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U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

fortune.com

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Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#91

Post by brianwawok »

megablast wrote: post #85
unquietcode wrote: post #51

There are health and environmental costs to fracking which are not being adequately addressed, and which are unsurprisingly ignored by this article. China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but there are consequences to this. Some of their cities are today near uninhabitable, some are just unbearably smoggy. We definitely do not want to pat ourselves on the back for an economic boom that…

> China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but there are consequences to this. No different to anywhere else in the world, just that it happened more recently.

Source?

I am honestly curious. I know for example that the US was very dirty in the early 1900s, but we had 100 million people. If China was dirty in the 2000s with 1.3 billion people, it stands to reason that China was more dirty, no?

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#92

Post by brianwawok »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #55

The next manufacturing frontier to cross is sub-Saharan Africa. We are starting to see signs of it happening. For example, I just bought myself some great shoes ( https://www.oliberte.com/men/ ). Since it is the last large severely underdeveloped place with cheap, young capable labor and lots of natural resources, this might actually be manufacturing's final frontier.

Is there enough political stability though? Outsider investors want some degree of stability to invest in large manufacturing plants. I am not a scholar in sub-saharan Africa, but I am not yet of the opinion that it is a stable place to set up shop.

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#93

Post by tarikjn »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #55

The next manufacturing frontier to cross is sub-Saharan Africa. We are starting to see signs of it happening. For example, I just bought myself some great shoes ( https://www.oliberte.com/men/ ). Since it is the last large severely underdeveloped place with cheap, young capable labor and lots of natural resources, this might actually be manufacturing's final frontier.

One thing that has given me pause in Africa though is the comparatively high price of food -- and energy, more obvious.

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#94

Post by hawkice »

brianwawok wrote: post #91
megablast wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but there are consequences to this. No different to anywhere else in the world, just that it happened more recently.

Source? I am honestly curious. I know for example that the US was very dirty in the early 1900s, but we had 100 million people. If China was dirty in the 2000s with 1.3 billion people, it stands to reason that China was more dirty, no?

Technology has helped curb the absurd pollution that was the product of older processes. We don't have data from industrialization in the US, because we didn't have the tools to measure precisely the pollution at that time. But based on verbal descriptions of the pollution, China today might be similar to the US when it was industrializing. Specifically, historians note the frequency of days where pollution is so bad you can't see across the street, which used to happen in the US regularly yet infrequently, which is the same narrative description you'd see in China today.

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#95

Post by socceroos »

dba7dba wrote: post #71
bobjordan wrote: post #54

Shenzhen China factory owner here. The costs are definitely rising in China for English speaking technical labor such as the engineers we need. We compete with companies like Apple and all the other foreign companies rushing to China these days to keep them employed. But we are still talking much lower salaries overall, for example, $30,000 USD/year for a degreed Sr. Electrical design engineer with 20 years experienc…

Parts maker. It's something people forget about. Britain for a time was the premier plane/jet developer and manufacturing center after WW2. Like the Comet. And that helped a lot of parts makers (like Rolls-Royce jet engine) for planes grow in UK. Even when UK lost the crown of biggest jet maker to Boeing, those parts makers in Britain are still around and thriving. So it's more disturbing to me that you can't find su…

Americans are more aggressive in strategy - which includes outsourcing. It also makes them more prone to being aggressively stupid and aggressively short-sighted.

But hey, profits.

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#97

Post by noir_lord »

sfrealist wrote: post #96

But the US labor force is increasingly composed of African Americans (average IQ of 86) and Hispanics (90) [1], versus Chinese labor force consisting of Han Chinese (average IQ 106). Thus it still has no competitive advantage. 1. http://www.rlynn.co.uk/

Source?

Because I'm calling bullshit on those figures, IQ tests are notoriously unreliable across cultural and societal boundaries.

Hell even across economic boundaries within the same society.

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#99

Post by douche »

oksawe wrote: post #98

Higher productivity equals lower wages. The busting of Unions, among a lot of other things, has kept wages stagnant at best over the past decade or so.

Unions are somewhat dependent on their members having skills, and cornering the market on that set of skills. If you can't keep the people that have the set of skills that you are unionizing around inside the union, then you can't expect much success.

Re: U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s

#100

Post by chrischen »

feelslikefelt wrote: post #37
adventured wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American entrepreneurs are the best thing that has happened to China in centuries. If it weren't for American capital, and the American consumer, China would have developed drastically slower (if at all). China's GDP per capita in 1994 was ~$480. That's ~45 years after the Mao revolution. There was no alternative than to pay them cheap wages to start. If you paid them 'first world' wages, nobody would have set up man…

I just don't understand how anyone could be OK with /anyone/ that takes part in this process. It's not okay for the "200 Chinese billionaires" to be profiting off of abusing others, just as it is not okay for Americans to be giving money to these people. There is a difference between being successful financially and being able to sleep well at night.

So you would rather the billions of Chinese regress just so you can sleep well at night?

What is actually happening is good for them, and the majority of them will not side with you or even care how you sleep at night. There will always be casualties and exploitation of workers in China, but that's more due to corruption than it is to systematic underpayment of Chinese workers.

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