Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The same problem exists for creating software. Massive software projects tend to be unimpressive to people not familiar with the IT industry because they don't comprehend the scale or fundamental difficulties in computer science that were overcome to accomplish something.
Compare airplanes and wifi on airplanes. Most people are impressed by an A380, but they couldn't give two shits about the incredible technology behind offering wifi 5 miles above the Atlantic ocean at 700MPH ground speed. They just trivialize it by saying, "yeah, it comes from that little radio".
http://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Pathways-...
Since the appropriate definition of inter-generational mobility depends upon one’s normative objective, we characterize the copula and marginal distributions separately in this paper."
It would appear we have different normative objectives.
"Based on all of these measures, we find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s.
"Although these rank-based measures of mobility have remained stable, income inequality increased over time in our sample, consistent with prior work. Hence, the consequences of the "birth lottery"---the parents to whom a child is born---are larger today than in the past. A useful visual analogy is to envision the income distribution as a ladder, with each percentile representing a different rung. The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart (inequality has increased), but children’s chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed (rank-based mobility has remained stable).
...
"Together, these two facts can be used to construct various measures of mobility. For example, if one defines mobility based on relative positions in the income distribution---e.g., a child’s prospects of rising from the bottom to the top quintile---then intergenerational mobility has remained unchanged in recent decades. If instead one defines mobility based on the probability that a child from a low-income family (e.g., the bottom 20 percent) reaches a fixed upper-income threshold (e.g., $100,000), then mobility has increased because of the increase in inequality. However, the increase in inequality has also magnified the difference in expected incomes between children born to low- (e.g., bottom-quintile) versus high- (top-quintile) income families. In this sense, mobility has fallen because a child’s income depends more heavily on her parents’ position in the income distribution today than in the past."
If that is too theoretic, consider the analogy of a lottery where one group of children win automatically and an other group has say a 10% chance of winning during their life. Increasing the prize (i.e. a rise in inequity among classes) serves only to worsens the situation not only for the median and average members but the vast bulk of the lower class since those who don't rise (the vast majority) are now even worse off relatively.
Or indeed by your logic simply raising the salary of a CEO by a massive amount also raises the "absolute mobility" of all other employees
So unless mobility also raises by at least a corresponding amount, any worsening of inequality at birth will only worsen the situation by every meaningful standard. And even then it is probably a bad idea.
Yes. If I had a 1% chance of being the CEO and having my income go from $100k to $1M, my expected payoff was $900k x 1% = $9k. If my income stays at $100k but the CEO income goes to $10M, and my odds of being the CEO stay at 1%, my expected payoff is $9.9M x 1% = 99k.
My situation has not been worsened and has a possibility of being improved.
You seem to think it somehow makes me worse off if my CEO makes more money. Can you explain? Note that I'm not a person prone to envy.
Although in the CEO's case, often no further harm is done, if half of a population has a massive increase in wealth while the other half does not then then poorer half must compete for limited resources with a group that will not only drive prices up but can now purchase assets as a form of rent seeking. So in fact, greater inequality acts as currency devaluation for the disadvantaged group.
The CEO example was not meant to cause unjustified envy but to show that according to your logic, instead of ever giving employees a raise you could simply give all raises to the CEO and tell employees that by cost benefit analysis the effect is the same, that they are better off.
To put it concretely, from now on, every time you ask for a raise just ask that your boss get that extra compensation instead. I think you will find the effect is not remotely the same.
Or from now on, ask for all of your pay check that exceeds poverty line for chances at a completely fair trillion dollar lottery.
Simple cost benefit multiplication is being erroneously applied in these cases (and often is)
You are not discussing an increase in wealth at all. You are discussing a situation of declining or fixed wealth and monetary inflation. They aren't the same thing.
I agree that we should try to avoid declines in wealth. Luckily wealth has only increased in the US and globally, for folks at the bottom and the top.
Everything I said is unchanged if you replace income with utility(income).
There is a reason people are willing to buy $1 lottery tickets but not $1000 tickets. (hint: a certainty of misery or high chance of death is not compensated by a remote chance of enormous wealth of ever decreasing marginal utility)
You are simply misunderstanding the use cost benefit, I assume because it clashes with some ideological point.
But if you want to buy a one in a million chance for a trillion dollars, I have a bitcoin address you could send a million bucks too.
First of all, it's a textbook exercise in topology to show that any rational decision process must have a utility function (at least for a countably infinite set of choices).
Let me repeat the statement for utility functions. Suppose I have a 1% chance of being CEO and increasing my utility to U(CEO pay) - U(my pay). Suppose this increases to U(10x CEO pay) - U(my pay).
It's simple arithmetic that 0.01 x U(10X CEO pay) + 0.99 x U(my pay) > 0.01 x U(CEO pay) + 0.99 x U(my pay).
Rearranging the arithmetic, this is merely the statement that U(10X CEO pay) > U(CEO pay) - i.e. I'll be happier as a CEO with 10M than with 1M. Do you disagree with this statement?
In the unlikely event you are actually interested in the correct formulation, you start to find the answer here [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility#Quantified_ma...
I work as a technician in aerospace and when I started I had zero experience in this type of manufacturing environment. If I hadn't gotten the opportunity to improve upon my skills while on the job I would most likely still be stuck in a much lower paid and less satisfactory low end retail or service job.
You sound a lot like me professionally haha. I had the same level of experience when I started at the EMS provider I'm with, just doing CAD library stuff and learning as much as I could when requests were light. Graduated to helping out with bits of full board designs like routing/placement, then graduated to full boards eventually. Having both a design team and SMT lines in the back to learn from is invaluable experience that's hard to recreate.
This makes it unusually open to the uncredentialed, if not the unskilled.
Now imagine typical blue collar worker having IQ below 100, who dropped from high school (as they often do) learning advanced technical concepts like network protocols, dozen of JS frameworks, not to mention higher order functions and macros.
That's the issue with technical advancements: there are more and more jobs for people with high IQ and vast knowledge, and less and less jobs for people who can only work with their muscles, not brains.
It can be quite a depressing sight to take a tour at the machine shop floor where machinists sit next to their CNC machines, maybe wiping coolant off of pieces and putting them in boxes, maybe just reading a comic..
I, quite honestly, really struggle to imagine this person. As someone involved in the agriculture industry, I see a lot of blue collar people. They all seem quite intelligent and capable to me. Some I could consider absolute geniuses. Save a small group who have real crippling disabilities, I'm not sure I have ever met a person who I think would struggle with those technical concepts.
It's a time commitment, for sure, but not a particularly difficult undertaking. What I have observed over the years are numerous people who think that this kind of technical work would be an awful way to make a living. That's the real barrier to entry. It is difficult to put in the necessary time when you get absolutely no enjoyment out of it, as difficult as that is for me – and I expect everyone else around here – to understand.
Or maybe I've just lived a sheltered life. The high school completion rate where I live is about 90%, so these people who you say can be identified as high school dropouts are not particularly common to begin with.
Agreed. That's what I meant by "if not the unskilled"
Yeah, but "check out our shiny robot trucks" seems to be an acceptable brag these days. :)
This is the bottom line on American manufacturing:
> From 2000 to 2010, the United States lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, by the government’s calculation. Only 13 percent of those job losses can be explained by trade, according to an analysis by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana. The rest were casualties of automation or the result of tweaks to factory operations that enabled more production with less labor.
> American factories produced more goods last year than ever, by many indications. Yet they did so while employing about 12.3 million workers — roughly the same number as in 2009, when production was roughly three-fourths what it is today.
Most of the jobs that left are never coming back. They didn't go to Mexico or China; they simply disappeared because automation and productivity increases rendered them unnecessary.
If the US sheltered its manufacturing sector from foreign competition, a small number of jobs might come back, but the increased cost of manufacturing things in the US would strongly incentivize companies to automate those jobs away as quickly as possible.
Manufacturing has a powerful political resonance, both in terms of the imagery of hardworking middle-class factory workers and national pride, e.g. "Why don't we make things in this country anymore?" However, I suspect that most politicians who talk about a manufacturing revival understand that it won't really happen.
Whereas service jobs seem more finite. There is only a finite demand for burgers or shelf stockers, unless you increase the population. I really don't understand how a mostly service based economy is sustainable.
In any case, the service based jobs are just as vulnerable to automation. There are already a number of prototype burger making robots, for instance.
there aren't a finite number of factories
That's even before you consider service industries that create intellectual property which scale with global laziness and boredom, or the finance industry which provides services that scale with global economic activity, rather than local population.
I'm not sure the quantity of goods is limited either. Looking at a supermarket today, the diversity of goods for so many niche purposes is incredible. And the internet has increased it an order of magnitude more.
Would they do it every single year if the furniture and appliances got cheap enough? IMO, yes.
There absolutely is a finite number of factories.
There's probably even a finite, though perhaps quite large, limit on the number of factories that can exist (at least, within Earth's future light cone.)
That doesn't help either. If you are increasing population without that population having wealth (and generally the wealthier you are the fewer kids you have) you dilute the distributed wealth of the poor to the point where they no longer have the economic influence to warrant hiring shelf stockers or burger flippers because they have no money.
> There are already a number of prototype burger making robots, for instance.
The automation of service is not coming in the form of robots doing a service workers job, its computers obsoleting the service. It is the same thing trying to make the "perfect" veggie burger vs learning to love naturally vegan dishes.
It is companies like Amazon that are displacing service workers by the thousands. There is so much potential revenue to be made and costs to be saved by having a wholly automated supply chain, and eventually you are having your burgers air dropped on demand by drone rather than having to go anywhere in a self driving taxi to get the burger. The logistics of service will... are... changing fundamentally, constantly, every day, progressing towards those eventualities.
It is not a problem tax rates or "American grit" solve. It requires a rethinking of your economic system when you finally accept reality that swathes of productive gains are not being made by the sweat of a single human being, at which point the fruits of those labors are no longer compatible with traditional laissez faire capitalism.
They both share the same limitation at the end of the day. At the end, the human being is relatively static. You can sell widget and services that free more of his time, and then you can sell widget and services that occupy that free time, maybe at a stretch you can sell him something to free the time occupied by other stuff he bought, but there is a limit at 24 hours attention span per human.
Not really. It's built on manufacturing base. You need to 'service' something.
I'm pretty sure that people who aren't members of the "rich upper classes" do make use of most of those services. To take just one as an example, nail salons are actually more common in the poorer parts of town in most cities I've been in.
Fireworks booths, Halloween shops, frozen yogurt franchises, "escape game" franchises, "curves" gyms targeted towards women, edible fruit arranged like flowers...a lot of service jobs have very short shelf lives, and can really only have one or two in a town.
More importantly, manufactured goods can be exported much more easily to a growing global consumer base than services (other than software) that are almost always limited locally or regionally.
It may be a generational thing, but I just don't see people owning or wanting to own as much stuff as the generation before. A desk full of organization tools like a rolodex, card holder, pencils and notebooks just doesn't exist anymore.
These items are also harder to produce and have, at least in my eyes, shorter product life
Monitors are newer, but you still see analog VGA ports and in TV, composite connectors.
It is the new digital interfaces that face obsolescence.
Anyway, a 'service economy' doesn't mean unskilled drones working in back-of-house. It means having a substantial professional class.
Not sure I agree. At the moment, I'm buying all the goods I reasonably want. Sure I might want to replace some of my cheap goods with expensive goods or some of my old goods new goods, but on the whole I don't really want to consume more goods.
On the other hand, I can easily think of dozens of services I would either start consuming, or would consume a lot more of, if they existed at an acceptable convenience and price point. The problem, as I can tell from my phrasing, is creating service jobs at a salary level that people can live on.
The thought that maybe some of them don't understand that is what scares me the most.
You only have to look at their opinions on "right to work" laws to see whose side they're batting for (not employees).
Automation is simply being used as a scapegoat and a political justification for keeping trade policies that export jobs in place.
>Manufacturing has a powerful political resonance,
Manufacturing ecosystems take decades to fully destroy and decades to fully rebuild. The flow of goods on container ships can be halted overnight - which has happened before and will happen again.
There's a country that begins with Z and a country that begins with V that enacted policies that deliberately sabotaged their local industrial and agricultural base and assumed they could always just import what they needed. Spoiler alert: it didn't end well for either of them.
You need to back up statements like this. Contradicting actual evidence with figures pulled from your ass isn't going to fly here.
The rage of the blue-collar masses is misplaced. It belongs with engineers, STEM people, operations research, Taylorist management. Globalism isn't the architect of their fate. We are.
Want enough work to go around? Ban the last 100 years of agricultural development. That'll create all the jobs you could possibly want, real fast.
Except then you'all find out that more work to go around is a wrong thing to want.
(I would love to suggest something, unfortunately, I have zero ideas, and not sure where to get any ideas, frankly.)
The boomers may have had a higher employment rate, but they weren't design consultants and business analysts and so forth.
And for a lot of people on the autistic spectrum, a factory production line type job might actually be somewhat enjoyable and well tailored for their strengths. Doesn't require any creativity, few communication skills are required, doing the same thing for long periods of time is rewarded...
This manifests as whingy articles in the mainstream media which leads to whingy people who enjoy both agreeing and disagreeing with them.
H1Bs are bound to the employer and a transfer costs $1k - $3k in legal fees. There's even an optional premium fee to ensure that it will be processed within two weeks instead of two to six months. Sure the new employer may cover this but it's obviously going to be priced in the salary.
Such a system pressures the employee to stick with their current employer even though it may be a suboptimal choice.
"Macroeconomic benefits" as usually measured by aggregate output measures, clearly not.
Distributional benefits, OTOH... well, not a strong requirement. But...
> As long as some of this wealth is captured for the people, then standard of living can increase.
The challenge is establishing the mechanism for that capture outside of employment. A fairly fundamental premise of the existing economic system is that the prime manner of that capture to provide distributed benefits will be employment, and there is fairly strong resistance (including from the people who would retain the benefits in the absence of employment without some knew capture mechanism) to changes to the structure.
Pretty much. The stuff you buy from China wasn't shipped 3000 miles because they have better robots than us.
That's why they are obsessed with manufacturing. If someone could come up with another industry that does the same thing for unskilled workers, then politicians would back that just as hard.
The sad part is that manufacturing itself no longer pays unskilled workers well. People blame China but it's arguable that automation and machines have taken more jobs.
This is why free college for everyone in the U.S. is a good idea. Our economy is leveling up, and it's time to level up our education too.
This is my thinking as well because this demographic is most likely a swing voter. College educated white collar types most likely have a lifelong party affiliation and don't swing their vote, but this demographic often doesn't as they aren't typically political.
Its easier to blame cheap manufacturing overseas than to admit that our own homegrown automation is to blame here. Everyone pretending automation isn't eating the world is something every politician and every party world-wide seems to have in common, at least or now.
Lastly, there's a puritan ethic at work here. Manufacturing, as well as farming, is hard work that brings tangible and easy to understand results. Politicians can talk about those jobs and farmers with no controversy compared to praising a hedge fund manager or an investment group that created vast amounts of wealth and jobs. Its politically incorrect to praise the wealthier people in society, even though they're the ones responsible for much of the economy. Election season tends to bring out the myth that the economy is run by hard working men in overalls sweating to produce value, when its really run in swanky offices by people engaging in fairly technical disciples.
One of the big problems with democracy or at least the demagogy needed to win an election is that you often can't talk about how things really work as its seen as too elitist, technical, or just confusing. So certain classes of people are seen a virtuous like teachers, farmers, or line workers and anything having to do with big business or finance is instantly vilified. So we have these elaborate lies and strange incentives (fight for manufacturing? why?) to make sure no one gets offended or feels inferior.
The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians are addressing are working from a memory of a time when "men were men", that worked hard in a physical way to produce a physical product; in the memory, these working men didn't think and didn't emote, they produced.
Now, the voter says, men have been "feminized" by being forced out of a productive, provider role where a single income could support the family. Instead, they are placed into a role where they need to express concern, care, and use soft skills instead of physical strength.
And when they want the same pay and security they had before, they are instead told to "learn to code" (or learn whatever, get an education). Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow.
Honest question. Is this a reality or a degrading stereotype?
1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/166490/americans-college-educatio...
This is true, but the fact that there are definitely stigmas around higher education in underprivileged and working class communities in the USA is very much a reality.
I disagree, you find a diverse set of viewpoints on HN, this isn't representative. The fact that a distillation of r/theredpill dogma is the top comment is upsetting to me, but then again, I have come to expect that when the number of comments exceeds the number of upvotes on a story, such stories are more of a lightning rod of politicizing than it is substantial conversation.
Eventually the up/down votes equalizes it out. There are a couple of interesting comments below this that shock discuss the content of the article and probably will take this comment's place.
I have plenty of friends and some non-intermediate family members that have reported that their friends and family actively discouraged continuing their education after highschool for one reason or another. In some cases, reasons like "you'll earn more working an honest trade", and "college debt is a scam" are given (in some cases, these may actually be true). In others, things like "do you think you're better than the rest of us?", "that's for white people", and "only f-gs and liberals go to college" are hurled at those that want to continue their education.
And in many cases, it doesn't even take active discouragement to prevent people from wanting to obtain any higher education. I have relatives that live in very small, rural farming towns that have actively resisted attending anything other than the local 2-year junior college, in part because the people that get 4-year degrees never come back to town. They're convinced that they would be betraying their family and friends by getting educated and finding a better living situation.
My roommate hired him to refinish his deck (He owns the house), and every time my father showed up for work and I was working from home, he was thrilled.
My mother is barely literate, never really attended high school. She always read to me, encouraged me to read, and always made money available to buy books. The only things she cared about was me taking education seriously and not saddling myself down with kids too young (which might have backfired because neither I, or my brothers, have any interest in having children, which makes her sad).
I guess I'm just saying: Have another anecdote to add to your collection. But I'd also say, don't think the GP is wrong. Both attitudes exist obviously.
People from cities exhibit this kind of behavior too, but for some reason no one talks about it as negatively as they talk about staying in your shitty rural town after high school.
We've really fallen as Americans, too eager to stick in one place. 2-3 generations ago many of our ancestors left everything they had in their home country to come here with nothing more than the money in their pockets and shirt on their back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia#As_a_medical_conditi...
Homesickness: An American History by Susan J Matt is a great book about how it existed in America. The song "Home Sweet Home" is banal to us, but was forbidden to be played during the Civil War because it caused homesickness and desertions.They used to hospitalize people suffering from nostalgia. It could be that bad. the past was nothing like the modern rootlessness we have now.
But as far as the "reality" goes, there are certainly personal anecdotes to support it, some about people I personally know.
I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get. If you really want to Make America Great Again, you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more. Easier said than done of course.
Within software, Haskell is the wrong direction. I haven't used it, but it seems like Go aims to make coding simpler. But it's not just programming languages; it includes large scale system design, which currently needs to be reinvented with intense effort at every firm, even repeatedly within the same firm, even within the same product.
I've been out of web dev for a while now, but React's one way state to UI concept actually seems like an amazing simplification.
Maybe but it doesn't matter that much. If some breakthrough in education made it easy for 60% of the population to become good quality coders, it would lower the wages of existing programmers, somewhat increase the pool of working programmers but not give that 60% good jobs.
The type of coding done at Uber, for example, is specifically valuable because it replaces the lower paid labor of other people. We can't all have jobs automating each other out of jobs, now can we?
2) Sure, you need all the hands you can get in the current market. Still, you wouldn't hire a ten thousand new developers tomorrow even if ten thousand people as competent as your most competent lead developers showed up on your doorstep tomorrow.
The tech companies in SV told the Obama administration that if they gave a million more H1Bs to engineers, they'd hire them all. And plenty of them put resources on improving developer tools.
Wouldn't a greater number of coders with lower abilities not work very well? Today's 10x programmers would become 20x or 50x
Just look at SpaceX. It's cool, it's tech and it is most certainly hard material science.
We won't be able to make it with just soft skills and software. Improving our material lives (including not wasting resources) matters.
In the case of SpaceX or similar companies that fall under ITAR or do classified work, meeting those security requirements is an additional hurdle to outsourcing, although automation will still have an impact.
The truth is that wages a worker can earn are bounded at the top by how much value they add. If they are paid more than the value they create they'll be fired (unless they're executives).
A manufacturing line can produce millions of dollars of value with a few dozen workers. This means if the workers organize properly and if they're not undermined by foreign competition then they can potentially capture a lot of value and have high incomes.
The "service" jobs that are replacing them add much less value. A caregiver can only work with one person at a time, and maybe six or eight in a workday. That guarantees the job will be low wage or not done at all.
Our economy used to produce jobs by the tens of millions where an average guy with average ability and a willingness to endure hard work and monotony could buy a house, raise a family, go on the annual vacation to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, have his wife work as much or as little as she wants and eventually retire comfortably. The economy doesn't produce these jobs anymore.
Now we have jobs that are still well compensated but comparatively small in number and highly specialized or jobs that are not and can not provide wages to live the lives people used to have.
Once 3D printing evolves to the point of being suitable to print everyday items it would kill a lot of jobs all across the supply chain the manufacturing industry.
That won't happen any time soon. Sure, you can print household items like a cup, plate, and possibly silverware but so many household things are made out of materials that aren't really 'printable' (a pillow or couch for example) or complicated devices with components (headphones, a can of air freshener, a laptop), manufacturing plays a role in all of those items.
We can actually 3D print a pillow now since we already have printers that can 3D print with memory foam. https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/now-can-3d-print-memory-...
The current high end generation of printers use a combination of lithographic/ultrasound and chemical based process control can produce rigid and flexible materials from the same substrate. e.g. http://carbon3d.com/
And we can print already circuit boards as well as embed wires and conductors in the 3D printing process, we can also 3D print basic components like resistors and capacitors. http://www.kurzweilai.net/3d-printing-basic-electronic-compo...
If you think this ain't happening any time soon, we either have a very different definition of soon or you don't really understand just how far 3D printing and additive manufacturing in general has progressed over the past 5 years alone.
We are considerably closer today to the day where when you need a new pair of headphones you simply walk to a kiosk than to the days when low-skilled labor manufacturing was a major part of western industry.
While this isn't going to be done within 2 years, within a decade it is going to be possible, especially considering that additive manufacturing is already being used by local shops and major companies are pushing for this in order to simplify their supply chain.
The car companies are a very good example of this, Audi and a few others have been investing heavily in additive manufacturing of replacement parts in order to be able to grant their authorized dealers and repair shops the ability to 3D print many parts in house. This means that car companies do not need to continue to manufacture replacement parts for decades and keep old tooling a live or to outsource manufacturing to 3rd parties in order to keep their cars running, this also cuts down the cost of shipping and inventory management considerably.
Many other businesses/industries also are expanding into similar techniques with plumbing, electrical work and HVAC systems being prime candidates and being actively piloted in the field, need a 4" Y connector? simply go to your truck and print one....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Preference_for_a_...
Because when the shit comes to shove and the global economy takes a nosedive or your previous friendly third world manufactures give you the finger, having a "service industry" is worth nothing, but being able to produce the actual shit your businesses design and sell/export, matters.
Of course for the US this might be less so, because they can always force, by diplomacy or might, those developing world manufacturers to comply.
Another question would be why are people like the author of the article not particularly hot for manufacturing?
Because they are upper middle class pundits, have worked all their lives in the culture/media/academic etc industries, and could not care less for lost manufacturing jobs and other such stuff.
That's how we get books about the world being flat, industry doesn't matter, it's all "information" and "creativity" now, from people that could not suffer a day without electricity (and the hard work that goes into producing it), or without their car, etc.
It's a globally integrated supply chain, and cannot be otherwise. There is no way countries are going back to a blast-furnace-to-car vertically integrated manufacturing world. It costs far too much and you couldn't even do it back when Ford tried it. He needed to import rubber, modern cars need to import chips.
The only non-globalised manufacturing chain is defence, which is instead prohibitively expensive.
Manufacturing is popular because it's percieved as a source of blue-collar jobs. Not only has that declined due to automation, but I think that one of the reasons for the decline in Western manufacturing in the first place was union-busting and labour relations issues. Part of the reason Germany has retained its manufacturing reputation is avoiding that failure mode.
If you buy into the philosophy that it is something other than an elaborate global Ponzi scheme.
For whom?
>It's a globally integrated supply chain, and cannot be otherwise. There is no way countries are going back to a blast-furnace-to-car vertically integrated manufacturing world.
The most competitive manufacturing though is "blast-furnace-to-car vertically integrated", just not within the same factory (which it wasn't even in Ford's time as you said) but within the same country. That's why China is so much better at it, because it has the whole manufacturing supply chain next door to the final assembly line. Of course you need materials (rubber, metals, oil, etc) but that's something different and at a lower level than manufacture.
Is China better, or just cheaper, due to starting from a low wage baseline in a blank slate with few environmental or worker protections?
Is it just an advantage from not having yet depleted its natural resources? The UK steel industry was built near iron and coal mines, almost all of which are now closed.
The US still has a lead in things that are heavily automated and meant for domestic consumption, and in super design intensive things- machines with engines, maybe Intel's fabs.
It actually is globalised. Things may be assembled in the US, but many components are imported from France, UK, Germany, Taiwan, etc.
> Manufacturing is popular because it's perceived as a source of blue-collar jobs
Totally agree. I would add that in the case of Germany, the manufacturing of industrial machines is very different in nature and volume from that of consumer products, etc.
The value of stuff made in America reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, even after adjusting for inflation.
It's not that the U.S. doesn't make things anymore, it's that there aren't endless jobs in making things.
From an economic perspective, however, there can be no revival of American manufacturing, because there has been no collapse. Because of automation, there are far fewer jobs in factories. But the value of stuff made in America reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, even after adjusting for inflation. The present moment, in other words, is the most productive in the nation’s history.
If the bottom falls out, the US may find that there are no customers for their comparative luxury goods and no US citizen willing to work for little enough to be competitive with anything else.
I am, of course, an random guy on the internet and my observations are worth slightly less than that, so who knows ;-)
People are disconnected by a lack of jobs that they want to do, jobs that provide tangible value, and need to blame that on something. So generally go with immigration, because it's a problem they can (try) and do something about and it must be that the immigrants who took the jobs.
Truth is the country as a whole decided that they'd outsource those dirty manufacturing jobs to a lower class in another timezone. Without really considering what value they'd provide now that they don't actually make anything anymore.
The country goes into decline, no longer producing anything of value, trying to suck money out of the marketing, economic and other forms of lockin they put in place (many of which would be called "service industries). Slowly, the countries actually doing the manufacturing wake up to the fact that they don't actually need that stuff.
So those politicians speaking to old people in steel towns are misleading them and giving them false hope. Bringing manufacturing back isn't going to do much to reduce unemployment . That seems to be the point of the article.
(There's an aside in Huxley's 'Brave new world' about new sports being invented with elaborate equipment requirements simply to soak up surplus manufacturing capacity)
1. http://www.marketfolly.com/2016/05/stan-druckenmillers-sohn-... 2. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/04/29/dont-bl...
> your previous friendly third world manufactures give you the finger
Countries are not kids on a playground. If a country's economy does a lot of trade with the U.S., cutting off that trade is the last thing they are going to want to do, especially in the midst of a downturn.
Think the government of Venezuela has liked the U.S. over the past 2 decades? But they haven't disliked us enough to stop selling us their oil, or buying our planes and construction equipment.
And, of course, the U.S. today remains one of the top manufacturers in the world. To the extent we are growing services, it is on top of manufacturing, not displacing it.
That said, manufacturing jobs have disappeared--and that's why politicians are obsessed with it. Because they get elected by people who want good jobs, and no one has yet discovered a new industry that will pay millions of high school graduates enough to buy a car and a single-family home, the way manufacturing used to.
But the article even points out that these jobs are not being moved overseas, they are being automated away. Thus, it will be an American manufacture giving you the finger.
> but being able to produce the actual shit your businesses design and sell/export, matters.
Good thing we are producing more "shit" than ever before in history.
> From an economic perspective, however, there can be no revival of American manufacturing, because there has been no collapse. Because of automation, there are far fewer jobs in factories. But the value of stuff made in America reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, even after adjusting for inflation. The present moment, in other words, is the most productive in the nation’s history.
--[T]here can be no revival of American manufacturing, because there has been no collapse. Because of automation, there are far fewer jobs in factories. But the value of stuff made in America reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, even after adjusting for inflation.
--[T]here were 64,000 steelworkers in America last year, and 820,000 home health aides.... Soon, we will be living in the United States of Home Health Aides, yet the candidates keep talking about steelworkers.
Given the opportunity, I think I'd vote for McKinsey, Bain, or BCG to manage the executive branch instead of our current Presidential candidates.
Why not just give them whatever money they ask for and be done with it?
That 14% number was about 50% in 1950, and maybe 90% in 1900. That's how much things have changed.
As for imports, China's government has decided that it is going to reduce its imports from the rest of the world. This is part of the "China 2025" program announced by Li Keqiang in 2015.[2] The US may have to reduce its imports from China to keep up. At most, though, this will add a few percent to manufacturing employment.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm [2] http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/922394.shtml
According to <https://www.minnpost.com/macro-micro-minnesota/2012/02/histo..., manufacturing employment peaked at about 35% in 1950s. In 1900, it was around 25%, with services about 33% and the rest in agriculture. That graph has services employment always outpacing manufacturing (which meshes with my knowledge of US history) and manufacturing only outpacing agriculture around the 1910s, 1920s (which also meshes with my knowledge of US history--agriculture was very labor intensive prior to mechanization).
(Correct MinnPost link: https://www.minnpost.com/macro-micro-minnesota/2012/02/histo...)
I'm picking up a sort of 'gamers are dead' vibe from all this. I wonder if the media considers Gamergate a sort of success story and template for future political discourse? The argument would be that the issues faced by outgroup demographic X are not real, because outgroup demographic X is dying anyway, and is being replaced by ingroup demographic Y, and is also full of misogynists and/or racists and/or basement dwellers and/or rednecks and/or Trump voters.
As supporting evidence, I will note the author just casually slipped in there that steel workers are all white men while service workers are mostly women.
It sucks because they're called on to provide solutions to deep problems, with only the skills of enthusiastic amateurs. Manufacturing solved a lot of problems. It's completely reasonable for an amateur to look at history for past solutions to current problems.
For reference, the us congress has a panel of 700 or so experts in all sorts of fields to help write policy. This is in addition to each congresspersons's staff. There's something on the order of 2000 people available to write legislation. And about 10000 pieces of legislation written. So each potential law gets a few months of effort.
It boils down to a congressperson (probably a lawyer), a few enthusiastic political scientists, and a few economists to shape national policy.
It's not that they don't produce good work. They're smart hardworking people. A trillion dollar budget is probably as difficult to produce as a decent compiler. That's the kind of thing we'll see congress try to slap together right after the election. It's not much different than a team of undergrads trying to get their compiler to pass test cases.
It's not inherently bad, it's that sometimes problems are really hard, and they should probably be handled by experts. We don't have a good way of collectively picking experts, so we pick amateurs and hope for the best.
Now, a politician generally does things to further their political career. They don't research solutions, they're lobbied for them. They do research what they can say to get themselves [re-]elected. They make deals based on their their status and trajectory within their political party, maybe tempered by "the right thing" depending on how much they hold the concept of a public servant. Sure, there's some out there with passion for a particular problem, but that's not the common case behavior.
I say term limits on everything. Eliminate career politicians.
Huge bills are currently put together without one hand knowing what the other is doing, and in practice things like budget are fudged anyway to keep the machine mostly moving.
If career politicians with no real-world knowledge of the represented issues can do this stuff, then a random scattering of people with greater expected slices of real-world experience and fewer expected strings attached can do the same.
Let representatives do everything they normally do but vote. A jury selected from voters in proportion to representatives is convened. The bill sponsors and opponents make their case to the jury. The jury votes.
It might be an unmitigated disaster. But, it would be interesting.
That -- random selection -- was the original, and more advanced than ours, conception of democracy. Not for all posts, mind you.
I think many politicians, despite appearances, actually listen to these expert advisers. It takes a generalist to integrate information from disparate domains of expertise and make a decision. It takes a political expert to establish public support for the decision and shepherd it through various levels of government.
This represents an idealized picture of government, of course, and may not correspond with the reality in any particular country.
It's not hard to imagine and expert proposing something really innovative, that slowly turns into "more manufacturing jobs". Each step dilutes an idea down to something that both sides can understand. The final step is generalists convincing other generalists, politicking. Maybe good parts stick, maybe not.
I have frustrations. Things work ok, i guess. I don't have a grand alternative.
Me neither. It would be better if all sides trusted experts more, but that seems to be the opposite direction from where we're heading. Denouncing experts seems to be a wellspring of political capital these days.
Writing good laws is not entirely unimportant, but it is a much smaller factor. And, as you say, they have experts to help out with that stuff.
In the US, this could easily be mitigated with shorter campaign cycles.
Here's an idea - direct democracy where one can only vote on a topic that he/she has proven a minimal set of competence in. This could be in the form of an exam on a topic (eg. economics) and/or logic test. The goal is that one should not be allowed to vote on something like climate change without knowing the science and data behind climate change.
We need to acknowledge that the world is too complex for one person to know what's best for everyone on every single topic. Our system of representatives is totally outdated now that we have the internet.
The beauty of direct democracy is that it removes the politicians. As long as there are politicians, there will always be corruption (eg. bribery).
Ideally of course we'd have AI deciding our best course of action because humans are inherently biased, but that's further down the road.
>As long as there are politicians, there will always be corruption
Corruption is unlikely to go away with politicians, my guess is that it'll be there as long as human nature stays the same.
>Ideally of course we'd have AI deciding our best course of action because humans are inherently biased
AI can be as biased as the training data you feed it.
I'm not claiming that this idea isn't without its flaws. Our current system is just such an inefficient laughingstock that we need to be seeking to improve it.
Of course corruption will most likely persist under any system. The goal is to minimize it. The purpose of my proposal would be to make us make more informed policy decisions and incentive society and the media to focus on the issues.
Okay, so in states where the majority don't believe in climate change and evolution, you'll have them design tests to exclude voters who believe in evolution/climate change from voting?
> This could be in the form of an exam on a topic (eg. economics) and/or logic test
We already have a long history of stifling voting rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St...
Some that stood out:
* Poll tax prevented the poor from voting * At one point, religious tests prevented non-christians from voting * Literacy tests prevented blacks from voting
Remember, the whole point is to only have people qualified on a topic voting on said topic.
So if you're voting on, say, the minimum wage, you should be familiar with the economic ramifications of it. You should be familiar with both the arguments and counter-arguments, and perhaps the general consensus of economists.
If you're voting on trade policy, you should know the economic ramifications of a tariff. You should probably know the history of our positions on trade as well.
If you're voting on some issue related to the national debt, you should know the difference between a country's debt and household debt. You should probably also know the role of the Fed as well and how it relates to this.
The tests should be on a federal level because knowledge is universal. I'm really surprised that you and the other commenter implied that these tests would be on a state basis, and am curious as to what made you guys think that.
> We already have a long history of stifling voting rights
Poll taxes and religious tests are totally irrelevant. Literacy tests are sort of comparable to what I'm proposing, but I wouldn't advocate literacy tests because I don't care if you can't speak English if you know what you're talking about. Again, the main idea is that only people qualified on a specific issue should be voting on said issue.
Or maybe I should propose it from this angle - we should institute direct democracy instead of our current republic system due to the reasons I outlined in my original post. Direct democracy however has some glaring flaws (mainly that most people are too stupid and emotional), and the solution I propose seeks to rectify the glaring problem with direct democracy.
But it isn't... take your example on economy. In the last hundred years people tried out all sorts of things with the guidance of experts, from market economies, planned ones like communism, globalism, and now economists are shifting their thinking on that too. The chances that we're right about all that today are pretty slim too. In 10, 20 years economic thought will have shifted elsewhere. That's a mere 2-4 election cycles.
> If you're voting on trade policy, you should know the economic ramifications of a tariff. You should probably know the history of our positions on trade as well.
Isn't that why we have a representative democracy? And even those who govern look to advisors for these things anyways. I don't need to be micromanaging the government.
> So if you're voting on, say, the minimum wage, you should be familiar with the economic ramifications of it.
Does anyone know the economic ramifications with adjusting minimum wage? Seriously. We just did this in Seattle and there were experts arguing that it would destroy all the businesses in the area. That didn't actually happen: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/08/10/...
Turns out, people disagree about all sorts of things. Usually it helps to look at what people have to gain or lose. In the minimum wage case, business owners didn't want to raise their expenses. In your case, the more people you exclude from voting who disagree with you, the better chance your policy preferences come into play.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to understand the choices we make through our voting decisions, but knowledge tests as a means to reduce.. "idiot voters" is just another way to exclude people who disagree with you from voting.
I'm simply arguing that we need to break out of the status quo, and throwing out suggestions on how to fix this. Direct democracy is one way to bring the power back to the people. A competency test to accompany it is a stricter one to alleviate the pitfalls of direct democracy.
Even if we never adopt a competency test, I'd still argue that direct democracy would be a massive improvement to what we have now - if only because it'd bring the focus of the debate on the policy issues rather than on the scandals of politicians. It would totally obsolete are ridiculous two-party system.
Like I said, the test would seek to be as objective as possible. Questions would not be of the subjective format: "Does increasing the minimum wage improve the economy?" Actually I don't even think there would be any questions specific to minimum wage. Better questions would pertain to indisputable fact-based questions (eg. what's going on in the middle east in regards to foreign policy questions about that topic). Or again we could just default to basic logic tests.
These are all just implementation details though and secondary to the main point - which is to improve our policy-making.
Also not a great example of something we understand. I think realistically you would not be able to test on something so practical since most of these things are so poorly understood. Logic tests may be the safest thing you could test, though at that point you would just be cutting everyone off below a certain SAT score.
If I were in charge of coming up with a test, it wouldn't be a logic test, but some sort of test against hubris: to see how much they can admit that they don't know or can't know. In my opinion politicians play the "I know everything vote for me" game and load up on untested theories, leading to poor results (interventionist foreign policy leading to terrorism, stock market crashes, maybe even deep ocean drilling, etc).
But I also recognize that while I believe that excluding overconfident people (the ones who don't know what they don't know) from office would lead to better outcomes, I also suspect that this could turn out terribly.
My direct democracy proposal expands that power to more people. You would have the power to vote on issues you're qualified to vote on rather than be beholden to your jack-of-all-trades representative who isn't the most qualified person to be making every decision.
And unfortunately, you have to have someone produce those voting tests. How do you think they will get their positions? Do you think that the tests in states such as Utah will have the same sort of things as tests in California or Vermont? In your version of the system, the politicians have simply changed professions.
Besides, there is actual need for politicians at this point (the AI still seems pretty far out). It is good to have someone to organize large infrastructure projects, good to have folks handle money and dividing it up, overseeing military operations - and it is good to have folks outside some of the industries asking questions and learning and trying different solutions.
Corruption itself won't go away any time soon: The best we've been able to do is minimize it.
The test should be on the federal level (knowledge is universal), and wouldn't be designed by politicians. The tests should be very very basic and test a minimal level of understanding. For example you should be able to explain what the Fed does if you were voting on an issue pertaining to monetary policy. The questions would be as objective as possible.
Yes we may still need politicians, but again the main idea is that we seek to have people only working on matters they're qualified for rather than some jack of all trades who's supposed to have the country's answers on everything. Military operations would be handled by military personnel, housing policy would be designed by experts in housing policy, energy and climate change issues would be designed by experts in those fields, foreign policy would be dictated by foreign policy experts, etc.
Could this new system be a slippery slope? Are there other problems? Of course. But our current system is failing - just look at the presidential "debates", they're a complete laughingstock. We need to try to figure out how to improve this broken system rather than keep perpetuating the status quo.
I'd love to hear your ideas on how we could improve things.
That experiment was tried in Soviet Union. How did that end?
But it is a lot harder for me to argue that basing healthcare or even health and safety policies on the advice of physicians and scientists is bad. If we are revamping the tax code, it might do us well both to look at how tax code compliance is in different countries at different rates - and also talk to psychiatrists and psycologists to help set it up in a way that gets the most compliance. Talk to poverty experts to see what tax codes could hurt the poor and work on ways to solve that.
First, shoe factories not having enough leather to make quota responding by making tiny shoes is one of the most cunning gaming of metrics i've ever heard of. I think that was brilliant. People in insane situations still have great ideas.
Second, I reread my post a couple of times. I missed the collective ownership point. Could you quote the line where i said the workers should control the means of production?
Third, the US military is getting tanks they don't want. This is pretty obviously dumb, and a clear example of politicians ignoring experts.
Finally, no real deep changes are needed. Look at the EU's handling of toxic materials. If something is super toxic, but not really used by anyone, the regulation is pretty light. If something is slightly toxic and popular, the regulation is light. The dangerous popular stuff is heavily regulated. It's the kind of thoughtful, risk aware policy that's pretty rare in the US.
That's what's great about them, because they are there to represent us, and we're all, in most fields other than ours, amateurs.
And also because most experts on economy and industry have private interests to take care off and force upon the rest.
(Well, those private interests also buy politicians, yes, but they always start by buying or directly employing experts).
Australia also has worse Anti-dumping protections then the US. China is dumping steel (i.e selling below cost) into our market - see: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-28/china-trade-arrangemen...
The government deciding to build a submarine fleet 'in Australia' was a huge election issue. The local unions around here are campaigning on forcing state government to use 'local' steel as a condition of their tender process for infrastructure projects. I think they have a point somewhat, it is pretty absurd that they built a sports stadium about 2km up the road from our huge steel plant and imported all the Steel for it.
I don't think there is an easy answer. Throwing the industry the odd submarine or two to supply material for isn't long term sustainable. However If it is enough to kick-start a ship building industry though who knows...
When I call up steel suppliers and ask if they have any maraging steel, they just laugh at me.
It is basically an economy of scale problem unless you make specialised grades in large amounts (thousands of Tonnes) it is not economical. The market for that volume is not there.
The Great Depression saw the "creative destruction" of farm labor. People migrated to cities and it took a long time for the economy to shift to manyfacturing.
Manufacturing jobs disappeared more gradually, but are now gone due to automation and outsourcing.
The only way they will come back is to robots.
The next sector is IP, it's one of the USA's biggest exports -- movies, music, ideas, brands, etc. Designed in California, assembled in China. That's why the USA has such a strong IP lobby and negotiates international treaties and bullies guys like Kin Dotcom.
What's left after that? Well, why do we all NEED jobs? Because currently wages is the primary mechanism of getting money to the masses. But demand for human labor is falling.
"For every $1.00 spent in manufacturing, another $1.81 is added to the economy. That is the highest multiplier effect of any economic sector. In addition, for every one worker in manufacturing, there are another four employees hired elsewhere. (Source: NAM calculations using IMPLAN.) - See more at: http://www.nam.org/Newsroom/Top-20-Facts-About-Manufacturing...
http://www.nam.org/Newsroom/Top-20-Facts-About-Manufacturing...
And if that's the case, would we still get the 81 cents in additional value if, due to global competition, we were able to import those same goods at 50 cents?
Or am I overthinking this?
Also, a lot of the Left longs for the days of big factories and big union collective bargaining that could raise the wages a lot of people quickly. It's a great thing to point to with good economies of scale. Globalization has made this a mostly untenable strategy, but the longing remains.
I'm not being hyperbolic, I expect western-style democracy to collapse within the next 10-20 years.
As TFA points out there is little chance of revival of American manufacturing. TFA makes a very good point that most of those who lost their factory jobs have moved to service industry and that's what the candidates should focus on making better.
Same as why the mittelstand is so important.
https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing-emplo...
It’s quite clear that manufacturing jobs have just been slowly and steadily disappearing over the past 70+ years.
Viewed at this scale, the debate over the bump in the last 6 years seems totally silly. Moreover it’s hard to imagine a policy that would turn that kind of trend around.
But you are right about one thing, the curve has not dipped up appreciably in the last 30 years. All I see are steps, plateau's where the level is kept before the next drop.
EDIT: can't do math or I keep thinking it's 2000's still.
A recession hits, some people get fired (sticky wages, etc, etc), the recovery comes and it's cheaper to automate stuff than hire people. Then things coast for a while. The cost of automation keeps falling, people keep getting relatively more expensive, but in good times generally you don't get people getting fired en masse because times are good and the employer is making a profit anyway. Then a recession comes, and the cycle repeats...
Manufacturing ended that, especially "factory farming".
So now, the logistics and communications revolutions are doing to manufacturing what manufacturing did to agriculture.
It's the circle of life...
Even if it's automated, it will still be cheaper to automate it in China.
I've bought quite a few things made in the USA (or other countries with decent worker and environmental protections, like Italy, Germany, Japan...) that other people seem to usually get from China. Anecdotally, I've noticed that people who will talk about how Grandma's toaster or washing machine lasted forever and it's a shame you can't buy something like that today are not willing to budget for it like Grandma did. Grandma spent a lot of money on her appliances in 1950, whether you want to adjust by consumer price index or just look at (e.g.) the ratio of minimum wage to sticker price. Are you willing to spend thousands of dollars on a washing machine, to match relative buying power and prices from the middle of the 20th century? If so, you can still find appliances that are built like a tank, built by workers paid decent wages, built in factories that don't just dump all their trash into the nearest river. But if you want to buy a toaster that lasts a long time, is made in the USA, and costs only a little bit more than the Chinese toaster, yeah, I agree that is hard to find. There is good stuff still available at the high end. The low end has gone a lot lower.
I had to go to US or Europe in order to buy them and them move again to China with it because most factories directly export what they manufacture.
Automating something in the US or Europe is probably cheaper than in China because of the educated people there is much better prepared than in China.
The huge difference is in basic commodities cost. China is so huge and dense(great basic markets) but with great fluvial communications(cheap transport), cheap energy from coal, and growing immensely.
Most of the US is sparsely populated by comparison. The industry hubs are not as enormous as in China.
http://www.johnkay.com/2016/08/29/the-economics-and-politics...
Contrary to popular belief, politicians only care about their own enrichment and careers. They couldn't give one iota about the needs of the people. They want votes. They'll say anything they have to say to get them. They'll do anything they have to do to get them. And one in office they'll do nothing for the people who voted for them. This is true world wide and it isn't any different in the US.
http://www.nam.org/Newsroom/Top-20-Facts-About-Manufacturing...
"For every $1.00 spent in manufacturing, another $1.81 is added to the economy. That is the highest multiplier effect of any economic sector. In addition, for every one worker in manufacturing, there are another four employees hired elsewhere. (Source: NAM calculations using IMPLAN.) - See more at: http://www.nam.org/Newsroom/Top-20-Facts-About-Manufacturing...
1. There is the problem of depending on potential enemies (all others have potential to be enemies) for goods that are critical to the military and/or general economy. Suppliers can threaten to cut supplies. Note that this can happen even if actual shooting war is unlikely; the threat to cut supplies is a brutal negotiating tactic that can block us diplomatically. For example, if we depended on Russia, they could demand that we support the Syrian government.
2. Lots of physical things contain computer chips. He who builds them is in control. Remember when France gave the UK some secret codes to make Argentina's missiles (purchased from France) fail. It's not just military equipment. Consider your Ethernet card and/or motherboard chipset. It could include a hardware debugger with full memory access, controlled by magic packets. What happens when we can only get those from government-owned Chinese companies? What about modern computerized farm equipment that phones home for licensing? If that were foreign, could a foreign power disable our farm equipment at a key time, causing us to face food shortages?
The reasons for both are not dissimilar.
In contrast, the manufacturing job turns you into a pre-programmed cog in a big machine that consumes substantial amounts of natural resources to produce something that will most likely end up in the junk heap in a couple of years. Where's the dignity in that?
In Manhattan, a nanny probably makes more than a journalist--but is there any comparison in which job is more dignified?
Pay no attention to the top % - that reaps all that benefit of that automation, and widening the wealth disparity chasm - behind the curtain.
Germany GDP: ~$4 trillion.
Japan GDP: ~$5 trillion.
USA GDP: ~$17 trillion.
9 * 0.18 = 1.6
17 * 0.12 = 2.0
So, as usual, Mr. Trump's ignorance is causing him to ask the wrong questions.
But your original argument was that the US doesn't compete with Germany or Japan in manufacturing, when the facts show they not only compete, America fucking decimates those countries in raw output.
The USA is getting $6355/person from manufacturing.
Germany+Japan is getting $7792/person from manufacturing.
They beat us, earning an extra 22.6% per person from manufacturing.
Maybe it would be okay if you weighted it based on % of the economy, in which case the USA would be $6355 / 0.12 = $54,441 vs 7792 / 0.18 = $43,289.
So, weighted GPD per capita, the USA comes out way ahead. And actually, the weighted GDP/cap in manufacturing for the USA is higher than the average GPD/cap of the economy overall, which is just $53,041.
you can't brag about unicorns.
Plus you can't just fire everyone and shut down the factory when they start talking union.
Most of light and heavy manufacturing is done somewhere else. Electronics. Housewares. Clothing. Tools. Equipment. Cars. Materials, both raw and those undergoing technological processing. High tech. A service economy? That's nice - but there are only so many prostitutes, bank clerks and Mickey D employees required, so what is everyone else going to do? Navel gaze? Fill jails? Starve? More importantly, what are you going to offer the rest of the world in exchange for all that stuff you can't make anymore? Democracy? Or just bomb them? At some point even bombs will be hard to make, due to lack of necessary facilities, equipment, materials, knowledge and experience. Just see how well "resurrecting" last century's space knowledge has worked out for NASA.
Even if you "resurrect" manufacturing, automation means less people.
Quoting: http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/blog/innovation/2015/0...
"Perhaps most surprising about the HRPF was the relative lack of employees on the floor of the massive facility. While ATI employs about 2,500 throughout western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the technology and automation of the HRPF only requires seven operators and nine maintenance employees per shift, making the operation safer and more efficient, according to Deluca."
That's not a recipe for a manufacturing job resurgence independently of whether you think that is good or bad.