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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Surprise, this is what happens when you shift everything in heavy industry or production in general off to India and China without keeping at least some production domestic or at least have everything documented and regularly (i.e. once every ten years) check if the documentation is accurate and workers can understand it to build a product that meets specifications.

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> this is what happens when you shift everything in heavy industry or production in general off to India and China without keeping at least some production domestic

I disagree, or at least think it's a lot harder than that.

1. It's not like we closed down Metal Cutting Inc. and just bought everything from China. There's no single company to have saved; there was Icebreakers and co. and Reactor Vessels Ltd. and ValvegearForgingCo. Any one of them might have been able to adapt but none of them were save-able and a lot of them were obviously obsolete.

2. Even when there is a Metal Cutting Inc., that's almost as bad. The supply chain was more efficient when it was integrated, not when its contracted out to a third party... or we would just buy from the places that still make things.

3. In this specific instance, but also in many others, market forces are not really the real problem. Look at Alcoa- hugely successful because small mills were cheaper to operate than large mills, but now we don't have huge mills everywhere. Can't fix that- even we had seen it coming and kept large mills alive, what would they make? What about harder problems,where you need a varied set of things to make to keep knowledge from dying out?

4. How do you do this without picking specific winners, and lobbying for who will live and who will die? If industries can survive the decline without losing their experts, how do you decide how much money to give them? How do you incentivize them to actually keep that knowledge, instead of getting into a more profitable industry?

5. In the end, the problem isn't about the companies or documentation or people. If you continued to employ all the people who operated the great presses, they'd just be mostly dead by now. It's not like people need much more than a wage, but I do think that an industry that depends on government subsidies, cannot possibly grow, does not build truly useful things, and could disappear because a new appointee dislikes it is not a line of work most people would be drawn towards.

My take is: Academia is the right place for some fraction of the people who are made redundant by outsourcing or technological change. They don't have to be lecturers, but they are already teachers. They pass on their knowledge to new employees. Document, research, experiment, and prove manufacturing and industrial techniques. Preserve that knowledge for when it is needed. Humanity doesn't invest nearly enough into education, much less the preservation of knowledge.

>to India and China

You probably mean just China. India's manufacturing output is less than 1/10th of China's manufacturing output.

India does a lot of steel, but especially medicine, which suffers from the same problem.

Here in Germany, we're lacking cough syrup and antibiotics for children and so fucking much more drugs it's not even suitable for making jokes about the situation, it's so dire. Decades of "cutting costs" by always going for the cheapest manufacturer - i.e. China and India - has led to serious issues now.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/health-ministry-confronts-germanys-dir...

[2] https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2021/daz-30...

The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes... and if they wished to survive competitively, they moved their production offshore (helps avoid UAW strikes).

Easy to know U.S. lost expertise, but tough question how do you get it back? Tariffs? A larger military-industrial complex? Even larger government?

> The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy.

You don't need a centrally planned economy. Subsidies are enough incentive to at least keep a bit of production around.

> Easy to know U.S. lost expertise, but tough question how do you get it back?

Invest money into subsidies / R&D like in the icebreaker case, or raise tariffs against Chinese and Indian price dumping.

> The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes...

Currently US federal government spending is around 36% of GDP, which means 36% of the US economy is in fact centrally planned, albeit with some devolution in some cases.

I don't really disagree with you, but that's very misleading to say.

64% of the federal budget goes to social security, medicare/medicaid, disability etc. That is, it goes to individuals. It's not meaningful to call that economic planning. It's not in the slightest like paying for defense contractors or research or infrastructure.

11% goes to interest payments, ie people who bought bonds etc. For individuals that's certainly not central planning, since they are the ones who decided to buy. A large amount goes towards paying of quant. easing etc, but it seems a little goofy to count that like we spend it every year still.

You raise valid points and I agree with the thrust of what you're saying. To quibble a bit though I'd say that Medicare and Medicaid aren't really individual spending, but rather a pharmaceuticals and healthcare subsidy, much like how food assistance programs amount to a food and agriculture subsidy.

Every large company is itself a "centrally planned economy". I worked for General Motors - it was much more like the Soviet Union than people want to admit. Every conglomerate I have worked for that had more than 10,000 workers was run like dictatorships.

Ok, so those company dictators are interested in national security instead of profits? The entire topic here is how to maintain or build skills within the U.S.

ive been at a few F500 companies, and while internally that might be true... you can just quit.

if anything, that "I can just go" leads to more of a cult or prison than a dictatorship.

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