Singapore Got Its Manufacturing Mojo Back
wsj.com
wsj.com
Right now it's only fraying around the edges.
Somehow I have a feeling this will never happen.
Source? That seems remarkably high in my experience. Also you will need to adjust the two wages for working hours which are much longer in China.
However, the website does list:
> Factory Worker 8,800 CNY
This is around 15800 USD per year, with all benefits included. This does seem reasonable. So bad average I guess.
So those numbers can't be trusted.
1. Singapore's manufacturing relies on automation.
The GDP share of manufacturing has gone up in recent years, reversing the earlier decline; on the other hand, employment in manufacturing actually dropped as a fraction of total employment in the nation.
2. Singapore offers favorable conditions for automated manufacturing:
A. tech talent pool
B. favorable government support (talent growth subsidy, political stability, IP protection)
C. network effect of other high quality firms in the vicinity.
> It is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of high-tech goods, according to the World Bank. The top three are China, Germany and South Korea. The U.S. is fifth.
As a Singaporean I had no idea all this was going on. pretty cool. as a more cynical news reader this article is so glowy to the point of propaganda.
I imagine very few people have a problem with employment in manufacturing dropping as a side effect of this. Keep right on.
I was there a decade ago and many foreign run startups were adamant about not hiring Singaporeans for creative or software engineering positions. Something something lack of initiative and free/critical thinking skills. The admin and finance side were mostly Singaporeans though.
To be fair, I am an ex-Singaporean and no longer keep up with matters concerning the island. Left because of the stifling (physical/cultural/political) environment. I visit every few years and find little has changed in those regards.
On fin tech, there’s Silicon Valley style critical mass now.
The government had a bad case of silicon valley envy though and would throw money at things local tech CEOs told them would be a good idea.
Singapore is both importing and exporting large amounts of high tech goods.
For example it imported 8.7bln USD of gas turbines and exported 9.2bln worth (https://oec.world/en/profile/country/sgp).
This makes sense when you think of Singapores position as a major trade hub.
It would be more interesting to see the domestic value add of the manufacturing industry.
I lived there for a year and while I appreciated the efficiency, when I needed it, the feeling of control of every little aspect of life and commerce eventually started to feel oppressive. I could give many examples but let me just choose one - I live in Thailand now and I can state for a fact that the single street I live on has more live music on any given night than the whole country of Singapore. (1)
Maybe that doesn't matter to you, but it sure matters to me. Singapore's one big, very well run, very efficient, very purposeful, corporate campus. Nice place to visit, you wouldn't want to live there.
(1) OK, maybe not every single night of the year - there are concerts and events in SG sometimes. But 99% of the time, absolutely.
http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Land_Problem.html
As it stands right now, most people are born into poverty. Why? Because they are born into this world, that is already owned by the past generation and they have no place on this planet. They aren't just humans with no possessions to their name, no, it is far worse, they are people who don't even have the right to exist on this planet, people who have been deprived of the very things that should belong to them.
A person born into land poverty has no means to help themselves, it is illegal for them to help themselves until they have bribed a previous land owner with years of their time. Imagine being born into this planet with an obligation to work 15 years to acquire land. Being born is no longer a blessing. Everyone who was born must justify their existence in front of the land owners.
Stay healthy - healthspan is key.
Makes Japan's push for automated elderly assist technology seem prescient. I wonder how far they are getting and will get in the next 20 years. anybody have any good info?
20 years from now America might have $8000/month starting wages (pretax) with $5800/month rent for a broom closet and thousands of miles away from family and friends. "Poor" countries may only be paying $2000/month, but with $400 rents, $5 dining, public medical services, plus family nearby to help with any troubles you have.
People really overestimate the appeal of their countries as an immigrant destination. The luster is fading pretty quickly as the world is catching up to western standards and online work helps balance the employment scales globally, plus crime rates and conflict generally leveling out.
Hyperbole. You think, for a US average, that nursing comp is going to go up by 20-30%, but rents will go up by 300%?
> People really overestimate the appeal of their countries as an immigrant destination.
When the waiting list is huge, trending upwards rapidly, and many don't even bother to try because of the difficulty in clearing the list... there's pretty clearly significant demand.
That doesn't mean these trends stay true forever, but it's a fair bit of near to intermediate-term momentum.
Immigration has been trending downwards for a very long time in the US[1]. There are far more desirable countries these days (such as Canada), and even then, those will likely lose their appeal as well.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/12/15/just-be...
If demand for nursing goes through the roof, wages for nurses will rise.
> factoring in the drop in the value of the dollar
If you're factoring change in the value of currency for rents, you should be considering it for in-demand jobs.
> rents may very well more than quadruple.
You're positing a scenario where the population wanting to rent falls, rents quadruple, and wages decrease markedly in real value. This seems to be self-inconsistent.
> Immigration has been trending downwards for a very long time in the US[1].
Then you cite an article mostly about internal migration. The real numbers don't look like that so much: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...
Immigrants are a larger share of the US population than any time since 1920, and much, much larger in absolute numbers. Net migration is a bit lower in these past 4-5 years than in years previous-- mostly because of restrictive Trump-era policies and decreased illegal migration from Mexico. And they fell off a cliff for the past couple of years because of, well, COVID.
But the actual queues for immigrant visas are also longer than before.
You can also look at America's farming industry. Demand is tremendous. Wages are incredibly low and dependent on immigrants who'll work for next to nothing, because it's better to accept missed opportunity than risk setting a higher wage standard.
Looking at what you linked, total immigrant population increased by 12 million from 1990 to 2000, 8 million from 2000 to 2010, but about 5 million from 2010 to 2019. Big dip.
Yes, the sharp hockey-stick rise of number of immigrants and their share of the population cannot go straight up forever. The only way immigrants can significantly increase in share of the population, while the population increases, is for net migration to be in excess of long-term historical averages. This is still happening today!
Up till COVID, legal immigration was still looking pretty healthy: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Ann...
This number isn't smooth, but the average is basically constrained by legislation. Note 1987-1991 is a special case after the 1987 and 1990 immigration acts provided for the normalization of the status of many illegal immigrants. Indeed, even the post-COVID number exceeds all years 1920-1988.
> Living in a country with massive demand for nurses that's being filled by immigrants, wages are plummeting. Demand still far exceeds supply.
Wages are so much higher than source countries (e.g. the Philippines) that -doctors- are frequently relocating and completing supplementary training to serve as nurses in the US. Remittances are 9% of GDP in the Philippines and the Philippines is building capacity to educate nurses that far exceeds internal demand; they have to go somewhere and compensation in the US outstrips other options. The number of immigrants in nursing is artificially restricted by immigration quotas.
Indeed, nursing wages are so high in the US compared to other US professions that demand outstrips supply of nursing education for domestically educated nurses.
I dunno, some of the US immigration priority dates are still last century (F3 from Mexico, 15SEP97), so demand still seems pretty high. (I also think our system is pretty rediculous, making some people wait for 25 years)
75+ population is 6.8% now
In 2040, it's forecast to be 12%.
It'll be an economic burden for sure. Yes, we'll need some more nurses-- about 25-30% more, during which time the working population grows by several percent.
It is already extremely automated in the US for semiconductors.
If you have any questions about semiconductor manf, ask away.
How much of the business/industry cost is HR/wages, would you say? If the industry is already automated, further attempts to automate would not lead to great cost reduction. It seems like a higher ROI approach would be increasing the efficiency of the existing automated processes.
There are areas in the fab that are not fully automated. Lot of backend wafer fabrication (Laser scribing, Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate or CoWoS, a bunch of other wild card assembly steps at wafer level, Wafer-to-Tape & Reel processes, etc.) is not entirely automated in terms of material flow in the Fab.
There are usually bigger fish to fry when it comes to Fab cost-reduction w.r.t labor. For example, if there is a trade off between having space for laborers to move about vs. using OHTs, the favor is almost always for OHTs. Why? Because every square foot of the Fab is big bucks. Floor space is king. You'd rather jam more equipment than to put humans that need 4 ft clearance and a whole bunch of OSHA needs.
Wages for a senior developer can be 250-300% higher in the US, with lower taxes. And no, "free" healthcare doesn't come close to making this huge pay cut worth it.
European developers get shafted badly, with the narrow exceptions of Switzerland and London (they get shafted less).
Afaik the gap is not as bad in the US, but I may be wrong?
Engineers turned managers would actually be fine, but we're talking traditionally educated managers who are often hired separately/brought in from outside.
Needless to say, they're not all that good, especially with modern startups/software businesses. Which plays a part in making Europe suck at them.
You will take at least a 55% pay cut -- and that's just pre-tax. Now consider Germany's 44% effective tax rate versus Seattle's 32% effective tax rate. The chasm gets even wider.
You get the double hit of massively reduced salaries and massive increased taxes.
How about purchasing power? Even more bad news. Local purchasing power in Munich is 40% lower than Seattle. Yet another hit.
Don't forget Germany recently also hiked their sales tax to 19%(!!!), which is almost double Seattle.
The higher you get on the seniority ladder, the worse the comparisons get. You can't get the equivalent of US$500k without being an executive, or for extreme outliers. US$500k is garden variety staff level in most top tier US companies.
Work just as hard as your US counterparts for a MASSIVELY reduced rate. Over 10 years, you've lost literally millions of dollars.
Not sure I would say that 2007 is that recent anymore (when it was increased from 16 to 19 percent ()). Also keep in mind that the EU minimum regular sales rate is 15% and only 4 countries in the EU have a lower sales tax than Germany. Most are above 20% with the highest being 27%.
Also there is a second reduced sales tax rate for life-essentials (food for instance), which is 7% in Germany.
() Unless you count the half year 2020 where they temporarily reduced it back down to 16%/5%..
@checkurprivlege:
your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31864002 seems reasonable. i vouched for it and the others. the others comments don't add much value in my opinion, but they don't seem actively toxic, but are maybe closer to noise than signal.
consider posting fewer comments that are each more thoughtful and more likely to contribute something novel to the discussion that others can get something out of. unexpected yet interesting conversation tangents are often appreciated here. fabfabfab is a good role model in this thread: niche expertise, actually somewhat relating to the topic, offering to go into detail if people have specific questions.