We don't have cities like Shenzhen, where everything you need to get a product to market is within same-day courier range. I understand this was a feature of the old "hardware-centric" Silicon Valley, and it made fast iterations on new products a lot more viable. I wonder if we could even build a hub like that today, with property speculators and NIMBYism blocking anything short of grabbing a cornfield in Iowa and declaring it our new national manufacturing centrepiece.
We've completely ceded on education, and that was realistically where we could have competed. We could never match the labour prices of China or Viet Nam, but we could offer better trained workers. Our schools are a disaster, and it feels like we've completely lost a focus on competitiveness. It was only a few years ago, we were very fixated about being beaten in test scores, but now the focus has been lost to social battles (scares over LGBTQ+ content) which suck all the oxygen out of the room when people want to ask about actual student achievement.
We don't have the right backing for moonshot inventions. The way we lost solar panels to the PRC should be a freaking embarrassment. We knew for 40 years that people are going to want these things. Moreover, it was a new technology-- you didn't need to fight with entrenched players that didn't want to retool (like EVs)-- all you needed was a stream of seed capital and friendly loans to make sure people built here first.
This might be helped with some more government intervention-- strong industrial development finance products with a VC-esque mentality of "90% of them will fail, but a few will pay off 50-fold". The state is a good backer here, because they can take the "50-fold" in forms other than raw stock appreciation, like "securing an industrial edge for our country."