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The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

fortune.com

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Re: The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

#121

Post by mistermann »

pm90 wrote: post #88
paulyg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't help Joe Six-pack. And your questions make me think you did not read the article. The manufacturing output will increase due to automation & other improved techniques. My fave quote from the article: > So while it's understandable the state of manufacturing is of concern to presidential candidates, those who say they can bring back lost jobs in the sector either don't know what they are talking about, or are…

> So while it's understandable the state of manufacturing is of concern to presidential candidates, those who say they can bring back lost jobs in the sector either don't know what they are talking about, or are being disingenuous. Or both, in case of the current president-elect.

How can you be disingenuous if you don't know what you're talking about?

Re: The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

#122

Post by apathy »

empath75 wrote: post #82
throwaway2016a wrote: post #7

I haven't been myself but my wife is a process engineer and had to go to China to install and train people on a new machine so this is only second hand... But one of the reasons China is so good at manufacturing is because everything is in one place (or at least clusters)... need 10,000 of an Integrated Circuit? The company that makes it is literally down the street. Need some raw materials? That's down the other str…

Silicon Valley is called that because that's how it used to be. They actually made the chips there, and if you grew up there, you could get computer parts cheaply and easily. Jobs and Wozniak could build the Apple I in a garage only because of where they were.

shit, that was true as recently as 15 years ago, from personal experience. You can't just drive down 101 from SF and buy shit at Greybar anymore?

Re: The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

#123

Post by analog31 »

jaekwon wrote: post #55

We're not even using the right metric system, so our export abilities are crippled, right? I remember trying to find parts for my 3d printer in the US.

Try McMaster-Carr. Virtually everything is available in US and metric units. There is less variety of things like metric fasteners, because designs have improved to use fewer weird parts.

Since almost everything is designed in CAD and manufactured by CNC these days, the real distinction between US and metric units has practically vanished. A dimension is a floating point number.

Re: The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

#124

Post by mikeash »

amluto wrote: post #93
ddlatham wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do feel like shipping goods by container ship is bad for the environment and bad for consumers. How is it bad for consumers (beyond the environment)? Shipping goods does include an environmental cost which is not incorporated into the price of things - an unfortunate externality. We should have a carbon tax to properly reflect the true cost of items made and shipped so the market can choose between a locally made…

> We should have a carbon tax to properly reflect the true cost of items made and shipped so the market can choose between a locally made good and one made elsewhere. I agree, but the results may be a bit surprising. Shipping by container ship is extremely efficient [1]. On the West coast, for example, it might be cheaper (possibly far cheaper) to buy goods from Asia than from the Midwest. And wine drinkers in New Yo…

It's not so bad if your land transport uses the train. Although I'm really surprised at how unsafe trains are, according to that. Is that all from automobile/train collisions at level crossings?

Re: The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

#125

Post by adventured »

redler wrote: post #107
brightball wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the big perks to manufacturing is that it draws the entire supply chain around it naturally. Even if the manufacturing job itself isn't as abundant, the peripheral jobs that comes with it from shipping materials, producing materials, distribution, sales agreements, logistics, building construction and maintenance...they all provide benefits. With the manufacturing hub overseas all of that's overseas too, which…

Yes, but since China is the manufacturing hub for so much of the world, its local surrounding galaxy of expertise, supply chain, and related resources will exceed the size of such a galaxy built only in the US — especially if the US efforts are by dint of tariffs and related policies, and not economics.

The US was a larger manufacturing nation than China as recently as five years ago. Cutting the US corporate income tax rate nearly in half and lightening economic regulations, will do wonders for boosting US manufacturing.

Given China's $3.x trillion in manufacturing is heavily tilted toward low cost, low value manufacturing, it's not going to be surprising to see their global share of manufacturing shrink in the next decade as other low cost competitors continue to take share from them (whether in Vietnam or Mexico).

Re: The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

#126

Post by mikeash »

blakeyrat wrote: post #106
scottm84 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle is this way. Washington state has an airplane factory in the woods and a car fiber (BMW) plant out in the desert. In the city you can find businesses to build anything.

The big question is what happens when the Chinese government puts a high priority on getting into aerospace and tries to replicate their own 787s or A-350s. That said, Boeing's defense contracts might keep is secure regardless of what happens in civil aviation. United Airlines might buy a plane from China (in a decade), but the US Navy certainly wouldn't.

The "quick, cheap, disposable" stereotype of Chinese manufacturing (whether deserved or not) seems like it would be a major hurdle for breaking into the Western civil aviation market. I see a lot of people leery of Airbus due to their approach to computer control and fly-by-wire, and that's without any doubts about their manufacturing care or attention to quality control.

Re: The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

#127

Post by memracom »

Chathamization wrote: post #111
witty_username wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? After all the American people want cheaper things and that is done by moving factories to China.

For a lot of things, I'm not sure it saves people enough money to notice. Production isn't the entire price of a product - you also have things like transportation, retail markup, R&D, advertising, etc. Let's say that there's a $3.50 product that costs $1.50 to produce, and a company can save 10% of production costs by producing it in China (even with lower wages you don't tend to have huge savings when things like t…

A notable example of electronics that is not made in China is the Raspberry PI which is made in the UK, in Pencoed, Wales, formerly the heart of the coal mining industry.

http://www.sonypencoed.co.uk/news/2016/03/01/latest-raspberr...

They haven't always been able to make it in the UK, but as the computer became more popular, the economics have worked out. But the driver for this has been the fact that the organization behind Raspberry PI wants to develop hi-tech engineering education and manufacturing in the UK.

There is an embedded computer called PICaxe that was launched in the UK for similar reasons, boosting engineering education in the country. It roughly competes with Arduino as a platform.

Re: The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

#128

Post by mikeash »

rrggrr wrote: post #77
bbctol wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been finding this graph: https://tropicsofmeta.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/2007-real-... very helpful (y-axis is percentages of GDP and workforce.) Manufacturing never left the US, in terms of output, it's just that jobs did.

This chart is almost worthless as a measure of US Manufacturing capacity or production. Why? Because sizable orders to a handful of companies (eg. Boeing, GE, Lockheed, etc.) offsets and distorts the disappearance of thousands of medium and small manufacturers over the past two decades. Its tempting to attribute the associated job losses to automation, but one look at this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of…

How is it a distortion to count output from large companies? If a handful of giants make up a large portion of American manufacturing and have sustained total production, then American manufacturing production hasn't decreased.

Re: The U.S. Will Surpass China as the No. 1 Country for Manufacturing by 2020

#129

Post by adventured »

ThomPete wrote: post #72
bbctol wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been finding this graph: https://tropicsofmeta.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/2007-real-... very helpful (y-axis is percentages of GDP and workforce.) Manufacturing never left the US, in terms of output, it's just that jobs did.

Which is why salary as a percentage of GDP is at an all time low.

That's a dramatic exaggeration. It's at a low post 1960s (an era which produced a temporary fake high because the rest of the developed world had been blown up, so the US took over half of all global manufacturing, a boon for working-class wages).

Go take a look at what labor pulled in per hour in 1890.

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