America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back • Hacker News Board

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#761

Post by elcritch » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

Suppafly wrote: post #696

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…

>That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. Sure, but we don't manufacture the things that are typically made in 3rd world countries and the lead time to build that infrastructure is years, and generally would result in us moving down the tech tree ladder from being a consumer economy to a manufacturing economy with all of the negatives associated with that.

This attitude that manufacturing is moving down the tech tree ladder completely misunderstands manufacturing. IME the entire notion was invented by elitist economists and embraced by CEOs looking to justify sending manufacturing overseas for short term profiteering. Regular people bought in because of the promise of cheaper gizmos.

It’s the sort of attitude that infected Boeing and resulted in taking them from the peak of aviation to an embarrassment. Because they don’t know how to lubricate doors or tighten screws.

Building things is hard, and requires significant technology and skills among a lot of people. A service based economy inherently looses that technology and skill.

Tim Cook interviewed and said China isn’t the low cost labor anymore it once was. China has become the place that knows how to manufacture things, especially electronics.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#762

Post by torginus » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

Regardless of what is believed about how well implemented or necessary these reforms are I believe there is an ironclad law of reality that real wealth can only be expressed in terms of material things - houses, phones, computers.

The era of making up tall tales about the supposed value of money via all sorts of futures and stocks and financial instruments the feeble mind can scarely understand cannot be over soon enough.

The value of money manifests when its exchange for physical goods.

If the Communist fairy waved her magic wand about and distributedall the wealth of the rich to every american equally, half of the people would decide to buy a new car with their newfound wealth next day, only to find out the supply of cars hasn't increased.

There'd be like 10% more cars sold, with people bidding over each other to actually get access to that supply, which would trigger massive inflation in practical terms, revealing the emperor had no clothes all along.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#763

Post by rat87 » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

erkt wrote: post #551

pjc50 wrote: post #35

> 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 a…

Tl;Dr: The author makes a strong case for broader, higher tariffs but understands it is impossible to help American manufacturing knowing that the next administration will cave to China and Wall-street and immediately move to undo everything. The solution is to work together to make American protectionism work. 1. They are not high enough: Correct. Raise them more. 2. America's industrial supply chain is weak: That i…

> The goal is to get America to a place where it can manufacture everything it NEEDS on its own.

That is just incredibly stupid. The only country that tries to do this is the hellhole known as North Korea and even they fail. No country is an island and doing this will just ensure America becomes a third world country or worse

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#764

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

mbgerring wrote: post #668

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards to bringing manufacturing back. I saw a headline yesterday that says there are more pets than children in Japan. How long until this is true in the US? The truth of the matter is that there is no workforce left in the United States, and will be less of one by the time manufacturing does spin up. In WWII, the Army was happy at how many of the young men there…

People are part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers because there aren’t other jobs available, and people can pick up skills faster than you think. I know a lot of people in the Bay Area with serious fabrication skills (mainly applied to art), who would love to have a stable job using those skills in a factory setting, but who are constantly looking for gig work instead. There were two different fabrication…

>and people can pick up skills faster than you think.

Possibly. But they can't change the attitudes that created them from childhood up. The barista that complains on r/antiwork that their manager is a douche and that they're taking another mental health day because standing upright is too challenging for an hour at a stretch isn't going to like mandatory overtime spot welding or manning the torque wrench. Can they be taught to do it? Yeh, probably, theoretically at least. Supposing they don't get out because they'd rather be scrolling on a phone.

I can foresee this, it's not prophecy... just common sense. But I suppose other people need to run the experiment and see the results for themselves.

Out of high school, I must have worked 4 or 5 factory jobs (even in the early 1990s that was drying up), and so I have some idea what this is like. It's not a long-form media article for me. I don't think it's menial. When I use that word, I'm talking about the person at the cash register at Dollar Tree, or the job where you scrub the toilets at Wendy's.

>I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce,

Maybe. But I'm not understating its size, or the demographic projections that say it's shrinking quickly.

>and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.

They'd be great. But you can't just make a magic wand and have them appear, and if you could you'd never fill the positions.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#765

Post by elcritch » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 6:57 PM UTC

dimal wrote: post #736

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…

It's shareholder capitalism. Capitalism can be a great thing, but shareholder capitalism defines profits as the only reason for a corporation to exist. Humans are simply resources to extract work or profit from, and destroying the future of the country is an unfortunate externality. CEOs are obligated to behave like sociopaths. Lying, cheating, stealing, and subverting democracy are all good business if it returns va…

The notion of shareholder primacy capitalism is one of those ideas that seems great on paper, much like communism, but its end effects are disastrous.

It seems great cause it’s simple and gives a nice simple answer to “what’s capitalism” and “how to make effective companies”. That intellectual (existential?) laziness is costly long term however.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#766

Post by ndiddy » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 7:01 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #675

glitchc wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actu…

To get employers to invest in employees, they'd need more of a stake in it. Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that. A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when…

If more employers gave raises such that an existing employee in a given role was paid the same or more as what they would pay a new hire to fill the same role, I don't think we'd see the level of job hopping that we currently do.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#767

Post by MetaWhirledPeas » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

runako wrote: post #755

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We ran this experiment for decades. It turns out that Americans are not willing to pay the higher prices, which led to our manufacturing consolidating around higher-value items. But did we run that experiment while foreign alternatives were nearly or equally expensive? That's the real test, and whether foolish or not that's what they are trying to do with tariffs. > Lower-productivity jobs mean less income for work…

> But did we run that experiment while foreign alternatives were nearly or equally expensive? Tariffs will have to go a lot higher than 145% for this to be a relevant question. US labor (and now due to tariffs, raw materials) costs are so much higher that frequently even doubling the import price would not make US cost-competitive. > Are you suggesting former factory workers all became scientists and engineers? No, I…

> A factory worker making cutlery or light bulbs will generate less money for the economy than the average Costco employee.

The good news is that we don't need to calculate the value of an employee, because the market itself makes it loud and clear: wages. The higher the wages, the higher the value. In any sane company, the less valuable an individual is to the bottom line, the less they get paid.

So then, if the wages of a factory job start to eclipse that of other fields, that's all the evidence we need of higher productivity/value/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#768

Post by runako » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 7:11 PM UTC

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #767

runako wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But did we run that experiment while foreign alternatives were nearly or equally expensive? Tariffs will have to go a lot higher than 145% for this to be a relevant question. US labor (and now due to tariffs, raw materials) costs are so much higher that frequently even doubling the import price would not make US cost-competitive. > Are you suggesting former factory workers all became scientists and engineers? No, I…

> A factory worker making cutlery or light bulbs will generate less money for the economy than the average Costco employee. The good news is that we don't need to calculate the value of an employee, because the market itself makes it loud and clear: wages. The higher the wages, the higher the value. In any sane company, the less valuable an individual is to the bottom line, the less they get paid. So then, if the wag…

Agree 100%. And in this case, the market is yelling that we should not bring low-productivity jobs back to the US.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#769

Post by inglor_cz » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

nneonneo wrote: post #699

paul7986 wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Americans are dying to and will do tedious labor (not many), as well robots, automation and AI can do a lot of it and or will end up doing a lot of it. If we want to strengthen America (military & economy) immigration reform is needed! This could be unpopular but such reform could be ...those who want to come here must serve in our armed forces for x amount of years and can bring two to four family members h…

Importing immigrants directly into the military sounds like a bad idea. I’m guessing many would be less likely to want to lay their lives down for the new country, so drafting them seems like a great way to end up with a bunch of disloyal troops.

Both the Romans and the US had success with immigrants in the military, provided that they were thoroughly mixed. A unit with 35 ethnicities in it usually does not rebel "like one man".

The Roman way started to fail when they moved to the foederati model, where there would be units of, say, only Goths under a Gothic commander. That proved dangerous.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#770

Post by hinkley » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 7:33 PM UTC

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…

This is even showing up a bit in tech now. The number of places that expect some articulation Venn diagram of skill sets is too high.

There are too goddamned many stacks to expect that your best hire is going to already have used everything you’re using. There are people who have used everything, but you’re mostly going to be hiring flakes if you look for those, not Right Tool for the Job types.