You don’t have to choose one. With automation you can have a small, highly paid, highly skilled workforce do the work of a much larger, low skill, low paid workforce and actually produce higher quality products at a lower price.
So you’re picking low prices and an UNpaid workforce - cutting a workforce by 90% but doubling pay for the remaining 10% doesn’t improve a local or domestic economy.
Yes it does - those people can do something else productive, the US gets the tools it needs to build other things in their economy, and the US has resilience in case of future (extremely likely and possibly fundamental) supply chain disruptions.
It's more like the endgame. 1. Western companies moves production of components to China. 2. Chinese companies becomes good enough to produce their own products. 3. Western companies starts rebranding Chinese products. 4. Chinese companies buy western companies. 5. Chinese companies open factories in western countries. Manufacturing isn't industry in itself and the growth of industry is orders of magnitude more in Ch…
> Western countries don't really have the infrastructure, housing or education necessary Why do non-Western elites send their kids to Western countries for university educations? > increasingly not alternative ways of competing either like creativity, influence or equality. Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?
> Why do non-Western elites send their kids to Western countries for university educations?
So that they can plug themselves and their kids into massive, powerful, prosperous, global alumni networks.
Low prices or well paid workforce...Choose one! This is a result of decades of regulations and labour laws. Paying Americans 10x more to make similar quality tools is a terrible business decision. This cannot be fixed without government incentives/handouts (eg. Chips Act)
You don’t have to choose one. With automation you can have a small, highly paid, highly skilled workforce do the work of a much larger, low skill, low paid workforce and actually produce higher quality products at a lower price.
And what about the highly skilled lower paid workforce also using automation in China? And with fewer safety requirements the machines are cheaper too.
It's not that it's seen as merely shameful in other countries, it's that it's seen as fraudulent and illegal. Trying to play fraud off as a cultural difference and misunderstanding is frankly bullshit victim blaming.
'barely functional' isn't fraud. And in most cases the cheapest made in china product is barely functional. It's only deliberately selling nonfunctional products that would meet the definition of fraud.
Plus selling barely functional products under a DONGJOY etc brand isn’t fraud, only trying to sell a counterfeit Prada bag under the Prada brand is (and only in Western countries at that)
That manufacturing process is the result of bean counters determining it's a waste to ship boxed products that are 50% air overseas in a container. Ship the broken down components instead with denser packing and have a minimum wage worker bolt it together stateside. It isn't an enlightened return to domestic production.
American manufacturing looks like low-wage workers making $12 an hour (a few years ago) making windshields. A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products. Basically what the Chinese are continually getting better at. There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college…
I don't know if that's a fair assessment, really. While it's not economically viable to pay American wages to put drills together, we do make things like jet engines and CNC machines here. The complexity has to be high enough to justify the high cost of labor. If you can build something from raw materials in your garage over the weekend, then it's probably not worth paying someone's mortgage, health insurance, and 401(k) to get it done.
I don't think this will make much of a difference aside from the branding advantage. The quality of a mass-produced product like a consumer hand tool isn't a function of the country in which it is made but rather of its design. All the decisions made during that process and all the cost / performance considerations made are what determine the ultimate outcome. It's common to blame Chinese manufacturing for cheap tool…
There's a great YouTube channel, Project Farm ( https://www.youtube.com/c/ProjectFarm/videos ), that features a single guy testing, grading, and comparing all kinds of things you might find in your garage. He's not sponsored and tries to be objective throughout the process. It isn't perfect but he puts a ton of effort in and for backyard science it's pretty good. Anyway, he mentions country of origin for a lot of too…
For hand tools, the highest rated brands tend to be German or Japanese, with US made tools coming in second or third. Just my observation, anyway.
Agreed. It's not always straightforward but I also feel there is a disconnect when on the one hand people say the answer to worker's poor pay is "Unions!" and then on the other hand they want cheap things and also say that people have a right to cheaper things because that improves quality of life through increased purchasing power... Well, that's true if you have a professional white collared job. If you're in the l…
Unions aren't about more wages. Unions are about checking owner/capitalist/CEO power. Why does the CEO get paid 10-100x more than the lowest paid worker despite working the same number of hours a day? That's the question unions aim to solve. This puzzle revolves around power. Power is the ability to execute force or inflict pleasure or pain. A CEO is clearly capable of painful force against their unskilled labor. A C…
> Why does the CEO get paid 10-100x more than the lowest paid worker despite working the same number of hours a day?
Honestly I wouldn’t want to work at a company (of any size) where the CEO was only worth 10x what the lowest paid janitor makes.
It's not actually too hard to walk into a big box store like home depot or lowes and find US made hand tools. They tend to be higher priced but quality is pretty variable.
Almost all the power tools are made in china, though.
It's more like the endgame. 1. Western companies moves production of components to China. 2. Chinese companies becomes good enough to produce their own products. 3. Western companies starts rebranding Chinese products. 4. Chinese companies buy western companies. 5. Chinese companies open factories in western countries. Manufacturing isn't industry in itself and the growth of industry is orders of magnitude more in Ch…
> Western countries don't really have the infrastructure, housing or education necessary Why do non-Western elites send their kids to Western countries for university educations? > increasingly not alternative ways of competing either like creativity, influence or equality. Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?
> Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?
They aren't, that's the point. Countries like China, Japan and South Korea are very good at pulling everyone in the same direction by following rules, having hierarchies, exchanging favors, working long hours, handing out punishments and whatnot. Far better than any western country could because we aren't at that point in time (and maybe Japan isn't now either). What they end up lacking is things like creativity. The problem is that western countries are also increasingly lacking opportunities to exercise creativity. There is few ways these days to in good faith drop out of school and crash on someones couch to do something else you rather want. Which has to some extent been the foundation of new industries.
You don’t have to choose one. With automation you can have a small, highly paid, highly skilled workforce do the work of a much larger, low skill, low paid workforce and actually produce higher quality products at a lower price.
And what about the highly skilled lower paid workforce also using automation in China? And with fewer safety requirements the machines are cheaper too.
problem is in theory it's "the same quality" but with the amount of shitty chinesium i seen i'm not convinced they're capable of producing anything more than a disposable.