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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

#981

Post by justinclift »

SR2Z wrote: post #773
imglorp wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also fundamental tech and a research pipeline supporting new ones. There are numerous examples of whole competencies were transferred to a foreign partner, leaving only sales and marketing in the US. TV's for example, gone by 2000, leaving only a swirl of patent walls to further prevent them from coming back. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2014/10/22/america... And research? DEC WRL, Bell Labs, Xerox…

Corporate research spending is nearly $1T/yr. Yes, corporations have a lower risk tolerance than the government, but that's not always a bad thing.

I kind of wonder how much of that money being reported is really research vs gamed numbers? eg for taxation claim purposes and things along those lines.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#982

Post by gsf_emergency »

vlovich123 wrote: post #939
giancarlostoro wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat. I think R&D for tax reasons n…

One reason Bell Labs is remembered so fondly for the innovations is that they really only benefited the broader world once Bell was broken up. I’ll also challenge the assumption that these companies only do R&D if it’s immediately profitable. For example, Microsoft and Google both are investing heavily in quantum computers despite the fact that it’s unclear that that is a profitable endeavor (or profitable to be the…

[I wish HN could host more long-running threads like SO as these topics require substantial back & forth]

Lasers? Information theory? Transistors?? Silicon tech in general? If you think hype-&-wishful-thinking-driven Google now or ever can be compared with Bell Labs.. you might just be a recent immigrant. The atmosphere at BL, I'm told, was way different. More an indefinite excitement (what can we do with quantum??) rather than the definite, closely guarded, superstition of Thiel ("quantum computing is the next big secret!!")

(Or maybe it's just that old subdued Jewish atheism of the East Coast vs the neurotic ambitious religiosity of California!)

I'm less biased against your low-hanging fruit framework.. still, I suspect that a rival framework based on the minimal attention paid to teaching undergrads at American universities would surpass it. I.e. materials science knowledge base has been spreading only about as quickly as the Baumol cost disease

2 other issues,

Even if there are low-hanging fruits in STEMM (of which I think there are still aplenty), infotech and especially advertising fruits are thought to be strewn all over the floor.

With AI, both thinkers & doers get into this weird emo haze of hubris+laziness, expecting neuro-furniture rearrangement to turn magically into paradigm shifts

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#983

Post by hcknwscommenter »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #481
toomuchtodo wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to pay everyone a living wage, regardless of job, and disconnect healthcare from employment. Lots of inertia against those ideas though. So, instead, "good manufacturing jobs" is the parroted point. Any job is a good job if you can live off of it. (tariffs do nothing to address labor shortages in healthcare, teaching, and other domestic service based sectors, for example)

That’s a solution of human rights and is orthogonal to becoming competitive to China. No question human rights needs to be fulfilled and we need to pay people living wages. But the conversation here has he orthogonal goal of being competitive with China as well. I can assure you just paying everyone living wages is one of the main reasons why we are not competitive with China. It’s the main reason why China is beatin…

"What tariffs do is they allow us to pay people living wages and sell expensive products and still be competitive because products from China are tariffed to be the same price."

Tariffs don't do that necessarily. Maybe a tariff applied to a specific strategically important product or industry, could achieve that. Basically you are then subsidizing an important sector of the economy in a way that is economically inefficient and will make us all poorer in favor of some other interest like national security. The kinds of tariffs applied by the Trump administration cannot even achieve price competitiveness because price is nowhere in their extremely dumb equation. They cannot achieve national security because they are applied to inputs and outputs. They cannot achieve anything useful. They can only make us all poorer.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#984

Post by kermatt »

vlovich123 wrote: post #939
giancarlostoro wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat. I think R&D for tax reasons n…

One reason Bell Labs is remembered so fondly for the innovations is that they really only benefited the broader world once Bell was broken up. I’ll also challenge the assumption that these companies only do R&D if it’s immediately profitable. For example, Microsoft and Google both are investing heavily in quantum computers despite the fact that it’s unclear that that is a profitable endeavor (or profitable to be the…

Microsoft and Google are not representative of most companies.

They have to invest in the innovation. Investor returns for most other companies are based on copy and paste.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#985

Post by toomuchtodo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #286
digikata wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the mistake here is the model of low-skill/high-skill labor is not a useful distinction. Manufacturing is high skill period, however there are low-infrastructure and high-infrastructure products and factories. The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor in product costs. By bypassing investment in US manufacturing skills and infra, the US sat itself on the sidelines for the abili…

The solution is to pay everyone a living wage, regardless of job, and disconnect healthcare from employment. Lots of inertia against those ideas though. So, instead, "good manufacturing jobs" is the parroted point. Any job is a good job if you can live off of it. (tariffs do nothing to address labor shortages in healthcare, teaching, and other domestic service based sectors, for example)

Citation:

Trying to “Bring Back” Manufacturing Jobs Is a Fool’s Errand - https://www.cato.org/blog/trying-bring-back-manufacturing-jo... - April 21st, 2025

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#986

Post by RecycledEle »

I understand his economic arguments.

Let me make a national security argument: China will move against Taiwan. Chinese ambitions do not stop there. They want Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and many more nations as their new territories.

We saw international trade cut off in WW1 and again in WW2. It will happen again, and soon.

We are better off with an incremental step-down in trade from tariffs than a sudden cut-off. That is what Donald Trump's tariffs are doing.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#987

Post by mbs159 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #281
margorczynski wrote: post #133

Still, this kind of outsourcing of manufacturing (or even more food production) puts the US in an incredibly uncomfortable position, especially that China is its main geopolitical enemy. What if a war erupts? Suddenly the US cannot produce a lot of essential stuff - I think Covid was a good example of that happening. Of course the question is can this be done and what will be the price if so.

What if a war erupts? I believe we should scale up manufacturing in the US for different reasons. But I'm also a realist. If war erupts between China and the US, then anyone in the US or China still alive 4 weeks after the start of hostilities will have more pressing concerns than worrying about where things are manufactured. Again, just the reality. We shouldn't plan on the basis of end of the world scenarios. Rathe…

> But I'm also a realist.

A realist would prepare for the worst

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#988

Post by bilbo0s »

mbs159 wrote: post #987
bilbo0s wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if a war erupts? I believe we should scale up manufacturing in the US for different reasons. But I'm also a realist. If war erupts between China and the US, then anyone in the US or China still alive 4 weeks after the start of hostilities will have more pressing concerns than worrying about where things are manufactured. Again, just the reality. We shouldn't plan on the basis of end of the world scenarios. Rathe…

> But I'm also a realist. A realist would prepare for the worst

The worst is us not being here anymore.

No real need for us to make economic or investment preparations for that eventuality. It does us no good in the life we do have to say, "Well, I can't invest in the US because in the worst case, non of our secret weapons function fully, Russia blows us away, and all my real estate and manufacturing investments go up in smoke." We'd sit around never improving anything, because it will all go away in the worst case.

Best to assume it won't go away because we won't go to war with Russia or China, (or even maybe the EU nowadays? Who knows?). Anyway, we should make investment decisions on the "we aren't gonna go to war" basis. If war happens, well, we're dead and all the investments are destroyed anyway so.. yeah.. nothing you can do. Can't even get out of the continental US in 15 minutes, so you can't even save yourself let alone your investments.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#989

Post by gsf_emergency »

kermatt wrote: post #984
vlovich123 wrote: post #939

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason Bell Labs is remembered so fondly for the innovations is that they really only benefited the broader world once Bell was broken up. I’ll also challenge the assumption that these companies only do R&D if it’s immediately profitable. For example, Microsoft and Google both are investing heavily in quantum computers despite the fact that it’s unclear that that is a profitable endeavor (or profitable to be the…

Microsoft and Google are not representative of most companies. They have to invest in the innovation. Investor returns for most other companies are based on copy and paste.

What about Meta^W Amazon*.. is their innovation too directed/constrained/product-based?

(I regret to inform you that HN are still withholding my comment upvote privileges)

*Because the gender of their founder is Kind Inventor

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#990

Post by gsf_emergency »

justinclift wrote: post #981
SR2Z wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate research spending is nearly $1T/yr. Yes, corporations have a lower risk tolerance than the government, but that's not always a bad thing.

I kind of wonder how much of that money being reported is really research vs gamed numbers? eg for taxation claim purposes and things along those lines.

Especially interested in data from Alphabet (e.g., from ongoing legal battles?)

(I'd assume Amazon & Microsoft are too clever, too well-run for their own good/our eptification)

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