Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

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I understand the economic benefit, but I have yet to see a good explanation of how it might happen. Americans aren't willing to work manufacturing jobs for $5 or even $10 an hour - and you can't support a middle class in the US on $5 or $10 an hour.

All manufacturing requires is a decent infrastructure, reasonably stable political and legal system, and a workforce willing to work cheaply enough. Trying to compete against China - and the rest of the world - on those terms for today's market, rather than doing everything in its power to keep its lead and define tomorrow's markets, is the biggest mistake the US could make.

Manufacturing is a relatively low skilled job - the expectation that manufacturing = middle class made sense 50 years ago, but not today.

Edit: a lot of my thinking on this issue is colored by the book The World is Flat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat). It's a complex issue, and I'm definitely open to new ways of looking at it.

Manufacturing is not necessarily low skilled. Look to Germany for example, which is a heavy manufacture that uses very advanced factories, some even completely automated.

I have no problem having China make goods for us. Manufacturing is usually a dirty process and the jobs can be relatively low paying.

I'm not sure how your points connect. If factories are becoming automated, then how does that show that the replaced human workers are skilled?

The workers who designed and built the machines are skilled. Inefficient jobs are replaced with with new jobs not necessarily in the same industry.

While this makes sense, I don't think the ratio is very high. Workers outnumber engineers by extreme amounts and so a replaced "unskilled" job will necessarily open up less jobs than it will close. No?

And the question stands, what to do with those workers? Move them to the facility that builds the robots that displaced them, in a loop?

That said, I do not oppose the replacement of workers with robots in any way, as that would be artificially trying to stop the progress of mankind. But what happens to the workers is a serious issue. What are all the people from the closed American car factories doing?

>The workers who designed and built the machines are skilled.

Then that's design and engineering, and not strictly manufacturing. Which is what I'm arguing for.

Most manufacturing will be done by robots.

It will be your job to build and maintain these robots.

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