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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)

#241

Post by bluGill »

neuralRiot wrote: post #133
palmotea wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that the US is already behind in innovation on that field, and better machines produce better machines. That's not a permanent situation, proven by the fact that the countries that are now ahead in machine tools used to be behind the US in machine tools. > So it’s “backwards in time” because you have to start manufacturing the shovel to start digging when your competitor has a backhoe. And even if yo…

>All you need is a little bit of investment and will. We’re cooked then. To give you some perspective I had some Chinese sales reps visiting my shop, they saw us working on some designs and casually asked about working hours i told them about 40hs/wk they laughed and said “in China engineers work 12hs a day 7 days a week”.

I could sit in the office that long if I had to and I would appear productive. However I need several hours of mindless meetings everyday as is because my brain can't engineer for 40 hours a week.

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

#242

Post by munksbeer »

didericis wrote: post #114
jajko wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... not how things will roll out. Sure it looks nice on some paper diagram my 5 year old son could pop out, but reality is way, way more complex. Also, here its US who is doing massive 'violations of international order'. You know which order I talk about? WTO for example, US is founding member, an org specifically designed and accepted to handle this. Various international agreements between close allies. And…

The USA already dictates the direction of much of the world economy through its position in the WTO, and you are correct that the tariffs will cause more independent production. That’s part of the intention. Europe specifically is underproductive and the hope is that these tariffs and the change of tone for defense agreements will bolster Europes domestic industrial and defensive capabilities. I also realize how incr…

> and you are correct that the tariffs will cause more independent production. That’s part of the intention. Europe specifically is underproductive and the hope is that these tariffs and the change of tone for defense agreements will bolster Europes domestic industrial and defensive capabilities.

> I’m simply explaining the logic behind it

I really disagree most strongly that this is the logic behind it. You genuinely think Trump and his base want these tariff wars to encourage more manufacturing in Europe?

As a foreigner, the message that comes across loud and clear from the US is "America first".

I can't speculate what is really going on inside Trump's head or inside his administration, but one thing I'm 100% sure of, they really don't care in the slightest about Europe or any other country in the world for that matter.

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

#243

Post by WillPostForFood »

no_wizard wrote: post #167
slicktux wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. And we didn't pay for re-skilling, re-training, re-education. We didn't give them welfare benefits to hold over while they learned these new things. We did near nothing, and expected these areas simply to…

And we didn't pay for re-skilling, re-training, re-education.

This was the old "learn to code" moment. You are going to take a 50 year old auto worker with a high school degree and train them to do what? We have tried it, we have invested in it, is just doesn't work well.

Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) Workforce Investment Act (WIA) Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)

You are better off using trade policy to at least slow down offshoring to give people a chance to move, retrain, retire if they are close.

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

slg wrote: post #230
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…

>the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. When you can manufacture warships, you can protect your economy. The counter to this thinking is that if you intertwine your economic wellbeing with your "enemy" to the point that neither side wants to sever the relationship, you won't need to build many warships. Reversing course back towards isolation in order to give yourself the opti…

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by UncleMeat »

tmpz22 wrote: post #32
whatshisface wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Yep. People with this wild nostalgia for manufacturing are missing what actually produced those lifestyles. It wasn't the factory.

Pundits are going on fox news and saying that having a job where you primarily use a computer turns you into a woman. These people are not coherant.

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

#246

Post by mindslight »

Avicebron wrote: post #226
mindslight wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if we're lucky, one of these sophomores will have an epiphany that military protection and a stable currency are some of the most complex exports , and that getting imports by trading away a self-created currency is a pretty great way to not give away any gold or silver... Just sayin'.

> military protection and a stable currency are some of the most complex exports And how come that always seems seem to come wrapped in ways that inexorably seems to concentrate wealth, so that the benefits of those exports seem to be less evenly distributed?

Because they're centralized sources of power, and power corrupts.

In my younger days I used to argue for a non-inflationary currency, and how that would have gone a long way towards not concentrating the wealth from offshorting and technological progress (instead enough money was printed to make price inflation keep occurring in spite of the fundamentals, and most of that new money was just given to banks to pump up the asset bubbles)

These days I've kind of just accepted the monetary inflation (cf Gresham's law), like other centralizing but perhaps inevitable dynamics like the economies of scale for electronics manufacturing.

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

#247

Post by chabska »

SideQuark wrote: post #225
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale Or about 12% of the US labor force. Meanwhile the 12th percentile US income is ~$22,000, i.e. less than the $32k median in China, and half of the jobs there are above that median. Obviously these numbers are all useless napkin math and none of it really works like that, but the premise isn't inherently absurd. If China is subsidizing manufacturing in order…

The US manufactures more than ever, and the % of GDP in manufacturing has been flat for 70+ years now. The jobs didn’t leave, so they’re never coming back. They got automated. Just like we need vastly less farmers than in 1900 to farm more than ever, we need vastly manufacturing jobs to manufacture more than ever.

> The US manufactures more than ever

More of what, exactly? I looked at steel production data (in metric tonnes, not dollar value), US production has been flat or slightly declining since 1970.

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

#249

Post by GS523523 »

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…

> Why? Is this just an isolationist dream?

Imagine if Russia produced their own technical components - how much of an effect would sanctions have on them? If Russia relies on our computer chips, we have leverage over them. If we rely on Asian factories and silicon, they have leverage over us. President Biden wouldn't have had to go begging to Prince Mohammad for oil if we had enough production at home. It's the way the world works.

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

#250

Post by cduzz »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #204
rainsford wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 colla…

Yes and no. Writing code is sitting in an office and typing stuff into a computer, all the way into production. Making machines is a physical thing. You can do a lot of the design on a computer, but to do even that you need a handle on the physical reality of the thing that benefits from experience with the physical object. If you want a prototype it's something you build with your hands rather than something you run…

Haas automation started in the early 1980s and was primarily successful because it leveraged the (new at the time) microprocessors to drive machine tools. I was there in the early 1990s, right when this silly article said that machine tool manufacturing was leaving the US.

There was lots of "making stuff" but the value of the company was largely the "office work" that happened off the shop floor, in the sales, support, development, etc. I'm not sure but I'd guess that 2/3rds of the employees were "white collar" jobs, even at a company that made machine tools

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