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Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

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Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#81

Post by rbranson »

aero142 wrote: post #75
rbranson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He agrees with you. You both come to the same conclusion. What you fail to realize is that we've essentially paid the capital to educate people and build infrastructure in another country. Once their wages rise and our massive capital investments no longer make economic sense, they've gained these, and we are stuck without domestic manufacturing capacity. Essentially, we are mortgaging our future.

I don't think that we do. My post was largely spent explaining why jobs move overseas, which is not the same as agreeing on what to do about it. He concludes that protectionist policies will result in manufacturing jobs staying in the US, but doesn't look past that to see that those policies will not create value and will just redistribute it around by moving the wage decreases to tariff increases. Wealth comes from…

They will only be setup to be more efficient because of our capital investment though. We have lost these assets because their only justification was based on the predicate of suppressed wages, which are temporary. This is a fools game.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#82

Post by 3d3mon »

CamperBob wrote: post #35

The real elephant in the room, which Grove and practically everybody else knows very well but refuses to talk about, is that nobody starts a company to employ people. People start a company to make stuff . To the extent this can be done with fewer people, this is always a good thing from that company's perspective, with no exceptions I can think of offhand. People suck, and you don't want to deal with them if you can…

> Grove is basically saying we need to start more companies that "scale up" to require factories where people sit doing stuff like what's seen in that video. He's wrong.

You have to give Grove more credit than that. Obviously, he does not want to create clock-punching jobs just for the sake of having clock-punching jobs. Grove is known to run a tight ship. His example of the alternative energy space is a perfect one demonstrating the inability of even new industries invented in the US to remain here. All the "scaling" happens in China, leaving little secondary benefits to the innovating nation. Why can't your oscilloscope be made here? Sure, they have the know-how, but so do we. They have assembly lines, so can we. In theory there shouldn't be a problem. But in the real world, we know the playing field isn't level. Like how China allows externalities to develop by quashing labor/worker conditions and the environment to create the perfect arbitrage situation for offshoring US entrepreneurs. Can't forget their dollar/yuan "managed" exchange rate. Again, they are subsidizing the offshoring startup. China has clearly stacked the deck hence the inevitability of your oscilloscope being made overseas. This is by design and its all policy-driven. Should the US sit idly by as a de facto trade war is staring at them in the face? Or should they follow through with the offshore tariff that Andy suggested? Controversial, no doubt, but one must do whatever it takes to win a war.

CB, you make good business argument for the current microeconomic behavior of firms but you must put on a political-economic hat and think decades down the road to really get at his thinking (and he's as sharp as they come). I believe Andy is being long term greedy. He's fighting the next war.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#83

Post by ericd »

lokiujhytyu wrote: post #79
CamperBob wrote: post #35

The real elephant in the room, which Grove and practically everybody else knows very well but refuses to talk about, is that nobody starts a company to employ people. People start a company to make stuff . To the extent this can be done with fewer people, this is always a good thing from that company's perspective, with no exceptions I can think of offhand. People suck, and you don't want to deal with them if you can…

The only purpose of a public company is to make money for shareholders. Not make stuff, not employ people, not even turn a profit - just increase the share price / pay dividends

This is an extremist point of view. Realistically they have a lot of purposes that should be kept in mind.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#84

Post by sitmaster »

Hubbert wrote: post #25
sitmaster wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is silly. No one is forced to work at an unsafe job for any given wage. The job of the government should not be to say "you can only work for this long, for this wage, under these conditions." Shouldn't that question be up to the would-be employee? And you're not as clever as you think bringing up asbestos. You're far more likely to die in a fire because your building had its asbestos replaced with shitty f…

We all need income to SURVIVE, and indeed FORCED to take the market wage for our labor. The question is whether the market wage will tend toward "Modern Western Wage" or "Communist Slave Wage." Current trade and industrial policies favor the latter.

But the government cannot, by fiat, deem that people should make "Modern Western Wage" because some people's work is not worth that much. Forcing wages to be at that level causes more problems than it solves (i.e. massive offshoring). Minimum wage laws, workplace safety laws, environmental standards, etc, all raise the cost of doing business and make it so only people whose work is worth "Modern Western Wage" can be employed.

The whole point is that "Current trade and industrial policies" favor the former ("Modern Western Wage"), not the latter, which is what is causing the problems in the US. Did you read the article?

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#85

Post by codexon »

CamperBob wrote: post #35

The real elephant in the room, which Grove and practically everybody else knows very well but refuses to talk about, is that nobody starts a company to employ people. People start a company to make stuff . To the extent this can be done with fewer people, this is always a good thing from that company's perspective, with no exceptions I can think of offhand. People suck, and you don't want to deal with them if you can…

To me, it's obvious what the future of mass production will look like, but it's not at all clear how to stave off a future where 10% of us are shouldering the entire productivity burden for the rest of the country.

Extrapolating your logic, that 10% will probably shrink to 1%.

And chances are, you or your descendants probably won't be part of that 1%.

Grove isn't saying that we should have more mundane manufacturing jobs. He is saying there is a problem with stratification when 1% of people make all the money while the other 99% are left unemployed because they couldn't patent X technology 1 day faster, or didn't beat the other 99% of applicants for the rare number of jobs left.

Whether or not the only solution to this is to artificially preserve mundane manufacturing jobs is another matter.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#86

Post by codexon »

aero142 wrote: post #75
rbranson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He agrees with you. You both come to the same conclusion. What you fail to realize is that we've essentially paid the capital to educate people and build infrastructure in another country. Once their wages rise and our massive capital investments no longer make economic sense, they've gained these, and we are stuck without domestic manufacturing capacity. Essentially, we are mortgaging our future.

I don't think that we do. My post was largely spent explaining why jobs move overseas, which is not the same as agreeing on what to do about it. He concludes that protectionist policies will result in manufacturing jobs staying in the US, but doesn't look past that to see that those policies will not create value and will just redistribute it around by moving the wage decreases to tariff increases. Wealth comes from…

You cannot "create jobs" by instituting tariffs.

You can't create jobs through tariffs, but you can shift the balance towards the US.

China keeps artificially inflating their currency when it would've naturally increased by now; maybe to the point of being economically infeasible for some companies. Don't forget that there is a huge overhead in shipping products across the Pacific Ocean.

And to fight this economic manipulation, tariffs are needed.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#87

Post by philwelch »

cageface wrote: post #51
rbranson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this true? 100 years ago there was virtually nobody employed doing purely intellectual work, yet this has grown to be a huge labor market. Your ideas here kind of trail off to be "The Bell Curve"-ish. Many of these "unskilled laborers" will instead find work in service industries and the arts. For an HN-geared example: look at what Ruby on Rails, Django, etc has done for web development. It allows web develope…

There may be a net gain of IP jobs in the future but are we going to find anywhere close to 5 billion of them? Service jobs will decline over time too as more and more of them are automated out of existence. When was the last time you actually went into a bank? The number of people making a real living in the arts will remain very small. The optimistic scenario is that world population self-regulates down over time a…

"The number of people making a real living in the arts will remain very small."

This sounds a lot like an agricultural-age person saying "the number of people making a real living in manufacturing will remain very small". If all physical goods are really cheap enough, you don't need to earn that much as an artist to afford them.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#88

Post by philwelch »

Hubbert wrote: post #13
ja30278 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoy _your_ third world economy, free from pesky pollutant-causing industry and manufacturing. The poster has correctly identified the value proposition that causes companies to locate their manufacturing facilities elsewhere, and points out (also correctly) that making our tax codes as unfriendly to business as our labor laws will only encourage _those_ bits of the business to relocate as well. You cannot have all…

* cheap products for consumers = higher standard of living. IIRC, consumer products are about 18% of a typical household budget. Housing, healthcare, and education are the majority. For the millions now with ZERO income, even Chinese-made Wal*Mart crap is unaffordable. Yet the unionized workers of the 1950s - 1970's somehow purchased cars, household products, and clothing like domestically-made Levis blue jeans WITHO…

Please don't SHOUT so much.

Re: Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late

#90

Post by nl »

aero142 wrote: post #59

I find this line of thinking very disturbing. Mr. Grove follows others in believing a common fallacy, by ignoring secondary effects, and fails to see how issues in macroeconomics affect each other. Where to start... The American standard of living is higher than China. In order for a worker in the US to continue to enjoy his standard of living and salary, she must contribute to creating something of value equal to wh…

In other words, as wages drop, the unemployment rate will go down, and less will be outsourced. This is just the tradeoff.

You make that sound so simple.

You left out the bit about that meaning falling standards of living, and the social dislocation that causes.

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