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US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

boston.com

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Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#61

Post by gscott »

uytrhyujkujhy wrote: post #59
gscott wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is part of my point, for that $1000 in value sometimes our only task is putting the pieces together. It can't last, China wants to do that too.

That was sort of my original point, much of the US high value engineering (defense/transport/infrastructure) is for the US government. Which means that the more the taxpayer spends on overpriced defense contracts and cost overruns the better US industrial output looks

I agree, paid for by the Fed buying U.S. Treasuries or by banks buying U.S. Treasuries. It is bound to fail sometime. What could save us is China failing first, property bubble, major projects, the 24/7 work, bad loans, floated by the Chinese as well but is backed by their Treasury bond holdings and the fact that no one knows how much money they print.

Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#62

Post by D_Alex »

ars wrote: post #33
D_Alex wrote: post #16

Measuring manufacturing in $$$ might be a bit misleading. If China makes 4 $10 business shirts for every one $50 business shirt the US makes ... ?

How else could you possibly compare them?

You could compare them in many ways, and $$$ is possibly the best single measure. But the OP article is uncritically self-congratulatory, which is not altogether appropriate given that same products of equal quality do cost a lot less if made in China.

Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#63

Post by tomjen3 »

Charuru wrote: post #37
3pt14159 wrote: post #6

While it is true that North America still manufactures great quantities of luxury and high tech stuff, that isn't what is pissing off the populists. They couldn't care less if our manufacturing doubled in terms of dollars of output. What they really want is a return to the highly paid, unionized, tradesperson. To them robots making Chevy trucks matters just as much to their lives as nerds writing software. As product…

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 ever…

Look, I admire your optimism but General AI has been a pipedream for almost 60 years now and though we build at an insane rate, the singularity is so far away that it doesn't matter.

Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#64

Post by tomjen3 »

nostrademons wrote: post #25
rdouble wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tradespeople do fine in areas where the economy is good. They are still highly paid and unionized. My friend welds staircases in the Bay Area and gets paid more than most programmers. Is there really a case where an electrician or pipe fitter today makes a lower wage than they did in 1970? If anyone's salaries in the USA have remained stagnant or dropped, it's the average engineer.

Engineers do fine. It's the line workers in factories and people in service jobs that have gotten screwed. It used to be that you could make a steady middle-class income as a factory worker, airline stewardess, or retail clerk. Not so much now. Tradespeople and professionals have done okay because they have marketable skills that accrue to their person, but people whose only assets are owned by their employers haven'…

Actually that was only true in a very short span of time in the fifties and sixties because there was a bubble in manufacturing since Europe and Japan needed to be rebuild, in some cases almost from scratch.

Compare today with a hundred years ago, and those people had it far worse.

Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#65

Post by anamax »

jseliger wrote: post #5

A lot of people don't understand this. I'm an English grad student, and one of my more, uh, politically-minded professors said in a seminar that the U.S. doesn't manufacture anything anymore. I sent him this e-mail: When I mentioned the bit about the U.S. continuing to manufacture a lot of stuff, I wasn't just trying to be a pain, as it's actually true; see Dept. of Labor Data on the subject here: http://research.stl…

> When you stop believing in polemics and conventional wisdom and start trying to look at what really is, you'll find a lot of unusual stuff.

That's good advice regardless of the subject.

Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#66

Post by tomjen3 »

nostrademons wrote: post #47
rdouble wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I buy that. Is there data that shows retail clerk wages declining over time? I happen to have a factory worker, airline stewardess, and retail clerk in my extended family and their wages have all increased over the past 20 years. I mean, not by amazing amounts, but definitely I wouldn't say they are doing worse than they were before.

Wages by industry: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb2.txt Historical CPI: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt From 1964-2010, weekly manufacturing wages rose from $102.59 to $765.08/week. "Private service-providing" jobs (which includes retail) went from $98.10 to $606.14. Over that same time period, the CPI rose from an index of 30.9 to to 216.687, an increase of 7x. In real terms, retail wa…

Does the CPI take into account that cars have improved in fuel economy, that TVS are now in color and with a remote control, not to mention a lot bigger?

Does the CPI take into account that a wristwatch today has more power than all IBMs computers in the mid sixties?

Does the CPI take into account that $X that either didn't exist then, or has been so improved that it wouldn't be recognized?

Try to compare it with the M3 money supply, shifted about 18 months ahead and that should give a much better idea of the real means of inflation.

Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#67

Post by wisty »

brc wrote: post #30
hartror wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the economy, Australian tradespeople make the same if not more than good coders right now. We're growing so fast the demand for those skills is high and shows no signs of dropping off.

Depends on the trade, of course. But tradesmen work on different projects, travel to different areas, work with a range of skills. I guess what I'm trying to say is that tradesmen != manufacturing plant worker. I have a relative with a manufacturing plant. Their strategy is to try and out-niche the chinese. Their chinese competitors can dump finishing product onto the market cheaper than they can buy the raw material…

It's not just about low-cost foreign labor. Chinese staionary energy is dirt cheap (burning dirty subsidized coal doesn't cost a lot) which might be 20% of the cost. And the land might have been free, if the investor had good connections. Oh, and they might have cheap loans. The costs are raw materials, energy, capital, and labor. Labor isn't the only factor. But people accept the $1/hour = 20X cheaper myth, and buy stuff that's 1/10th the quality.

Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#68

Post by wisty »

rdouble wrote: post #39
grav1tas wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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 th…

Australia owes way more money than the USA, per capita. That's where the money is coming from. It's just that our government didn't owe a lot at the start of the GFC, and they were able to keep the private sector afloat for a while.

Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#69

Post by jff »

tomjen3 wrote: post #66
nostrademons wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages by industry: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb2.txt Historical CPI: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt From 1964-2010, weekly manufacturing wages rose from $102.59 to $765.08/week. "Private service-providing" jobs (which includes retail) went from $98.10 to $606.14. Over that same time period, the CPI rose from an index of 30.9 to to 216.687, an increase of 7x. In real terms, retail wa…

Does the CPI take into account that cars have improved in fuel economy, that TVS are now in color and with a remote control, not to mention a lot bigger? Does the CPI take into account that a wristwatch today has more power than all IBMs computers in the mid sixties? Does the CPI take into account that $X that either didn't exist then, or has been so improved that it wouldn't be recognized? Try to compare it with the…

Not to derail, but the thing about wristwatches/pocket calculators being more powerful than the best sixties computer is a frequently-quoted and entirely wrong bit of BS. That is all.

Re: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent

#70

Post by enjo »

uytrhyujkujhy wrote: post #59
gscott wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is part of my point, for that $1000 in value sometimes our only task is putting the pieces together. It can't last, China wants to do that too.

That was sort of my original point, much of the US high value engineering (defense/transport/infrastructure) is for the US government. Which means that the more the taxpayer spends on overpriced defense contracts and cost overruns the better US industrial output looks

I keep seeing this, but never a citation. Looking at the best data I could find:

http://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/prel/pdf/table1p.pdf

Total output: 436,031 Excluding defense: 424,680

Making defense, at least how it's defined in this report, merely 2% of the total output. I'm not sure how much of that 2% is going to the U.S. government as these defense contractors also produce quite a bit for other countries.

That probably doesn't cover the total of it, but I just can't find any substantiation that the government is buying up a significant amount of the manufacturing output. Does someone have a source to help me better understand this?

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