US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

Is it really the case that the demand is so high or that supply is kept artificially low by tradesmen apprenticeship programs? I thought that was the point of the trades...to reduce competition by decreasing the number of competitors. Though this might be a misconception entirely...

How else could you possibly compare them?

Interesting enough - but what's the trend? Is growth in US manufacturing growing at the same pace as China? Or is it continuing to decline, and will cross at some point.

Maybe this sounds slightly kooky, but...

I believe there is no 'solution' to their plight. The timeline until singularity is too short for a complete retooling of the economy. However the pace of development at the higher end is fast enough and explosive enough that we can afford to keep on subsidizing the lower classes with bread and circuses until we reach sentient AI, at which point we will be able to provide everyone with robot servants and who knows what else.

Just think about the current web 2.0 economy. If a nineteen year old is able to write a piece of software and execute on a plan that makes him a billionaire in a few years, that's... really quite amazing. Yes yes I know, some people are going to call bubble. Whether or not it's true, I think it's evident that the pace of innovation has sped up more than most people realize. Things like this will continue happening and happen quickly. We're at the beginning of a fantastic time when the pace of wealth creation will increase exponentially, with the internet as the great enabler.

From my vantage point it looks like the demand is high. There is a mining boom, there have been serious disasters the past 2 years (bushfires, floods), and for some reason new residences are still being built at a fast clip.

I'm sitting here in Austraia, trying to summon up the will to fire up XCode and instead being dragged away to surf trips with my brother-in-law and all his tradie friends. They all have houses that I once dreamed about owning after I sold my startup to Google. That never happened, so I spent some time researching the trades here.

Many of the trades have apprenticeship programs but are essentially unlicensed. For instance, for some reason you can make loads of money laying tile at the moment. There might be "tiling apprenticeships" but for the most part you can just show up and make $20/hr lifting boxes and cleaning up, and $50/hr putting the tiles down.

Plumbers and electricians are in high demand, especially in the mines. In addition to demand, they have to be licensed, and thus they make more money. There is an apprenticeship period, various certs for residential, commercial, data, hospital, high-energy, marine, etc.

The apprenticeship period may be pushing up the wages of sparkies a bit but there does seem to be a lot of work. I don't think these apprenticeships are artificially limited like the way med school seats in the USA are limited. Plus, you get paid $19-$20/hr as an electrical apprentice, which is $40K a year.

One interesting thing I learned is that sparkies and plumbers can sign up for on-call insurance jobs and charge even more money. During this weekend's floods in Geelong my electrician friend's phone was constantly ringing. I think he got about 8 jobs that he passed over to his partner.

All that said, I get a bit of a bubble feeling over here. Especially for residential building. Who are all these new subdivision houses supposed to be for? The tradesmen building them? I can't imagine a lot of office drones communting from the Bellarine Peninsula to Melbourne. Or even being able to afford the homes in the first place. In other parts of the country, once the mines are all tapped I wonder where the money is going to come from.