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The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

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Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#51

Post by whimsicalism »

morkalork wrote: post #9
jackyinger wrote: post #4

How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. And let me tell you there ain’t many of them, especially not young ones. Why? Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. That’s how you end up with a manufacturing industry full…

Crushing unions is partly to blame here. I've got relatives whose families have been working in the mining industry for a few generations. They all lament the good old days that are long gone now.

how would increasing the cost of labor mean that we have more manufacturing jobs in the US today?

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#52

Post by ferguess_k »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #13
ferguess_k wrote: post #5

I have a sense that manufacturing is not coming back until there is a real Cold War 2.0 (or Hot War 3.0 which hopefully never realizes). I mean a real one, like the NATO-WP one when there was not a lot of trading between the two blocs.

There's a way to do it. This playbook has been used repeatedly throughout the 20th century. First you invite industry to reshore via subsidies and preferential access to government contracts. If necessary, the government must directly invest in new firms. (They already do this in a very small way with In-Q-Tel and others, so it's not totally beyond the pale. For a time there was even a US Army VC firm.) If you talk t…

I think the playbook is easy, as you described multiple countries went through more or less the same process.

The difficulty lies in political will and execution. Either fails then the whole scheme fails.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#53

Post by anon84873628 »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #19
turtlesdown11 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? You mean the worlds strongest, most developed and most successful economy?

We've been coasting on advances made many decades ago. Most developed, sure. Successful? By nearly any metric you can imagine or make up. Strongest? Our economy is eaten hollow by termites. A stiff wind would make it crumble. Worse, there doesn't appear to be any path to true recovery... we can't create the jobs that people need to prosper, but if we could somehow do that we no longer create the people who would grow…

Which people got the COVID vaccine first?

Why is HN in English and always talking about FAANG?

Why do kids all around the world play with Spiderman?

Asking for "vital" and "21st century" is a paradox, so maybe it's not what you really meant. But the proof of our success is all around if you're willing to actually look.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#54

Post by whimsicalism »

jackyinger wrote: post #17
turtlesdown11 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? You mean the worlds strongest, most developed and most successful economy?

Reminds me of a friend’s defense of the service focused economy: “I’ve got a PhD in economics”. Sure services may be great when things are going well, but you can’t ONLY have services, and then go and blow up international trade and expect to have a good time.

the US is the most diversified economy in the world, we do not only have services.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#55

Post by potato3732842 »

ryandrake wrote: post #35
elictronic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing will start coming back based on the high tariffs just with two big caveats. 1. Manufacturing takes time and money to setup. This is a software forum where changes are made at lighting speed. Manufacturing requires capital, years, and will. In software it might take a day to make an obvious change. Manufacturing hopefully 6 months. Working with physical systems takes time. 2. Manufacturing does not mean…

> Manufacturing does not mean jobs. Exactly. I think a lot of people who say they "want manufacturing to come back to the USA" have a picture in their imagination of a 1950s factory employing hundreds of middle class people standing along an assembly line picking up parts with their hands and working on them, or turning bolts on a car as it goes down the line. Then the old steam whistle blows, and all those workers e…

Those were not middle class jobs before the 1950s nor were they for long afterwards.

The idea that one can be functionally illiterate yet afford a home, a car and a family by spending 40hr and no more riveting spring hangers onto Chevrolets, or whatever, is a legacy from a blip in time during which the US had a bear monopoly on state of the art for the time manufacturing.

Those men who worked comparable factory jobs in the 1870s through the 1930s had wives and kids doing piece work at home. And in the 1970s their wives all went back to work again, just outside the home.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#56

Post by InDubioProRubio »

whatshisface wrote: post #22
ryandrake wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. If I could make as a machinist what I make as a software monkey, all other things being equal, I'd go back in time and train to be a machinist. People will go where the money is.

The only way to "solve" this is to reduce US output of valuable goods so that people are attracted to jobs that pay less and make less valuable goods. I don't understand why everyone's so enamored with the prospect of making $50k working a lathe in a world where engineering jobs have been made rarer artificially. It won't even be a job in a factory that makes something cool like rockets or lithography machines, witho…

https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/25/ycombinator-startups-surve...

I would argue they know..

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#57

Post by pjc50 »

walterbell wrote: post #12

Andy Grove, "How to Make an American Job" (2010), https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/documents/areas/adm/loeb/11_35... The first task is to rebuild our industrial commons. We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the…

> make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations

As always, it comes back to the solution which pays executives and shareholders from taxpayer and consumer money. That's the system which gave America Boeing: too big to fail.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#58

Post by FirmwareBurner »

neogodless wrote: post #47
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone can be a SW engineer. Same how not everyone can be a doctor. Or a lawyer. For a lot of people, bolting bumpers to Fords is as good as it gets in terms of job prospects.

This is the eternal evolution of individual labor. But then the question is - do you think going backwards to an earlier time is a solution? Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing. You'll be self sufficient, but you won't be able to afford a phone or television! It's going to be a difficult problem (always) solving for the future of individual contributions to society a…

>This is the eternal evolution of individual labor.

This argument of "fuck others' jobs, I got mine" works if you're OK with having a handful of prosperous cities full of multinational conglomerates with smart/educated people in the service industry, surrounded by slums of poverty, crime and homeless people on drugs who can mug you, as their industry blue collar jobs got offshored and they couldn't "just learn to code bro".

There's a reason countries with a solid industrial base like Germany are livable almost everywhere with a lot less income inequality, poverty and homelessness, and try to hold on to these jobs.

UK's deindustrialization is also another point on the map. Great if you work at some bank/tech company in London, not so great otherwise.

>Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing.

No one's arguing about going back to the stone age. But having moved nearly all manufacturing to Asia was a mistake, not only we lost jobs but also scale, competencies and bargaining power.

Remember the covid pandemic when you couldn't get masks initially because most were made in China and they were hoarding them all for themselves? What then? Use stonks as masks?

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#59

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

whatshisface wrote: post #18
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a way to do it. This playbook has been used repeatedly throughout the 20th century. First you invite industry to reshore via subsidies and preferential access to government contracts. If necessary, the government must directly invest in new firms. (They already do this in a very small way with In-Q-Tel and others, so it's not totally beyond the pale. For a time there was even a US Army VC firm.) If you talk t…

Don't forget the step where you ignore intellectual property law so that it becomes temporarily legal to start companies without a "war chest" of patents to ward off disputes with.

I mean, patents only apply in the nation where they're granted. So "ignoring" IP is just a matter of refusing to recognize foreign patents, which is something that all nations do implicitly.

Also, in most foreign countries, court cases are cheap. (They could literally be 100x cheaper to litigate than they would be in the US.)

If you're talking about in a US context specifically, then if absolutely necessary the federal government could either buy or nationalize the patents in dispute, just as all states nationalize land from time to time under eminent domain. Zvi recently wrote about this in the context of the state buying the Ozempic patent: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2025/01/21/sleep-diet-exercise-...

> [The US Government] should buy out the patents to such drugs.

> This solves the consumption side. It removes the deadweight loss triangle from lost consumption. It removes the hardship of those who struggle to pay, as we can then allow generic competition to do its thing and charge near marginal cost. It would be super popular. It uses government’s low financing costs to provide locked-in up front cold hard cash to Novo Nordisk, presumably the best way to get them and others to invest the maximum in more R&D.

> There are lots of obvious gains here, for on the order of $100 billion. Cut the check.

Re: The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

#60

Post by kcb »

jackyinger wrote: post #4

How’s basing the US economy on services looking now? My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources. And let me tell you there ain’t many of them, especially not young ones. Why? Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. That’s how you end up with a manufacturing industry full…

Shoot yourself in the foot...guess we shouldn't have depended on that foot to walk for so long.
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