Because the numbers show that every dollar of manufacturing investment in an area produces $7.
Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
41–50 of 265 posts
Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
#42Manufacturing has a history of high growth and employment. Services do not. Economically, service domination means an overall slow-growth economy. Even highly intellectual services do not come close to the historic growth / employment curve the nation enjoyed when it was dominated by manufacturing. Wealth distribution is also heavily-weighted toward to the top with services. Generally democracies fare better when wea…
Not sure why this is being down-voted: it's pretty well established that service economies have limited potential to export or achieve economies of scale, and thus unable to benefit from expanding global trade.
The plus side of service economies is that they're a lot harder to outsource - you can't open a Manilla call-center to handle a nursing home.
Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
#43The memory is that these old factory/manufacturing jobs were high paying (middle class), secure, and accessible to people of low intellect, minimal education, and limited social grace. The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians…
>Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow.
I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get. If you really want to Make America Great Again, you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more. Easier said than done of course.
Within software, Haskell is the wrong direction. I haven't used it, but it seems like Go aims to make coding simpler. But it's not just programming languages; it includes large scale system design, which currently needs to be reinvented with intense effort at every firm, even repeatedly within the same firm, even within the same product.
Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
#44The memory is that these old factory/manufacturing jobs were high paying (middle class), secure, and accessible to people of low intellect, minimal education, and limited social grace. The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians…
> actively resisted it Honest question. Is this a reality or a degrading stereotype?
Definitely a stereotype.
Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
#45There is a lot more dignity of work in manufacturing. You're not servicing some old person who can afford to have a home health aid--you're making a product for people to buy (including other people like you).
[deleted]
Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
#46The memory is that these old factory/manufacturing jobs were high paying (middle class), secure, and accessible to people of low intellect, minimal education, and limited social grace. The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians…
> actively resisted it Honest question. Is this a reality or a degrading stereotype?
According to this poll [1], only 6% of Americans see college education as "not too important", and the rest see it as at least "fairly important". If there are people actively resisting education, they are a rather tiny minority.
1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/166490/americans-college-educatio...
Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
#47Automation? Oh is that how you see Foxconn employees? That would explain quite a bit... Most of light and heavy manufacturing is done somewhere else. Electronics. Housewares. Clothing. Tools. Equipment. Cars. Materials, both raw and those undergoing technological processing. High tech. A service economy? That's nice - but there are only so many prostitutes, bank clerks and Mickey D employees required, so what is ever…
> Automation? Oh is that how you see Foxconn employees? That would explain quite a bit...
Even if you "resurrect" manufacturing, automation means less people.
Quoting: http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/blog/innovation/2015/0...
"Perhaps most surprising about the HRPF was the relative lack of employees on the floor of the massive facility. While ATI employs about 2,500 throughout western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the technology and automation of the HRPF only requires seven operators and nine maintenance employees per shift, making the operation safer and more efficient, according to Deluca."
That's not a recipe for a manufacturing job resurgence independently of whether you think that is good or bad.
Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
#48The memory is that these old factory/manufacturing jobs were high paying (middle class), secure, and accessible to people of low intellect, minimal education, and limited social grace. The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians…
> Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow. I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get. I…
TIL that the React ecosystem is a conspiracy against the poor.
Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
#49The memory is that these old factory/manufacturing jobs were high paying (middle class), secure, and accessible to people of low intellect, minimal education, and limited social grace. The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians…
> actively resisted it Honest question. Is this a reality or a degrading stereotype?
The entire comment is an absurd stereotype, and about what you'd expect to find in this forum. Manufacturing jobs weren't (and aren't) filled with a bunch of meatheads coloring by numbers any more than are construction jobs.
Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
#50Politicians are amateurs. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. Politicians are experts at politics, they can achieve consensus in seemingly impossible circumstances. If you pick a random politician, and ask them to design a transmission, or perform open heart surgery, they'd do as poorly as you or me. Yes, there are politicians from all walks of life, and you can probably find a surgeon politician. In general, the…
Contrast a politician with a juror. There's no real reason for a juror to focus on anything but the case at hand. They don't have a career as a juror to pursue, yet they're expected to learn about things relevant to the case. There's almost no personal incentives involved (which also happens to be heavily policed) besides scheduling.
Now, a politician generally does things to further their political career. They don't research solutions, they're lobbied for them. They do research what they can say to get themselves [re-]elected. They make deals based on their their status and trajectory within their political party, maybe tempered by "the right thing" depending on how much they hold the concept of a public servant. Sure, there's some out there with passion for a particular problem, but that's not the common case behavior.
I say term limits on everything. Eliminate career politicians.
Huge bills are currently put together without one hand knowing what the other is doing, and in practice things like budget are fudged anyway to keep the machine mostly moving.
If career politicians with no real-world knowledge of the represented issues can do this stuff, then a random scattering of people with greater expected slices of real-world experience and fewer expected strings attached can do the same.