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> Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets

As China has shown over the past 20 years, that advantage erodes quickly if you stop making widgets altogether. It's very easy for widget makers to move up the value chain into widget design. And once they do, you're cooked, there's nowhere to hide.

Not to mention, widget design can't absorb as much labor supply as widget production. And many people can't do widget design, still need a living, and would be perfectly competent widget makers. So...you gotta solve for that if you focus only on widget design.

Out of all the many industries out there, I don't understand why we keep glorifying and romanticizing manufacturing and trying to "bring it back." I've also worked a few of these jobs and you're right: THEY SUCK. Depending on what you are manufacturing, it can be boring, stressful, stinky, physically taxing, or dangerous. And most of them, even the highly skilled ones, don't pay well. For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.

Because there are 300M people in the US and not all of them can have your cushy SSE role. See all the homeless people - it's because we're selling them out.

Maybe not literally all but certainly most. We hardly have any farmers or factory workers compared to what we had at one point. They've mostly moved onto cushy office jobs.

Most is 12%? This is the problem with HN. You're all so bubbled it's ridiculous to think sometimes a HN'er will say something like "If I were President."

You're using officer/administrator role for your number. The number of people who work in an office or sitting at a desk is much higher. I see numbers ranging from 40-60% for that.

that's a very incomplete view though. How many of those would take up the newly created manufacturing jobs? How many of those can be trained to do other, better jobs? There are reason to bring some manufacturing jobs back for national security interests etc, but from a labor and economics perspective, it seems a better investment is first to try to invest in people such that more of the current labor pool can be engaged in "better" jobs first.

> For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.

So let me get this strait. You think these dangerous, monotonous jobs are bad for "our own society" so the best thing for "our own society" is to export these dangerous jobs to another society "own own society" doesn't give a shit about. Wonderful.

I can't believe how ignorant and callous people can openly be.

You can't seriously believe those other societies are taking manufacturing jobs because they are worse than what they already have. People in the 3rd world are less fortunate; they're not dumb -- they want the same as us: better lives for themselves and their family. If they're working in a factory and not the alternatives it's because they passed something else along the way that was an even shittier option than that.

> You can't seriously believe those other societies are taking manufacturing jobs because they are worse than what they already have.

My statement is in reply to those who are unconcerned about exploiting desperate societies.

Short of going back to a society of married families with a single income, there isn't really a solution to keeping everyone working and making an income though. Without jobs, we revert from a modern society to a third world nation.

There are some people who like the rote work. You and I may not but some of the people I talk to like that they can basically "turn their thinking off" and get paid.

>Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up This should not be possible in the US. OSHA is still in existence(you could argue that the future state is unknown)

https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19... >1910.212(a)(1) >Types of guarding. One or more methods of machine guarding shall be provided to protect the operator and other employees in the machine area from hazards such as those created by point of operation, ingoing nip points, rotating parts, flying chips and sparks. Examples of guarding methods are - barrier guards, two-hand tripping devices, electronic safety devices, etc.

> a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. When the safety on a machine fails, the machine should stop. If it does not, then the safety was not installed correctly.

Sounds nice but not reality. The price of paying out a finger every few years is a lot cheaper than paying for maintenance and safety equipment.

Where was this? Because that's not true in the US, land of the personal injury attorney. My brother used to be a machine salesperson. He got a call from a law firm couple years after his company sold a machine asking about a particular one that was sold (not even by him) because their client lost a body part. Those payouts often end up in the millions.

A payout in the million doesn't seem in disagreement with the OPs assertion that the payouts make economic sense for these companies.

I think the picture you paint of the US is rosier than the reality. Brings to mind the death of a 16 year old working in a poultry processing plant:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children...

These companies know what they're doing.

It looks like a company was using uninformed and "scared" employee population to commit labor violations. Also using the same tactic that I alluded to in one of my other comments: Production workers are hired from a staffing agency and dispatched to the job site, that way the company HR doesn't know(and can't legally ask about work eligibility).

It looks like that plant in particular has serious issues. Someone else died after the 16 year old, bringing the number of deaths in recent years to 3.

This one in particular seems to know what it is doing: Googling "Mar-Jac Poultry" does not bring up any of the issues, nor are they listed in the Wiki page.

I've worked some in metal fabrication and supported some light industry. if you think anyone in a normal business in the US that hires less than 50 hourly people has even read the OSHA regs, you're completely unconnected with the reality

we really do call those stamping machines 'finger eaters'

I work in manufacturing and stamping machines scare the shit out of me, usually because of the forces involved but I did work on some that were not guarded. That was not in the US however.

My first job with a stamping machine was in a company with about 30 production workers. This was early 2000s in the southern US, all the workers were from Latin America and I think that most of them were not here legally(I say this because the company used temp agencies to employ the workers and at one point later they wanted to bring one of them on in a management role so they had me(also a temp) ask if the person wanted too switch the the higher paying but also requiring them to submit legal documents role).

Even under those circumstances, I never saw the company do something that skirted OSHA regs. Their stamping machine was a POS that was annoying as hell to use, mostly because the light curtain and other safetys kept tripping but it was never bypassed.

Or more likely, the safety measures were bypassed because they were a PITA. You can put all of safety measures you want on equipment, but humans have this insane mindset of faster = better. Yes, that includes top to bottom of companies.

> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills

We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.

> Unions are a potential solution to this issue

This is part of the Labor vs Capital stuff I mentioned in my post. We're not likely to have strong unions again in the near future, so any jobs we bring are likely going to be dangerous in addition to carrying low pay.

OTOH if we posit strong Labor, the good news is we have a lot of jobs now that we can turn into Good Jobs. We could, for example, make it so that any large employer pay their employees enough such that nobody who works for them full time (including contractors) is eligible for income-based government assistance at the state or federal level. We could choose to expand those rules to any organization over a certain size. There's a lot we can do to turn Bad Jobs into Better Jobs without boiling the ocean and moving industry supply chains.

Because in a lot of people's minds having ~1/1000 of your coworkers killed for every decade you work at the factory still sucks less than taking orders from some algorithm crafted in a downtown office by someone who wants to exploit you at best and hates you and your way of life at worst.

In the factory you get both. With essentially zero chance to change the algorithm. When my father worked in the factory he found a way to manufacture the product faster and cheaper and just as safely, and rearranged the factory to do so. He was punished by management for altering the algorithm and also ostracized by fellow workers because they perceived it as reducing the demand for jobs.

Yup, that does sure sound like a silent-generation or boomer era story.

I'm sure pockets of that stuff are left but pretty much all of "those sorts" of "we don't pay you to think" workplaces either transitioned or went tits up over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as the Japanese management made its way to the US (though one could argue it's come back over the past 10-15yr).

Now, of course if you are doing something that's as unskilled as unskilled gets or in a particularly perverse workplace you'll encounter those conditions, but they are absolutely not the norm. The business schools these days teach various flavors of "it's cheaper to run a workplace people feel doesn't suck".

This stuff goes through phases to some extent. The 1920s and 30s were adversarial. The 1940s-60s were more cooperative. The 1960s-80s were not great. 90s and 00s were quite collaborative. Now we've kind of got another wave of "management knows best" and adversarial thinking that's waning.

That's the American dream story- always starts with dad getting yelled at for making things better and faster - the next sentence in the founding documents: So he went his own way and now we have NicoCloth Inc. which in the years since has become a global corporation.

Pretty sure they regulated that out of existence in the past several decades. Now best you can hope for is to be bought out by the competitor of the company you left sometime before the 50 employee mark.

(only partly joking, and that part is way smaller than I want it to be)

Well, I hope to think it's still possible.

Doing rote work is better than no work and living off the government.

People in those rote jobs enjoy the camaraderie, the beers after work and putting their kids through school. Something an unemployed person has more difficulty doing.

Even the great USSR had huge amounts of rote work. People found a way to live life.

Sure, let's adopt the Soviet model of "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay" because what could go wrong there!

You're basically asking every consumer to pay more for goods so someone can feel better about themselves personally (at the cost of someone who they don't share a country with). I'm not sure if you've met many people, but it's not a very compelling argument, nor a morally superior one due to the global impact.

It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.)

I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.

> It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.)

It's actually not, because people aren't required to live near people who consume more in social services than they contribute in taxes. Areas like you describe exist, but basically contain the people who are unable or unwilling to leave an economically depressed area. Most people just leave.

> I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.

I don't disagree entirely, but most people do based on behavior.

It's not a simple problem at all, including what is fair to consumers and the businesses themselves which have to compete with other companies that don't have artificially inflated expenses.

> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over.

Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. I ran the press, milling machines, lathes and saws. No one in that shop was missing body parts. Sure, its monotonous at times but that can be said about many jobs. A well ran shop should not put you in harms way.

> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.

I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with other people being subject to the same conditions.

> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over.

Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. No one in that shop lost a finger.

> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.

I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with people outside of your country So the laborers in other countries where safety is ignored aren't people?