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Comment by jordanb | Hacker News Reader

> I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.

Absolutely people were extremely dismissive to anyone saying that we're losing the ability to make things in this country!

There were all these theories like Comparative Advantage that people would trot out to point out that, if you don't like outsourcing, not only are you ignorant and backwards you're also probably racist.

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I specifically remember seeing the ricardian tables, featuring 8th grade math proving how competitive advantage means everyone wins. This was very persuasive to me as a college sophomore, all my professors were on board and I was young.

I guess we were all lacking wisdom.

I remember being a young guy, blue collar background, but in the left-wing anti-globalization movement (think Seattle WTO protester types).

When I was in college or going to parties with New Yorker Reader types I'd try to argue against globalization and they would start smugly dropping their theories on me. I was too young and naive to refute them in any kind of convincing way, but my life experience told me that it was wrong.

But it was pervasive in the zeitgeist. Basically anyone trying to argue against it was backwards and stupid, or shrill if they were lefty.

I wonder if the exact date of anti-globalization switching from being a "left populism" to "right populism" thing could be determined.

However I'm not sure it could really be stopped or whether it was inevitable from containerization. Can you really prevent people from getting cheaper products forever?

Again containerization happened in the 1970s and 1980s. The China Shock was 2000-2010.

What technology was invented in 2000 that allowed everything to go to China? No technology. That was the year the US adopted Permanent Normalized Trade Relations with China. It was a government policy change!

By the way the US already had trade relations with China. All PNTR did was promise not to change the policy in the future. That was the starting gun that signaled to all American companies that they should start investing in production in China.

So would globalization happen on some scale just because of the march of technology? Sure. But the way it happened, the speed at which it happened and the extent to which it happened, were the result of policy choices.

I'm pretty sure that China demonstrating that they are a stable country, that they want foreign investment, that they won't gank your investment two weeks after you make it, and that they aren't going to do another Great Leap Forward may have had something to do with why foreign investment in it skyrocketed.

This sort of thing takes time, and by the 00s, enough time (and a recent Hong Kong transfer that did not result in mass liquidation) passed, and foreign investors were gaining confidence.

The world, and especially China has agency of its own, it isn't sorely driven by whatever American policy is it's flavour of the week.

> a recent Hong Kong transfer that did not result in mass liquidation

No, but there definitely was a much slower gradual repression over a longer period, with a final round of protest repression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...

> The world, and especially China has agency of its own, it isn't sorely driven by whatever American policy is it's flavour of the week

Amen. A two-pole model is simple and attractive but the rest of the world is also, you know, doing stuff and buying things. America can, for example, preserve its car industry by refusing to allow Chinese EVs, but will gradually discover it has become uncompetitive overseas.

Completely agree Jiang Zemin spent the 1990s courting global capital.

The point is that it wasn't technology it was policy, on the Chinese and American side, that drove the China Shock.

This was also what a lot of anti-globalization people were say at the time. The pro-globalization people were saying not only is it good but it's inevitable. There Is No Alternative.

The anti globalization people were saying if it's inevitable why does it need all these policy changes, trade agreements, and bigwig conferences?

Those would be part of the mechanisms of inevitability (under that hypothesis). Globalization is a phenomenon at the human societal level, they would be predicting human behaviors, it's not like rocks and rivers were going to precipitate it. It's not like those singular events "changed everything" either, it's an accumulation of decades of social sentiments, purchasing decisions, etc.

This whole subthread is from like an alternate timeline where the world actually found out or agreed that globalization was bad and stopped or slowed it somehow? Did the US meaningfully take back manufacturing or something?

If globalization is not inevitable, what's the alternative?

The globalization we are talking about here is not inevitable, and it is facilitated by global capital with their own interest in mind and in order to exploit the working classes in cheaper labor markets as well as the consumer in the local market by selling them subpar products at inflated prices.

The local consumers don‘t want this and would rather get quality products for a fair price, but are forced to participate because of the economic situation. Likewise the workers in the cheaper labor markets don‘t want this but are forced to participate due to their economic situation. And there are systems in placed enforced by both global capital as well as governments to keep it that way.

True globalization would have open borders where the flow of workers are as free as the flow of capital in the current system. Where cheaper labor markets simply wouldn’t exist and therefor could not be exploited by the owning class. True globalization would have solidarity of workers reach across international borders. Such that striking textile workers in Bangladesh would see retail workers in America refuse to sell clothes from involved factories to American consumers in solidarity.

The type of globalization we are talking about here is only globalization of capital. It is a misnomer, and should instead be called global exploitation of the workers.

The globalization we are talking about here...is facilitated by global capital with their own interest in mind and in order to exploit the working classes in cheaper labor markets...

This is true, but, in their efforts to maximize short term gains, they are moving us towards your "true globalization" whether they intend to or not. That's kind of the inevitability. You can't send all that economic activity and expertise over there without lifting those people up. They are inexorably chipping away at the reserves of cheap labor to arbitrage. China's getting better, and I'm here for it.

I am not so optimistic. A globalized world with free movement of people and workers seems further away then ever, and if anything we are moving further away from that world every year. The very same politicians that help facilitate the free flow of capital and exploitation are at the same time pumping up xenophobia and advocating for closed borders. The border walls are coming up both a literal one in America and a tech dystopia one in Europe.

China is getting more rich, that is true, and workers in China are not living in the same abject poverty they were in the 1980s, but labor rights in China have not improved much, and neither has consumer rights. And even if by some miracle the next General Secretary of the Chinese Communist party is a socialist that enacts labor rights and consumer protection across all of China, making exploitation just that much more expensive for capitalist exploiters, there are other labor markets which are unlikely to get such reforms, particularly in India and West Africa. Also the borders into China are not exactly open either.

Yes it will be annoying for the capitalist class, but they will absolutely do it, if it means more profits, and they will lobby governments to keep borders closed, to shut down any potential for free movement of workers, and global solidarity.

There is a reason why a popular slogan among unions is: “No free movement of capital, without free movement of people!”

EDIT: Thought of an example to back up my case. Within the EU the free movement of people was inseparable from the free movement of capital from the start. This has been a great success. On the contrary, NAFTA had only the free movement of goods and services and capital, but neglected the free movement of people. Allowing free movement of people was hardly even discussed, and after 9/11 there was no way it was ever going to realize. Now NAFTA is dead. True globalization was, in fact, not inevitable it turns out.

Another good example is how these trade deals strip liability at the border.

I recall an example of when a Mexican worker in an LG plant lost her hands in a poorly-maintained stamping press. Theoretically Mexico has robust worker protection laws, but in reality the courts are corrupt and controlled by the maquiladoras.

So instead lawyers tried to sue LG in US court on her behalf. In fact they sued the actual TVs being imported by LG US that were made in her factory, the same way counterfeit goods are sued and arrested at the border by intellectual property owners.

The US judge dismissed the case arguing that the TVs were owned by LG US, who bought them in Mexico from LG Mexico. Both companies being owned by the same parent company is irrelevant to the law which saw them as completely separate entities and neither LG US nor the TVs it bought have any responsibility for the conditions in the Mexican factory.

Now if the drafters of NAFTA cared at all about worker conditions they could have easily made liability follow the goods across the border the same way they made copyrights and trademarks follow the goods across the border. They did not care about the workers and in fact they saw the mistreatment of workers as an advantage of the free trade deal.

Yeah, it's tough, there are a lot of discouraging developments and backwards things still going on. I don't think anybody would claim that it would all happen within our lifetimes. And even in the long term, I can't say whether we're headed toward an ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots or a more egalitarian society, but there are some positive indicators. And I think the "global community" is steadily pulling together (when looking over the whole timespan of civilization).

Offshoring to Asia began long before it moved into China. What you are describing is the acceleration point of the trend.

anti-Globalization on the right has nothing in common with anti-Globalization on the left. The only thing they share is the name. And is probably the reason we don‘t call it anti-globalization any more, but rather simply anti-capitalism or more accurately anti-global capitalism, or anti-imperialism. Anti Neo-colonialism used to be popular but is already (and rightly so) falling out of fashion.

Even back then people on the left had a problem with the term globalization. On the left it was wildly recognized that the term came from the right to decorate global capitalism and (what was then called) Neo-colonialism in a more palatable light for liberals. In Iceland we used to make fun of it and said it should instead be called Americanization.

Right-wing anti-globalization is basically just hating foreigners (except white Americans), and supporting border fascism. Interestingly the right wing types in Europe love American culture, and have no problem with America spreading their capitalism and Neo-liberalism world wide (they only hate it when the EU does it).

>Can you really prevent people from getting cheaper products forever?

Do you even want cheap products? We're all trapped in low-quality-product hell together, and some of us have realized we'd be less frustrated and less poor with something at least not-quite-so-low-quality.

If people could have realized that sooner, and if there had been some vision or political will at the top, stopping this would've been a matter of very boring policy decisions. It wasn't inevitable. Containerization might have made it easier, but it didn't make it irresistible.

Anti-globalization is not right-wing, at least here in France. Right parties and the extraparliamentary right are very happy to have cheap goods from China, oil from the middle east, and gaz from Russia. Hell, even the neo-fascist (which directly descends from actual nazis) Front National regularly has their propaganda manufactured in China.

Right-wing parties are very opposed to organic food and local production, and always defend transnational treaties. Hell, even Mercosur, which Marine Le Pen spent years arguing against, 100% of Front National MPs voted for it.

So beyond that words come out of these lying scumbags, i'd be curious how you came to this idea that anti-globalization is right and not left?

> But it was pervasive in the zeitgeist. Basically anyone trying to argue against it was backwards and stupid, or shrill if they were lefty.

It was so very weird. Even in Ireland (which was the target of the first wave of US outsourcing), people seemed to believe that everyone could be "knowledge workers" and that industry was unimportant.

I still don't really get why everyone believed this, but they did. Something something Upton Sinclair I guess.

> I guess we were all lacking wisdom.

Yes, economists famously do, and they also lack intelligence and knowledge given that their theories keep being proven wrong by reality but they never update them.

Economists have effectively become a priestly class, dressing up the ruling ideology in "science-y" robes so as to communicate authority. All social sciences are at risk of doing so, but they fall right into this hole the instant that they don't perceive the world as it exists.

A trained economist either sells out to the Overlords or he gets a job as a barkeep. Or he ends up as some crank in a half-forgotten nonprofit somewhere. There's no middle ground.

Human intelligence is a remarkable adaptation, but "tendency towards delusion" might be the decidedly maladaptive trait that comes with it.

They're the mandrins of our modern age. Their role is to make what our rulers want to do sound smart and reasonable

okay lets do wide spread price controls and wealth taxes it'll be great

> All social sciences are at risk of doing so,

It's like saying that the Titanic was at risk of sinking after it hit the iceberg.

> A trained economist either sells out to the Overlords or he gets a job as a barkeep.

That's what training is for.

> Human intelligence is a remarkable adaptation, but "tendency towards delusion" might be the decidedly maladaptive trait that comes with it.

I'd say the reason is more external than internal - personal interest is a mind bender.

Irrational exuberance

And they were right. American manufacturing is $3 trillion/year, second only to China, and 1/5th of the entire world. American built airliners and American built engines fly all over the world. Millions of American cars come out of factories every year. American rockets put more into orbit than everyone else combined.

The idea that the US lost its manufacturing is not based in reality. One reason people think that is because people think cheap plastic crap and consumer electronics when they think “manufacturing.” Another reason is that US manufacturing has become highly efficient and automated, so a fairly small portion of the population works in it.

Yeah, your iPhone wasn’t built in the US. But the plane that got it here probably was.

You're arguing that American manufacturing is healthy because of Boeing?

Among others, yes. Nearly $100 billion in revenue last year. From your snark I guess we’re not supposed to count a manufacturer with revenue equaling the GDP of a small country because they’ve had some quality issues?

Boeing is not a healthy company it's a deeply sick company with a horrible internal culture. I know because I've spoken with people who work there.

The fact that leadership is focused on extracting profits out of the enterprise is also not a show of strength. It's a demonstration that they're trying to drain whatever value is left in it.

This is pretty much true of any of the American "greats:" Boeing, Intel, GE, GM, Corning. They're producing (or have recently been producing) great profits because they're eating their own seed corn. Nobody expects them to still be the businesses they currently are in another few decades.

One other metric the parent didn't mention: The US is #1 in the world in productivity per worker in manufacturing.

We're not the largest in absolute output, but we are literally the best manufacturer in the world, and we are the 2nd largest.

We manufacture lots of stuff, often the most state of the art and difficult things to manufacture. We're very good at it.

And we've sat around close to full employment for so long, the only way to convert more of the economy to manufacturing is to either import workers, cannibalize other sectors of the economy, or automate even more.

Yes, a larger share of the economy is services, but is there some objective optimal ratio of services to manufacturing we should be shooting for? If so, what is it? No one ever says.

Yeah but something something testosterone manliness degeneracy decadence.

Sending emails from an ergonomic chair for eight* hours a day and having to be civil to female coworkers and polite to your boss inherently degrades the male spirit in a way that permanently damaging and poisoning your body with 12-hour factory shifts with a foreman yelling at you doesn't. This is so self-evident and obvious that nobody even bothers to state it, it's just an assumed undercurrent in discussions of "bullshit jobs" etc.

If you can’t see the direction and velocity of China you’re beyond hope

Americans cars are falling behind, they rely heavily on American cultural exports which relies on the world not thinking Americas are twats because the voted for Trump. Germany alone is over twice the size of America in terms of car exports. Including domestic destinations then china is three times the size of America.

America planes fall out of the sky far too often as Boeing pivoted from engineering to politics

Musk does good rockets. Not America. China is catching up and lost to overtake unless starship proves itself; and if it does China will copy that too.

Chinese planes are increasing very year, comac now about 15% of traffic, and heading towards about 20% in a decades time. and Boeing is about the same size as airbus at 40% each which will shrink as china catches up, won’t surprise me in 2050 is the largest provider of passenger planes is Chinese.

And do you know where the tools and dies to make those things come from? Where the robots that work at those lines come from? Where the chips in those robots at those lines come from?

Hint: not here. Even basic machining is cooked here. Go on Xometry and compare the pricing of any simple design made in USA vs. China and you’ll see, we can’t competitively do the basics anymore (you conflate basic with crap).

If you go back to WWII America was the China of the world: mass produced products if midrange quality.

Europe owned high end quality, especially Germany.

Most Radar technology was invented in the UK and then sent to the USA where American engineers would redesign it for mass production. You'd have a magnetron that the British machined at great expense and the Americans would redesign it so it could be stamped out by the thousands.

Germans would look at the wrecks of bombers they shot down. Early on they'd look at a B17 and say "this thing is crude" but by 1944 they'd look at a late model bomber and say "we don't even know how they made some of this stuff".

People have it entirely backwards. They think if you can do high end manufacturing the low end is easy. In fact if you can do mass production of low end parts with consistent quality then high end stuff is easy.

We can't manufacture most of those low-end things at competitive prices with developing nations - and we never will be able to (or else we have bigger problems).

So who's going to buy the low-end stuff at high-end prices?

You can try tariffs and the like (as we're foolishly doing right now) - that usually ends up having the opposite intended effect. You make everything more expensive domestically, including manufacturing (b/c your inputs got more expensive), and hurt our ability to export, even the things we did well.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world unencumbered with protectionism reaps the benefits of free trade and out competes us.

All this eventually leads to a loss of manufacturing jobs and output and manufacturers that can only sell to the domestic market (instead of the whole world). The whole sector starts to shrink. So that's no good.

America has lots of natural resources (even more when we're friendly with Canada) cheap electricity, good transportation infrastructure (historically).

China has to import much of their raw materials. Wood from SEA and Russia, oil from the middle east and Russia, even coal, ore and beef cattle from Australia! They don't have the water supply, forests, mines or oil that exist in North America.

There is no good reason for them to be the manufacturing center of the globe and there were rational reasons why the US was the center of manufacturing in the globe in the 20th century.

The reason they became the global center of manufacturing was policy choices in China and the US at the turn of this century, and the reason why they remain the center of manufacturing is they developed a massive amount of capital and know-how in an era where the USA was actively destroying its own.

China has plenty of coal. They import metal refining coal, which they don’t have. And they import thermal coal because it’s easier to boat the stuff in from Indonesia than move it east by rail from western China.

Australia was never very interested in being a manufacturing power house, they simply don’t have the people for it anyways, and it’s easier to ship raw material than finished goods vast distances. Russia has the same problem in population so China is convenient for them. China would have happened even if the USA didn’t help it along in 80s-90s.

Australia in the mid 70s was party to the Lima Declaration [1]

Presently there's a lot of yap how it didn't or wasn't the reason Australia lost its way to retain its manufacturing sector. Indirectly though it was bouncing around the walls of Govt and industry's board rooms and pushed decisions to reduce or discontinue ongoing training in regard to upskilling, or simply improving skill sets that might be needed in the unemployed working class.

However much of the shift way from general manufacturing was the inevitable result of the declaration, the inability for a small manufacturer in places like Australia to compete with cheap imports - I recall a relative back in 1979 - 80 having a long rant about a manufacturing company near him - the whole problem was the small dry cells the company purchased at quantity to install into an electronic device - the exact same branded dry cells were available to their oversea competition for next to nothing and could / did sell their version cheaper than the purchase price the company was paying for the batteries per unit.

The other part of the issue was those industries that opted to hang on - the bogey man here again was the thinking that it would be better / overall cheaper for manufacturing sector to be elsewhere overseas. Thus with this mindset setting fruit in the higher branches of the wealth market, there was not much help from Industry heads or Govt at the time to encourage or provide affordable means for whichever industry still hanging on, to modernise - textile being one that comes to mind. I actually had a strong belief (I knew no better from the propaganda being dribbled out,) 80s / early 90s that the reason the textile and clothing industry was falling off was overseas workers were paid a pittance, which made it hard for textile companies here to stay competitive - that was until someone who'd had travelled and had business interests though Asia and the US dispelled the usual propaganda I'd been suckling on, she corrected me on that it's not all sweat shops, and much of the textile base over in Asia had modernised quickly and been computerised for years.

[1] https://www.unido.org/sites/default/files/2012-10/Lima%20Dec... [pdf]

And how much of what China makes is dependent on imports? Breaking news: the global economy in 2026 is highly interconnected.

This also applies to the UK: major manufacturer of turbines, i.e. Rolls Royce in Derbyshire. More electronics than you'd expect, but all short-run highly specialized things like satellites and scientific instruments and Martin-Baker ejection seats.

Massive numbers of people on production lines is not coming back. The rest of the economy is too well paid for that and automation too advanced. VW will retain car manufacturing in Europe by automating away its workforce, at the cost of high redundancies.

> And they were right. American manufacturing is $3 trillion/year, second only to China, and 1/5th of the entire world.

Values are 2021 because that's the most recent available for US at the same source, to keep consistent.

World Manufacturing output: 16.16 trillion https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD

US Manufacturing output: 2.5 trillion (15.47% of world) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD?location...

China Manufacturing output: 4.85 trillion (30.01% of world) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD?location...

Whatever analysis you make, let's use the correct numbers, from which you were off by about 1/5th. Should you think that is a negligible margin, you'd have to consider the US participation in global manufacturing output as similarly significant.

You’re using numbers from five years ago and you’re going to hassle me about not having accurate figures? What the fuck.

> You’re using numbers from five years ago

Four. 2021 vs 2025. Unless you have numbers from 2026 from the future.

> and you’re going to hassle me about not having accurate figures?

Merely pointing out. The subjective interpretation of the experience is entirely on you.

> What the fuck.

Get more recent numbers that show I'm wrong and your 3 trillion & 1/5th of world total is right then.

$3.000 trillion annualized in Q1 2026: https://nam.org/mfgdata/facts-about-manufacturing-expanded/

Ok thank you for finding more up-to-date data for US manufacturing GDP. Let's re-do the analysis with 2025 data, because I draw the line at using annualized data for a year that has not yet ended.

World total: 17.6 trillion (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD?location...) US: 2.961 trillion, 16.82% of world China: 4.82 trillion, 27.38% of world total

So you were very much closer to the 3 trillion figure (again, 2026 annualized data is not current, it's forecast). Still quite off from the 1/5th of total. About the same as the EU - 3.03 trillions for 2025 (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/euu/eur...)

In terms of participation in world total the US has come down from 22.44% in 1997 to 16.82% in 2025 losing 5.38 percentage points or a loss of over 1/5th in less than 30 years.

I'd say there is some justification to claim a decline in US manufacturing.

Again thank you for engaging productively and providing up to date data. I feel like I should offer praise as I chastised you for cursing at me for using data 4 years out of date.

The 1/5th is definitely very approximate.

There’s a decline in the relative share, but that’s down to the rest of the world growing. Adjusted for inflation, 1997 was slightly below the current figure. That’s nothing to brag about, but it’s a far cry from the “we don’t make anything anymore” narrative I see so much.

Where it has declined substantially is employment. That peaked at almost 20 million at the end of the 70s and is now under 13 million.

Yes. I do agree with you on

> The idea that the US lost its manufacturing is not based in reality.

But I disagree with your claim that people are right in being extremely dismissive of losses in US manufacturing.

>> Absolutely people were extremely dismissive to anyone saying that we're losing the ability to make things in this country!

Interpreting that as a complete loss of manufacture capacity I agree with you, with the qualification that concerns of relative decline were justified since there was a definite decline in aggregate.

I have to say that overall I don't think economies and citizens of these economies should prefer certain economic activities over others. In principle I think specialization is a good thing. On the other hand, I do think that the US has committed some strategy mistakes in terms of how much manufacturing activity was moved out of the country and how dependent it has come to be on foreign supplies of, for instance, rare earths and advanced IC.

But that analysis is predicated on US strategic goals and geopolitical intent. The coming impasse over Taiwan with China is almost completely self imposed due to the prioritization of short term corporate profit over strategic goals.

But that is a different conversation altogether. I think data from the past 30 years show that alarmism over de-industrialization was overblown as you said AND that there has been nonetheless a significant decline in the previously absolutely dominant position of the US economy in global manufacturing. If that is good or bad, to whom or to what ends, is way outside the scope of internet forum messages.

> You’re using numbers from five years ago.

I'm sure fresh numbers are available, they're just unpublished.

We could do some educated guessing here - in the last 5 years China's economy grew at the rates of 8.6%, 3%, 5.4%, 5%, 5%, the US grew at 6.5%, 2.5%, 2.9%, 2.8%, 2.2%. We can extrapolate the manufacturing numbers based on that, which would give some advantage to the US because the US manufacturing lags the average, while the Chinese leads it.

The math gives us the current values for

World: $19.4 T, (%6.5,%3.4,3x%2.9)

China: $6.3 T - 32.5%,

US: $2.9 T - 15%.

The ecosystem to build cheap physical products is incredibly important for creating new wealth. If you're building something new, in manufacturing cities in China you can walk across the street and get everything you need. In the U.S. you have to fly to China and build relationships with Chinese suppliers. Which means creation of new products, which is where most future wealth will come from, is extremely difficult. This is like Germany lacking a meaningful tech ecosystem because creating tech startups is so difficult.

We can make planes and engines because we kept the expertise, and we can make rockets because of herculean efforts of a few people. This simply isn't good enough, we need to make creating new physical things as easy as possible.

That's manufacturing based in dollars which is quite misleading. Rolling with your example of planes, this [1] is how a 737 looks in terms of manufacturing. Boeing does a lot of assembling, but the majority of the manufacturing is outsourced.

When people think of manufacturing they generally think of going from basic materials to something useful, rather than 'just' assembling quite advanced parts. Like if I go buy some parts and 'build' a PC that'd technically be manufacturing, and quite high value manufacturing if I was able to sell it at a good markup.

[1] - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/boeing-737-global-supply...

You can find the same kind of diagram for an iPhone. Any product of any complexity is going to have components from all over the place.

All over the place and one place in particular. This is why people generally say the US manufacturing has disappeared relative to China.

I think one other point is that demand for American goods has never been higher. I've had Europeans come to me with tears in their eyes saying 'sir, sir, we want more Fords'. There has never been a better car brand than an American one, that's for sure.

>“we don’t make anything anymore” narrative I see so much."

This conflating US financializing manufacturing vs actual industrial capacity, i.e. the entire manufacturing by value / MVA "cope". US objectively doesn't make much relative to past and a lot of shit US makes, US doesn't actually make, others does the actual making while US financializes and capture via spreadsheet maxxing, hedonic adjustments etc, and do insert "I made this meme" on things US fundamentally did not "make"

Like US does make some legitimate frontier stuff in house - the reality is is in aggregate industrial base terms, US MAKES / FABRICATES very little vs pre industrial chain hollow out, US does import a lot of subcomponents that others make, integrates, or outsource actual MAKING abroad while capturing intangibles like IP/patent fees that get bundled up into value add stats, but when people talk about making they're talking about extraction to factory gate pipeline. Not US can sell a bunch of foreign made goods with some CONUS final assembly or IP accounting because muh smile curve that attributes disproportionate "value" to US "makers". Consider a US widget co imports $10 of components assembles and sells for $40, the statistically manufacturing value add is $30 even though US did very little making. Now add tariffs, regulatory capture etc and widget sells for $50 and that's $40 of MVA for basically doing minimal M. Said US widget factory makes 10 widgets and adds $400 to MVA. Meanwhile a PRC widget company makes 100 identical widgets at $2 each... but their MVA is only $200, but they did literally all the making. These two industrial bases are not the same. Then a few years later, US BLS/BEA applies a statistical adjustment because widget X is slightly more performant... (prevalent in tech), so that widget is now listed as $100 equivalent utility, so hey manufacturing expanded (it didn't).

SpaceX... doesn't make that much... they make a few thing that are reusable and due to techstack can lift a lot, i.e. operational improvement (not discounting how game changing resuable is). But compare to PRC, who made like 2x-3x more first stages, i.e. their output is significantly higher, which is to say SpaceX is "making" at about American scale. For reference Boeing like ~30% domestic content, US auto ~50%. Reality is the ONLY thing US is REALLY good at making is refined fossil, agri, wood products etc. Almost everything else US very good at making money, but not the stuff.

TLDR US got much better at MAKING money from other people MAKING things. The other caveat is regulatory capture = US grossly overpay for mediocre shit, a lot of stuff that makes in US are just... not good, i.e. vehicles, but people trapped paying domestic premium which inflates value add but not actual relevant when people discuss US making things. US broadly makes a lot of mediocre overpriced things while population stuck shopping in company store for large items, that looks good on value add / productivity stats... but it's not reflection of industrial capacity which is what people think about in terms of real manufacturing.

Why are you championing a system that benefits a smaller minority of people every year? Americans don't prosper when Apple sells iphones. Americans don't prosper when they sell more F150s. The sure as heck don't prosper when Boeing sells 747s either.

You literally are praising a system that condemned tens of millions of Americans to abject poverty because the rich wanted slightly better returns.

How is that the case? Apple, Ford, and Boeing are American companies that hire mostly Americans, with some number of H1-Bs. Those Americans pay taxes in California, Michigan, Washington, and elsewhere, and also to the federal government. Those taxes get redistributed to all of America, as determined by the budget as set by Congress and the President. We can complain about billionaires at the top not paying their fair share, and that the budget isn't set how you would, but largely, that is the deal. The workers on iPhone, the F150, the 7*7 pay their taxes in America. Those three are American success stories.

Boeing builds their planes in America, F150s are largely built in Michigan, iPhones are manufactured in China, but California is much richer because of the taxes that Apple employees pay. Millions of Americans are in poverty according to the latest census, but I don't know how you establish cause for that poverty being "that rich people wanted higher returns".

Those three companies employ hundreds of thousands of Americans. Millions more are employed by suppliers, contractors, dealers, etc. Selling iPhones, F-150s, and 7x7s is how those people make their living. In what sense are they not prospering from that?

Americans are better off than they've ever been. The improvement has disproportionately gone to the wealthy, but even the poorest have seen gains, not losses.

I don't understand this kind of comment. It's like some sort of disaster fantasy. Like you need it to be a crapsack world full of slums, so you come up with absurd takes like American companies employing huge number of Americans not contributing to American prosperity, and just make up troubles.

If there are not history books out there that try to discern the etiology of those decisions, there really should be.

What many people don't realize is why is America suddenly caring about manufacturing everything inhouse when Elites decided earlier Globalization was good, because China wants to command respect more than America. That is also the reason why Gold is pushing higher. If China was nobody, no nation would care for gold. So all these unnecessary downstream reasons distort what is actually going on.

If there was no China, Globalization would spread very strongly with Bangladesh manufacturing clothes and Milan doing the fashion show. All those calculations are coming undone. So please keep this main reason front and center when we discuss this matters.

That’s a good point. I’m also going to bring race into this and say it’s also because the Chinese are not white. The same type of rhetoric was said about Japan in the 80s, but barely about Germany.

Even with how long Russia has been an antagonist, they are still seen as a “wayward brother.”

Toyota would have gone bankrupt in post-War Japan if it wasn't from massive US demand in the Korean War.

The Vespa popularized by Hollywood's Roman Holiday propped up a post-War Italy.

Ping-Pong Diplomacy of the 70s gifted China its electronics manufacturing (think: PONG) turning it from a 3rd world backwater to what it is today. The exchange was in removing the 'Gang of Four' and the drugs associated with it.

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The US was put into a privileged position as reserve currency of the WORLD in Bretton Woods. This is with the understanding/responsibility that the US would act as World Police and prop up foreign economies.

That is the system that is ending.

Keynes didn't want USD to be reserve currency but he was overruled.

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