Politicians who pitch “I match your worldview and will implement the simple fixes you want” outcompete “I think your worldview is incomplete and this is what you really want instead”, by a lot.
Some might be very crafty and believe the second while shouting like the first. Many will actually believe the simple solution can work though.
My favourite example from Adam Smith remains the nail maker. At the time, London factories were churning out iron nails by the bushel, whereas the provincial Scottish blacksmith was able to craft perhaps 10 in a day.
Is it so terrible that no one these days knows how to make nails? That our physical and mental capabilities are put to more productive ends?
That’s how I see these skill sets ‘lost’, national security related industries notwithstanding.
When I was in aerospace management decided to move our fixture guy to a part time contractor instead of meeting him on his salary increase request. Almost every step of the factory other than some sub-assemblies were dependant on the fixtures, the fixtures needed to be constantly re-calibrated, etc. And there was no other fixture guy in the area. We fired like the most important person in the entire factory and hoped he'd stick around for part time contract work. I was no longer working there before it happened, but the first time a fixture needed calibration but he had other contract work, that whole section of the line is down at like $200,000 a day until he can come in. Like OK you scheduled him for the normal maintenance, but what happens when a forklift hits a fixture and he's off at some new clients site for 3 weeks? Or the AC goes out and the heat takes everything out of tolerance before you get it cooled off again.
And with JIT manufacturing having fixtures down throws off the schedule AND you don't have capacity to catch back up because you have capacity for the barest minimum you can get away with. These guys are very very important and yes it is terrible if we don't have their skills available on demand.
There is big support of these models from consulting world. If it doesn't work than it just means we need further micro components to make it work but never try back to integrated system.
Some two bit code monkey screeching "it's not my fault my code shit all over the production database when something upstream of it got a little wonky, I coded to the spec I was given" is no different than some dumbass middle manager or MBA at HQ who's intentionally making the system more shitty for negligible, but measurable, savings so they can fuck off into the sunset with their bonus for hitting KPI before it all comes crashing down.
Ergo, any decision which saves dollars and time in the present but increases future risk looks good... in the present.
It's always surprised me that businesses don't attempt to quantify risk in an effort to produce a more balanced decision function.
But I wonder if the outcome is simply that we drop every known manufacturing technique on the floor and just start from scratch with current adjacent technologies. Basically kill the whole industry and reboot it again.
My sister was a petroleum geologist. She went into oil in the early 2000s because she saw the roughly 30,000 person shortfall of petroleum geologists that was about to happen as the baby boomers aged out of the profession, and was like "Well, they're going to need to hire new blood, that's good for me." And it worked great for about 5 years, she was paid a shit-ton of money because they couldn't get people. But then two layoffs later, what actually happened is that the entire oil industry and associated value chain is dying, and we're replacing it with electricity, solar, batteries, EVs, smart-grids, and a bunch of things that didn't exist in the early 2000s.
Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
Well that's the pitch they want to throw at you. Actual studies disagree.
>Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
I legitmately think we will hit General AI before we have anything close to this. We simply don't have the resources needed on an individual bases to faciliate everyone being a "factory worker at home".
If AI keeps improving, I am not so sure about that. Smart people may be able to quickly jump to senior skills. And what we view as senior skills at the moment may become useless.
If you are always on crutches and need the AI companion all the steps of the way, you basically offload the most important part of the work which is the whole cognitive work.
That "senior skill" is the debugging of complex systems that often interconnects in unusual ways, why? Because this might be a one off this might not be well documented, or even the code might not really point at the issue because it might be a subtle interplay of hardware and software.
Even if you are smart, it doesn't solve the problem that people still have to learn, and institutional knowledge is more important at times, because this might not be documented or easy to figure out, even with the greatest AI companion...
Also our airplanes suck, you could not possibly have picked a worse example of American heavy industry than the Boeing corporation.
There's only four things [Americans] do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
When I was a kid growing up in the post communist 90-00s, we were going nearly weekly to the cinema to watch the latest American movies: Blade, Shrek, Toy Story, The Matrix trilogy, LotR trilogy, American Pie, Batman trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Fast & Furious, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Scary Movie, Rush Hour, etc
We couldn't get enough of US entertainment, while now everyone here avoids the new US releases like the plague since it's only cash grabs injected with $CURRENT_DAY identity politics, diversity box ticking based on focus group testing, resulting in sterile, predictable, zero-humor, zero-edge, zero-creativity slop that's not even worth pirating.
Americans have no idea how much soft power they lost worldwide by forcing their identity politics and ideologies in entertainment. Japanese anime and Koran movies and TV shows now run rings around the US entertainment industry.
I know kids in the target demographic have a place in their heart for them but Star Wars prequels given as a positive example while complaining about 30 year old IP slop?
You may also have missed the subtle subtext in Star Wars about fascism.
You're twisting my words to move the narrative goalposts. Nobody complained about diversity in movies (otherwise I wouldn't have praised Rush Hour and Blade). The complaint was about US movies today being solely built around a toxic form of diversity checkbox ticking, masquerading as entertainment, which is not interesting to anyone outside the US crowds of movie goers who care more about seeing $CURRENT_DAY political issues in their movies instead of recognizing entertainment as being fantasy escapism, which causes the US to loose soft power abroad, and judging by how they flop at the box office, US viewers aren't interested in paying for this slop either.
>most of your good old days classics examples are in fact "slop based on established IP".
Source that they're slop?
>but Star Wars prequels given as a positive example while complaining about 30 year old IP slop?
The prequels were considered shit at the time because they were compared to the original masterpieces, but compared to the modern Star Wars that Disney shits out today, they're basically gold. They ended up ageing like wine due to how bad we have it today.
>You may also have missed the subtle subtext in Star Wars about fascism.
What's your point here?
The superhero movies that have filled that niche are by any measures wildly popular.
Because a country isn't a business. If a companies falls out, they move on to another company based on the market.
If a country falls out, we go to war and sanction everything. If you can't survive those sanctions, the war is lost before any blood is spilt. Or at least any blood spilt by foreign invaders; the citizens will burn down the country for you instead.
In contrast, "Maximally efficient is minimally robust."
Something that business intelligentsia propagates should be given extra scrutiny. Why should you assume that statement about core competencies is correct, a priori? We have lots of evidence that statement isn't true in general. And we have mountains of evidence that such statements tend to be more incorrect the longer a time horizon you account for.
Vertically integrated businesses aren't rare. Everybody loves being a fabless chip company--until an earthquake or a pandemic hits. Designing chips was not a core competency for Apple--until it was and suddenly you have the M1. GE outsourced water heater manufacturing and lost their core competency to design them. etc.
All of them took the feedback onboard and improved the quality of their systems (Continuous Improvement is a practice that was refined in Japan - Toyota)
There's nothing stopping any other country from doing the same.
Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs.
We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot.
Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it.
Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.
And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
1. this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time. The contract is broken.
2. LCOL areas in the US still pay better than many other countrie's middle class jobs. That's why the solution for 30 years was to outsource, not to immigrate talent here to run factories. The US lacks many protections, but the bare minimum is paying federal minimum wage.
3. The thing about LCOL areas is that they lack the resources and funds to start such initiatives. What you're really asking for is for the government to invest 10's, 100's of billions of dollars into a project to create the factories, million more to bring in talent to run the factories in what are often less desirable areas, and then billions more to bring in talent in these still less desirable areas. Even with a supporting administration, this would be a difficult proposal.
Costs of Living to some extent are linked to how valuable that land is to begin with; hence, coastlines tend to have more value than arid midwestern desert or bumpy mountainous terrain.
This also means that until and unless we can squash this country's fascist tendencies with something approaching permanency, they're never going to trust that such things will be honored again.
As things stand, that effectively means that the Republican Party needs to go, and be replaced by something much more center-right. (Or, even better, overhaul our voting system so that a two-party system is no longer effectively mathematically guaranteed.)
We’re arguing over importing a massive underclass when 5 families control 50% of the wealth and 2 people have private space programs.
Let’s just tax the shit out of them, instead?
That’s explicitly not what the economic research shows.
I’ll also point out that DOGE has produced no prosecutions for “waste” - it turns out that Government work might be a net positive in efficiency, cost, and resultant economic activity. In fact I’d argue that Trump (et. al.)’s economic plans have been shown to be disastrous and misguided - watching the economy shrink in real time as Americans fought for arbitrary regressive taxes isn’t how I expected 2025 to go.
I’ll also point out you could fund tens of thousands of Government jobs a year for the low, low price of Trump’s corruption. One is economically useful, the other isn’t.
4. ...
5. Profit!
Interestingly, we favored China's manufacturing over Mexico's "maquilladoras," I think mostly over quality and cost issues due to corruption, lack of education and cartels.
30/hr for manufacturing is exactly why the US ceded its power to China over the decades. if we care about the economics, we're doomed as soon as China makes a move.
Manufacturing in the same city starts just below $20 and also gets scheduled raises for sticking around.
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XUZ3azgCNyawIQ5... [2] https://youtu.be/GDzBE6vz5r0 [3] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY
One example they gave, it used to be someone's job to load and unload the silicon wafers into the various etching phases. As time went on more and more of that manual work was replaced with automation. A floor with 50 workers became 25, then 10, then 1.
And, to be clear, this was absolutely a good thing for the product. So many yield issues were caused by manual processes.
The future of any manufacturing is that of high automation. That means low to no jobs. We aren't going back to an economy where a shoe factory employes 500 people.
What's particularly bleak, IMO, is society in the US revolves around work. Every job out there is being automated away. That's not a bad thing for quality, but what it means is there will be increasingly fewer jobs to go around.
A family friend was a chip designer for a large European company. Back in the 2000s he told me he saw the writing on the wall as they moved manufacturing to Asia.
He said he expected design to follow not long after, and sure enough some 5 or so years later he lost his job as they moved design department closer to the factories.
Perhaps it's different now, but as I recall he said there were advantages of chip designers being close to the chip manufacturing folks.
I also think there has been a bit of bias in trade schools towards learning manual processes because it is cheap. You can have a room full of students spend weeks learning to use a file to shape a small block of steel to precise dimensions. A $5 file and $10 of material is easier to supply than a $1XX,XXX computerize manufacturing machine that can process $XXX of material or more per day. But spending weeks to learn how to precision hand file is pretty well a waste of time for modern manufacturing.
I think that I have seen that this kind of "independence" has been a driving reason for China's strategies too. I don't think that it's necessarily a defence against a war, maybe more of an economic buffer, ensuring that China, and whomever follows the strategy is no longer dependent on any other entity for parts of their supply chain.
One of the things, too, that people seem to forget is that the West (in general) has neglected their manufacturing capability in favour of the "Asian Tigers" doing the work (Japan, Korea, Taiwan), China is just the current holder of the title (for how long is anyone's guess, Japan especially has endured a sustained stagnation of their economy over the last several decades).
Germany, for a while, was a strong manufacturer, and have (so far) been using the resulting economic position to their advantage inside the European Bloc. Perhaps that's the model that the USA (and others) should be looking toward?
That said, we can bring manufacturing back stateside which can be highly automated and have high value while employing workers at wages much better than their service-job counterparts.
In addition, we don't have the same population growth we had in the post-war years, so we don't need to produce millions upon millions of jobs. What we need to do is stem the job losses and increase output.
We can be a bigger version of Switzerland. Sure, things get more expensive, but by and large folks live better.
The problem is that these two concepts are treated as one.
And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots. This is alone worth the effort.
I think we're at the point where more automation means more loss of work, as opposed to people moving into the new jobs created, for an ever larger portion of the population.
Not with these constant layoffs and high turnover. We're not working like a country that wants to last long term.
E.g., in semiconductor fabrication - over the past decade, Intel’s chip production and process nodes have lagged 1–2 generations behind leading non-U.S. manufacturers.
The top 2 universities to study nuclear engineering are both in China.
Yay. Men get to spill their blood over a country that won't even give them enough pay to cover rent. The robots are cushy at home making weapons to kill more men with. Very good thing.
> If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory, but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.
Yup, just automate out the construction industry while we're at it.
Sorry for the cynicism, but but somehow I don't think even with more houses that we're going to have Gen Z and Gen Alpha survive the way The Boomers and early Gen X did.
You can mortgage to profit when the asset is scarce.
It might well be true that we're never going to see the kind of employment in manufacturing that we used to, but a blanket "the jobs are not coming back" attitude doesn't match the data either.
When I buy an iPhone, a vacuum (robotic or handheld), a drone, a camera, a KitchenAid kettle, a silicone brush, an electric fan, a battery-electric drill, just about anything really -- the expensive models might say "designed in USA" but they'll still say "made in China". The US used to be the go-to place to make all of these categories of products. So I don't believe the only thing that's happened is that American factories set up robots, laid off the workers, and got more productive than ever.
(Automobiles probably could be, except for their powerful labour unions; automobile production has been highly automated since the 30s.)
As some point folks will discover that dollars do not actually equal physical goods. Exporting 100 F35s at $100m/ea is not the same value to a country under duress as the capability to manufacture $10B of random consumer goods. Nevermind the supply chain of that F35 is not remotely contained to domestic manufacturing.
It's hand-wavy financialization of America speak.
If you're buying jet engines
Edit: I looked it up, it’s a lot of things. Airplanes, military aircraft, helicopters, satellites, rockets, construction/agriculture equipment (Caterpillar, John Deere), ICE and EV cars, chips, medical equipment (MRI, CT scanners), lots of defense stuff, drugs and pharmaceutical, processed agri goods etc.
Will we? It appears to me that modern war works substantially like modern factories - you don't actually want a large mass of semiskilled workers to pull the levers, each of which can substitute for a different one on about five minutes' notice. You want relatively few, highly-trained specialists to instruct the ~~robots~~ drones. It is perhaps less true in war than in manufacturing, quantity still has that quality all its own, but it seems very unclear that just raw numbers of soldiers will be an important bottleneck as between Great Powers.
1. During Covid, medical supplies were in short supply, to the point where the US government was flying in individual airplanes from China full of N95 masks and face shields. The guy making the video knew that Alabama (where he lives) wouldn't be on the priority list for where the masks and face shields would get distributed. His community's initial response was to 3D print face shields and donate them to healthcare facilities, but they knew that they had to step up to actual manufacturing to produce the face shields in necessary volumes. He was only able to find a single aging technician in Alabama capable of producing injection molding tooling, which he then was able to use to mass produce enough face shields to supply Alabama and neighboring states. If that one guy had chosen to retire before Covid, they would have not been able to make the injection mold locally. At a time where global supply chains were massively disrupted, they would have been screwed.
2. When an American company gets their products made overseas, the factory overseas that manufactures the product owns the tooling. This means that they're able to fill your order during the day, then at night make exact clones of your product with lower quality materials and undercut you, and you have no recourse. He brings up an example of a local small business that had this happen to them. Even though they had a design patent, they needed their lawyer to continually send letters to get Amazon to take down no-name clones of their product (and then the seller would just pick a new random set of 6 characters to sell it under). If US companies have no choice but to get their products made in countries that don't care about IP, then we're not just giving up on manufacturing, we're also giving up on designing products in the US.
When he was trying to get the injection mold for his grill scrubber made, lots of companies in the US were willing to do the actual plastic manufacturing in the US, but could only get the injection mold tooling done in China. He brought up that in the past, an American company would build a machine and then ship it away to the developing world to be operated there. We've now reversed this, so the high-skill portion of manufacturing is done overseas and the only Americans involved are just pushing the buttons to operate the machine.
The dip in number of manufacturing employees corresponds time-wise to China joining WTO, and the massive CEO hype of shutting down US factories and moving them to China, rather than super-duper automation hitting the scene and automating the factories in place.
I have a suspicion that the displayed manufacturing output chart is in dollars, not amount of stuff, and that is likely bumped up by highly automated IC/chip manufacturing that is high cost/value, but low tonnage work.
Try to have a device made without sourcing parts of China. Maybe an assembled PCB. Maybe it's a tool of some sort. You will find that this is impossible, or much more expensive/worse experience than sourcing from China.
Now, imagine a scenario where China collapses. (In the broadest sense). Whether it's a war as you say, or any other scenario. Imagine this happens in a few decades, after we (The world) has committed to this path. We will have lost so much of the tools we build our civilization on, and it will take generations to get this tacit knowledge back.
What's good: We (humanity) can build things cheaper, and higher quality than ever before, thanks to China's exquisite, vertically-integrated, and automated manufacturing capabilities.
What's bad: We are putting our eggs in one basket.
If you really had an automation boom, this will show up as an increase in output. If there is no increase in output and an increase in demand, the prices/margins improve which might explain why producers are happy but they won’t be able to export their products; which they might not want to do as China has killed any possible margins.
Machines don’t take breaks, don’t need holidays, don’t get injured, and when deployed are more consistent and efficient.
Having people work in factories, and get paid is great in a vacuum. However this is a competitive economy, your competition is doing lights out manufacturing, and is making more consistent goods, cheaper, and faster.
And we’re getting better at building robots. The American debate is about 20 years late.
It's interesting that you mention this because most of the small-time inventors I've seen online in the electronics space either build things in their garage by hand or have them fabricated in China (or occasionally another poor country like Vietnam). Custom PCB production and assembly at places like JLCPCB and PCBWay (both in China) appears to be highly automated. But getting the same thing made in the US in smaller quantity is going to cost not a little bit more, but often ten times as much. And it will require "relationship building" with a job shop, rather than just uploading something to a website and paying for airmail delivery. And will likely have a longer lead time. To say nothing of the fact that most of the components you're buying are made in China anyway.
So it may be fine to manufacture a large run finished consumer product in the US, but it's very capital intensive. For new products that aren't attached to an existing massive corporation with domestic production capability, you basically have to outsource to be price competitive and do any kind of volume beyond your own garage. I would be love to be proven wrong and learn about other options in the US but when I looked around I wasn't too impressed.
When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2].
The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here):
1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI.
2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.
If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.
Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die."
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP