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Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

   There is no industry left in USA

This is a myth. The US is still far and away the largest manufacturer.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CompanyFocus/...

Even if it weren't true, there are more opportunities to be create value with unconstrained creativity than ever before.

You can sit down and write code or draw designs and be creative with zero outlay.

Excuses excuses excuses.

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You are looking at a very wrong graph. This one is correct: http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2010/06/28/manufacturing.... Look carefully at China and Germany, and then to USA. See - QED - USA has no industry left.

There is no business case, no economic pressure for creativity. Yes, you can create, but you do not have time - for your creation nobody is gonna pay money - so there is no incentive to be creative.

Excuses?! Any engineer knows that many good ideas appear as the result of interaction with production process, but if something is designed in USA but made in China then the loopback time grows very big and you end up with making same boring stuff year after year, year after year...

I've worked in manufacturing.

I'd love to hear just how it is you think that "manufacturing-as-a-percentage-of-GDP" is any kind of an indicator for creativity in a country, considering that manufacturing is one of the most menial jobs there is.

    You are looking at a very wrong graph.

No. You said, "There is no industry left in USA". That graph gives manufacturing as a percentage of GDP, which isn't relevant.

It is very relevant. This how one economy gets classified as service or industrial. Even if we take different approach, overall industrial output of USA per capita, it still less than Germany's.

In just means that the US isn't a manufacturing economy. Manufacturing is a very small part of US economy but that doesn't mean that in absolute numbers it might be higher than other countries', especially if most of the goods manufactured were with high added value (e.g., the aforementioned jet engines).

In absolute numbers economy of China is much, enormously bigger than economy of Iceland. Not per capita, however.

What does manufacturing as a percent of GDP have to do with anything?

Case in point: You'd be pretty silly to think that the US isn't an agricultural powerhouse. However, only 2% of the US is employed in that industry which contributes 0.9% of GDP. However, it has one of the highest outputs in the world - and perhaps the highest per worker.

Another point: The US' manufacturing value is so high because it builds expensive goods. There is more innovation occurring with jet engines and airplanes than textiles.

Yet it is pretty silly to say that USA is an agricultural country. That means there is a lot creativity going in the agriculture to keep it so efficient.

Even if there is innovation going on in the jet engine, there is still a lot of space for innovation in less hi-tech industry.

The most interesting thing to me about that graph is that the percentage GDP of China coming from manufacturing decreased in the 2000s.

(If I'm getting the colors right. Having so many similar colors in one graph certainly reduces its usefulness.)

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