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Comment by acslater00 | Hacker News Reader

That's a myth. The US has a huge and growing manufacturing base. We make airplane engines, medical devices, computer chips; all kinds of complex, high-tech manufacturing. We have the highest manufacturing productivity per worker in the world. What we don't make anymore are the kinds of products that require rote assembly tasks, like shoes and clothes and iPads. The upshot is that we have decreasing manufacturing employment even as the manufacturing sector grows rapidly.

Would it surprise you to learn that US manufacturing output looks like this?

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OUTMS

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Everything you mention has long design cycle times. Airplane engines and medical devices need certification, which means you can't iterate fast anyway. Chips take 8+ weeks to iterate on the lithography. An efficient consumer electronics operation in China can iterate every day.

I completely agree with your point, but I think it's important to point at this is measured in $$ value. We are manufacturing lower volume, higher value stuff than before (high tech) but we probably don't manufacture the same volume that we did 30 years ago (measured by weight or # of widgets).

I can believe a 60% increase since 1985 (which is what this shows; check the Y-axis range), as that is around 2% a year of growth, but the longer I look at that site, the more I wonder whether that is what it shows. Main question is what is on the Y-axis. Relative dollars or relative inflation-corrected dollars? I could not find that at the site.

You realize I didn't mean we manufacture nothing, but that we manufacture much, much less than we used to, right?

If we can't agree that manufacturing started to move out of the US decades ago, was accelerated by NAFTA, and that we are a consumer of goods made elsewhere (more than others are a consumer of goods made here), then this conversation isn't going to go well.

You're right, it won't go well, because you don't seem to know what the facts are. Check the parents data.

Not only do we manufacture things, we manufacture much, much more than we used to.

Not sure what metric you're using to claim that we manufacture "much, much less than we used to". US manufacturing output continues to hit all-time records. Measured in real dollars, output is ~40% higher than in 1990, and ~$220% higher than 1970.

See http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp for data.

The only way to stem the tide of downvotes here is going to be to stop repeating yourself in other comments and directly address acslater00's graph.

There's nuances here to be explored in what exactly is being manufactured, and there's some other interesting ways to extract bad tidbits of news out of that data, but it is certainly the case that the data does not justify running around shouting "DOOM! DOOM!" about manufacturing qua manufacturing in the US.

Personally I'm upbeat about the future. As robots and automation continue marching forward, the US goes from having a major labor cost disadvantage relative to poor countries to having a significant educational advantage. (Not a unique advantage, Europe and Japan also have good stories here, but China is not as well off on this time frame per capita.) I don't expect the broad direction of that curve to change anytime soon.

Here's a good article to read on the subject http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-welcome-rise-in-man...

In summary US manufacturing output is increasing and US manufacturing output exceeds that of China by about $100B, but only employs about a tenth as many workers as China.

The US is manufacturing more than they ever have and it's continuing to grow. If you want to complain about the loss of manufacturing jobs complain about automation and not the incorrectly stated lack of manufacturing output.

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