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Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

There's a presumption that it would be beneficial to return mid-20th century manufacturing economies. If you look at economic output and productivity, and quality of life for labor (physical labor, especially repetitive physical labor, is hard to do for decades), we want to move forward and we did. We want to plan for a mid-21st century economy.

The problem is a small group seizing the benefits for themselves.

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Yes, but in the end you still live in physical reality, and this determines our actual productivity.

Whether we can make a boat, or a tennis racket, or a toothbrush cheaply is in the end what determines how many people can have boats, tennis rackets and toothbrushes, not whether the service economy, or our scientific research is excellent. We can hope to be able to do neat stuff and trade that for products, but in the end, once trade is no longer mandatory when people do not need to obtain foreign currency to obtain oil, everything having become battery-electric, I suspect that everybody will be better off simply building what they want.

That's not how, in physical reality, the world works. The question is not 'what is needed' but 'what adds value'.

If you walk into a room where a full crew of people are painting the walls, you don't add any value by picking up a paintbrush yourself - you may even get in the way. You need to find something valuable to contribute.

In our real world, many things that are needed are already well provided for: They are so cheap and easy to produce, that making more doesn't add value (and consequently earns little income). Making t-shirts is very cheap and easy; you provide little value by doing it yourself and consequently you won't be paid much for it. Another example is water: Potable water is absolutely essential to life - the most essential thing. But it's already well provided for and therefore we don't invest substantial resources in producing it. We'd be a very poor country if we made t-shirts and potable water, and deservedly so - we'd be adding little value to the world.

We add value to the world by doing hard things that others can't do: Designing chips, designing airplanes, writing software. Science is hard. Those add a lot of value - and you get paid well for it.

We're not starting from a world of nothing - maybe like 10,000 years ago - and adding things to it. Then t-shirts and especially potable water would be essential. We're starting in the world as it is now. Manufacturing, for many products, was valuable and hard in early-to-mid 20th century; when Henry Ford first did it, it was hard and extremely valuable. Now lots of people can do it and we add little value by doing it ourselves, and we won't get paid well either.

This is economic myopia that leads to long term subservience to countries which have maintained manufacturing capability. China can literally bring the rest of the developed world to their knees at will with rare earths.

There's lots of rare earth deposits all over the world, but the question is, are you willing to accept the pollution that results from extracting them as efficiently as possible?

China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.

China dominates refining, which is also a nasty industry. The mining is done in many places.

> China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.

i.e. long term thinking is their strategic advantage.

Actually, the most powerful country in the world by far is the United States, and other than China, other Western countries that have followed this "myopia".

> rare earths

Rare earths are not a manufacturing product, but a natural resource. That's not an applicable example here.

Also, China is more dependent on the rest of the world than vice-versa; China has power, but certainly hasn't brought anyone to their knees - when has that happened?

The reason your original post was downvoted was because the events of the last few years have so thoroughly damaged your neoliberal ideas and of course this follow up just confirms how poorly you are informed.

If I understand you, you have no argument but you feel threatened by what I say ?

Generally we don't talk about up/downvoting on HN, but it's especially odd when someone else talks about it.

I have plenty of arguments but have learned arguing to be a complete waste of time. Neoliberals are experts at ignoring/dismissing real life evidence to maintain their thought bubbles.

The point of my post was what it says, express why your thinking is no longer popular, even though it was main stream just a short while ago.

It’s easy for a small group to seize the benefits when productivity is centralized in the hands of a small group. If you diversify the ability to build boats, then you may not be rich, but you’ll have a boat.

The increase in wealth concentration mostly happened after ship-building (and other manufacturing) departed.

The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy. If China could turn on a switch and become independent, they'd do it. They can't and it's interesting that the US/EU are not happy with this superior status quo and would rather return to a pre-1900 world where they are the sole center of the world.

It's not going to work, in my opinion; and it's going to end with them having neither. You being downvoted shows that this is not the opinion of the elite only but everyone is onboard the insanity train.

>The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy.

Except that we don't have monopoly on that. Assembled in China, designed in California worked for a while because of the inertia of the previous times when the whole pyramid was located in the US. For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.

Guess what - we moved the bottom layers of the industrial pyramid and we are acting surprised that the top layers are also organically happening there. We are probably somewhat ahead, but if we get wiped out of existence tomorrow the progress in China won't slow down.

Somewhat ahead in a few areas but those are only temporary.

> For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.

What am saying is that this is not happening because shit got assembled in China but because of internal issues in the West. Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better; and I think this is where I (and most?) people disagree here.

> Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better;

How so? Why would bringing back domestic manufacturing be worse for a country than outsourcing all of it to another country that is actively working to replace the few parts of the process your country's still involved in?

Of the top of my head: pollution, jobs that negatively affect your countryman and then require expensive healthcare, side effects (noise, truck traffic) that negatively affect knowledge workers, low pay.

I can't also think of any reason why bringing these jobs is a net positive. Like I get it, China is adversarial but there are 2-3 billion more people you can outsource this work to who are unlikely to get adversarial.

This is the fundamental thing you get wrong. The whole industrial knowledge thing was build because we were building stuff internally. When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing. For free.

We live at a physical world - so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper is extremely important for continuous dominance.

The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.

> When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing.

I don't think so. Employees on the chain line are not going to become literate and engineers just because you are outsourcing the menial stuff.

> so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper

That is knowledge work.

> The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.

It didn't stop Brazil from creating a rather very good aerospace company.

I am afraid we cannot reconcile the difference in our thinking.

>It didn't stop Brazil from creating a rather very good aerospace company.

That uses prat and whitney and GE engines

Unfortunately, neoliberal bullshit only works out the long term in a political fantasy world.

The impression is that you must know nothing about the merits and this is all you have - name-calling, swearing, condescension. But most of that is unnecessary and definitely inappropriate to HN: What makes you think you can treat people this way? Because they have economic ideas you don't like - and, it seems, don't understand?

I don’t think I insulted anyone, I said neoliberal ideas are bullshit. Because they’re demonstrably so. In the UK, Thatcherism resulted in terrible decision after terrible decision, and we must all live with the consequences.

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