Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

fivethirtyeight.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 48 posts

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#11

Post by nradov »

jerf wrote: post #4

Secondary conclusion: As long as manufacturing productivity continues to improve, increasing our manufacturing may lead to American prosperity, but it won't save the economy, in that it won't produce jobs. Long-term, I've actually not been concerned about American manufacturing for a while now. Why is overseas manufacturing cheap? Primarily, cheap labor. When does that cease to be an advantage? When labor is no longe…

Besides cheap labor, the secondary reason for overseas manufacturing is lack of (enforced) environmental laws. That advantage could last quite a while.

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#12

Post by teeja »

richcollins wrote: post #5

Secondly, there have been calls for a US industrial policy -- that is, for Washington to essentially "pick winners and losers" by promoting some industries that they feel have a high probability of success. Asian countries have been doing this for years with remarkable success and it is a policy which we clearly need to copy. The market is pretty good at picking winners. Washington likes to take money away from the w…

Winners like Goldman and Enron?

The government can help by protecting productive concerns from the thieves and pirates. Those "winners" can go to hell.

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#13

Post by go37pi »

jerf wrote: post #4

Secondary conclusion: As long as manufacturing productivity continues to improve, increasing our manufacturing may lead to American prosperity, but it won't save the economy, in that it won't produce jobs. Long-term, I've actually not been concerned about American manufacturing for a while now. Why is overseas manufacturing cheap? Primarily, cheap labor. When does that cease to be an advantage? When labor is no longe…

I echo that sentiment. To share another testimonial, I work in a vaccine manufacturing facility with control systems and robotics. The only reason biologics manufacturing facilities haven't been built overseas with the same zeal as other factories is the stringent requirements by the FDA, MHRA, etc. on manufacturing facilities that use live cultures. Many of the technician jobs are similarly dedicated to pushing carts and transferring components to the robots for processing. Because of the reduced efficiency of old drug discovery methods, many of these jobs are taken by college educated science majors who are finding that jobs in drug discovery research are quickly dwindling.

However, I disagree with the idea that robots are going to be able to take over in a five year timeframe.

I agree with you that the capabilities for robotics to do these tasks exist. "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed." I doubt however whether large manufacturing companies would be willing to shoulder the huge investments needed to develop robotics for these applications even in a healthy financial climate. Maybe this type of development could come from a company that proposes to do consulting work for manufacturing facilities, for example, Honeywell.

Additionally, I've seen that while companies see automation as an asset in pharmaceutical manufacturing, they also view it as a huge liability, as a single automation error can lead to enormous problems that take time to detect and can have huge costs, while human error generally leads to small mistakes that can be corrected and detected easily. Not sure how it is in other manufacturing subindustries.

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#14

Post by jerf »

go37pi wrote: post #13
jerf wrote: post #4

Secondary conclusion: As long as manufacturing productivity continues to improve, increasing our manufacturing may lead to American prosperity, but it won't save the economy, in that it won't produce jobs. Long-term, I've actually not been concerned about American manufacturing for a while now. Why is overseas manufacturing cheap? Primarily, cheap labor. When does that cease to be an advantage? When labor is no longe…

I echo that sentiment. To share another testimonial, I work in a vaccine manufacturing facility with control systems and robotics. The only reason biologics manufacturing facilities haven't been built overseas with the same zeal as other factories is the stringent requirements by the FDA, MHRA, etc. on manufacturing facilities that use live cultures. Many of the technician jobs are similarly dedicated to pushing cart…

"However, I disagree with the idea that robots are going to be able to take over in a five year timeframe."

That's not quite what I said. I specifically meant that robots will be able to take over the task of moving things around in the five-year timeframe. That is, the guys moving bins of things from here to there. We've already seen warehouses adopting this technology with a fairly high degree of sophistication today, so it's not really a far-out prediction. I'm not predicting that something that doesn't exist will be created, I'm predicting that something that does exist will be commercialized to the point it will become irresistible.

Remember, even if the robots are initially expensive, to replace an employee for a year opens up about $50,000 in capital to play with, assuming a low-paid employee + insurance (yours, not the employee's) + overhead, give or take $20,000. $50,000 is becoming a lot of robot.

Completely taking over in five years, no, definitely not. Certainly not in the facility I saw. But the long-term job trend will be clear in five years.

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#15

Post by ugh »

jerf wrote: post #4

Secondary conclusion: As long as manufacturing productivity continues to improve, increasing our manufacturing may lead to American prosperity, but it won't save the economy, in that it won't produce jobs. Long-term, I've actually not been concerned about American manufacturing for a while now. Why is overseas manufacturing cheap? Primarily, cheap labor. When does that cease to be an advantage? When labor is no longe…

We get richer as labour gets more automated and cheaper. So it’s not a bad thing. It shouldn’t be.

The big problem is that we don’t have work for bigger and bigger parts of the population. They are poor not because society as a whole got poorer, they are poor because they don’t have anything the labour market wants because it can be had cheaper now.

I think it’s about time we recognize that. We have to make it possible for everyone to live ok lives, even without having a job. We are rich enough. We didn’t get any poorer as a whole. We should be able to afford that.

How to do that is anyone’s guess (I’m betting on some sort of ‘basic income’), but it’s about time to start. We can’t think about work and earning money with our 19th and 20th century goggles on.

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#16

Post by rms »

richcollins wrote: post #5

Secondly, there have been calls for a US industrial policy -- that is, for Washington to essentially "pick winners and losers" by promoting some industries that they feel have a high probability of success. Asian countries have been doing this for years with remarkable success and it is a policy which we clearly need to copy. The market is pretty good at picking winners. Washington likes to take money away from the w…

What you say is true, but reality has also become more complicated than free market good, socialism bad.

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#17

Post by go37pi »

jerf wrote: post #14
go37pi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I echo that sentiment. To share another testimonial, I work in a vaccine manufacturing facility with control systems and robotics. The only reason biologics manufacturing facilities haven't been built overseas with the same zeal as other factories is the stringent requirements by the FDA, MHRA, etc. on manufacturing facilities that use live cultures. Many of the technician jobs are similarly dedicated to pushing cart…

"However, I disagree with the idea that robots are going to be able to take over in a five year timeframe." That's not quite what I said. I specifically meant that robots will be able to take over the task of moving things around in the five-year timeframe. That is, the guys moving bins of things from here to there. We've already seen warehouses adopting this technology with a fairly high degree of sophistication tod…

I guess we both agree on the long term trend and at this point, that's all that really matters.

But the task of creating highly reliable industrial robots is really quite difficult and quite a bit more expensive than $50,000. We have 12 robots in our facility and the field testing and applications testing process for a similar facility elsewhere is taking approximately 2 years and counting. This doesn't include the entire development and specification process of developing the robots as well as the control systems. Each robotic system is upwards of $5,000,000.

A lot of this cost comes from the additional points of failure. Large systems are prone to failures due to small, cascading errors. This necessitates a larger testing and development period.

This is different I'm sure for other industries however. The cost of a failure is exponentially greater in pharmaceutical manufacturing as compared to other forms of manufacturing. Its possible that costs could be much lower in other industries where the cost of a failure is reduced.

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#18

Post by jdminhbg »

teeja wrote: post #12
richcollins wrote: post #5

Secondly, there have been calls for a US industrial policy -- that is, for Washington to essentially "pick winners and losers" by promoting some industries that they feel have a high probability of success. Asian countries have been doing this for years with remarkable success and it is a policy which we clearly need to copy. The market is pretty good at picking winners. Washington likes to take money away from the w…

Winners like Goldman and Enron? The government can help by protecting productive concerns from the thieves and pirates. Those "winners" can go to hell.

I'm not sure how you saw this sentence: "Washington likes to take money away from the winners and give it to the incumbent losers that bribe lawmakers." and thought that Goldman was an example of the former rather than the latter.

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#19

Post by rw »

Where are the corrections for population growth? I think the OP's claim might be true, but their case is not watertight.

A quote: "The real issue is manufacturing employment, which is dropping like a stone. And the reason for the drop is an increase in productivity." ...Really? Maybe it's only part of the reason? Macroeconomic phenomena are complex. 538 should be better than this! Give me nuanced analysis, with intellectually-honest qualifiers.

Re: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead

#20

Post by Kadin »

richcollins wrote: post #5

Secondly, there have been calls for a US industrial policy -- that is, for Washington to essentially "pick winners and losers" by promoting some industries that they feel have a high probability of success. Asian countries have been doing this for years with remarkable success and it is a policy which we clearly need to copy. The market is pretty good at picking winners. Washington likes to take money away from the w…

Amen.

Also, although some of the quasi-planned economies (where "winners" were picked and subsidized) in Asia have been remarkably successful, it doesn't necessarily follow that the relationship is causative, or that they wouldn't have been successful anyway, had that selection process not happened.

A lot happened in the 20th century in Asia that keeps it from being a repeatable experiment, much less a model that can be followed elsewhere. The effects of WWII and the consequent rebuilding on Japan, and urbanization and the so-called "demographic dividend" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend) on many other countries in the area, shouldn't be underestimated.

Post reply on HN