Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

molsonhart.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 1001 posts

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#31

Post by api »

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?…

The problem with an exclusively intellectual economy is that it easily loses touch with reality entirely. You end up with generations of people who have no idea how anything works or how to actually make anything or do things in the real world.

Why does it cost us 10X more to build half as much? It's not all wage differences. It's that we don't have a large talent pool of builders. When you make things -- physical things in the real world -- you learn things about the nature of reality that cannot be learned from books or computers.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#32

Post by ughgrog »

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?…

[dead]

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#33

Post by throwawaymaths »

davidw wrote: post #26
throwawaymaths wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the point of capitalism to not have a plan and let the market figure it out?

How are markets going to figure anything out with tariffs changing every day, depending on the mood of dear leader?

That's a problem for the markets to suss out.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#34

Post by mppm »

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 takes know-how and skilled workers to execute properly. Both can be recovered and scaled back up if the will is there. And time -- ten or twenty years of persistent and intelligent effort should be plenty to MAGA :)

1. https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk

2. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#35

Post by pjc50 »

> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why?

This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.

Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.

> If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last

Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.

> 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's chicken tax trucks all over again.

> This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen

Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen so far. The budget is yet to come.

> If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.

(also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers, crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal migration control of hukou combined with media control?)

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#37

Post by vishnugupta »

jmclnx wrote: post #27
vishnugupta wrote: post #19

No 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.

And do not forget NIMBY :) Where I live it is close to impossible to even get a Dog House approved and built.

Exactly!

The regulatory apparatus has to be rewired.

And then what happens when a new administration comes along 4-8 years down the line and decides to abandon some of those initiatives?

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#38

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#39

Post by kotaKat »

Missing reason #15: commercial lenders with a brain realize that these tariffs and this self-imposed domestic crisis will dissipate in the next ~6 years. Nobody's going to lend in this market to try to spin up a new greenfield project in the US that will take years to get operational when they can sit and ride it out - ESPECIALLY at these interest rates.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#40

Post by lesbolasinc »

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?…

this is what i've been saying - critical manufacturing should of course be brought on shore but I don't understand the idea of bringing back "the assembly of hyper niche part that country Y can produce extremely cheaply but America can't even reasonably produce in quality" to American shores.

It literally harms industry because anyone relying on that hyper niche part now has to pay more (because American mfg, let's face it - is not efficient) and deal with subpar quality as opposed to higher quality foreign parts.

I hate it say it, but come on man - people aren't buying American cars globally because the Japanese and even Germans can do it better. That's free market economics, either get better at making cars or focus on making things that we can do better like iPhones and Macbooks - not try to artificially defend an industry we suck at by forcing people to deal with shittier subpar products.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, I don't know.

Post reply on HN