America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.

This is it. Aside from manufacturing, most recent AI startups are almost universally aligned in the desire to use it to reduce headcount. It's plastered all over their landing pages as a selling point: "use our product and you won't have to hire people."

Business culture is eating its own young and hollowing out the future with such empty goals and sales points.

I'm skeptical of actual results. There are a lot of layoffs attributed to AI but far fewer cases of increased sales attributed to it.

'We just don't want to employ people' is a gross simplification. We do want to employ people, and lack of skilled labor is a serious problem which has hampered business growth for years,

The first unspoken problem is that very few young people want to live where many factories are located. I can't blame them. I certainly jump through hoops to live in an area well removed from the industry I work in but not everyone has this luxury.

The second is psychological. How many kids do you know who are ready to commit to a future of 35+ years of factory work in their early twenties, even with reasonable pay. This influences manufacturer's hiring practices because of the 'skilled' labor thing. Putting time and resources into training employees when there is a high probability they will make a career change within 3 years isn't really acceptable.

This is HN, so I don't know if this resonates but as a thought experiment, would you take a welding/machine operation/technician position for 25 - 45 USD/hr (based on experience)? Overtime gets you 1.5 base rate and health insurance + dental + 401k is part of the deal. All you need is a GED, proof of eligibility to work in the United States and the ability to pass a physical + drug screen on hiring. After that, no one cares what you do on your own time if you show up, do your job and don't get in an industrial accident. Caveat, you have move away from anything remotely like a 'cultural center' but you do have racial diversity. Also, you will probably be able to afford a house, but it won't be anything grand or anywhere terribly interesting.

There is a dearth of applicants for jobs exactly like what I've posted. Why don't people take them?

Most jobs are wholly unsustainable. You have to job hop every couple of years to keep up with inflation because God knows you're not getting a raise that keeps you comfortable.

This has led to churn and brain drain and the slow collapse of US domestic business.

It's not that people don't want to work, it's that wages have fallen so far behind the cost of living that it's financial suicide to stay in any one job. Even with all the traps like employer sponsored healthcare, most people just can't afford to be paid the pittance most businesses are willing to pay.

This is a deep societal illness in the US. We've glorified and deified the concept of greed to the point where even talking about income inequality and the unimaginable concentration of wealth is just anathema. It's seeped into the everyday consciousness in the form of "I'm the only one that matters, fuck absolutely everyone else"

I genuinely believe that America will never, ever recover until we address this. We will always be this sick and broken country until the state entirely collapses or we get our shit together and address income inequality.

I have some real serious doubts that we'll ever get there, but it's easy to be pessimistic.

The US manufacturing sector is about half the size of China's in terms of value-add, but it's much smaller by any other measure. The US has focussed on high-value verticals like aerospace and pharmaceuticals, where intellectual property provides a deep moat and secure profit margins. That kind of manufacturing doesn't produce mass employment for semi-skilled or unskilled workers, but it does create lots of skilled jobs that are very well paid by global standards.

That's entirely rational from an economic perspective, but it means that US manufacturing is wholly reliant on imports of lower-value materials and commodity parts.

A Chinese manufacturer of machine tools can buy pretty much all of their inputs domestically, because China has a really deep supply chain. They're really only dependent on imports of a handful of raw materials and leading-edge semiconductors. Their US counterparts - we're really just talking about Haas and Hurco - are assembling a bunch of Chinese-made components onto an American casting. To my knowledge, there are no US manufacturers of linear rails, ballscrews or servo motors.

If the US wants to start making that stuff, it's faced with two very hard problems. Firstly, that it'd have to essentially re-run the industrial revolution to build up the capacity to do it; secondly, that either a lot of Americans would have to be willing to work for very low wages, or lots of Americans would have to pay an awful lot more in tax to subsidise those jobs.

It's worth bearing in mind that China is busy moving in the opposite direction - they're investing massively in automation and moving up the value chain as quickly as possible. They're facing the threat of political unrest on a scale they haven't seen since 1989, because of the enormous number of highly-educated young people who are underemployed in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs.

Lots of Americans want to bring back mass manufacturing employment, but very few of them actually want to work in a factory. You can't resolve that contradiction through sheer political will.

I have worked US manufacturing and manufacturing R&D for most of my career: pharmaceutical, microelectronics, materials, aerospace, etc. The US is awesome at manufacturing when we want to be.

One problem is that "modern MBA/business philosophy" views manufacturing and manufacturing employees as a cost center and there is so much emphasis on maximizing gross margin to increase shareholder value.

So business leaders scrutinize the hell out of anything that increases the cost of their cost centers:

- employee training & development? hell with that.

- Increasing pay to retain good employees in manufacturing? Why? isn't everything mostly automated?

- manufacturing technology development? Not unless you can show a clear and massive net present value on the investment... and, then, the answer is still no for no good reason. I have pitched internal manufacturing development investments where we conservatively estimated ~50% internal rate of return and the projects still didn't get funded.

There is also a belief that outsourcing is easy and business people are often horrible at predicting and assessing the total cost of outsourcing. I have been on teams doing "insource vs. outsource" trade studies and the amount of costs and risks that MBA decision makers don't think about in these situations really surprised me initially... but now I'm use to it.

Anyhow... the US (and Europe for that matter) can absolutely increase manufacturing. It is not "difficult"... but it would be a slow process. I think it is important to differentiate between difficulty and speed.

I think you're exactly right there.

>> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

> That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world.

I want to quibble with that a little bit. I don't have the numbers, but relative position matters too. The US could be "second-largest manufacturer in the world" if it only manufactures Dixie cups, other countries manufacture nothing, and China manufactures everything else.

My understanding is Chinese output is so huge, that even if the US had maintained steady or modestly growing manufacturing output from the 70s or whatever, it would be dwarfed by China.

Our biggest exporter is Boeing and sure Boeing produces commercial aircraft but their position has a lot to do with inertia as the accountant leadership of Boeing is doing their best to destroy Boeing by nickel-and-diming every aspect with a complex web of outsourcing that will fall apart the second there is any disruption in international trade.

What China has now is the infrastructure and ecosystem to manufacture. You need some tiny screws made of titanium? Well, there's a factory that produces that down the street.

The best financial years Puerto Rico had ended when the tax incentives to be there went away. It's a real shame. Puerto Rico was #1 in production, above the US and Japan. You could buy something made in Puerto Rico and you knew it was a high quality product. Its much harder to gain back that level of quality once you've effectively killed such a culture, I can only imagine the detriment in Japan if they lost their work culture and how much harder it would be for them to regain it.

There are too goddamned many stacks to expect that your best hire is going to already have used everything you’re using. There are people who have used everything, but you’re mostly going to be hiring flakes if you look for those, not Right Tool for the Job types.

Sure, but we don't manufacture the things that are typically made in 3rd world countries and the lead time to build that infrastructure is years, and generally would result in us moving down the tech tree ladder from being a consumer economy to a manufacturing economy with all of the negatives associated with that.

Just need to make steady progress each year with incentives that encourage large leaps in progress.

I agree with the unhealthy society and your statement got me thinking. In regards to health what happens when global trade is shut down and a country can not make it's own pharmaceuticals for example? About 64% of people in the US over age 18 are on prescription drugs. Some of those drugs have really dangerous rebound effects if one suddenly stops taking them. Some of those effects can be deadly, especially blood pressure drugs. Most of those drugs come from China, some from India. How quickly can each country start manufacturing and distributing it's own prescription drugs? Would that cause a quick adjustment to the culture or is that not enough?

I don't think it's just that. We manufacture, but we aren't great at the entire chain. China is much better are specialized tooling, etc. We have definitely lost a lot of knowledge in critical parts of the chain.

That’s a misleading oversimplification. While it’s true we haven’t stopped manufacturing, we did offshore a massive portion of it--especially after the Open Door Policy with China and subsequent free trade agreements. That shift didn’t just change where things are made; it fundamentally altered corporate incentives. Once production moved overseas, the need to invest in domestic labor--training, benefits, long-term employment--shrank accordingly.

As an European, there have been many decades since the last time when I have seen any competitive "made in USA" product that is intended to be sold to individuals.

There are products that I buy, which have been designed in USA, e.g. computer CPUs, but none of them have also been made in USA.

When I was young, it was very different, there were many "made in USA" products that could compete with those made elsewhere.

And since every major corporation is behaving like this, even if a CEO wanted to give a shit about the country, they can't do anything about it because someone else will be more cutthroat than them and eat their lunch.

The idea that “labor is cheaper elsewhere” is simply a neutral statement of economics is wrong — “lower living standards” is not just a economic measure, it’s a political statement about the value of labor and labor conditions. The US and by extension the “western capitalist world” has been exploiting labor since day 0 with chattel then later globally slavery.

The reason Japan was the biggest manufacturer exporting to the US post war, is because the SCAP forcibly rewrote their constitution to be explicitly capitalist. Read “Understanding Defeat” for detailed proof of the 7 year occupation of Japan, explicity to destroy any semblance of Japanese imperial/keretzu culture, and replace it with explicitly capitalist structure. To be fair to MacArthur, they did suggest labor practices, like unionization, but it was a thin veneer suggestion, not forced into cooperatives and syndicates.

China moved into that position post 70s, because Japanese labor began getting “more expensive.” Nixon and Kissinger saw an opportunity to exploit “cheap” labor because there were no protections for workers or environmental protections - so “opening up china,” plus the Nixon shock and floating of interest rates allowed for global capital flight to low cost slave-like conditions. This is why labor and productivity began to separate in 1971, there was a “global south” that now could be exploited.

NAFTA made Mexico and the southern americas the agricultural slave countries etc…starting in the 90s, and on and on just moving the slave-wage ball until there’s nowhere else to exploit.

It’s not a conspiracy to demonstrate that capital will move wherever it needs to in order to exploit “arbitrage opportunities.” Its good business/MBA capitalism 101.

Just like #2 in Austin powers said:

> Dr. Evil, I've spent 30 years of my life turning this two-bit evil empire into a world-class multinational. I was going to have a cover story in "Forbes". But you, like an idiot, wanted to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore. It's only corporations.

I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics.

There's places where producing A, whatever A is, is economically more efficient for countless reasons (energy prices, logistics, talent, bureaucracy, cost of labor, etc).

That's not gonna change with whatever investment you want or tariff you put.

But the thing I find more absurd, of all, is that I'd expect HN users to be aware that USA has thrived in the sector economy while offloading things that made more sense to be done elsewhere.

I'd expect HN users to understand that the very positive trade balances like Japan's, Italy's or Germany's run are meaningless and don't make your country richer.

Yet I'm surrounded by users ideologically rushing into some delusional autarchic dystopia of fixing american manufacturing for the sake of it.

If we want to strengthen America (military & economy) immigration reform is needed! This could be unpopular but such reform could be ...those who want to come here must serve in our armed forces for x amount of years and can bring two to four family members here that are able to start working and contributing to the economy immediately (pay taxes). Rounding up and getting of rid of these eager want to be Americans when we have adversaries with larger armies and we bang the drum on beefing up defense (and our economy) doesn't make sense to me.

It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point.

I believe the comparison is absolute production, not per person. Anything else would be odd. Considering China has 4x the capita of US it would mean that in absolute terms China is producing 8x the energy of the US. In reality it seems to be roughly 2x (although both sources are a bit outdated):

US 2023: 4.18 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity from utility-scale generators. Additionally, small-scale solar photovoltaic systems contributed around 73.62 billion kWh 1.

China 2021: 8.53 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity

--

But the staggering difference is how much of the electricity is attributed to the Industrial sector:

China: 70% (~6 trillion kWh)

US: 26% (~1 trillion kWh)

So overall China allocates 6x the electricity to production compared to US...

That the official line from the CCP was that China had no drug problems, no prostitution, a variety of other things†, and that there were no gay people in China; That these were all Western ailments.

Urban China is a panopticon state not only digitally, but culturally. Housing is much tighter than the US, walls thinner. Your underwear is hung out to dry in clear view. "Privacy" in terms of politeness norms mostly consists of pretending you don't see or hear a thing. Neighbors generally know a lot about what each other are doing. 7% of the population are Party members, and in Marxist-Leninist systems this connotes something closer to earning a military officer commission; The Party is not trivial to apply to, the Party is strictly regimented, Party rules are held above and before the civil law, Party members are expected to be informers and have a strict lawful-good orientation from the perspective of the regime. Penalties for commerce in illicit drugs are even more extreme than the US, and due process is not bound by the same presumptions.

There are lots of factors conspiring against the sort of informal US inner city street drug distribution being as big of a deal in China.

Disclaimer: All my information is more than a decade out of date, and was only ever a thin slice of opinions from mostly Westerners in some first tier cities.

† From an academic paper: "2 The Six Evils are prostitution, drugs, selling women and children, pornography, gambling, and feudal superstition. Criminal gangs, or triads, are often counted as a seventh evil. These vices represent impediments to modernization and throwbacks to social problems that were present prior to the Communist takeover. Elevation of a problem to an "evil" symbolizes that the Beijing regime will mount a "campaign" or "struggle" against it."

If we had the same requirements here in the US it would likely become the same.

Most corporations will wait it out. Corporations that have an established interest (like Big Tech) will bribe Trump to get the exemptions they need to continue their business. Everybody else will have to decide how much they will want to depend on such an openly corrupt system. There industries that see no problem in dealing with corrupt regimes.

Output in the US has been flat for some time, while China has been on a steady rate of climb for several decades.

American companies? Register for EU tax system?

I can buy from anyone in the US and worldwide for that matter, and as long as they're willing to figure out shipping they don't need to register anywhere, I can handle taxes myself when receiving.

What "AI" did they use to write this?

1. They are not high enough: Correct. Raise them more.

2. America's industrial supply chain is weak: That is why we need to bring the factories and resource extraction home.

3. We don't know how to make it: Perhaps we can steal the IP like China? We will figure it out.

4. The effective cost of labor in the US is higher than is looks: Then raise the tariffs higher.

5. We don't have the infrastructure to manufacture: You have to build it first, This will get cheaper and easier as we continue to bring industry home.

6. Made in America will take time: Blaming permitting time and Bureaucracy is a ridiculous excuse. The federal government can override all state and local requirements here. Its a choice to slow projects down.

7. Uncertainty and Complexity around tariffs: Democrats will have a hard time undoing progress if there is movement to reshore industry. War over Taiwan seems basically inevitable and this will harden resolve.

8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing: Most (well a very large and non-negligible percent of) Americans are going to loose their jobs because of AI. Most of us hate our jobs already, manufacturing will pay better. There are always endless service industries...like delivering food, if they do not like supervising a robotics controlled factory. It is disingenuous to imagine a return of American manufacturing without Huge AI and robotics investments. More factories will be lights out than the alternative. The jobs will be in servicing the robots, computer systems and quality control. We aren't talking Rosie the Riveter and the author must know it.

9. The labor does not exist to make good products: This is why there must be some discrimination over tariffs and why they should not be a simple even percentage. We can choose to bring back GPU manufacturing but pass on fast fashion. And during the process of negotiation we can give up those industries we do not want in exchange for support of a China embargo.

10. Automation will not save us: The author cannot imagine a world where manufacturing is not motivated by global trade. They fail to understand that it does not matter how much more productive China is when protectionist policies prevent trade. The goal is to get America to a place where it can manufacture everything it NEEDS on its own.

11. Americans file lawsuits: Good- this will increase the quality of goods we enjoy and we can get past the disposable foreign garbage that floods our markets. 12. enforcement will be uneven and manipulated: so get on board and help to improve it, stop undermining the attempt to help this country.

13. tariff policies structured in wrong way: Really not a terrible idea to have a disparity in tariff between input goods and finished goods but it is a half measure. We need the entire supply chain from resource harvesting, to tooling, to components to final finished manufacturing if we want to ensure national security in a world post-NATO.

14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball: Was there serious consequence to MJ trying his hand at baseball? We got through COVID. We have survived massive supply disruptions and the market has been pumping as hard as ever. If you are not currently retired it is absurd to worry about fluctuations in the stock market. And if you are, you likely invested in companies that sold out America.

From the piece: "The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who’ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you’d know how hard the work is."

[1] https://www.agriculturedive.com/news/agriculture-shifts-farm...

[2] https://www.terrainag.com/insights/examining-the-economic-cr...

[3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor

[4] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_BE5KPp18

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/there-are-a-...

As others have pointed out, this is not a contradiction. (Read their reply.)

However, the question of 'Do YOU want to work in a factory?' is heavily influenced by the fact that we don't see factory work as a high-paying career, or a career at all. Part of the solution to the factory problem is enhancing the value proposition for the employees.

I am ambivalent toward tariffs, but the idea is that if we make foreign products more expensive then the higher price of domestic goods becomes more palatable by comparison. If paying domestic workers more raises the price of domestic goods, and if people are willing to pay that price for whatever reason, you will start to see growth in manufacturing.

It's also silly to reject long-term goals simply because achieving them is difficult.

Very soon we'll be forced to make shoes and other things behind bars. No trial needed, just indefinite detention.

Its always easy to expect other people to make sacrifices working these jobs, while imagining you and your kids working office desk jobs.

Currently less than 20% of Americans work in factories. All those 80% need to want is that the 20% of people who want to work in factories can do so.

People want to be sure that their success is protected and they love telling other people what they should do.

Misinterpretation of data.

> The other day I saw the results of a poll [1] where 80% of Americans thought the country would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. However, only 20% of Americans thought that they would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. It was surprisingly bipartisan.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/a-look-at-manufacturing-jo...

Compared to the current percentage of people employed in manufacturing (9.9% - 12,759,129 / 128,718,060), there are **more** Americans that would like to move into manufacturing, not less.

It's still far from played out, but right now they're solidly on the road to Russia 2.0, with decades-long trends pointing that way.

https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...

What the US got in return was cheap goods and a whole lot of debt. What the world got was stability. The US is no longer interested in subsidizing the global order.

The current discussion re: “bringing back manufacturing” is making the mistake that everyone always makes when Trump is involved: taking him at his word. The point isn’t to bring back all manufacturing. The point is to profit off of imports. Some manufacturing will return — whatever is high value added and benefits primary from cheap shipping internally - but nobody thinks that Americans are going to sew t-shirts.

Also, those who are looking for an American decline as comeuppance for being unkind to allies are going to be sorely disappointed. The US has everything it needs to be self sufficient, and no matter how batshit crazy the leadership is, it’s still — still — the safest place to park capital, still the largest consumer market by far (more than twice China), has a stable demographic and a middle class country to its south that brings in lower cost workers as needed. Not to mention being totally energy independent, bordered on two sides by oceans and with more potential port coastline than the rest of the world combined… and also holding the virtually all of the world's supply of high-purity quartz, which is a requirement for semiconductor production.

They each had longer runs than we’ve had.

My pet theory is lead. From 1950 to 1980 we birthed a leaded generation [1]. Today, up to 60% of American voters were born before 1975 [2]. (Voters born between 1950 and 1980 came into the majority in the 1990s and should fall into the minority by 2028, but only barely. So in summary: Iraq War, Financial Crisis, Covid and Trump 47. It won’t be until the 2040s when truly unleaded voters, those born after 2000, command a majority.)

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35254913/#&gid=article-figur...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-changing...

China and others are clearly demonstrating the power of capitalism with state support. The US is too busy infighting and keeping capitalism and politics separate (small government, let the market decide etc). You wouldn't find enough employees that want to work in manufacturing; you'd need millions to even try and get close to what China is doing.

Now I'm not actually OK with what China is doing, the paragraphs about worker conditions were quite telling. But I will recognize that it gives them the upper hand in manufacturing that the US hasn't had since the 50's.

(meta: I'm gonna have to specify "the 1950's soon" don't I?)

The tariffs most certainly will dissipate but we can't discount the chance that they may be replaced with actual written in law voted on by congress and signed by the president taxes that have similar but much more durable effects.

Manufacturing and heavy industry really hates off-shoring. They only do it because the sum total of other policy makes it the only viable option. I can see them taking a decent haircut in pursuit of some longer term goal.

Its a terrible state and situation to invest in a business doesn't benefit anyone. My hometown had a large cultural center built by the mayor, he couldn't run for reelection again, new mayor is elected, completely ignores the whole thing was built and lets it rot. Everything is only done for an election cycle, the next cycle could bring something else entirely.

Its terrible to live in a place like this, Americans have no idea how bad this is going to be for the country.

The incredible part is USA exported that entire sector to China.

> Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has. In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

It's an actual joke to present something with such a derogatory view of the median American worker with no data to back it up. Most of America's "labor class" is in fact Mexican, the country with the highest annual hours worked per year. Secondly hours worked does not relate directly to productivity. American workers are the most productive in the world. [1]

More importantly, _we don't manufacture like this anymore, even in China_. Doing "acrobatics" on the factory floor is now obsolete. Much of what's said here fails to acknowledge that we would _not_ build our supply chains the same way as China does. China had a surplus of human labor (one that's facing an impending demographic crisis) and so used human labor in ways modern western countries would not and do not.[2]

[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/01/the-countries-where-... [2] https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robotics-race...

Reproducing these supply chains is more possible than this article states. Doing it via destroying our economy however will not work.

Do we sacrifice a democracy for the dollar? If not, is our economy annihilated? We have no credible alternative to reshoring for this reason alone.

Manufacturing is skilled, well-paid labor that requires commitment, attention, and care. That is why there's a shortage of labor--not because of wages.

Too bad a large portion of our electorate is brainwashed by propaganda and/or completely out to lunch.

This post is basically correct. The Chinese will accept being exploited way harder than we will! Good going communism!

This shit is why I will resist Marxist bullshit with all of my fiber forever. Fucking barracks communist no matter how hard they try to claim “nah we don’t support that”.

I think you're overlooking that, say, giving out a 10-year loan for a small business is exactly "holding an asset" (holding a bond issued by said small business for 10 years). For the benefit of everyone involved.

It used to be a thing that people were importing massive quantities of baby formula to China because they didn't trust locally manufactured stuff.

You know sinophilia means "love of China", and that anime and Japan are not Chinese, right?

Why would you assume they don't understand? Every time they're questioned about the tariffs the narrative shifts. We have a trade deficit, we're getting ripped off, we want to bring back domestic manufacturing jobs, we'll automate them with robotics and AI, we're playing hardball to negotiate a better trade deal and get rid of fentanyl, it's a matter of national security, an economic emergency, the dollar is overvalued.

You cannot trust a word from them. If you want to understand why they're doing something you must look only at incentives and outcomes. My current analysis is that there's some internal conflict, but the overall push for tariffs comes from a desire to crash the economy and use the downturn to consolidate wealth and power.

Curious why you are surprised at incompetence being unable to understand complexity.

That's the optimistic POV at least imo.

I believe we should scale up manufacturing in the US for different reasons.

But I'm also a realist. If war erupts between China and the US, then anyone in the US or China still alive 4 weeks after the start of hostilities will have more pressing concerns than worrying about where things are manufactured. Again, just the reality.

We shouldn't plan on the basis of end of the world scenarios. Rather we should plan on the assumption that we want to confer maximum benefit on the US in likely non-apocalyptic future timelines.

If it actually costs $60 (really more like $25 for made-in-America t-shirts I’ve bought) to make a t-shirt, with environmental regulations and human costs accounted for, then isn’t that the actual cost of a t-shirt? And they were artificially cheap at $10 for imported ones due to ignoring externalities? In that case, producing these simple products is actually a bit more valuable than you suggest.

You can run the numbers many different ways, but the important point is low value production is always about volume.

You can't put a monetary value on a t-shirt, because people will buy them anyways. Who is to say that t-shirts aren't $60? People only think that t-shirts are "low value" because we have offshored the labor and are used to very low prices. Meanwhile I bet most Americans can't even sew.

Seems much better to look seriously at the manufacturing we still have (as you say, it's considerable), where we can expand on that, and where we're lacking and need to rebuild.

Where I live it is close to impossible to even get a Dog House approved and built.

Factories can be air conditioned.

> America would be better off if more Americans works in manufacturing than they do today. Agree 80%/Disagree 20%

> I would be better off if I worked in a factory instead of my current field of work. Agree 25%/Disagree 73%

[0] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-08/Globalizat...

What in the modern situation suggests the comparable level of diligence in approach to the goal? The fact that both goals are far-reaching does not suggest comparability of approaches to the solution.

Changing the way society/economy operates is nowhere near "building X," whatever X is, whether it's something hard like a bomb or a collider.

> We will do it, and we will win, whatever that means.

How do you know that you haven't won already? Shouldn't the end goal be clear? In the case of Kennedy you're referring to, criteria and motivation were clear.

--

To a non-US bystander, your comment sounds like a no-thinking patriotic slogan. The details of the article are such that you can take any argument and bring it into discussion in order to show its irrelevance. But we're discussing slogans irrelevant to the situation and belief in the win, even though the win is not defined.

These are the questions people need to ask themselves. We both know what the answer is.

The only sane way to bring back manufacturing is investments like the chips act.

Think about it this way, you are a widget manufacturer trying to place a new factory. You could put it in say Canada and enjoy cheap imports and exports of your product globally. It's cheap to produce and easy to sell.

Or you could place it in the US, but now you are looking at a minimum 10% tax on importing the resources you need. On top of that, a significant portion of the world (especially the richest nations) are tacking on an addition 10% or more tax on your product because it came from the US.

Would you build a factory in the US? Maybe if you can source everything in the US and you are fine with your primary market being only the US. Otherwise, it's a bad business move.

When talking about something like semiconductors, global access is really important to be profitable. Low or no tariffs and the proximity to China and other raw resources powerhouses is a major reason why so much of the semiconductor industry is in Asia.

Even after considering the alternate pathway called ROC[tm]-- after all you may argue Morris Chang et al gave up lifestyles-- & I hear Rationalistic Daoism is having a resurgence on the mainland (vs Confucianism)--

  Because (sadly) it's all still about morale & spiritual

Work to do what?

> But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children.

Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or manufacturing?

> How do we get that level of prosperity back?

Better pay for the jobs people actually work. Reducing inequality by preventing the richest 0.1% from capturing all the massive gains in wealth the US has seen over the past few decades. Removing regulations that prevent the country from building housing and therefore driving up housing costs. Switching to a healthcare model in nearly any of the comparable developed countries almost all of which deliver better healthcare at half the cost. Not expecting everyone to be able to live a completely unsustainable suburban life. Having the government support children's upbringing by paying for high quality education, instituting rules and regulations that require mandatory paid maternity/paternity leave, etc.

Lost of poorer countries manage to do this and more just fine. The US is far richer than most of those countries.

Very little of this has to do with manufacturing jobs falling from 18mm to 13mm.

Given the improvements in cameras and computer vision and AI and robotics, there is no reason to think this won't accelerate. A long long time ago, labor was cheap and resources were expensive. Today, the opposite is true. Keynes predicted in the 50s that we would be working 15 hour work weeks. The reason he was "wrong" was that he underestimated our insatiable human greed. We all want more. Average house size in the 50s was < 1200 sq ft. Today it is 2400+. Each kid must have their own room that is 12x12!! (I grew up with 4 boys in a 10x10, lol). Each kid must get a new $200 bat each year for little league, etc. We want a higher standard of living for ourselves and our kids. This is understandable but we forget our role in the never ending chase.

It’s so simple it hurts. Stop the ruling class hoarding all the wealth.

Top tax bracket used to be 94%.

Have a VERY steep wealth tax, an inheritance tax and whatever else is needed. The fact individuals exist with many hundreds of millions of dollars while so many in the same society are struggling so bad is a disgrace.

1. win a world war that destroys the economy of every other country in the world for a decade.

2. destroy about the past 50 years of technology and all knowledge of how manufacture it.

3. Kill 90% of people over retirement age to lower demand for housing, healthcare costs, and retirement benefits.

In the modern world with modern technology there's a lot less productive work out there for people without specialized education. We could do a better job of training more people for trades jobs (e.g. plumbers, electricians etc), and removing college requirements from some professions (e.g. med school and law school could probably be college level education rather than post college) but anyone saying that we're going back is just lying.

> How do we get that level of prosperity back?

The issue is that this is a false premise. The house sucked. Only 1/3rd of American families had a single car at the time, and the cars sucked. We can go on and on about everything else. Not to mention the social environment at the time sucked.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the issues Americans face. But tariffs with a shifting set of sanewashed justifications are just Not It.

Like what is unique about factory work that allows for this? I’ve heard stuff like this so much and I just do not believe it. Is anyone working in a factory in the USA today able to buy a home and have a stay at home spouse on a single income?

So... here goes: rather than proclaiming a "housing crisis", maybe we're seeing the end of an exceptional period of "housing affordability". (A similar analysis of Europe and Asia applies, piecemeal.)

As such, if we want to re-enter into a new period of housing affordability, we need to ask ourselves what we plan to give up and/or trade for that?

For WW2, it was millions of lives and worldwide devastation. It seems like we'd need a complete re-evaluation of the way wealth, family structures, and social safety nets work in order to vastly expand housing. (In the US.)

By making everyone poorer. Seriously.

You are competing with your fellow citizens for those things. This was true even back then.

Right now, today, it has never been easier to make a lot of money working. So you need to compete with people in that environment. You need to be able to outbid those people for that beautiful home you want. In an environment of lots of educated and skilled workers getting skilled salaries for doing vary valuable work. That's where the bar is.

We can lower the bar back to blue-collar-high-school-diploma, but then we need to also sacrifice all those high earning college degree jobs.

Not going to happen.

And something they're not going to get. Manufacturing is going to be heavily automated. The money is going to continue to funnel into a small portion of the population.

When was that last really true? 1971?

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/america

It doesn't make you wrong, but you're also not right.

He was that bad at baseball compared how good he was a basketball.

The article seemed correct IMHO,

> What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball? He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player in the minor leagues. 2 years later, he was back to playing basketball.

Someone may be able to pay workers $300/month and make them work the "996 working hour system"[1], but if they then have to mark up the end product by 100%, the disparity between local and global price to consumers narrows.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

Personally, I think we need to focus on making things like homes more affordable. This would go a long way toward alleviating people's feeling of being trapped.

See the hundreds of thousands of people in US that have died from opioid overdoses. 50% of the US population, specifically those living outside major metro areas, experienced a slow collapse (over decades) that was not unlike the fall of the Soviet Union.

A country should have _some_ semblance of what it is to truly source, manufacture, and produce the lifestyle that's made possible in the country. When the top 15-20% become completely disconnected from the other 80% working menial service jobs because the core manufacturing has been outsourced to outside the country, it will come back to bite you.

"Man must feel the sweat on his own brow" or at least have an appreciation for what makes this possible. Your comment essentially implies that you feel that you are above or should be disconnected from this reality, which is dangerous.

Offshoring has produced a world where we can buy cheap trinkets but where many, many, americans live precariously, have little to no stability, and work more than one job to make ends meet. What Americans really want is more control over their lives and "bringing back manufacturing" is a sort of short-hand for that ideal.

I think bringing back some manufacturing may help, but in the end Americans need to learn that what they really want is more power to shape their lives and that they will need to wrest that power back from a system which has leaned ever more towards market control of the allocation of time, energy, and labor.

The poorly educated need a livelihood too. If the economy is healthier for global trade (I think it is), then some way must be found of destributing its benefits to the demographics who got hit. Otherwise you get revolution or populism.

Telling an unemployed factory worker to send their kids to college doesn't help. Doesn't help the factory worker, and doesn't help kids who see education and middle class jobs as about as unreal as the idea of becoming a famous influencer or kingpin drug dealer.

Also the US is already the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world.

Why does it cost us 10X more to build half as much? It's not all wage differences. It's that we don't have a large talent pool of builders. When you make things -- physical things in the real world -- you learn things about the nature of reality that cannot be learned from books or computers.

It literally harms industry because anyone relying on that hyper niche part now has to pay more (because American mfg, let's face it - is not efficient) and deal with subpar quality as opposed to higher quality foreign parts.

I hate it say it, but come on man - people aren't buying American cars globally because the Japanese and even Germans can do it better. That's free market economics, either get better at making cars or focus on making things that we can do better like iPhones and Macbooks - not try to artificially defend an industry we suck at by forcing people to deal with shittier subpar products.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, I don't know.

You are the one who thinks of the work as below you, that it should be moved out of sight so we can stop caring and make it someone else’s problem.

If you believe this statement, then you must be supportive of open borders.

People in China might be more efficient at doing local US service jobs. Whose to say we dont let them do it?

Lord man... there's a whole mass of humanity who don't want to fart in an office chair all day, or lay around collecting the dole.

What we have instead is a nation straddled with debt and useless degrees. While the counties like China do “theirs world” work produce smarter and more capable workforce all while doing the mundane work too.

I think your view also vastly underestimates the number of not so smart people that exist in America. This is no knock on them, but people in tech bubbles get to walk around in a society where the average person they interact with has a far above average IQ. So for those who don’t balance red/black trees and find shortest paths with dijkstra's algorithm need jobs too.

On top of that you forgot something I am sure you have yelled many times, diversity. Remember when it was a strength? It’s not good for any nation to be completely void of entire industries. Having factories next to the tech will germinate the thinking minds with new problems to solve.

But even more to the point. China is doing amazing things, and they were we let do the manufacturing. So we always have a strong evidence that letting others might not be the best idea.

The wise thing to do is to at least make steps in the direction of on-shoring or at least make your plans and investments compatible with it.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know this: it’s that the person making the decisions rejects the idea of needing to make a detailed plan, or even understand the situation well enough to recognize the problems a plan would need to address.

Blue collar workers were the first to push for globalization, because they suddenly could afford a lifestyle that used to require the salary corresponding to a couple of steps upper in the corporate ladder. A blue collar salary suddenly could provide for many more amenities... til the salary was no more!

Everyone wants manufacturing back, but only for the products they can produce, because everyone still wants to buy at Chinese prices.

Furthermore, the regulations that most stand in the way of cheap manufacturing are environmental regulations, and good luck with that! We have got used to breathe clean air, and I feel most people still love clean air more than they hate globalization.