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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

molsonhart.com

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Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#101

Post by lenerdenator »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #82
lenerdenator wrote: post #51

America? No. The shareholder class underestimates it. A lot of Americans realize that it's going to be hard, which is why we should have made an example out of the first guy to profit off of sending manufacturing off to the shores of a geopolitical rival.

Americans also have more free time and disposable income because of that decision, among others. Why would you want them to struggle more?

The people in the areas where things used to be made certainly have more free time, but they don't have disposable income.

Unless we're just here to repeat canards from the 1990s given by financiers which explained why it was good to shut down the main employers for entire towns.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#102

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

npiano wrote: post #91
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #38

This pretty much mirrors what a friend of mine said (he is a recently-retired Co-CEO of a medium-sized manufacturing business). He's been telling me this, for years. It's not a secret. The information has been out there, for ages. I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this.

A genuine question, presuming no correct answer: what is to be done about it? China is reportedly on track to run more than 50% of global manufacturing by 2030, if the World Bank is correct. What would you do to act against this? Is doing nothing acceptable?

Yeah, there's no painless answer. China is not a democracy. They can force millions of people to endure terrible working conditions, pollution, corruption, and abuse, and take a very long view. The US can't do this.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#103

Post by constantcrying »

Building up manufacturing has always been a period of pain for the population. There is so much to learn and so much hard work to do with, at least initially, so little gain.

Competition is extremely high initially, products will be ridiculed for being expensive and low quality. Companies will fail and go bankrupt, workers will suffer from that.

"Bringing manufacturing back" is a path of pain, not a way to fast economic success. There is no way to change that, tariffs will certainly not change it. Are Americans ready to leave their office job and work overtime in factories and engineering departments? No, automation will not do this for you, you are competing with a country which knows far more about automation than you do. To compete with them you need to be better and cheaper.

Lastly look how Germany struggles, right now. Their industry is in large parts starting to loose any competitive edge and will continue to do, unless very significant cuts are made somewhere. You can not keep the same living standards while someone is doing twice your work for half your costs.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#104

Post by mbrumlow »

vFunct wrote: post #7

Our 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?…

And that is not working out…

What we have instead is a nation straddled with debt and useless degrees. While the counties like China do “theirs world” work produce smarter and more capable workforce all while doing the mundane work too.

I think your view also vastly underestimates the number of not so smart people that exist in America. This is no knock on them, but people in tech bubbles get to walk around in a society where the average person they interact with has a far above average IQ. So for those who don’t balance red/black trees and find shortest paths with dijkstra's algorithm need jobs too.

On top of that you forgot something I am sure you have yelled many times, diversity. Remember when it was a strength? It’s not good for any nation to be completely void of entire industries. Having factories next to the tech will germinate the thinking minds with new problems to solve.

But even more to the point. China is doing amazing things, and they were we let do the manufacturing. So we always have a strong evidence that letting others might not be the best idea.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#105

Post by numbers_guy »

Isn't manufacturing mostly a red herring? Sure some select people who are currently in Washington might care about it from a geopolitical angle, but the electorate is not lamenting the lack of manufacturing jobs, but rather their decreased share of the proceeds of the no.1 national economy in the world. Even if you bring all manufacturing back, I doubt those same people will be happy working in those factories.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#106

Post by gambiting »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #64
PaulKeeble wrote: post #9

Its the integration and overall combined effect of the entire industrial pipeline that makes China so incredible. It processes all the raw materials and the recycling/reuse of off cuts through every possible way to turn those raw materials into components and then into goods with very little need for import from other countries. Its the complete system for a huge variety of goods. To compete with that the entire pipe…

And if China invades Taiwan, which they have said for decades they will do (we just don’t like to believe them), what then? Do we sacrifice a democracy for the dollar? If not, is our economy annihilated? We have no credible alternative to reshoring for this reason alone.

>>Do we sacrifice a democracy for the dollar?

What democracy? Whose democracy?

Trump just blamed Zelensky for the war in Ukraine again. The entire administration keeps saying they will make Canada the 51st state and "destroy canada economically". They want to take Greenland by force. I don't think America cares much about democracy anymore, only dollars. China will take Taiwan and US will will keep buying chips like they always did.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#107

Post by jballer »

vFunct wrote: post #7

Our 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?…

To the contrary, they think of manual and “low-skill” labor as an essential undertaking that no person or society is above.

You are the one who thinks of the work as below you, that it should be moved out of sight so we can stop caring and make it someone else’s problem.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#108

Post by robertlagrant »

imbusy111 wrote: post #48
mppm wrote: post #34

Jonathan 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?

> But the important question is - is it worth it? Should we be doing something more valuable instead?

It's hard to quantify. E.g. the CHIPS act is a strategic thing in case TSMC is disrupted for some reason. How valuable is insurance? How much useful work (and skill) do you ship overseas in exchange for promissory notes[0]?

[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/tariffs-saving-and-invest...

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#109

Post by asdajksah2123 »

America does need to bring back manufacturing. Not because a manufacturing job that pays $25/hr is somehow better than a service job that pays $25/hr.

The US needs to bring back manufacturing for strategic reasons and in strategic areas.

And it needs to have the capability to scale up manufacturing in response to emergencies.

But also, importantly, the US doesn't need to do this by onshoring all manufacturing. Near shoring and friend shoring will have to be extremely important components of adding these capabilities, and unfortunately, teh actions the US is taking will likely hurt nearshoring and friendshoring and will end up making the US less strategically capable in manufacturing even if it's able to reshore a significant amount of manufacturing.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#110

Post by smcl »

nine_zeros wrote: post #50
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #38

This pretty much mirrors what a friend of mine said (he is a recently-retired Co-CEO of a medium-sized manufacturing business). He's been telling me this, for years. It's not a secret. The information has been out there, for ages. I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this.

> I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this. Curious why you are surprised at incompetence being unable to understand complexity.

The thing is the US already experienced Trump 1.0, so it was presumably easy for many to assume that Trump 2.0 would follow broadly the same pattern and that there'd be an "adult in the room" somewhere to say "this will crash the world economy and do three consecutive 9/11s worth of damage to the stock market". So even though there are some very silly people in very high places saying some very wild things, the assumption for many is that there's someone there to manage the chaos and minimise the stupidity.

This has been a pretty sobering reminder to anyone that, in fact, there is no such thing.

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