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Comment by monocularvision | Hacker News Reader

US Manufacturing is still going. In fact, we manufacture more than ever. Folks conflate manufacturing with manufacturing _jobs_. Our manufacturing is more efficient then ever which is why you constantly hear this false refrain that US manufacturing is down or gone.

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It seems to me that if you can make a product of a given quality very cheaply, that probably indicates that you're very good at making it.

The fact that I can't get competitive production quotes in the USA for most products, like electric motors, injection molded plastic parts, printed circuit boards, stamped metal parts, castings, etc, suggests that the US is also not particularly efficient at making those parts. There was a time when the cheapest place to go for such things in production volumes was actually the US.

The price quotes you are getting also include the opportunity costs of saying no to other people wanting to pay for that manufacturing capacity.

The people I know that are running manufacturing aren’t exactly hurting for business. Now is just not the time to lock in high quantities of low-cost stuff.

This article is about TSMC raising prices for what little capacity they have unallocated. We can all agree that they are probably the best in the world at what they do, yet there is no way you will get “competitive production quotes” from them for commodity chips. Jim Bob’s Plastic and Stuff out in Fort Wayne is no different. Now, Jim Bob is probably going to cut you a deal way sooner than TSMC is, but I know of a certain mega-big car company that shut down an engine plant for a week because Jim Bob said last years prices aren’t this years prices - and you probably aren’t as big as mega-big car company.

Isn't the time right now?

people always point to this dumb metric, "we're producing more than ever" compared to ourselves, while ignoring that the number in comparison to the rest of the world has dropped massively. Our share of global manufacturing is tiny compared to what it used to be

I've worked for manufacturing companies my entire 30+ year career. It's not a dumb metric. It's usually pulled out in response to the silly complaint that "the US doesn't manufacture anything anymore."

Sure, our share of global manufacturing is smaller, but that's hardly surprising when many more countries up their manufacturing game. A more interesting metric would be US percentage of total worldwide manufacturing as a function of sophistication: I'd rather be building complex medical instruments than toasters.

I build complex medical instruments, I'd rather build toasters the way the chip shortage is nuking my BOMs right now.

Most toasters suck. I have to buy a new one every other year or so, for some stupid electrical or mechanical reason. Right now, for instance, the latch on our current toaster -- the one that latches on to the handle you press down to lower the bread and close the circuit to start the heating elements -- isn't latching any more. Fucking low-grade crap! I mean, I'm not asking for a self-lowering magically-correct-degree-of-toasting toaster like in the old TC video -- I just want a stupid mechanical latch in a product I bought a couple of years ago to keep stupidly mechanically latching for six or ten more years. That is not too much to ask.

So, stick to your complex medical instruments. Or, if you switch to toasters, please don't build the same shitty crap as everyone else.

>I'd rather be building complex medical instruments than toasters.

Why? In what way is it better to have a handful of elite workers creating a handful of units sold to a handful of consumers instead of having many ordinary workers producing many units for many consumers?

Because ordinary workers, producing many units, is a business with low margins.

And in modern developed economies, those margins are insufficient to support a decent salary.

So what happens when every economy becomes developed? What happens when we can't rely on the existence of low wage workers?

This always seems like a question with an agenda.

What happens? Well I suppose the economy collapses and the proletariat rise up and usurp power, or something fantastical.

What’ll more likely happen is we’ll further automate repetitive low skill tasks, and / or start making more durable goods, or otherwise ingenuity our way forward.

Post-industrialized countries make it impossible to for those countries arriving late to the party to advance any further, by way of global environmental agreements and glass bead "carbon credit" payments, thereby ensuring a permanent pool of slave labor.

All of the statistics on wage and per capita GDP growth contradict your claim..

> > > So what happens when...

> > Answer for what happens when

> That hasn't happened yet!1!!

Time isn't that complicated a concept.

Eventually it becomes more profitable to automate. See: Sony's automated PS4/5 factory. Formerly these would've been assembled in some Foxconn plant by tens of thousands of low wage workers.

I have a sneaking suspicion that's fundamentally impossible, as some of the prerequisites for developed economies (in the modern, not-industrialization sense) seem to require predatory exploitation of developing economies. And the global inequality of capital ensures there's a power disparity sufficient to enforce it for the former, to the detriment of the latter.

But I guess it's really a question about post-scarcity economics, and whether they're possible?

I think your mistaking how it tends to be for how it must be.

I’m more optimistic. Not really sure I have much to base my optimism on, but oh well.

Edit: fixed a word

It happens very gradually, and in aggregate we tend to end up working fewer and fewer hours per year.

Because there won't be "many ordinary workers" producing those toasters. Low margin products like that will have their manufacture automated to the n'th degree and they'll be built by "a handful of elite workers" supervising the automation.

Or, you know, they'll send it to the lowest-cost labor supplier they can find to build by hand and that won't be in the US!

That's because the rest of the world is no longer a bombed-out postwar wasteland or its near-enslaved colonies as it was in 01945. "Producing more than ever" is what you needed last year when you couldn't get N95 masks or ventilators, not "producing more than the rest of the world". But something went wrong and the masks and ventilators were not forthcoming, something that looks an awful lot like an absolute decline in manufacturing abilities.

Other people said this above, but I will add my own anecdote I heard from a factory owner, that he had the ability to retool immediately back then to make medical masks, but between the uncertainty around whether people would keep buying them and at what cost, he was unsure it was worth the risk of switching away from a profitable business to something that would take less ability to make and less certain profits. I don’t know what he ended up choosing to do. But sounds like ‘not forthcoming’ is also possibly an indicator that skills, and the demand for them, is high—and not in decline.

Was this in the US? In both PRC and Taiwan the government guaranteed the profits of factories that retooled to make medical masks.

> Our share of global manufacturing is tiny compared to what it used to be

You mean compared to a time when most developed countries' production capacity was significantly limited because they had been bombed out in WW2 and developing countries were a long way away from being competitive?

Of course it is, after WWII the rest of the world’s manufacturing capacity had more or less been bombed to smithereens.

The US is 4% of the world. All else being equal, we would eventually move towards manufacturing 4% of things.

Oh?

https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...

tl;dr if you focus on Intel's monopoly money-printer years, multiply it by a hedonic adjustment due to Moore's law, and mix it in with the rest of manufacturing it's enough to hide de-industrialization in your statistics.

> But it turns out that Trump’s story of US manufacturing decline was much closer to being right than the story of technological progress being spun in Washington, New York, and Cambridge.

Claiming Trump was really right, is usually sign of a writer trying to get people to read a bunch of opinions that don't match reality presented as "bold independent" stance

> Worse than the Great Depression: America’s manufacturing jobs implosion

So they're straight up going to max bullshit mode?

And they say if we ignore one of the most productive manufacturing sectors (computing) the data looks worse, Is that at all surprising?

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