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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)

#311

Post by tastyfreeze »

gedy wrote: post #251
slg wrote: post #230

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. 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…

But China is and has been producing warships at a rapid pace for some time.

Not only that, all ships they produce are required to meet their military standards. The are all dual use.

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

#312

Post by klooney »

chabska wrote: post #247
SideQuark wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.econtalk.org/susan-houseman-on-manufacturing/#au...

People normally show a slowly increasing graph to claim that the US manufactures more than ever- but it's primarily because of hedonic adjustments for Intel chips. If you take that out it falls off a cliff in the 2000s during the China Shock.

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

#313

Post by WalterBright »

dalemhurley wrote: post #280
bitmasher9 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really effective at increasing the amount of gold in your vault, but The Wealth of Nations (Admin Smith) made a strong case against that primary goal. Crucially for the HackerNews crowd, Mercantilism increases the value of physical goods relative to services, and services becomes a smaller portion of the overall economy. Most of us sell server-time wrapped in software that performs a service…

Ironically, Adam Smith would be called a socialist in modern USA with his views on preventing monopolistic behaviours, the need for government oversight and controls, and the need for strong public goods where the private market fails. So many people would benefit from reading his works.

Adam Smith died in 1790, a time when the world had little experience with free markets. He was a pioneer in economic thought, but that doesn't automatically mean all of his prognostications about the future are correct.

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

#314

Post by klooney »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #295
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 USA is already a lot more productive than everyone else. This is because the USA generates an enormous amount of wealth through very few people thanks to its technology and finance industry. Irony is that there's no end to handwringing editorials in Canada about our "productivity gap" between us and the USA and the USA under Trump is wanting to move itself backward and become less productive. Everyone else in the…

> thanks to its technology and finance industry

There's been a great sucking sound from all the electrical and mechanical engineers switching to writing CRUD apps because the pay is double.

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

#315

Post by rat87 »

banannaise wrote: post #293
consumer451 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main concern is that de-globalizing trade will remove a large barrier for real kinetic war. Bombing your economic partner is generally a dumb move, and that has been pretty nice for humanity in the last ~50 years.

To quote the philosopher Tankian: "Why don't presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?" Those in power right now have no personal disincentive to real kinetic war. It doesn't affect them personally, or so they think up until the moment it does.

I wouldn't put it past Teddy Roosevelt. When he was undersecretary of the navy that helped start the Spanish American war he resigned (despite his superiors asking him not to) to fight in the war. He also asked to fight in WW1 despite being old.

For all his positive attributes former senator McCain was known as a hawk. There have always been men who after fighting come away with a firm belief in military power. If you made service a requirement you wouldn't necessarily get fewer hawks just ones you can't criticize for not participating in war themseu

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

#316

Post by WalterBright »

runako wrote: post #263
Avicebron wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This was not true in the immediate postwar period. The turning point was roughly the 1980s. Wealth concentration has been a deliberate US domestic policy for decades. This is, to a large degree, separate from the stability of our currency or military protection. It's the stated intent and logical result of relaxing taxes on the rich while enacting policies designed to hurt the working classes (e.g. reducing union pow…

> Wealth concentration has been a deliberate US domestic policy for decades.

Wealth is not concentrated in a market society. It is created. Some people creating more wealth than others is not "concentrating" wealth in their hands.

Another way to put it is it is not a fixed pie, where if one gets more another necessarily gets less. If I buy some art supplies for $20, and paint a masterpiece I sell for $100,000, wealth was not "concentrated" in me.

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

#317

Post by stblack »

What so many commentators here seem to under appreciate, so far, is the following:

Financial power is a bad proxy for military power.

Military power is ultimately a bad proxy for industrial power.

The linked article is about the clear decline of US industrial power.

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

#318

Post by dcrazy »

Izkata wrote: post #298
consumer451 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extremely good point, which hits really close to home. I wonder if Putin would have still invaded Ukraine, knowing the extent of sanctions that would hit them. He might have been lulled into thinking that the EU would not care, given the existence of people like Gerhard Schröder and his ilk. edit: I am not sure that the reason for the Russian-German energy alliance was an attempt at pacification. It seems m…

Before WWI there was a similar belief in Europe, that the growing economic interdependence would prevent wars from breaking out. Instead once there was a spark, those relationships kept pulling more and more countries into the conflict and turned it into the "Great War".

Were they economic interdependencies or high-level political alliances?

The E.U. is clearly an example of the economic interdependency theory. It evolved in post-WW2 Europe from the European Coal and Steel Community. Mineral richness is why the Saarland was given to France after WW2. The idea is that economic integration will lead to political integration from the ground up.

My understanding of the pre-WW1 alliances is that they were deals made between a lot of people with “Habsburg” in their names.

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

#319

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

WalterBright wrote: post #313
dalemhurley wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, Adam Smith would be called a socialist in modern USA with his views on preventing monopolistic behaviours, the need for government oversight and controls, and the need for strong public goods where the private market fails. So many people would benefit from reading his works.

Adam Smith died in 1790, a time when the world had little experience with free markets. He was a pioneer in economic thought, but that doesn't automatically mean all of his prognostications about the future are correct.

His prognostications were not necessarily considered by him to be "about the future". Smith believed that most of what he was writing was about things that were true for all time. He may (or may not) have been wrong about that, just as he may have been wrong about any of the specific things he wrote. But he was generally not predicting the future in any real sense.

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

#320

Post by shrubble »

WalterBright wrote: post #306
bitmasher9 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really effective at increasing the amount of gold in your vault, but The Wealth of Nations (Admin Smith) made a strong case against that primary goal. Crucially for the HackerNews crowd, Mercantilism increases the value of physical goods relative to services, and services becomes a smaller portion of the overall economy. Most of us sell server-time wrapped in software that performs a service…

Gold isn't really wealth any more than paper money is. Consider Spain, which looted S America of gold and silver. How did that work out for Spain? Spain had lots of inflation as a result, and didn't get any wealthier. The same thing happened with both the California and Yukon gold rushes. The same thing happens when the government prints lots of money. What creates wealth? People creating goods and services that peop…

Spain had a literal Golden Age (not referencing current politics)
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