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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why people romanticize 1950-style manufacturing jobs so much, like they are some kind of objectively ideal job. These jobs really weren't great. Bunch of dudes standing at an assembly line all day physically busting their asses and sweating it out. Sometimes in a physically hazardous environment. Sometimes breathing stinky and/or harmful chemicals. Sometimes surrounded by ear-damaging loud noises. Sometimes mind-numbingly repetitive work. This work sucks! And we should be happy that as a country we managed to transition our economy away from depending on this kind of work! Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?

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Nostalgia more than anything. At the time a factory job could buy you a home out of high school, have a wife that stays home and takes care of the children. The factory job itself is a red herring. What people actually want is a post WW2 baby booming economy.

Agreed. For that economy to come back, you need all possible competitors to be weak and poor, in the mid 20th century that meant either still agrarian (China) or rebuilding after war (Japan and Europe). It was a unique moment and it's never coming back.

This doesn't make any sense at all. The reason China is dominant in manufacturing isn't because the other countries of the world were weak and agrarian and rebuilding after war.

What would be awesome is if half-assed finance bro speeches weren't being thrown around as serious macro.

They were talking about economic boom, not manufacturing dominance.

China wasn't a factor in global economics until the 90s, and Europe only was relevant for US growth for a very short time following WW2 and the Marshall Plan.

Without post WW2 taxes.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the extra wealth ends invested in the house market. This increases the cost of terrains for both old and new homes. It is also not very productive just to buy one thing to extract rents from it. ( There is value in handling the rent, building or reforming and old house).

The urban land is limited and requires government infrastructure to connect it.

Another big cost is the university.

You won't hear me say that the housing market doesn't need an overhaul, but I'm not sure that the "a factory job could buy you a home out of high school" meme is entirely accurate. If you look at home ownership rates, the rates today are higher than (though not by much) the rates in the 1960s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

I can't find numbers from earlier than 1980, but 18-44 _is_ lower, though again the rate in 1980 was just a few percentage points higher, and not nearly high enough to imply that home ownership out of high school was in reach for the majority: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

Manufacturing jobs are mostly unionized and service jobs aren't.

Americans actually want unions back, but because anti-union propaganda is so prevalent, they confused themselves into thinking they want manufacturing jobs back

Conservatives don’t want unionized labor - they want 1890’s style manufacturing at best, no unions and rampant exploitation of labor. At worst, no people in the factory of any sort - dark factories end to end. There’s little room in the conservative morality for people not working, or for people who are working.

Can we not call those people "Conservatives". There is very little conservative about them.

You are correct and I sincerely apologize. I have always had immense respect for my conservative peers. This is something else carrying the mantle of conservative, cowing the conservatives to silence.

Part of the decline in union jobs is that loyalty (on both sides) is dead. It's hard to unionize a transient workforce.

>Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?

The main argument would be if you are relying on other countries and you can't produce anything yourself then you need to rely on other countries being good trading partners. If the relationship with those trading partners fails your economy is in trouble.

What does that actually look like, though? And at what cost?

No single country can produce everything it currently imports much less compete globally on every product.

Does the government just prop up every industry with subsidies? Or use tariffs to make everything as expensive as domestic goods?

Back then a couple could buy a house and raise a few kids on the paycheck that factory job of the husband's earned. These days even someone with a 6 figure tech job has trouble with that goal, but I think a lot of people think they can go back to the good old days.

Back then before manufacturing jobs were sent overseas

Homer Simpson exemplifies this. Heres a guy that never went to college being the lead safety inspector for a nuclear power plant. He owns his home with three kids a stay at home wife and two cars and two pets(with the occasional elephant that comes and goes). A lot has changed since the writing of these characters and the world now.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp2Ey0H7OUE

My go-to example is Al Bundy. He was a loser, but most zoomers can only dream of having a house, a few kids, a car project in the garage et cetera

Yes absolutely! I was never too much into Married with Children as a kid hence I jumped straight to the simpsons but the idea of a shoe salesman having all of that today? Not possible.

That guy did retail shoe sales too. I’ve known some people to survive off those type of jobs, but they sure as hell weren’t living with a sitcom family in the burbs.

you guys understand that was a fictional comedy show right? It had no resemblance to reality on purpose.

Sure, but the shows tried to relate somehow to the reality of the time they depicted. They could've also make the character have another profession but it would be much less credible.

They don't realize that making good money in a factory was due to a particular tech/economic environment and the US' position inside it.

People thinking they can go back to making good money in a widget factory is like thinking because you had an ascendant economy in 1836 exporting wood before global electrification, then that lucrative job is always waiting for you even in 2025.

What's missed in that nostalgia: the house was crap; the appliances, if any, were crap; the car(if you had one, and only one), was crap. On and on.

That crap house hasn't been updated and is worth 200x currently in California. Houses that sold for 10k in the mid 70s are selling for 2 million or more in 2025. Cars, appliances and everything else is just a rounding error by comparison.

That's a condemnation of zoning laws artificially restricting the market for housing, which ironically only came about after that period of relative abundance

"Things are not shitty because of X you mentioned but because Y, therefore things are not shitty"

Does not compile.

Holy shit you have eaten it all up even licked your fingers just wow.

It isn't the jobs, its the economic power of having unions that people really want.

> Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?

A house was 2 years salary.

National security

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