China's middle class will rise out of their oligarchy in the next 100 years and then you will have the largest cultural middle class cluster the world has ever seen. Then all that cheapo labor will come from somewhere else. I personally think this is irrelevant, the US doesn't need any more toxic waste dumps (a.k.a factories).

The truth is MFG is not what the US needs to be doing, the US needs to be working on automation and permanent systems design related to agriculture.

F* making some future recycling nightmare in the form of a fashion accessory and telecom unit, we need to be figuring out how to actually feed people on a massive scale without dumping phosphate and nitrates and plastics into the ocean, we need to figure out how to avoid the massive and unsustainable aforementioned supplies of chemical inputs required to sustain the BS process that is modern plow and sow automated factory farming. We need to shift the global food diet away from beef and other carbon nightmares and into more localized food sourcing.

This is going to require robots, and entirely new disciplines combining agriculture, industrial/agricultural/robotic engineering, and systems design.

Do you think anybody is going to give a shit about the iPhone 12 when half of the world is eating itself alive in the Water Wars of 2030? I doubt we will be as extravagant in our tastes when that new world order arrives.

tl;dr who gives a shit we have bigger fish to fry (or none really because they all died in toxic algae blooms)