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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

#581

Post by NoTeslaThrow »

We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people.

> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.

The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

Of course, the government could weigh in, could incentivize, could subsidize, could propagandize, etc, to encourage us to actually build domestic industries. But that would be a titantic course reversal that would take decades of cultural change.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#582

Post by justin66 »

bananalychee wrote: post #545
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part that is so frustrating to me, and not just with regards to tariffs. It's that I see the extremes being so laughably bad (though not necessarily equally - I'm not "both sides"-ing this), and more ludicrously bad is that I've seen positions that don't follow these extremes as being derided now as "centrism". E.g. before the administration's attack on higher education, I do believe a lot of elite univer…

Tangential comment, but I now see people adding disclaimers reiterating their political affiliation to their posts regularly and I want to say that you shouldn't have to justify bilateral criticism. It doesn't imply equal magnitude, and it's only taken that way by bullies in dogmatic bubbles.

I don't mind getting some extra clarity on where someone is coming from.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#583

Post by Herring »

potato3732842 wrote: post #500
wiseowise wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territory... Very graceful.

The sum total of the fatalities column on that page is joke compared to even the most optimistic assessment of how the British middle east or French Indochina went, and that's before you add in all the crap in Africa. Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine shindig and my statement would still hold.

Yeah in retrospect I could probably have phrased that a little better!

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#584

Post by pphysch »

robertlagrant wrote: post #574
like_any_other wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight. It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used…

> The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point. I think this is because China is an autocracy, so they can make long-term plans. Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does is no place for that, and that's not limited to the new administration.

Did America stop being a democracy under FDR? Conflating specific term limits with autocracy/democracy is a bit dramatic.

There isn't anything physically stopping America from doing what China is doing. We literally did it first (in modernity)! Albeit for too short a time before the robber barons and foreign interests retook control.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#585

Post by nickpsecurity »

NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #581

We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people. > We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials. The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-bus…

Which means policies that reverse that are immensely important. The process of offshore our jobs and much I.P. took decades. Getting them back and rebuilding manufacturing support will take a long time, too.

Just need to make steady progress each year with incentives that encourage large leaps in progress.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#586

Post by 4ndrewl »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #564
jghn wrote: post #117

The other day I saw the results of a poll [1] where 80% of Americans thought the *country* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. However, only 20% of Americans thought that *they* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. It was surprisingly bipartisan. In other words, people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/845917ed-41a5-449f-…

> people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this As others have pointed out, this is not a contradiction. (Read their reply.) However, the question of 'Do YOU want to work in a factory?' is heavily influenced by the fact that we don't see factory work as a high-paying career, or a career at all. Part of the solution to the factory problem is enhancing the value proposition for the employees. I am ambiva…

Instead the products might just cease to exist. Or cease to exist in a particular market. Tariff-free trade brings into being products or markets that previously didn't exist.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#588

Post by justin66 »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #564
jghn wrote: post #117

The other day I saw the results of a poll [1] where 80% of Americans thought the *country* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. However, only 20% of Americans thought that *they* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. It was surprisingly bipartisan. In other words, people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/845917ed-41a5-449f-…

> people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this As others have pointed out, this is not a contradiction. (Read their reply.) However, the question of 'Do YOU want to work in a factory?' is heavily influenced by the fact that we don't see factory work as a high-paying career, or a career at all. Part of the solution to the factory problem is enhancing the value proposition for the employees. I am ambiva…

> If paying domestic workers more raises the price of domestic goods, and if people are willing to pay that price for whatever reason, you will start to see growth in manufacturing.

Why would you need to pay them more? Remove their legal ability to organize, cripple their social safety net, and they will either work or die.

I'm not advocating for that, but it does seem to be the path we're deliberately taking.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#589

Post by glitchc »

NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #581

We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people. > We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials. The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-bus…

Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work. Meanwhile organizations see employees as cost centres and a net drain on their revenue sources.

Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#590

Post by rollcat »

daveguy wrote: post #566
qgin wrote: post #558

Given what’s likely to happen with with AI and robotics over the next 10 years, all this debate about bringing back manufacturing jobs is pretty silly

There is no technological path to AGI, much less intelligent robots, in the next 10 years. Everyone underestimates the massive amount of parallel processing going on in a single human brain. That doesn't even consider how massive the sensor array is. The doublings required for our artificial technology to catch up is about 25-35 years, maybe more depending on how much Moore's Law slows down.

> The doublings required for our artificial technology to catch up is about 25-35 years, maybe more depending on how much Moore's Law slows down.

"A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely."

https://m.xkcd.com/678/

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