Watch the 1986 movie "Gung Ho" starring Michael Keaton, about a Japanese car company opening a fab in the US. It's amazingly witty and funny.
The gist is that Japanese workers (and Asians in general) are expected to sacrifice their personal life for the good of the company with all the downsides that incurs for them, while American workers want to do the bare minimum at work and also expect to be paid significantly more than workers in Asia (duh!).
In the globalized world of today (let alone the 1980's), manufacturing is a race to the bottom in terms of cost where you need to squeeze your labor as much as you can to keep costs down, and high income countries like the US, can't compete, nor do they want to because they have better options to pump up their GDP, like printing USD.
So why do we keep discussing this over and over again? Working in factories competing with Asia kinda sucks for the 21 century wealthy westerner so they don't want to do it like in Asia, which is what it takes to keep prices low and consumers happy. So opening factories under these conditions seems like you're setting yourself for failure form the start.
What’s the alternative for your average American? They don’t want to work like Asians in a factory, but they also don’t want the dead-end service jobs that are the alternative in an economy where the real productive work is done overseas.
I suspect the proximate cause of the drop is the hysteria about overpopulation that gripped all Asian countries in the 1960-1990s. The governments there raised two generations of people socialized to believe that having too many kids was bad for the country.
Japan and Korea never had anything as barbaric as China’s one-child policy, but the government heavily propagandized population control during the second half of the 20th century. They imposed taxes on families with more than two kids, heavily promoted abortion and sterilization, etc.
We've disguised it with massive immigration.
There may come a time when a new way of thinking will spread, causing this trend to reverse.
>The UN forecasts that Japan’s total population could plummet to 104.9 million by 2050, possibly even as low as 87 million by 2060;
There was a larger delta then because US workers were much more skilled than Japanese ones in 1960
There is plenty of semiconductor industry in the US but it's differently specialized and they compete for the same pool of engineers. Nvidia, AMD or Broadcom don't have fabs, but they hire engineers from the same pipeline as fab companies.
It's few years since I was hiring EE majors in the US, but it felt that skilled people with EE master's are harder and harder to find every year. I think USC and CMU are the only ones that produce quantity and quality. MIT, Stanford, and Berkley produce quality but not quantity.
Semiconductor pay is dogshit compared to software. And everything is going to be in the office at whatever crap city has the fab--no remote work for you.
Any EE smart enough to be good at stuff for a fab is smart enough to GTFO to software.
The solution: cough up some damn cash.
I have to use my microscope to go hunt for the world's tiniest violin when I hear companies complaining about hiring EEs.
Also, your "crap city" bit is an important factor too. WhoTF wants to live in Phoenix AZ? The fabs are usually located in rather lousy places, whereas software jobs usually give you far more choices for places to live. There's software jobs virtually everywhere these days.
Here is some data:
CHIPPING AWAY ASSESSING AND ADDRESSING THE LABOR MARKET GAP FACING THE U.S. SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SI...
>67,000, or 58%, of new jobs across manufacturing and design will risk going unfilled by 2030.
Another nugget from Fig 6: More than half of the MS graduates in semiconductor-related engineering fields are foreign and 80% of foreign Master’s leave the U.S.
People in the US keep asking "Should I go to college?" and "Who needs calculus?"
sorry, the what of Americans?
You can still see pockets of this. I was in Salt Lake City a couple of years ago and it was amazing. I was also in Iowa, and the older folks were pretty orderly, but you can see among the younger folks that southern redneck culture has been spreading.