That manufacturing process is the result of bean counters determining it's a waste to ship boxed products that are 50% air overseas in a container. Ship the broken down components instead with denser packing and have a minimum wage worker bolt it together stateside. It isn't an enlightened return to domestic production.
American manufacturing looks like low-wage workers making $12 an hour (a few years ago) making windshields. A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products. Basically what the Chinese are continually getting better at.
There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator. This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.
> A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products.
So like Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA Tencor? The global leaders in semiconductor machinery are predominantly American, with honorable mentions for the Japanese (Tokyo Electron, Dainippon Screen) and Dutch (ASML, ASMI).
Most of the equipment is made stateside, e.g. Applied Materials manufacturing is in Austin.
> America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator.
The "America is doomed!" rhetoric is older than the hills and, while we are in decline as the global hegemon, economically we are still as vibrant as ever. Last year KLA Tencor opened a second headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan... not in China.
The second sentence has nothing to do with the first and is universally true. Everyone, regardless of the state they are currently in or their current trajectory, should invest in the future of engineering.
The first statement is an extraordinary claim for which extraordinary proof is required (especially as a direct response to a post explaining how the opposite is true).
> There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids,
Working on factory production lines does not require a bachelor's degree. Germany isn't assembling cheap power tools either. One reason is that labor costs are too high, and requiring low skill jobs have a college degree does the opposite of helping that.
> let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator.
This isn't true. USA has some of the best EEs and programmers in the world.
> This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.
TSMC is sending recent American college graduates to Taiwan for 12-18 months of internship/training, in preparation for work at the TSMC fab in Phoenix, AZ, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29676073
That’s pretty short for actual education on those kinds of processes, sounds like they have found the raw engineering talent they need at US universities. They then send them for a short stint in Taiwan to learn “the TSMC way” and then send them back.
I don't know if that's a fair assessment, really. While it's not economically viable to pay American wages to put drills together, we do make things like jet engines and CNC machines here. The complexity has to be high enough to justify the high cost of labor. If you can build something from raw materials in your garage over the weekend, then it's probably not worth paying someone's mortgage, health insurance, and 401(k) to get it done.
> A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products.
I didn’t say they opposed free college. I said the folks you would expect to support free college (those left of center) have been co-opted by a version of “anti-racism” that treats acknowledging civilizational competition with China as “racist.” There’s lots of people who support free college(or at least claim to)—but not as a means to rebuild the American industrial base and get jobs back from China. They support free college, but also oppose tariffs and other America first policies.
What's the point of this apparent straw man? The reason the US can't / doesn't / shouldn't (not sure which, but presume you're suggesting at least one of those otherwise your comment's irrelevant) provide free college is because too many people who support they policy also support continued collaboration with China?
I don't see how that's relavent even if we set aside nuances and just agree for the sake of this topic to say that whatever your view on how relations with China should or shouldn't be is the right one.
edit: oh my bad it's not a straw man, you did create a link in your first comment it was just so tenuous I'd forgotten it.
> Because the folks who would ordinarily be advocating for free community college don’t want kids to go to school to learn those things.
So it's the fault of the left wing for not being left wing enough?
> So it's the fault of the left wing for not being left wing enough?
It’s the fault of the left wing for abandoning its traditional working class base to advance the interests of its elite donor class, which increasingly benefits from globalism.
Societies have groups with conflicting interests, and political parties represent those groups. Right wing groups will exist, and should exist, to represent the interests of businesses and upper classes. That’s not a problem. It’s a problem when left wing groups are co-opted by ideologies that causes them to turn on the working class people they are supposed to represent.
I did actually have a lady yelling at me once at a street fair because one of our products had a "Made in the USA" tag on it. Called us imperialists. Yes those people are out there. (I'm in the US btw)
In a big enough society you can almost always find someone who has some fringe belief. If you had this once a week it could be relevant. But once? Doesn't reach the relevance threshold for policy discussions.
I didn’t say everyone who supports free community college also thinks rebuilding the industrial base and trade wars with China are white supremacy. But there are enough people who do to divide the coalition and render it ineffectual.
On your side of the argument, you've marshaled Bryce Covert, contributing writer for The New Republic (I read it twice and I still don't know what that Zeitlin article was trying to say).
On my side of the argument, I have the President of the United States of America, and one of his first executive actions:
This is not a good hill to die on. Everybody thinks made-in-America is a good thing. Republicans like it. Democrats like it. Liberals like it, conservatives like it.
There are tax implications as well when shipping fully assembled products. The big auto manufacturers have done this to avoid tariffs on vehicle imports.
1. Western companies moves production of components to China.
2. Chinese companies becomes good enough to produce their own products.
3. Western companies starts rebranding Chinese products.
4. Chinese companies buy western companies.
5. Chinese companies open factories in western countries.
Manufacturing isn't industry in itself and the growth of industry is orders of magnitude more in China. Most people just have no idea how supply chains work or how many R&D centers are opening up elsewhere. Many western countries are no longer great industrial economies but still far from real knowledge economies. Western countries don't really have the infrastructure, housing or education necessary and increasingly not alternative ways of competing either like creativity, influence or equality.
There is a documentary called "American Factory". It isn't the best but it is something.
The video can be found when one looks around some.
Tek, under the leadership of Howard Vollum, literally built the whole region around it up. People could walk in off the streets and end up designing products, in sales, even doing a startup that Tek would help to fund.
I am a product of that culture, and learned a freaking ton from that place and the people who were in and around it.
When Howard Died, the private equity game chopped it all up and it's a shadow of what it once was.
Investments in the local people, partnering with schools, other manufacturers, all add up.
> Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?
They aren't, that's the point. Countries like China, Japan and South Korea are very good at pulling everyone in the same direction by following rules, having hierarchies, exchanging favors, working long hours, handing out punishments and whatnot. Far better than any western country could because we aren't at that point in time (and maybe Japan isn't now either). What they end up lacking is things like creativity. The problem is that western countries are also increasingly lacking opportunities to exercise creativity. There is few ways these days to in good faith drop out of school and crash on someones couch to do something else you rather want. Which has to some extent been the foundation of new industries.
Creativity isn’t something that just spontaneously appears or flourishes. It requires an appropriate environment. Most of the great achievements of the ancient Greeks happened in a fifty to hundred year span of time.
Much of today’s population’s drive is dissipated into online entertainment.
Solar PV, battery technologies, and smart phone transaction systems are areas where China is playing a leading role. They are competitive in EVs and Automated Vehicles. I'm sure there are others.
The US isn't even in the game any more for many consumer products.
Those rankings are for 15 yr olds. The US definitely is #1 when it comes to high-end university schooling.
Even among high schools and prep schools the nation-wide US average might be mediocre in public schools but when it comes to the higher-end private schools the US is still easily #1
Who does better than the “West” at non-elite education then? Surely non-elite must include a lot of people who never go to university. The PISA or TIMMS rankings are about as good a ranking of those as you’re going to get.
> Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?
As I see it, Asian economies like India, China, Japan, South Korea offer a reasonable competition to Western economies today.
1. Samsung is a very viable competitor to Apple in hand held + wearables creative space.
2. Indian fin-tech solutions IMO today are some of the best in the world. All I need is a phone to shop for things (from buying a car to paying for parking) and have not used a credit/debit card for a year now (I live in India). Same in Indian edu-tech space. A lot of kids have quit school and are learning at home. Full time. I have not seen this happen anywhere before.
3. Toyota's are way more reliable than BMW's, Audi's and Ford's.
4. TSMC vs Intel is another good example.
I foresee a lot of innovation happening in Asia right now to go global in this and next decade.
Um, TSMC sources many parts which are made exclusively in America. The machines TSMC uses for all of its highest end semiconductor work come from a company called ASML which whilst being a Dutch company sources many of its most sophisticated parts from the U.S. and Europe. But before we bother to argue about what is and is not a knowledge economy, humor me this one possibility.
Perhaps there is no such thing as a "knowledge" economy. At least not in a mass sense. Maybe instead the design knowledge which will drive automation is derivable from only a fraction of the population. That is only a small fraction of the population is capable or necessary for producing this knowledge. Perhpas the Utopia in which every child achieves a doctorate in engineering, medicine, etc was just a fantasy.
Perhaps the people who most perpetrated this story were motivated to. Because they were either complicit in the dismantling of the West's lower middle class economy or perhaps because they were apologists of untrestrained "free markets" and they needed a way to square their dogma without seeming cruel.
Perhaps the consequences of globalization minus the dogmatic fantasy of "everyone will be educated into being einstein" left the nagging uncomfortable suspicion that growth had its limits and someday we would have to admit that the only answer to making sure an equitable portion of wealth made its way into everyone's pockets wasn't an endless growth, every mom blasting their womb with Bach, an STM on every crib nerdocracy but instead gasp dare I say it? Redistribution!?
> admit that the only answer to making sure an equitable portion of wealth made its way into everyone's pockets
This is the key difference between the two ideologies. One side believes equity should be distributed equally regardless of achievement, the other believes equity distribution is directly correlated to productive measures of success.
"From those with the greatest ability, to those with the greatest need."
> One side believes equity should be distributed equally regardless of achievement
I'm not sure this is true. I think a lot of people including economics professors like to consider themselves fairly humanistic. And I think the idea of a mass of people permanently living near or below poverty bothers them.
And I think they take it somewhat for granted that their favorite economic theory has in our recent past effectively provided a middle class standard of living for many people. But when we start talking about dismantling the mechanisms which have created the large middle class and how it could decrease quality of life and increase poverty, they don't offer an honest assessment based on the fundamentals of their theory. That would be to say, "well yes such changes may induce pverty here."
Instead there is kind of a shrug. We'll become a service economy, nevermind making a comparison of the quality of the new service jobs against those being transplanted.
Or we'll become a knowledge economy, the great brain of global capital. Again never really contending with the question of whether that is even possible.
This allows them in my opinion to advocate politicies which harm people whilst shrugging off any guilt because instinctively they know to willfully empoverish people is wrong. It is this dishonesty that bothers me.
My gripe is not with those advocating against redistribution. Though my personal politics are for a mass ownership of property in some regard. My gripe is with people who have setup what might be a fiction (maybe it could be real too) as the answer to making choices which create suffering. And then for that image to have become a dogma we all expected to accept without questioning its basis in reality.
I'm willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I come from a working class background. I've known a lot of working class people over the years and the idea that most or even many of them are going to pivot into IT or what have you is just nonsense. The vast majority have pivoted into low paid service work without much social insurance of any kind.
Or avoiding duties. Putting the parts together is what drives up the value, but if you import the constituent parts and assemble domestically, the manufacturer will spend much less in duties.
And then you can export that Made in USA thing to Mexico or Canada and probably other places duty free.
