-class-employment rat race, anyone could find a stable, respectable, long-term job - probably even get trained on the job - in an industry that really matters, that does useful stuff for the country.

Now? If you fail to jump through all the office-job hoops of picking a fancy field, getting a degree, finding internships, dressing up nice, keeping a clean record, acing job interviews, etc. Or if those fancy jobs just aren't hiring near you. What are the "default" job options most people are left with? Working retail at Walmart? Putting fries in the bag at McDonalds? Janitorial? Driving a truck? Doordashing burritos?

Obviously the main thing the lack of stability and decent pay in these jobs, but when it comes to public perception and fantasizing, like you said, I wonder if a part of it is just that these service sector jobs feel... shittier. Less important for society.

I think its more complicated than this. People don't want to work in factories per se, but what a world where labor has actual power. The big thing that offshoring did was strip the power of local labor to enforce certain reasonable conditions on employers and this allowed normal people to live stable, even comfortable lives.

Offshoring has produced a world where we can buy cheap trinkets but where many, many, americans live precariously, have little to no stability, and work more than one job to make ends meet. What Americans really want is more control over their lives and "bringing back manufacturing" is a sort of short-hand for that ideal.

I think bringing back some manufacturing may help, but in the end Americans need to learn that what they really want is more power to shape their lives and that they will need to wrest that power back from a system which has leaned ever more towards market control of the allocation of time, energy, and labor.

But how many citizens know calculus, literature and physics? Certainly not enough know history - or US democracy wouldn't be facing the threat it does now.

The poorly educated need a livelihood too. If the economy is healthier for global trade (I think it is), then some way must be found of destributing its benefits to the demographics who got hit. Otherwise you get revolution or populism.

Telling an unemployed factory worker to send their kids to college doesn't help. Doesn't help the factory worker, and doesn't help kids who see education and middle class jobs as about as unreal as the idea of becoming a famous influencer or kingpin drug dealer.

But aren't China's learning outcomes higher in calculus, physics, etc?

Also the US is already the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world.

There's a lot more to our education than that. Additionally, our REAL competitive advantage are our universities. We have the best universities in the world, by far, and that's what drives our economy over all others as we create the most valuable intellectual property.

That doesnt really address how the leading manufacturer is also leading in the metrics you said are opposed to leading in manufacturing.

At its root I think this is driven by anxiety over how America would perform in a hot war, rose colored glasses culturally regarding the post WW2 era, and acknowledging that there's no real economic growth opportunity in America for unskilled labor, it's merely a way to tread water now.

going to have to give you kudos and steal that last part of "unskilled factory labour being a way to just tread water"

i didn't understand it myself until I developed a hardware system and computed the margins, hassle, etc - manual labor/assembly/mfg is not what a developed economy relies on and its asinine to pretend it is.

I don't know how the current American dynamism movement has picked up the steam it has

Manufacturing doesn't have to involve large amounts of low-skill manual labor. It can be highly automated and serve as a source of jobs for engineers.

Yet, 40% of our students can't read at a basic level.

this is what i've been saying - critical manufacturing should of course be brought on shore but I don't understand the idea of bringing back "the assembly of hyper niche part that country Y can produce extremely cheaply but America can't even reasonably produce in quality" to American shores.

It literally harms industry because anyone relying on that hyper niche part now has to pay more (because American mfg, let's face it - is not efficient) and deal with subpar quality as opposed to higher quality foreign parts.

I hate it say it, but come on man - people aren't buying American cars globally because the Japanese and even Germans can do it better. That's free market economics, either get better at making cars or focus on making things that we can do better like iPhones and Macbooks - not try to artificially defend an industry we suck at by forcing people to deal with shittier subpar products.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, I don't know.

To the contrary, they think of manual and “low-skill” labor as an essential undertaking that no person or society is above.

You are the one who thinks of the work as below you, that it should be moved out of sight so we can stop caring and make it someone else’s problem.

Everyone wants to think they're the most valuable thing in the world, but economics doesn't care about how much people value themselves. It only cares about when both buyer and seller agrees to the value of their work.

You may think a farm worker deserves $500,000,000 a year, but that won't matter until someone else decides to pay them that.

Ultimately, it's OK to say some things are more valuable than others, including the value of your labor.

The idea that everyone can just do knowledge work is pretty unrealistic, to put it mildly.

Because you cannot hide the imbalance of disconnecting yourself from the material reality that's involved with making your lifestyle possible by outsourcing to other human beings, over multiple decades, without it coming back to bite you in one form or another.

See the hundreds of thousands of people in US that have died from opioid overdoses. 50% of the US population, specifically those living outside major metro areas, experienced a slow collapse (over decades) that was not unlike the fall of the Soviet Union.

A country should have _some_ semblance of what it is to truly source, manufacture, and produce the lifestyle that's made possible in the country. When the top 15-20% become completely disconnected from the other 80% working menial service jobs because the core manufacturing has been outsourced to outside the country, it will come back to bite you.

"Man must feel the sweat on his own brow" or at least have an appreciation for what makes this possible. Your comment essentially implies that you feel that you are above or should be disconnected from this reality, which is dangerous.

You didn't explain exactly why we need that physical connection. You just broadly complained. Every one of your statements could be refuted by globalists saying its perfectly fine for foreigners to perform our manual labor for us instead.

Because in the absence of that physical connection you begin to accumulate a social and economic debt that will eventually come due, because sooner or later that 80% working in the service economy will come for the remaining 15-20%. Domestic manufacturing made possible by some degree of anti-dumping/tariffs would at least create a more balanced distribution of this wealth.

Globalist trade promoters are just short-term wishful / magical thinkers. It's magical thinking that you can create this social and economic imbalance via outsourcing it to the other side of the globe, without consequences over the long run. It's wishful thinking that there are enough upper middle class jobs / lifestyle for everyone that took Calculus.

Typical coastalist ivory tower thinking. No wonder we're in a pickle...

And that is not working out…

What we have instead is a nation straddled with debt and useless degrees. While the counties like China do “theirs world” work produce smarter and more capable workforce all while doing the mundane work too.

I think your view also vastly underestimates the number of not so smart people that exist in America. This is no knock on them, but people in tech bubbles get to walk around in a society where the average person they interact with has a far above average IQ. So for those who don’t balance red/black trees and find shortest paths with dijkstra's algorithm need jobs too.

On top of that you forgot something I am sure you have yelled many times, diversity. Remember when it was a strength? It’s not good for any nation to be completely void of entire industries. Having factories next to the tech will germinate the thinking minds with new problems to solve.

But even more to the point. China is doing amazing things, and they were we let do the manufacturing. So we always have a strong evidence that letting others might not be the best idea.

> our citizens as third worlders performing manual labor like we were oxen.

Lord man... there's a whole mass of humanity who don't want to fart in an office chair all day, or lay around collecting the dole.

The problem with an exclusively intellectual economy is that it easily loses touch with reality entirely. You end up with generations of people who have no idea how anything works or how to actually make anything or do things in the real world.

Why does it cost us 10X more to build half as much? It's not all wage differences. It's that we don't have a large talent pool of builders. When you make things -- physical things in the real world -- you learn things about the nature of reality that cannot be learned from books or computers.

And yet A&W campaign for 1/3 pounder failed against MacDonald quarter pounder because Americans believed 1/4 > 1/3.

The Quarter Pounder plus

>Economics works when the people do the things they are most efficient at.

If you believe this statement, then you must be supportive of open borders.

People in China might be more efficient at doing local US service jobs. Whose to say we dont let them do it?

Yes. Now people understand why open borders are a good thing.

Imagine how bad the US economy would be if we had tariffs and border controls between states.