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The US is building factories at a fast rate

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Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#121

Post by lotsofpulp »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #92
marianatom wrote: post #11

Meanwhile in China: - exports plunge by 7.5% in May, far more than expected https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/07/chinas-exports-plunge-by-7po... - profit tumbles 18% in April https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-industrial-profits... - chip progress stagnating. Oppo chip design unit completely shut down https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/12/oppo-chip-disbands-phone-c... . Japan stops shipping semiconductor equipments to…

8 million babies for a population of 1.2 billion? Woah. Back of the envelope, that's something like half replacement rate.

I cannot find a source for 8M babies. I see 9.56M births in 2022 for China:

https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/320...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/250650/number-of-births-...

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#122

Post by jl6 »

bsder wrote: post #85
FpUser wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I also want to make sure that the USA does brain drain the rest of the world so that there is absolutely no way to compete with us." "The rest of the world" might have a little problem with that.

> "The rest of the world" might have a little problem with that. Good. Smart people having more leverage will topple places with shitty governments faster or consign those countries to the dustbin.

If all the smart people leave, are the remainder really going to be more effective at toppling shitty governments?

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#123

Post by nojvek »

no_wizard wrote: post #116
obblekk wrote: post #2

> The US has added around 800,000 jobs in manufacturing employment over the last two years, employing around 13 million workers It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was 1. 50% tariffs on China, and 2. $100B of subsidies to chip makers and green tech... The reversal of Reaganomics we're living through will become permanent for at le…

I had a professor remark once (this is circa 2009) that we should all learn a highly skilled trade around advanced manufacturing because eventually offshoring will reverse itself and by your early 30s you'll be in a prime position to profit immensely off the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing equipment and processes Maybe he was right. I'm in my early 30s now, and I don't regret becoming a software engineer, but al…

I really envy anyone working in Industrial Robotics. It's such a fascinating field. Automating physical things is so much more rewarding than automating digital things.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#124

Post by tshaddox »

kneebonian wrote: post #89
wizofaus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely though there's still plenty of places in the world that, on the basis of labour costs, it would be vastly cheaper to operate than in the US. On that basis I'm not convinced wage growth in SE Asia is the primary reason the US manufacturing industry is deciding to reshore. Is the same phenomenon occurring in other wealthy countries that haven't put in place taxpayer funded incentives to do so?

> there's still plenty of places in the world that, on the basis of labour costs, it would be vastly cheaper to operate than in the US. Keep in mind costs aren't just what you have to pay people but also things like regional security, the risk of the government nationalizing your company and assets, ability to get skilled/capable/honest people. Basically there has to be a degree of stability, including a centralized…

> Keep in mind costs aren't just what you have to pay people but also things like regional security, the risk of the government nationalizing your company and assets, ability to get skilled/capable/honest people.

Also a lot of those same stability/security concerns, but applied to the trip from here to there, likely across the ocean, which is something that people have largely taken for granted for years now other than some stories of Somalian pirates.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#125

Post by oilchange »

nimish wrote: post #5
obblekk wrote: post #2

> The US has added around 800,000 jobs in manufacturing employment over the last two years, employing around 13 million workers It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was 1. 50% tariffs on China, and 2. $100B of subsidies to chip makers and green tech... The reversal of Reaganomics we're living through will become permanent for at le…

Bad free trade deals likely did more than Reaganomics here. NAFTA + China-WTO accession really did not help American manufacturing.

> NAFTA + China-WTO accession really did not help American manufacturing.

American manufacturing was declining way before NAFTA or China. The anti-japanese/asian period of 70s and 80s existed for a reason. The way we are attacking china today is how we attacked japan in the 80s. The only difference is that china isn't going to back down like japan did. Far easier to bully a nation that you militarily occupy.

The trend isn't going to change. Manufacturing will go to ASEAN and India next. All the propaganda about "factories in the US" exist to distract from that reality.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#126

Post by marianatom »

mhuffman wrote: post #99
marianatom wrote: post #11

Meanwhile in China: - exports plunge by 7.5% in May, far more than expected https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/07/chinas-exports-plunge-by-7po... - profit tumbles 18% in April https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-industrial-profits... - chip progress stagnating. Oppo chip design unit completely shut down https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/12/oppo-chip-disbands-phone-c... . Japan stops shipping semiconductor equipments to…

> China is no longer the "world's factory". It will stagnate for 10+ years, similar to Japan's lost decades, but with worser birth rate than Japan today. idk, Japan seems like it thought the party would go on forever, whereas China does seem to have clear eyes with it comes to world politics (eg. long-term investment in the rest of Asia and Africa). > We've never seen a large portion (25%+) of a large modern economy…

> China does seem to have clear eyes with it comes to world politics

You're hyping up Xi Jing Ping, who is considered an idiot in most elite circles including Putin, too much. One belt and one road is now considered a failure with Italy, the most prominent member, dropping out of it this year. Most of the countries that took on the debt are unable to pay it back, and China has had to forgive a lot of the loans recently. And no one has aligned US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, India, Australia, Nato quite like China in recent years. The most recent focus in G7 was squarely on China.

> NAFTA

with respect to NAFTA, US manufacturing only consisted of 15% US economy in 1994 https://www.stlouisfed.org/en/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-m..., whereas Chinese manufacturing consisted 30% of China's economy today. Also, the difference is, the laborers in US manufacturing moved to other higher paying jobs, as a result, average income went from 25k to 30k in 2000. Whereas what we're seeing now with Chinese laborers is that they're moving back home to countryside to farm (< $1 a day)

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#127

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

wizofaus wrote: post #97
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a 2020s factory in any significant way similar to a 1970s factory? Given a factory from each era that produces roughly the same product and quantity, how many are employed at each? What are their inflation-adjusted wages? It seems difficult to believe that modern factories can employ enough people for your blue collar middle class dreams to become reality. The difference in population alone is 200M vs 330M. And ev…

Only half, over 50 years? That would imply less than 1.5% productivity growth rate on average, pretty sure it's been higher than that!

To be fair, I'm having trouble thinking of many examples of factories that might even be comparable. Auto and auto parts, obviously, are still big. But then I can't come in and say "tires" (included in the previous). What's even left?

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#128

Post by no_wizard »

nojvek wrote: post #123
no_wizard wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a professor remark once (this is circa 2009) that we should all learn a highly skilled trade around advanced manufacturing because eventually offshoring will reverse itself and by your early 30s you'll be in a prime position to profit immensely off the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing equipment and processes Maybe he was right. I'm in my early 30s now, and I don't regret becoming a software engineer, but al…

I really envy anyone working in Industrial Robotics. It's such a fascinating field. Automating physical things is so much more rewarding than automating digital things.

Maybe not surprisingly, the real money in this field is in maintenance and ensuring uptime. The robots are cool to develop too but its really hard to get a job doing that directly unless you're a startup with funding from a VC or have an incredibly good resume, but there is a cottage industry of people (businesses or business units usually) that make lots of money maintaining deployed fleets and developing patches / augmentations for existing robotics.

I think its hard to break into in some respects, compared to other fields (you need some certifications iirc in addition to a degree) but my limited, anecdotal exposure suggests its quite interesting and lucrative.

That said, my sample size is small, and on the other end of the spectrum, I know a few folks who maintain complex CNC equipment and develop software for it (using a language I don't recongize, I think its proprietary) and while they make good money, its not better than you can make as a senior engineer at a reputable place as a web developer, for example.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#129

Post by spywaregorilla »

marianatom wrote: post #120
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8 million babies for a population of 1.2 billion? Woah. Back of the envelope, that's something like half replacement rate.

Yeah and that's not the crazy part. There's a 50% drop in marriage rate in 2023 compared to 2022.

Source?

I see marriage rates falling by about 50% over the past decade. But this claim seems unlikely, or perhaps just badly skewed by the seasonality of things.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#130

Post by standardUser »

ch4s3 wrote: post #103
standardUser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underlying your perspective is the idea that economic activity is only about growth or efficiency or "winning". Governments have very different interests, such as maintaining social order, protecting vital industries and spurring innovation. A government doesn't care if their industrial policy is sub-optimal from a growth-uber-alles perceptive. Only a tiny sliver of libertarian-types think that way and those people r…

So my point is that protectionism undermines things like innovation by creating protected industries that don’t need to be innovative. Maintaining order is an odd goal for an economic policy no? But on that note, France is probably the most protectionist among developed western nations. Yet they have created a situation where a third of young people can’t find work and social cohesion is unraveling.

I didn't say governments were always good at it. But every one of the East Asian tigers owes its first-world status to aggressive industrial policy. And despite France's issue with unemployment and immigration, you'd still rather be born there than almost any other nation on the planet. And I'd add, NASA is industrial policy. ARPA is industrial policy. University funding is industrial policy. Government-directed investment is responsible for a significant chunk of technological development since the dawn of... industrial policy.
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