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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)

#181

Post by tharne »

absolutelastone wrote: post #101
ty6853 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic picture of what will happen is instead of being an American engineer designing widgets made in China, some fraction of you are now decimated to be an American widget maker of items engineered in China. Tarriff is essentially just a handicap to comparitive advantage in trade, trading out jobs where you had the advantage. It is one of the most baffling thing I have seen our government do in our lifetime.

I don't know that the prior situation was sustainable and would have lasted much longer anyway. Using China for manufacturing is like using Amazon for sales. You are required to give them everything they need to take your business away.

> I don't know that the prior situation was sustainable and would have lasted much longer anyway. Using China for manufacturing is like using Amazon for sales. You are required to give them everything they need to take your business away.

If if comes to pass that the 21st century is a Chinese one, it will be this long con that launched the whole thing: "We'll manufacture anything you want real cheap, just show us how to do it."

The U.S. outsourcing it's manufacturing to China is likely to go down as one of the biggest economic and political self-owns of the modern era.

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

#182

Post by no_wizard »

rainsford wrote: post #160
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…

> Because the US has emphasized college as the only respectable education path, as well as the only path to well paid jobs. There's this idea that the shift to college and white collar jobs was some artificial push, but it seems more like an incredibly natural and obvious move to me. A lot of blue collar work is just not super great from a working conditions and pay perspective and while not every white collar job is…

It was at least partially artificial. The GI Bill post WWII introduced millions of families who otherwise wouldn't have gone to college the ability to go to college. This set off two cycles, one of which is now those folks who went to college on the GI bill wanted to encourage their kids to go to college, which is well and good, but it also showed the economic value to a bigger mass of the country of going to college. Now that made its way into government policy as a result, so the government took steps in the 1970s and 1980s in particular to expand collegiate enrollment, which drove up the price of college which lead to Clinton signing a bill that gave us the student loan system as it exists today, which then fed even more enrollment as a matter of policy, but now universities too were in on the game, as that money is guaranteed which lead to bigger recruitment drives.

I'm giving a very high level synopsis here, but the snowball effect wouldn't have happened without the policy interventions by the government, in particular the student loan shenanigans

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

#183

Post by [deleted] »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #141
caycep wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"manufacturing as a service", however that may look, might be more of a fit for the modern economy...unless we really regress back to 1930

MaaS is definitely a thing and has been for a long time. Contract manufacturers abound in the US.

[deleted]

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

#184

Post by ben_w »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #14
franktankbank wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On paper. That's not to say we don't have the greatest potential for even greater prosperity but you can't eat stonks. Right now we are making good on promises to the boomer generation while absolutely dicking over the generations who are making good on the promises of old.

The US has by far the world's strongest economy no matter how you measure it. We obviously can and do eat the fruits of our labor. In fact we (being Americans broadly) eat only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the absolutely gargantuan amount of value we (being Americans broadly) create.

> The US has by far the world's strongest economy no matter how you measure it.

Strong, yes. Strongest by nominal, yes. But not strongest by PPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

slicktux wrote: post #144
jmward01 wrote: post #142

I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. Why? Is this just an isolationist dream? The reductive, absurd, extreme of this is why don't individual people go out and build all their own stuff like cars and houses. Let's all go out and learn how to mine and refine metal ore so we can get started on building the family sedan! There is…

That is a pretty hyperbolic paragraph only to imply that we as a nation would loose out on innovation by doing so; nowhere do we want to isolate as a country. Look at all the jobless Americans in once thriving industrial cities. Generations left without pensions or skills all because we outsource our workers to other countries. That’s one of the many problems that need to be solved and by manufacturing here in the US…

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by hudon »

squigz wrote: post #176
hudon wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. When you can manufacture warships, you can protect your economy. or: If all you sell are financial services, and a pandemic hits and you need to protect your people, where will you find masks? We don't need to build literally everything ourselves, that's a reductionist argument, we just need to become a lot more productive than we are now…

Was mask manufacturing capacity during the pandemic an issue?

Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID...

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

#187

Post by rainsford »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #179
rainsford wrote: post #160

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. There's this idea that the shift to college and white collar jobs was some artificial push, but it seems more like an incredibly natural and obvious move to me. A lot of blue collar work is just not super great from a working conditions and pay perspective and while not every white collar job is…

The flaw is in putting these things out as alternatives to each other. The future of manufacturing is in automation, but in order to do automation you need machinists and computer science. You need people who can design a machine that makes other machines, which is a physical device that operates under the direction of software. Getting people to learn to code instead of learning how to build machines doesn't get it.

I agree you need a variety of skills and jobs, but "learning how to build machines" is just as white collar as learning to code. Particularly since the functionality of any modern machine involves just as much code as it does mechanical engineering. Don't get me wrong, mechanical and software engineering are completely different fields and we need both of them. But they're both unarguably college educated white collar jobs.

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

#188

Post by michaelhoney »

jmward01 wrote: post #142

I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. Why? Is this just an isolationist dream? The reductive, absurd, extreme of this is why don't individual people go out and build all their own stuff like cars and houses. Let's all go out and learn how to mine and refine metal ore so we can get started on building the family sedan! There is…

the reductive, absurd version of something is reductive and absurd, but that doesn't mean that the nuanced, appropriate version is wrong

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

#189

Post by mechagodzilla »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #172
jmward01 wrote: post #142

I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. Why? Is this just an isolationist dream? The reductive, absurd, extreme of this is why don't individual people go out and build all their own stuff like cars and houses. Let's all go out and learn how to mine and refine metal ore so we can get started on building the family sedan! There is…

There are two main reasons that individuals don't build their own houses and cars from scratch. 1) They don't know how. Specialization is a thing. But this is a thing that applies to individuals rather than nations. You don't need every person to know how to mine ore or hang drywall as long as somebody does. But a country the size of the US could certainly contain someone who knows how to do any given thing. 2) They…

So applying this to China and the USA - the USA has a median household income of ~$80k, and China, in terms of purchasing power parity, has a median household income of $32k. China has a workforce of ~775M people vs 163M people in the USA. The USA has ~7M unemployed people. For the USA to stop importing goods from China, we would need to 1) stop consuming those goods altogether (even if they're intermediate goods that go into things we do manufacture), or 2) employ US workers to make those goods instead of whatever they're currently doing (either employed or unemployed).

Employed Americans largely earn a lot more than employed chinese people, and there just aren't very many unemployed Americans. Based on the value of imports to the US from China vs Chinese GDP($440B vs $17.8T), we import about 2.5% of their output, or the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale. I don't think there is any way around the fact that significantly reducing imports from other countries means we significantly reduce our consumption in absolute terms (i.e. we have a poorer standard of living), just out of spite for other countries.

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

#190

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

tharne wrote: post #177
xienze wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks? It’s important to be at least somewhat self-reliant as a nation, especially when the country we are VERY reliant on is not a friendly one.

> “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks? I don't why the mainstream media isn't focusing more on this angle. Five years ago the richest, most powerful, country in the world couldn't get basic medical supplies to its citizens during a public health crisis. That should have terrified us into making major policy changes, but instea…

The US can barely get basic medical supplies to much of its population outside of a health crisis - not because of direct supply chain issues, but because the system is designed to put corporate profits over adequate service provision.

And in the not so general case, over national security.

Is manufacturing the real problem here? Or is it a symptom of decades of systemic mismanagement of opportunity by a culture that values short-sighted opportunism over strategy?

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