The US is building factories at a fast rate
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was
1. 50% tariffs on China, and
2. $100B of subsidies to chip makers and green tech...
The reversal of Reaganomics we're living through will become permanent for at least another generation, and for good reason. Maybe a good time to start a company selling to the government.
Who could have thought that manufacturing using western labor and laws, can't compete with manufacturing in a totalitarian regime with no respect for human lives/rights or the environment? /s
Free trade should only happen as long as the trading partners share similar laws and regulation on human rights and environmental protections, otherwise people and the environment get screwed for the sake of corporate profits, so tariffs should always be in place to level the playing field and prevent such exploitations.
Don't allow Google or US media imports? Sorry, you can't export cheap manufactured goods.
A lot of American Exceptionalism comes from the fact that EU got absolutely destroyed by world wars while the US got to keep chugging along.
This community can be picky about tone and phrasing (which I believe keeps things mostly civil), don’t take the downvotes personally. Some users may have felt the ‘not reading history’ part was targeted at them, even though you were speaking generally.
Building things has been looked down upon for 40 years because boomers thought it was a step backwards since their parents worked on the assembly line.
Bare in mind, vocational still means "not college bound" == "useless" == "doesn't look good in the US news rankings"
Ive talked to superintendents and they just give me a blank stare when I told them that a great way to get kids to understand the cartesian coordinate system is in machine or woodshop, reading a blueprint, schematic etc. Actually doing the work is better than a word problem. They have no respect for it and this is in the best educated state in the US with supposedly the best school system.
Bottom line, if we are going to build things again, it needs to start in the schools.
[0]https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/how-boys-learning-styles-di...
No, it was looked down upon because the pay to quality of life ratio was much better in white collar careers. It probably still is for the most part. Wake me up when the same people are deciding between becoming plumbers or electricians rather than lawyers or doctors or engineers.
Either way, a Mon to Fri 8 to 5 salaried gig with benefits requiring little travel and no health risks was a comparably better goal to aim for due to the lack of sufficient price premium for the non desk job labor.
American manufacturing was declining way before NAFTA or China. The anti-japanese/asian period of 70s and 80s existed for a reason. The way we are attacking china today is how we attacked japan in the 80s. The only difference is that china isn't going to back down like japan did. Far easier to bully a nation that you militarily occupy.
The trend isn't going to change. Manufacturing will go to ASEAN and India next. All the propaganda about "factories in the US" exist to distract from that reality.
if only I knew what the government wanted to buy. Besides weaponry that is.
Edit to add: If you're building in the space, YC cofounder matching also does events targeted to gov once in a while, and I personally am doing some ideating if you want to chat
Email in profile
--Some old dude about 15 years ago.
https://sam.gov/opp/57075abba039462f8ed76c2641de3394/view
"The contract requirements are geographically spread over the State of Alabama in the following counties: Clarke, Monroe, Wilcox, Dallas, Autauga, Lowndes, Montgomery and Elmore along the R.R. “Bob” Woodruff Lake, William “Bill” Dannelly Reservoir and Claiborne Lake. Alabama River Lakes consists of approximately 1,092 miles of shoreline, 39,452 acres of water and 68,006 acres of land. Facilities include 6 Class A campgrounds, 38-day use/land water access areas, 9 Multi-purpose Areas, 3 Visitor Centers/museum, 9 maintained but undeveloped Natural Resource areas, 2 Contractor maintenance Compounds, along with a Resource Management Office and other associated operational facilities. Provide services for maintenance, repair, minor construction (as defined in AR-420-1 and DA PAM 420-11) including all planning, supervision, administration, labor, equipment, materials, supplies, and replacement or repair parts that is required for performance of this contract.
The contract scope of work will include, but is not limited to, some or all of the following types of work: maintenance and repair of buildings, facilities, offices, water and electrical systems, concrete structures, maintenance facilities, operational areas, roadways, vehicles, boat docks, bathhouses, washhouses, toilets, gatehouses, security fences, sanitary disposal systems, launching ramps, playground equipment, bulletin boards, game courts, playgrounds, telephone lines, picnic sites, campsites, and other related facilities."
https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/topic/current
Pick science or health instead of defense from the list on the left.. but you would be missing out on "MDA23-T002: AI-Informed Algorithms Combined with Differential Game Theory to Support Swarm-on-Swarm Engagements".. Basically to help them build Skynet.
An eye opener is the list of top contractors to the US government:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S...
Caltech, MIT, Stanford... SpaceX is 53.
The coolest one is Atlantic Diving Supply (No. 24): it started as a small dive shop that just happened to be located in Virginia Beach.. some Navy Seals kept ordering things from them.. then 9/11 happened..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
The real test will be once they stop taking our taxes and handing it to businessmen if they can stand on their own merits. Until then this is charity to the private sector.
Or more realistically, charity to one part of the private sector paid for by all of our great grandchildren.
The US also protected furniture and garment production into the 90s. Had that not been the case, the transition int hat industry likely would have been much smoother and no so apocalyptic for workers.
Underlying your claim is the notion that technocrats can or could ever know what an economy as large and complicated as the US "should" be producing.
Maintaining order is an odd goal for an economic policy no? But on that note, France is probably the most protectionist among developed western nations. Yet they have created a situation where a third of young people can’t find work and social cohesion is unraveling.
The 5th Republic has been teetering on the edge of collapse for the last few. years, so I wouldn't be so bullish on France.
BY ARPA I'm not sure if you're referring to the Advanced Research Projects Agency or the American Rescue Plan which is now stupidly called ARPA sometimes.
Um yeah, NASA was pretty cool back in the day when they were shooting V2s at the moon. But later efforts like the shuttle were kind of boondoggles because it was tethered to goofy military spying stuff, so it ended up being shitty for science and a dead end for anything commercial. That's not really a great success story for industrial policy IMHO.
"The 5th Republic has been teetering on the edge of collapse for the last few. years, so I wouldn't be so bullish on France."
OK, I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on anything if you hold those kind of hyper-cynical views.
The tech reason was that they had a way to make thin film panels which was super promising for driving down costs due to a silicon shortage. But then Diamond based silicon tech emerged, eliminating the silicon shortage and reducing input materials, which outcompeted thin film on price.
Such is the way of innovation. Looking only at subsidies gives you a false picture.
It doesn't make sense to think of infrastructure and technological capacities as less important than agriculture anymore, when it comes to keeping some significant presence locally.
And recall Globalization was championed by Bill Clinton.
Donald Trump pumped up Tariff’s against China.
Joe Biden pushed for chip and green subsidies.
It's a clearly absurd proposition on its face. Of course that's going to depress wages and destroy jobs, especially in manufacturing.
I'm all for free trade with other free countries with similar levels of rights for workers and concern for the environment. Outsourcing elsewhere should be taxed proportionally to the gap in these areas.
If you want a simple to implement solution, a tax on a combination of wage disparity and CO2 emission disparity would be enough to capture most of the relevant differences. The latter can be very objectively checked using satellite imaging.
Do officeholders in the United States have any responsibility to people in foreign countries beyond that in ratified treaties?
Do we have any moral obligation to make restitution for our great-great-grandparents' crimes to the great-great-grandchildren of the victims? And what level of punishment is going too far?
Back to shrugging off the idea poor people on the other side of oceans are going to pick a fight with me specifically. I live in the middle; after rowing over the Pacific they’ll have to get through a lot of other people first.
Hey you should probably stop buying toxic technology and flying; would hate for the kids to karma your elder form.
Shit n hellfire; anyone making use of modern technology has little wiggle room to pontificate about why and how others are oblivious to reality of their choices.
But if that were a threat, then I'd like to see some other country make good on it.
Big corporations didn’t reluctantly close down factories, hat in hand, because people weren’t buying their products. They moved the manufacturing offshores and people kept buying the products they always have.
Saudi Arabia, Russia and other countries may have more oil than US, but it's too far from there places where it would be usable for manufacturing.
There's also the political motivation of banks, which blindly trusted fossil fuel investments, leading to massive investment that was unprofitable in the first round of fracking.
When it comes down to it, fossil fuels are surviving, and continue to survive, largely as a cultural and political effort, as much as a technology effort. And once we move away from them we will be saving massive amounts of money that can be directed towards improving the economy in other areas that improve people's lives rather than damage their lungs and cause climate change.
March 28, 1987:
"President Reagan decided Friday to impose punitive 100% tariffs on a wide variety of goods produced by Japanese electronic giants in retaliation for Tokyo’s failure to abide by the semiconductor trade agreement between the two nations"
-- https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-28-mn-698-st...
That Reagan?
50% tariffs are rookie numbers.
Outside of the more immediately-public-facing stuff like tax cuts, Reagan's legacy is very much a "do what we say, not what we did" situation.
That sounds like manufacturing jobs to me.
The original post's point seemed to me to be "Reaganomics was bad for manufacturing jobs", and listed tariffs and subsidies as two things that are good for manufacturing jobs that were a reversal of Reagonomics. Do you agree that was the original point?
But Reagan implemented both tariffs and subsidies that were good for manufacturing jobs. So how are tariffs and subsidies a reversal of Reaganomics?
A common definition is something like "widespread tax cuts, decreased social spending, increased military spending, and the deregulation of domestic markets" - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp - and in common parlance it is heavily associated broadly with "trickle down" ideas. Subsidizing manufacturing and putting more regulation around trade run counter to that. Especially when you're subsidizing not-immediately-defense-focused manufacturing. Reagan and the neoliberal era as a whole was very bad for most manufacturing, the existence of one area that Reagan invested in doesn't disprove that, but it should've led its supporters to say "hey, that worked, maybe it would be useful in other areas too."
Even the tax stuff, right? The idea being pitched was that lower rates would result in higher government revenues but in practice the old tax rates were not at such a point that they were strangling productivity in the ways that would've been required for that to be true. Yet the legacy is simply "tax less" instead of any associating remaining with the "we actually think we can get more revenue to fund our spending" part.
Where is the economic statistic that you can point to as being X during the Reagan years that was recently changed to Y, and that you think explains the increase in building factories over the last two years?
Here's a chart illustrating this point: https://i.insider.com/532ccb18eab8eadc39f33da6
Probably don't have chain correct, and it is different for different industries.
But there was definitely a progression of 'local salary goes up', 'time to move to next cheapest country'.
Keep in mind costs aren't just what you have to pay people but also things like regional security, the risk of the government nationalizing your company and assets, ability to get skilled/capable/honest people.
Basically there has to be a degree of stability, including a centralized government that can provide a certain level of law and order in order to attract capital. Otherwise you have to price in the costs of missing a day of work because the factory is being shelled by government/anti-government groups, etc.
Corruption is fine, bribes are fine, because they can be priced in and managed, what can't be managed, planned for and predicted is instability.
For the record my bet on where the next big booms will be is Indonesia, Mexico and to a lesser extant west Africa.
Also a lot of those same stability/security concerns, but applied to the trip from here to there, likely across the ocean, which is something that people have largely taken for granted for years now other than some stories of Somalian pirates.
Extreme corruption, lack of rule of law, extreme violence to name a few. Mexico is basically a failed state: the government doesn't even control large parts of the territory it claims, ultra-violent drug cartels do. How is that a good place to build factories?
Other central American counties are at least as bad. El Salvador has a higher death rate from violence than war-torn Syria during the height of its civil war.
Countries farther south would be much better bets, but they still have huge problems with corruption. Brazil, Chile, Peru, etc. aren't nearly as bad, and do have their own manufacturing industries (Brazil is home to Embraer, for instance).
> Brazil, Chile, Peru, etc. aren't nearly as bad
Brazil is just as bad.
Drug gangs essentially own their territory. Brazilian state is legitimized by the police's monopoly on force. Gangs don't allow police in their territories which implies the laws of Brazil don't apply there. They have seceded from brazilian territory and established their own parallel government without anyone noticing.
It's common knowledge that local businesses operating in those places are doing so with the blessing of these drug lords. They even took on the role of police by punishing small time criminals who interfere with with their drug dealing operations by scaring away customers. They implement barbaric punishments like cutting off the fingers of thieves or shooting their hands. People living in those places may not even get mail because it's too risky to send mailmen in there, I've seen people who had to go to some remote post office to pick up correspondence.
It's actually kind of impressive. Shows what a people can do when it has the balls to organize and most importantly to arm itself.
The issues are generally that in the next largest potential cheap manufacturing sources (South Asia, SE Asia, Africa) they’re either not big enough or have extremely poor logistics and red tape. A big part of the East Asian miracles have been extensive infrastructure and bureaucratic emphasis on making exports as efficient as possible.
Japan and Korea have plenty of domestic manufacturing.
What you are saying is that both sides have agreed to put policies in place to make foreign goods more expense, to the point that domestic labor can be competitive, and corporations will move manufacturing back to the US.
But as others have posted as questions. Is this sustainable? If the US is not competitive unless barriers are put in place, can that be done indefinably, or will this naturally reverse again when the US Gov can no longer afford to prop up a more expensive and inefficient workforce.
In all those cases, there's little or no job growth. Just a couple administrators and engineers. Nobody on the line, because there is no line, just robots and conveyors.
Someone has to maintain the robots and conveyors, unless you’re assuming that has also been automated. I suppose this could also be contracted out if it hasn’t been automated.
Sure factories employ skilled labor. But very few. And what are unskilled laborers supposed to do?
American has 30M folks who's employment has descended to service industry (teller, cashier, food service). They can't all be retrained as Engineers, even if we needed 30M more Engineers which we don't.
It's not. This is disaster planning.
We're being forced to bring production back home because we can't keep outsourcing to a region subject to control by a potential adversary. If war breaks out with China, access to Taiwan for chips or Vietnam for socks is going to become difficult. Blockades will be immediate.
If this were about money, we'd move production to South America. That we're keeping it this close to home after years of shopping everything globally suggests we're building infrastructure for a supply chain that can't be interfered with by foreign governments.
You mean Vietnam surely?
"lights out" manufacturing[0] can happen with more and more things. The humans in the process can become minimal (thus shifting more costs to fixed capital costs rather than variable costs)
[0]: https://www.roboticstomorrow.com/article/2016/10/is-a-robot-...
Why do you think this sudden rise in industrial investment? The US didn't turn attractive overnight. This is the "economy" selling to the government their $280Bn CHIPS package.
> It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was
A 50% tariff does not affect attractiveness. You did not address the core issues, as the tariff will hide it. What will happen is free market economy at play: As the issues are hidden behind tariffs/protectionism, the US will keep falling behind China until you are significantly behind that you can't catch up. Then you become a real third-world country.
Reality will never care about any human philosophy. Humans will invest agency in interesting things regardless of some model in a vacuum anyone can conjure. Finance is has something very in common with religion; something humanity has zero obligation to perpetuate.
You have no idea what you’re talking about because we’ll just “fix” the philosophy to align with the reality. Trying to “fix people” to serve the philosophy is not happening.
Given a factory from each era that produces roughly the same product and quantity, how many are employed at each? What are their inflation-adjusted wages?
It seems difficult to believe that modern factories can employ enough people for your blue collar middle class dreams to become reality. The difference in population alone is 200M vs 330M. And even modest improvements in automation has the modern factory at something like half the personnel of the 70s-era factory for the (roughly) same output.
Semiconductors
Telecommunications equipment
Elevator/Lift equipment
Agricultural equipment/trailers
Aeronautical parts (both mechanical and electronic/sensor)
Planes
Helicopters
Printing services
Nutrition supplements
Cars
Just a few off the top of my head.
These all seem to be growing a lot, as I see a lot of new buildings all the time. Many of these are definitely for domestic consumption, I'll grant you that.
My own opinion is that 40 years of globalization have lifted a billion people out of poverty and now the global pay scales aren't so vastly different. It is becoming more economically viable to produce things in the US. (Which will also put pressure on higher inflation.)
Has the Inflation Reduction Act had any positive impact on manufacturing either? Its main provisions seem to be related to economic redistribution, climate change, and infrastructure, all of which may have long-term impacts on industry and employment, but don't seem to have done much in those areas yet.
I’m all for a strong middle class. However, I don’t see how an inheritance tax that forces children to sell their parents farm or business to pay estate taxes is supposed to accomplish that though. If I wanted a large permanent asset-free working class I’d definitely aggressively tax intergenerational wealth accumulation, resting assured that the upper classes would easily dodge it with trusts, corporations, expatriation, or some other tax avoidance strategy. That sounds like an excellent strategy to crush the remaining middle class.
Also a 700 acre farm, which is an at most medium size family farm, could easily have a nominal value north of 10 mil even though there's no way it's returning 1 million a year net. Same for a modestly profitable small business.
that's what you said and that reads plainly to me like you are implying a causal relationship.
Maybe he was right. I'm in my early 30s now, and I don't regret becoming a software engineer, but all the highly skilled tradesmen I've met in the last 5 years make at least what I do, often more, and have the benefit of actually owning their own businesses or real, meaningful slices of other ones.
I'll boldly admit I don't think I would like over physical labor and I do wonder about the toll of it long term, but they make a killing, especially the ones willing to travel all over the US.
Granted, the highest earner I know has both a degree in CS and Industrial Engineering, and goes all over the place working with industrial robotics and makes piles of money doing it. More than elite SV companies in the last 3 years, IIRC, if you discount the stock based compensation package (simply salary to salary comparisons) its north of 300K.
And arguably better retirement benefits, I think 12% goes to the 401K and they get bonuses every quarter right now. Well invested I bet he'd come out ahead. Can't for the life of me remember the name of the company though.
EDIT: forgot to mention the folks making tons of money on the DoD now starting to require things made in the USA and sourced raw materials from either inside the US or from friendly approved countries from the last few years either, and I don't think that's going away any time soon. They've in the last 2-3 years started paying lots and lots of money to get suppliers that are US based and source their raw material from friendly nations only, and they pay alot of money to make it worth while.
I think its hard to break into in some respects, compared to other fields (you need some certifications iirc in addition to a degree) but my limited, anecdotal exposure suggests its quite interesting and lucrative.
That said, my sample size is small, and on the other end of the spectrum, I know a few folks who maintain complex CNC equipment and develop software for it (using a language I don't recongize, I think its proprietary) and while they make good money, its not better than you can make as a senior engineer at a reputable place as a web developer, for example.
You would make more in webdev or ML though.
The one outlier example I gave is specifically tailored for medical equipment.
But the pay was nowhere near that of a software dev job in SV.
Anyway, in automotive manufacturing right now frequently the industrial automation firm is told they will be paid net 240. This is insanity. It leads to unnecessarily long projects as the firms have to figure out how to cash flow enormous expenses.
In the meantime, inexperienced competitors regularly fixed bid quote something that cannot be safely and timely built for the quoted budget, ignoring profit. They win the project and they're worn down to a nub and either go under or deliver to avoid being sued into oblivion, so it's a horrific race to the bottom.
The latter behaviour I witness regularly in the software consultancy industry and it's a bothersome thing.
I know Google was handing out $385k total compensation offers ($200k salary, $150k stock, $35k annual bonus) in 2020 to senior software engineers, and Google's 401k matching is 50%.
First is Google is an outlier, even among Silicon Valley. So is Meta. They both are well known for very high total compensation. I also specifically didn't say FAANG for this reason. There's other high compensation places that I would bucket in as top 5% that aren't in the acronym (Microsoft comes to mind) which very good TC packages.
Second is I removed stock because stock is hugely outsized in value for tech companies, and most of these jobs aren't going to have RSUs. If you compare salary to salary however, its a better metric. I know an industrial HVAC specialist that pulls in north of 300K in just salary, and has great retirement benefits. In fact, better than you might see even at say, Apple on both fronts, for most people, and importantly, they're young (7 years my junior).
One thing alot of the highest paying trade jobs have in common though, is travel travel travel. The folks who work only local jobs do well enough, but not near the gangbuster rates the travel folks are pulling in.
Source: I have friends and extended family who are all trades people. Plumbers, carpenters, masons etc. as well as a few who work in other engineering disciplines (like industrial engineering & robotics). Blessed with a large enough extended family that I think I get a decent idea of whats out there
He made 300+, and busted his ass to get it. Most of his guys were in the 60-85k range.
HVAC at 300k is an absolute outlier, and there are going to be some serious tradeoffs in terms of how brutal that's going to be on your body. Gonna be some long, hot days.
RSUs are the companies you're talking about are effectively cash, and they make up a significant portion of the compensation for the "elite SV" companies. So yes, if you exclude ~40% of the compensation for the "elite SV" companies, then you friend is probably making more.
_This_. A lot of software developers think they are the only high earners out there. Skilled tradesmen are making a killing in europe as well. And unlike software engineers, the path to starting an actual business is much shorter and the growth potential much higher.
Scaling software to the same level of revenue as a trade business is as easy if not easier. For one you don’t need that many employees
There are massive problems that come with "scale" - problems most people don't want. The VC model is all about the exit, whereas, again, 90-something-% of businesses, trades included, are focused on long-term sustainability, not on the "exit".
Sure, the VC space us very visible, very "loud", gets a lot of press, and so on. And of course 100% of non-vc owners don't get to be billionaires, but to VC world is a tiny sliver of the software world.
Even living outside of SV I don’t see a lot of in between firms.
I'm in a space that doesn't remotely interest VCs, it's not a regulated industry, and we're not a consulting company. Actually we're in 3 such spaces.
I also teach other (working) developers and while some are in health care the vast majority are unregulated.
But to be fair, you've likely never heard of us, or our ilk. We do the boring office software that underpins every boring industry. We're not self-driving cars or exoskeletons, we're data in, data processing, data out.
Our market isn't sexy enough, or wide enough for VCs, we don't need millions of $ anyway, so we've never bothered to ask for it. We do boring things like make a profit, and fund growth out of cash-flow. We hire slowly, and we don't do layoffs.
We have lots of competitors just like us.
There are many boutique SaaS firms - but if you only have a few customers, the business looks more like an outsourced internal team then an independent concern.
happy to be proven wrong on this point, would give me some ideas for my career :)
He heads out to the sites/jobs he has that day to see that the teams know what to do, then heads to the golf course.
Sometime in the late afternoon he makes the rounds again to see how the jobs have progressed that day. Does some book-keeping in the evening.
I envy him. I would be surprised if he completed college (although I know his kids all have now).
Unless the robots are either going to become good at swinging hammers or designing, maintaining, and install themselves, I think these are some of the safest jobs you can have, if there is such a thing
This sounds like a business is just something that happens to fall on your lap while you're fixing a pipe rather than something that you build with your blood sweat and tears. Most tradespeople make nowhere close to 300k. Their success is credited to their hard work, not their happening to choose the trades.
One is being the trades is rewarding, yes not all bring in 300K+, but I don't know a single trades person, many often my junior, who don't bring in a good income pretty comparable to software engineers at non FAANG companies make (typically 150K+) and I don't think any of them are carrying high debt student loans (many states even pay for trade education outright) and their benefits can't be beat, esp. if they're union.
The second is that there are trade businesses that do earn, esp. right now in the industrial sector, but they all have a singular thing in common: Travel Travel Travel. thats the name of the game. They're gone alot. For instance, my cousin is an industrial electrician, and works on windmills. He travels all over the midwest and Texas to do the work, is rewarded quite handsomely for the privilege, but is gone over half the year. Has no wife or kids currently, so there is that, but its taxing. Other trades folks I know have businesses and do pull in alot, but the "grind" can be very real at times, but I've been told that its rewarding, because its yours at the end of the day
Third is in a specialized sliver of robotics / industrial systems, you can make a fortune, but its not so outsized across the board. Medical systems are a big one, robotics are being really big in surgeries, and there's alot of money to be made there
The US has outsourced so much, this cash dump is just going to head straight into the pockets of cronies who will then say 2-5 years they need more.
Industrial base takes time to spin up, but if you have solid economy (as the US currently does) then using monetary policy and other incentives to push capital toward industrial base development is good for the country. It also plays well on TV since these factories are revitalizing towns and cities that previously were suffering from a lack of industry.
As a result, I don't see these shifts so much as a "reversal of Reganomics" so much as a realization from the Russian-Ukraine war that "globalism" isn't something authoritarians really like. And if you're primary trading partner is run by an authoritarian regime, that is bad.
This basic belief allowed us to write trade deals that reduced manufacturing capacity relative to non-manufacturing.
Totally agree with you the Ukraine war has been incredibly important in previewing what would have been much worse in a Taiwan war.
I think supply chain risk through peak COVID is also a huge factor giving this shift momentum. Supply chain shocks were comprehensible and visible to most Americans and impacted practically every business owner. It kickstarted renewed calls for localism and reassessments of worst-case scenarios for business continuity. Bringing up the home industrial base is a necessity for shortening those supply chains and bringing that risk under control.
Reducing risk from suppliers based in countries where government policy is less predictable or west-aligned was also highlighted by the pandemic. Shanghai locked down in May 2022, for example, and I am sure many Americans were surprised and annoyed at the time.
The one-two of COVID then the Russia-Ukraine war seems to have knocked us into a new alignment. Remains to be seen how it plays out against our current, difficult social backdrop.
Reagan wanted to get the U.S. back on the gold standard, which leads to balanced trade. He was talked out of it by Fed chair Volker.
What you call Reaganomics goes back to Nixon. I suppose that's probably just as well for you, but I don't think any administration between 1971 and 1991 (or even 2011 or now even) really thought "hey, let's take blue collar jobs and send them to Japan, and later China! haha! suckers!". Nixon didn't take the U.S. off the gold standard because that was something he yearned to do -- he did it because it was the only way to fund the then federal deficit. Sure, we would have been better off staying on a gold standard and being forced to cut that deficit, but every politician from Nixon onward -Democrat and Republican alike- kicked that can into the future. It's a non-partisan issue. Getting off the gold standard created easy credit junkies everywhere, and here we are. Junkies don't care about ideology.
Reagan wanted to get the U.S. back on the gold standard, which leads to balanced trade.
Sample result:
In 1981, for example, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan created a “gold commission” which decided not to go back to the gold standard.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
Construction spending is a terrible proxy for manufacturing - both because the size of a building you need isn't pegged to the value of your output (e.g. a $100 million dollar shop making aerospace components might have a tiny fraction of the footprint of a $1 million sweatshop making t-shirts), and because the cost of factory construction is determined by the cost of construction in general (i.e. if there was a real estate boom building residential buildings then you're competing with that for construction materials, equipment, labor, etc).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMAN
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
But not everything is a plateau. Fabricated metal reached an all time high post covid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A32SNO
Same with semis: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPG3344S
The fact is that offshoring of manufacturing was a myth - the jobs never left, the industries just transformed in such a way that old, labor intensive processes were eliminated. Those jobs, and the economic prosperity they brought, are never coming back. It's merely a coincidence that at around the same time US manufacturers were computerizing their operations China was building 1920s level industrial facilities.
Certainly none of the data is indicative of a sudden boom in US manufacturing in the past 2 years which could be attributable to any recent decisions or events.
Does Santa Barbara or NYC really look antiquated compared to Mumbai? Or Da Nang? Or Fukuoka?
Maybe if you're trying to compare Detroit to Shenzhen or Tokyo.
Because London was partially bombed and rebuilt within the last generation.
New York wasn’t. NYC was built a while ago, and a lot of that infrastructure and builds still work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
A lot of what you think of as "Paris style" is much newer than New York City. NYC has plenty of buildings older than that, and more importantly, its grid pattern is even older.
New York does have many newer buildings, while Paris deliberately prevented much modernization after that. Downtown Paris has no skyscrapers except the Eiffel Tower itself, but it does have modern business centers pushed off to the outskirts of the city.
It takes 75+ years for a rebar building to reach end of life. The US just built up during earlier decades than many of those Asian cities. In another 30 - 50 years those antiquated buildings should start getting replaced.
If US-China trade were to stop tomorrow, US would suffer 100x more than China due to lack of critical goods. China would have a dearth of greenbacks.
China June 2023: Massive reverse migration by laborers back to countryside, Shanghai population down 135k compared to 2021 https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3215126/s.... Physical retail closures up to 80%. Entirely empty malls in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Real estate prices dropping 30-50% in tier 1 cities. Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing having 50k+ used homes for sale in span of 2 months. Shipping containers pile up 7 stories in every port https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3210870/c....
US June 2023: not much.
They've always been spectacularly wrong because they don't understand China and don't want to.
Sure, let's talk about broader context and macro trends. unless something big changes, these macro trends won't go away:
- alignment of dictatorship vs free countries. China, Russia, North Korea, Iran vs US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Australia, Philippines, Canada.
- dictatorship is losing. China is propping up all the dictators around the world, and its losing that power
- China demographics collapse
- China's rising and insolvent local government debts, which can no longer generate income by selling land. because China has too many buildings - 6 billion by last count. and demographics collapse. and lack of jobs
- Tech sanctions on China. China's inability to catch up on tech.
which indicates China's stagnation and decline for the next 10-20 years.
I'm sure most of us are aware of the gulags that China ran in 2022, in the most prosperous city like Shanghai, with welded doors, lack of food, arbitrary killing of pets, moving their own citizens against their wills to camps or cells with no running water and unsanitary conditions. with cries in tall buildings from families in the middle of night for food. If. you haven't seen these things, go watch it online. Imagine if somehow China succeeded, and that's all of humanity's fate.
Sure you have companies like apple that make $$$ from hardware, but most HW players in tech get slowly replaced offshore. Silicon Valley was silicon valley because of hardware. Now it’s mostly software, and HW is increasingly a commodity.
It’s the same thing elsewhere in the economy… it’s easier to set up a factory to sell something anywhere, but when you control buyers, you’re rich. The US is still the shopping powerhouse of the world… and even massive markets like China can’t consume as much because they just don’t have as much money.
And software that could be a commodity is often given away for free (Open Source).
The lower in the stack you are, the closer you get to commodity. Eg SQL databases - often somewhat interchangeable for different target features, but also language and expectations don’t match exactly, so there’s high cost to switching. That’s why Oracle now has to fight cloud providers, MSFT, and a ton of open source projects for business. Comparably, several languages (C, Java/Script, Python) have multiple compilers/interpreters with much better compatibility and little commercial options.
- exports plunge by 7.5% in May, far more than expected https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/07/chinas-exports-plunge-by-7po...
- profit tumbles 18% in April https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-industrial-profits...
- chip progress stagnating. Oppo chip design unit completely shut down https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/12/oppo-chip-disbands-phone-c.... Japan stops shipping semiconductor equipments to China https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Japan-c.... China is still stuck on 14nm chips.
- multinationals moving supply chains out of China faster than ever. Tesla asks Chinese suppliers to build plants in Mexico (June '23) https://cnevpost.com/2023/06/08/tesla-asks-chinese-suppliers.... BYD make EVs in Vietnam (May '23) https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chines.... On top of older news this year that Apple wants Foxconn to move out 50% of its production lines from China by 2025. And Dell's production completely out of China by 2027.
China is no longer the "world's factory". It will stagnate for 10+ years, similar to Japan's lost decades, but with worser birth rate than Japan today. It reported 8M babies in 2022, low that was last reached in 1940s.
We've never seen a large portion (25%+) of a large modern economy vanish in a span of a few years. (factories moving out, which decreases downstream economic activities such as real estate and retail).
I see marriage rates falling by about 50% over the past decade. But this claim seems unlikely, or perhaps just badly skewed by the seasonality of things.
This year's 520 marriage rate is ~40% of last year's.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/320...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/250650/number-of-births-...
https://news.sina.cn/gn/2023-01-17/detail-imyanfvn6707213.d....
(Figure 3)
2017 - 17.23 million
2018 - 15.23
2019 - 14.65
2020 - 12.00
2021 - 10.62
2022 - 9.56
Note that this is official Chinese gov statistics. Their numbers are known to be untrustworthy.
1: https://medium.com/@CollapseSurvival/overshoot-why-its-alrea...
2: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2005-03-06/dependence-pha...
idk, Japan seems like it thought the party would go on forever, whereas China does seem to have clear eyes with it comes to world politics (eg. long-term investment in the rest of Asia and Africa).
> We've never seen a large portion (25%+) of a large modern economy vanish in a span of a few years.
Do you recall NAFTA? or the quick rise of China not long after? These are still studied as huge exogenous economic shocks in business schools!
You're hyping up Xi Jing Ping, who is considered an idiot in most elite circles including Putin, too much. One belt and one road is now considered a failure with Italy, the most prominent member, dropping out of it this year. Most of the countries that took on the debt are unable to pay it back, and China has had to forgive a lot of the loans recently. And no one has aligned US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, India, Australia, Nato quite like China in recent years. The most recent focus in G7 was squarely on China.
> NAFTA
with respect to NAFTA, US manufacturing only consisted of 15% US economy in 1994 https://www.stlouisfed.org/en/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-m..., whereas Chinese manufacturing consisted 30% of China's economy today. Also, the difference is, the laborers in US manufacturing moved to other higher paying jobs, as a result, average income went from 25k to 30k in 2000. Whereas what we're seeing now with Chinese laborers is that they're moving back home to countryside to farm (< $1 a day)
I don't really care what Putin says but I do think they are thinking more long-term. Only here and in Europe do people think in terms of election cycles. Don't get me wrong, I am not a Xi fanboy, and I definitely don't want to the US to be like China in general terms, but I just disagree with you. I think they know that the US-centric money flow was capricious and they have been long making plans for when it isn't what it was.
>with respect to NAFTA, US manufacturing only consisted of 15% US economy in 1994 https://www.stlouisfed.org/en/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-m..., whereas Chinese manufacturing consisted 30% of China's economy today.
Now, put those in real numbers and you will see the effect! Also, do you not think 15% of the world's biggest economy taking a fucking as being significant? We had to pivot to service industries after that!
I can tell that you have a hard-held opinion on this and I am not fighting with you, I just think that your original post was not as nuanced as reality.
But when China lose most of the foreign manufacturing jobs, it lost a significant portion of its economic output. Because now these workers just went back home to countryside to farm.
there is a lot wrong with starryeyed libertarianism, but free trade with allies is absolutely not in the bad parts.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/us-growth-gdp-china-economy...
What other numbers don't lie? 20.4% youth unemployment rate https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/29/record-youth-unemployment-st.... 22% drop in daily home sales in 2023 vs 2022 https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/chinas-april-prop.... Yuan losing 7% value against dollar https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/13/investing/china-covid-yuan-us.... and on and on.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-q1-gdp-grew-45-yy-...
>On a quarter-by-quarter basis, GDP grew 2.2% in January-March, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed, compared with expectations for a 2.2% increase and a revised 0.6% rise in the previous quarter.
Right now China isn't pouring money into industry because it frankly never needed it. With the opening, more money is now being pumped into reopening services in China, that's why when you look at the PMI for services it's much higher, because people are taking money out of industry (unless it's high tech oriented) and parking it in services. People aren't necessarily consuming more, but it doesn't mean they aren't using much more services than they previously were, and eating out more, etc. GDP doesn't only look at industrial output.
BTW. All the other numbers you cited in the other articles were also provided by the Chinese government.
PRC exports to US/west near record highs while trade with global south have exceeded western bloc. The only reason export decline notable is because PRC exports has increased so spectacularly in the past few years (export value grew from 2.5T in 2019 to 3.6T in 2022) that there's nowhere to go but down when global economy underperforms. Net export value is still up ~40% since 2019 - exports stats can be confirmed bilaterally. PRC exports grew as much in last 4 years (~1T) as it did in decade between 2008-2018 (1.4T-2.4T). Meanwhile US increased imports from "friendshore" countries mirrored PRC increased exports to those countries, i.e. it's tarrif engineering and US import dependence on PRC ultimately still increasing.
China totally outclasses the USA when it comes to manufacturing.
https://www.statista.com/chart/28031/manufacturing-racing-ba...
This comment gives a better perspective https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=36247499&goto=threads%...
Their “miracle” was a US creation, a policy to build them up to create a counterbalance to Russia. It’s gonna take ten years to tell, but China is already feeling these effects and feeling them hard.
That linked comment is also cherry picked stupid. PRC exports to US/west near record levels, WHILE exports to global south has officially surpassed western bloc, i.e. PRC is MORE factory of the world than at any point in the past. The drop in exports is due recent to global economic downturn that saps demand everywhere, but it's sapping from hilariously record high exports during covid. Meanwhile PRC export:GDP is like 20% down from 35% high in 00s, i.e. it's one of the less export dependant major economies in the world responsible for substantial global exports (including heavy industry) but it's not even an export driven economy anymore.
On demographic front, the reality is PRC is minting OECD combined in skilled talent every year and last 5 years of PRC topping citation (controlled for quality), innovation index is just lag affect of PRC growing with fraction of that talent. The PRC miracle is basically doing all that with ~20% skilled workforce, because at PRC scale that's enough to be globally competitive. Now it's in process to grow that competitive workforce to 50-70% skilled in next 30 years, which is adding anohter couple US worth of talent into the mix.
Today factories in the US are built automated. No jobs, not for anybody but an accountant, an administrator, a couple of engineers.
We have around the same factory employment today as in 1945. Despite growing population by more than 2X. 13M mostly non-skilled. Maybe 5%
Could I please borrow your time machine?
China becomes less of a competitor on costs as wages rise there. Once the manufacturing wage differential gets into the 4:1 range, offshoring is less attractive. In the 2:1 range, offshoring starts to be a lose. That happened with Japan two decades ago.
Typical MRP/ERP solutions limit the way information flows around a factory. We have custom software running most of everything. It's a lot of CRUD and data pipelines. But wow are our processes easier to automate than I've seen with other systems, such as SAP.
Not to mention that also means that we will hold more power and ensure longer stability...why buy from China that could go to war with our allies and restrict our access to their manufacturers when we can just ask a factory in the next state over to make it?
That's what the article says, but the chart in the article casts quite a bit of doubt on that explanation (it's obviously an accelerator). Indeed, two paragraphs later, the article states "Census Bureau data reveals manufacturing construction spending has escalated from January 2020 until April 2023 in every region except New England and the Mid Atlantic."
If you assume that people make plans before spending a lot of money, you would think that the tipping point was back in 2019 or so. In fact, I know people that make machines that are used to make and outfit factories and they've been running at capacity for a long time. You might think it's crazy looking at that chart, but factory construction in the USA is currently constrained by availability of parts and people. People want to spend more than they're currently spending...
Second: you're basically making stuff up with that 2019 argument. That's not the way incentive spending works at all. If you have free money on the table as a corporate executive you record that revenue immediately, you don't put it in the bank to "plan". In fact, most bills like this make it largely impossible to "save" the funding anyway, and for exactly this reason: politicians want their results now, now in the next administration.
I am all for immigration reform as long as it prioritizes americans heavily. This means no H1B abuse but with congress getting massive subsidies from H1B mills, I don't think this will happen.
"The rest of the world" might have a little problem with that.
Good. Smart people having more leverage will topple places with shitty governments faster or consign those countries to the dustbin.
So if you want dictatorships to collapse it’s best to let the smart people leave, so no one can run the country, and the not smart people get angry at their government.
They will just kill bad dictator and install "good" one
Now you need 5% more houses, 5% more cars, 5% more electricity, 5% more infrastructure, and ~33% more immigrant support services.
Immigration is not a simple sticky-plaster - it has deep impacts on every part of your country’s infrastructure and services. It can work, but it ain’t easy: I live in New Zealand where ~30% of our population is people that were not born here (New Zealand is quite picky about who gets to come here, so we have less structural problems than some European countries that accept large numbers of refugees with little opportunity to filter for the most suitable people).
New Zealand has been building housing at a fast pace to keep up with the ~50% increase over the “native” population. How many places in the US can absorb the pressures of increasing immigrant numbers?
Do you like your standard of living? For most, you should when compared. That comes from one type of economy. This is another type, incoming. And there are no guarantees as to what your change in standard will be.
One rhetorical question might be: is your standard of living better or worse than in China, which is replete with factories? Neither does Bangladesh have a factory shortage.
Who owns the factories being built? It will surprise some to know that foreign ownership will be heavy.
One objective trend is foreign pressure to reduce the cost of exported goods, which means foreign buyer downward pressure on wages as exported goods make up larger portions of the economy.
Don't expect wages to be in Federal Reserve Notes. Do expect a continuing rise in corpocracy and feudalism. Do expect large pools of immigrant labor that will serve to minimize wages.
Our raw materials are tested by our lab when they're received and again after mixing/encapsulation.
You don't know what you're talking about.