With Trump destroying international trade and ensuring economic collapse at home, he is creating the exact opposite of the conditions that encourage “re-industrialization”. There’s no market.
No company will build factories for products no one will buy. Of course Trump and his allies will never admit that to themselves because they despise the common people as subhuman parasites, and therefore it’s ideologically and emotionally unacceptable to treat the wages and product consumption of the non-wealthy as mattering.
True. But I once attended a talk by someone in the consumer electronics industry, and he asserted that iPhones could not be made in the U.S., even if wages were not an issue. He said (my paraphrasing), “The U.S. is simply not set up to make iPhones, for example. It just can’t be done here, and it’s not only because of wage differences (though that is a factor). Consumer electronics like iPhones are made in huge factories employing thousands of workers who live in dormitories, and the robot-like mindset of the workers - which I’m convinced is necessary for that type of work - simply does not exist here.”
I started in the CE industry in 2007, and at the time, my company was in the process of moving our (television set-top boxes) manufacturing from Mexico to China, and before I moved to another job in 2009, we were already looking at Vietnam as the next stop.
I got to see some of the plants in China, and watched one woman on the line, picking some resistor out of a bin and placing it on the board, dozens of times a minute, 10 hours a day. This was a relatively small plant and line, but I also saw a giant Foxconn facility where literally 100s of thousands of people worked, and lived. The hosts described another factory for which the compound had its own farm for food, fire company, and other self-sustaining infrastructure to support the workforce. This was the era of nets to catch folks who hurled themselves off the buildings in despair.
One of the most memorable things was them telling us that they always have issues right after CNY, because after a few years of this people get sick of the pace and never come back from visiting their villages (they were proud to have people from every province in their workforce).
I don’t see that model working out here in the US.
Henry Ford had a problem with people quitting because the work was so incredibly boring. He raised wages and shortened hours to address that issue and reduce turnover. I’m not saying money/hours could absolutely definitely fix the problem of retaining a work force in the face of very boring work, but it has worked at times in the past. Also, I think this is exactly the sort of task that people would really want to automate. Which wouldn’t increase employment (directly, at least - don’t discount knock-on effects), I admit.
Though I am not talking about whether it makes most financial sense to do these things. Just pushing back on the idea it’s impossible or “requires a robot-like mindset.”
Yeah, most of the components were attached to the boards via machines, but for some reason, some had to be manually placed. And tons of it - the casting of the back cover of iPhones, and the bending of sheet metal into cabinets for large routers and stuff, was being done by robots, even back then. It was amazing to see.
Is our lifestyle sustainable without a solid workforce producing goods, or does it not matter where they are produced as long as we are still making money.
When you say “our lifestyle” what is it that you mean? Simple GDP comparison, or something a little more nebulous? For example, there are security implications of failing to maintain a manufacturing base for the production of ordnance.
You might want to take a look at a blog post from the St. Louis Federal Reserve bank that asks if the decline in manufacturing employment is economically normal.
US manufacturing has progressively gained productivity and gone up the value chain (there’s another blog post that shows that). The result is that less than 10% of our workforce is now engaged in manufacturing activity, but those workers are producing more than they have since 2008 (though there is a plateau in what had been a mostly-ascending trend before then).
Other nations at the same stage of development show similar trends. Paul Krugman pointed out today that Germany, a net manufacturing exporter and nation that runs a trade surplus, has seen manufacturing employment decline by almost half over the last 50 years. Heck, China’s manufacturing employment declined from 2011-2015, and likely has only increased slowly since then because of China’s attempts to keep the yuan weak so that their exports are competitive against other countries coming up the value chain, like Vietnam.
Looking into it more, the % of US GDP devoted to manufacturing was already extremely high before WW2.
It was already around 25% of GDP before WW2. All they had to do was change what they manufactured. They didn’t have to build new factories from scratch.
Also the % of GDP devoted to manufacturing has dropped from about 28% of GDP in the post WW2 era, down to about 10% now. However I don’t know if thats because we are manufacturing less, or if its because our economy is bigger and we devote more of our bigger economy to service industries.
This article implies we are manufacturing as much as we were in the post WW2 era. Its just that manufactured goods have gotten cheaper so they are a smaller % of GDP.
Where is that chart from? (I see it’s from Wikimedia, but I mean what the source of the data is.) I don’t understand how manufacturing could be 20+% of GDP before 1820.
Yeah, sadly thats the only chart I could find of pre-WW2 US manufacturing.
I would not trust that source. I tried running it through google image search, but I still can’t find where the values come from.
Also I’m wondering if by manufacturing they meant things like carpenter, cobbler, weaver, leather maker, blacksmith, etc in a pre industrial civilization.
I used to go to AT&T board assembly factories, and even 25 years ago there were many components too small to be placed by hand. A big Silicon Valley company said in a presentation that they did not automate a lot of factories in SE Asia because people were cheaper than depreciation on machines. Not sure if that is still true, I doubt it, and definitely not true in the US.
Worse, a lot - perhaps most - board assembly is done by a few big contract manufacturers. Board assembly operations once done in house aren’t any more. They are big enough to automate.
Plus, all the American engineers I used to work with are now retired or dead. Maybe the government can encourage foreign engineers to come here.
Oh, wait.
Now, bringing semiconductor manufacturing back home is a good thing, but notice Biden didn’t raise tariffs and expect new plants to come on line in a month.
I agree madness is not a good word for this. How about bull moose lunacy?
I mean, have you asked yourself that question? Are you willing to pay 25% for goods just for the peace of mind of knowing they were made in the US?
Our current lifestyle exists because markets are able to discover a good balance of prices and wages on the global market. If we try to onshore everthing because of um… reasons… then the economy will be worse for it. The wages will be higher (good) which will also lead to higher prices (bad) and lower exports (also bad).
Command economies are proven to be a bad idea. They’re only getting a resurgence now because it’s now obvious that Democrats run the economy better than Republicans. Hence Repubs have to pretend there’s some ticking time bomb hiding in the economy Biden built, and they’re determined to prove it by detonating it. (Debt, dependence on foreign industry, “excessive entitlements”, “unsustainable stimulus”). Musk is trying to crash the airplane to prove his theory that the airplane shouldn’t be able to fly.
All of it is fearmongering to cover the fact that Repubs loot and ruin the economy every time they get control of it. It’s pure hogwash. It’s fine that Americans have higher paying tech jobs while other countries produce cheaper steel and industrial widgets. That is (or was going to be) our reward for being a more advanced economy with better educated workers. Republicans don’t want us to enjoy the fruits of a modern sophisticated economy, they want us back in the mines and factories, I guess because they feel that class of worker is easier to control and dominate.
One of my pet peeves with this discussion (not THIS one, the one around US manufacturing and manufacturing jobs) is how ill informed most people are.
The US is still a manufacturing powerhouse. But it will never make sense to manufacture fidget spinners and iphones here. Jet engines and gas turbines? Sure.
Also, factories used to be like Ford’s River Rouge plant. At it’s peak, that one factory employed 100,000 people. Because nothing was automated. Today, GM’s Arlington Heights plant (chosen at random) employs 5000.
Finally, a lot of manufacturing today is closer to computer programming. Running CNC machines and the like. These aren’t the jobs for a “strong back and weak mind” they once were.
I agree with you, mostly. As you mention the high-skill-end and automation (very worth mentioning), I’d also like to mention that factory work is also bifurcated. You mention the “strong back and weak mind” era, but I think people mostly hearken back to the era of the factory jobs being semi-skilled work. Now there is a lot more tendency to either high skilled or low skilled, IMO. Automation means that some jobs that used to require skills now don’t (and, of course, require fewer workers), and those jobs pay like you’d expect jobs that take six hours training to pay.
This is something that actually came up when I was reading about WW2 (another thing brought up in this thread) and airframe manufacturing. There was huge modernization in general and specific response to women in the factory. One thing that was brought up was operating equipment to do heavier work instead of muscle power. Another was just how much more automation and breaking it down into simpler tasks happened (this was also to speed up production, of course). So after the war, when men came back, they found their skills of less use, even though they had jobs to go back to - the strong backs were less needed and the higher skill was also less needed. Actually, I’ve also seen that by the end of the 1956, white collar workers outnumbered blue collar ones in the US, despite our perception of the era as overwhelmingly factory work.
It’s actually worse than that. IMO It is deliberate conscious vandalism.
They are deliberately actively destroying the world trading system and the US economy. Because in the end, they will be the Lord over the flies. Or because in the end, the upside of money they’re being paid by Putin looms larger in their mind than does the wreckage of the USA.
Or because like Trump, they hate the idea of any arrangement where someone else benefits. They don’t want trade and employees, they want tribute and slave labor.
