America doesn't underestimate it, its president does.
America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
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Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
#72It's easy to bring manufacturing back, just give it a decade or two, but impossible to make it internationally competitive without large-scale market regulation such as tariffs or handing out government subsidies.
This view is too trivial. You could also stimulate manufacturing by promising tariffs increasing over the next X years, while not taxing the imported building materials and machines for longer. Or you could use tariffs to both break trade and make the environment too expensive and uncertain to invest in large construction - and delay the process by a few extra years.
Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
#73The state of the art is literally a half century beyond where american manufacturing was when it died. Anecdotally according to older family members who had those old manufacturing jobs, they were working at companies doing stuff like bending a steel rod at the end and then shipping it off to a sub contractor. This was not glamorous work. Most of them got into it because you don’t need to speak english to bend a pipe in a factory. And they did everything in their power to ensure the next generation would not have to work those sorts of jobs.
Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
#74Our economy was designed to NOT have citizens work at factories. We pay thousands of dollars a year in our public schools to teach each of our citizens calculus, literature, world history, and physics, so that they DON'T have to work at a factory, or perform manual labor like picking strawberries or driving trucks or cleaning toilets. Why would anyone want to go back to an economy that can be run by a third worlders?…
> our citizens as third worlders performing manual labor like we were oxen.
Lord man... there's a whole mass of humanity who don't want to fart in an office chair all day, or lay around collecting the dole.
Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, sure, but perhaps some kind of plan is warranted?
Isn't the point of capitalism to not have a plan and let the market figure it out?
The free market (which I think people also include in capitalism) would correctly predict labour intensive jobs would be outsourced. This is very much a feature (comparative advantage), not a bug. I realized a lot of supposedly free market people don't even know the basics of it. Politically the free market has become an identity associated with national greatness and a sense of control of ones destiny. The dominant feeling seems to be if you have a free market, you will win everything (which is actually opposite from the truth).
Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
#76There are plenty of people saying these tariffs will not work. But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children. How we get that level of prosperity back? That's the people really want. Tariffs are simply a means to that end. I wish people would stop writing articles about 100% criticizing tariffs and instead write arti…
> There are plenty of people saying these tariffs will not work.
Work to do what?
> But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children.
Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or manufacturing?
> How do we get that level of prosperity back?
Better pay for the jobs people actually work. Reducing inequality by preventing the richest 0.1% from capturing all the massive gains in wealth the US has seen over the past few decades. Removing regulations that prevent the country from building housing and therefore driving up housing costs. Switching to a healthcare model in nearly any of the comparable developed countries almost all of which deliver better healthcare at half the cost. Not expecting everyone to be able to live a completely unsustainable suburban life. Having the government support children's upbringing by paying for high quality education, instituting rules and regulations that require mandatory paid maternity/paternity leave, etc.
Lost of poorer countries manage to do this and more just fine. The US is far richer than most of those countries.
Very little of this has to do with manufacturing jobs falling from 18mm to 13mm.
Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
#77Jonathan Blow's "Preventing the collapse of civilization" [1] makes a similar point. It is easy to assume that, if we can build EUV machines and space telescopes, then processing stainless steel and manufacturing PCBs is baby stuff, and is just waiting for the proper incentives to spring up again. Unfortunately that is not the case -- reality has a surprising amount of detail [2] and even medium-level technology take…
But the important question is - is it worth it? Should we be doing something more valuable instead?
Depends on how evaluate what is valuable. E.g. here in europe a lot of people think subsidising local agriculture is not valuable and we should just import cheaper food. On the other hand, a lot of people agree that food security is kinda valuable by itself. And want similar security in more fields. In that sense yes, doing „low tech“ is valuable in the long run.
Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
#78It's easy to bring manufacturing back, just give it a decade or two, but impossible to make it internationally competitive without large-scale market regulation such as tariffs or handing out government subsidies.
My problem with large-scale market regulation is that it also increases the price of inputs for companies who would otherwise be interested in building a factory in the US. Do you have a solution for that?
Why would you incentivize foreign companies to do that, when you want American companies to build factories in US?
Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
#79No kidding! Beyond the obvious skilled labor there’s supply chain network, maintenance, townships and supporting system around them. And all of this needs human labor which is taken from somewhere else. How do you incentivize them? Just throwing money at the problem won’t solve it either. Because more often than not it’ll attract charlatans who will promise the sky, take the money and move away.
Americans have a very 1980s idea of manufacturing (and China in general) in that there aren't actually that many humans being used in Chinese factories let alone the American ones some of them want to build here. There's even a concept of, "Dark Factories" in China which are 100% automated factories that operate in the dark. The only jobs that will come from bringing manufacturing back to the states will be in automa…
Well, even a better argument to bring those factories to the US. Why not develop the know-how on manufacturing and improve automation in the US rather have China lead there.
Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
#80Our economy was designed to NOT have citizens work at factories. We pay thousands of dollars a year in our public schools to teach each of our citizens calculus, literature, world history, and physics, so that they DON'T have to work at a factory, or perform manual labor like picking strawberries or driving trucks or cleaning toilets. Why would anyone want to go back to an economy that can be run by a third worlders?…
Because you cannot hide the imbalance of disconnecting yourself from the material reality that's involved with making your lifestyle possible by outsourcing to other human beings, over multiple decades, without it coming back to bite you in one form or another. See the hundreds of thousands of people in US that have died from opioid overdoses. 50% of the US population, specifically those living outside major metro ar…
You didn't explain exactly why we need that physical connection. You just broadly complained. Every one of your statements could be refuted by globalists saying its perfectly fine for foreigners to perform our manual labor for us instead.