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Comment by throwawaysleep | Hacker News Reader

Manufacturing is low value commodity work. If for some reason a country has lots of low value commodity bodies to screw things on, then focusing on manufacturing makes sense. But if you want a high standard of living, you need to have high productivity. That is incompatible with humans working assembly lines as they simply aren't that productive.

The US economy is the world leader and continues to pull ahead of everyone else.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/04/13/the-lessons-fro...

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It sounds like you have a pretty antiquated view of manufacturing. It looks nothing like what you are calling it: "low value commodity bodies to screw things on." No offense to you in particular, but it sounds like you haven't updated your views since 1975. This is common because most manufacturing happens well outside of the lives of people in tech or service work.

Most screws these days are not screwed on by "bodies." They are screwed on by machine. Much of employment in manufacturing these days is in higher value work: operating CNC machines, maintaining robots and other machinery, engineering, and so on.

If manufacturing work is so low value and commodity, why do manufacturing jobs pay $20k more per person, on average, than service work?

Why does the manufacturing sector have annual average compensation of $70k, despite taking place in generally LCOL areas?

Do you look at a modern car and say: wow, what a low-value commodity good?

The Economist article you cite says nothing about manufacturing and does not support your point. In fact, when you look at the total output of manufacturing today versus 1947, it is about the same percentage of our GDP: even though manufacturing employment has dropped from 35% of Americans to less than 9% because of efficiency gains. The idea that manufacturing has disappeared from America is false and a myth.

I invite you to actually go tour a modern manufacturing facility with high speed robotic computer-controlled production lines. It may make you think differently about the physical comforts you depend on in your life.

What you are describing is also the reason why China has lost more jobs to automation than the US to China.

This is a commonly restated falsehood, manufacturing doesn’t have to be a commodity, you can just have labor laws and unions. The US had a thriving manufacturing sector for generations and it was the backbone of our economy, then we gave it all away in the name of cheap crap from Walmart and Amazon and sold out our middle class.

Look at Germany as an example, they do a lot of manufacturing and they have an excellent quality of life. They also make things that are objectively much higher quality than what comes out of Asia.

We can have both, an educated knowledge worker base and a manufacturing workforce, they are not mutually exclusive.

"Manufacturing is low value commodity work."

Some manufacturing, yes. But most manufacturing is highly complex, starting with t he suppliers, supply lines, workers etc. And manufacturing often brings in itself innovation.

"of low value commodity bodies to screw things on"

Most manufacturing is not so easy. Stitch some shoes in Africa? Maybe but even this is hard to scale in this environment. Try to assemble a complex product there. Hell, you might not even have reliable power and have to start building your own power backups there.

Not talking about military dependencies. What if Taiwan returns to China and does not deliver Chips anymore? How much of the world market do they supply? 70%

This take seems incompatible with the general prosperity nations that focus on manufacturing experience - look at the major economies of the 20th century, or of China’s booming wealth roughly commensurate with the stagnation developed nations are experiencing as they’ve outsourced manufacturing to China.

The apparent paradox is easily explained by the fact that China and the west are not starting from the same place, the average US worker is far wealthier since they have already gone through widespread industrialization. Manufacturing will show massive % gains on a smaller economy, but the kinds of labor that lifts you from a poor argriculturally eventually top out.

That’s what this “made in China” initiative is tracking - moving up the value chain in China.

Had the US not already gone through widespread industrialization by the 1950s, the supposed golden age of American industry and prosperity?

About 10% were still working in agriculture: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-agriculture-in-t...

Also, the post ww2 US period is unique in that the rest of the world either didn’t have skilled manufacturing at all or not at the scale the Americans had immediately after the war. Everyone else was bombed or not fully developed yet - it’s hard to draw universal lessons from the American experience, but it makes sense to look at the other nations that progressed after that. Like Japan for example, which was industrialized but industrialized further up the value chain after WW2

Except the high value jobs is in support of low value areas. Of which if those are outside your country then you are hosed.

For example google extracts value from sellers. If those sellers themselves sell product made and developed in china. Then soon enough the Chinese system will move up the chain by use of competitive regulatory, skill, and supply chain advantages

Companies all over the world are having supply chain issues and you comment this lol

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