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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

> factory worker is never going to be paid $30/hour plus pension/retirement contributions, good medical, etc. to make regular, el cheapo consumer goods

Well, this is possible, but it will take very few workers to produce the huge amount of goods to make it profitable. Case in point: e.g. a Novo Nordisk factory that produces like half of the EU supply of insulin employs like 15 workers per shift, who mostly oversee automation at work, handle incoming / outgoing trucks, and ensure physical security of the plant.

It's the same thing that happened to the US agriculture: in 1800, it used to employ like 80% of the population, in 2000, 2% to 3%. Machines replaced human labor almost fully.

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Sorry, to clarify: by "factory worker" I'm referring to the pre-offshoring state of your typical American factory job. A skilled employee who's closer to a plant operator and troubleshooter than an assembly-line drone is, of course, another case and can make very good wages.

Your parallel to ag is a good one: it's something we need to be here, and we wisely embraced automation to ensure 1. we could do it even in wartime, when our male population is needed elsewhere, and 2. that we could produce in a way that cost little for the average consumer and the export market. We need the same thing to happen here.

I mentioned the "factory jobs aren't coming back" point more because Trump is playing hard to a rust-belt base that wants those jobs back, doing this in some ways as a hand-out.

Absolutely. A factory worker doing something that a Bangladeshi factory worker is doing (expertly but manually sewing garments or shoes) can only make comparably much to the Bangladeshi worker, and would need to survive in comparable conditions, unable to afford more.

Places like Bangladesh are experiencing the industrial revolution; to remember what it looked like in England, read some Dickens (or even K. Marx, haha); for the US, read some Mark Twain or Theodore Dreiser. It was bleak.

The paradise of 1950s, when a Ford factory worker could be the only breadwinner in a middle-class family, was only possible because most of the rest of the world was devastated by WWII, from which the US emerged relatively unscathed.

> only possible because most of the rest of the world was devastated by WWII

Maybe this is the situation the Trump administration is striving for

Recombinant insulin is exactly the kind of high value IP the US excels in producing.

Historically, yes. The arson performed on our research funding puts that at risk for anything which isn’t already clearly close to commercially viable.

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