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Comment by iratewizard | Hacker News Reader

There are a number of contributing factors. The lack of manufacturing in the US, which you can blame on bean counters wanting to utilize Chinese slave labor. A tax system that prefers the lower wage workers be either on the dole, work illegally, or work 3 gig-based jobs. A kafkaesque government contracting system dreamed up and continually patched by government workers. The same government workers that would work private sector if they were given a chance. But, they often can't because a lack of experience, aptitude or drive.

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> The lack of manufacturing in the US

> The United States is the world's third largest manufacturer (after the People's Republic of China and the European Union) with a record high real output in Q1 2018 of $2.00 trillion (i.e., adjusted for inflation in 2009 Dollars) well above the 2007 peak before the Great Recession of $1.95 trillion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St....

From your link: the US made up 28% of manufacturing in 2002, dipped steeply, and then rose back to 18%. That's a huge loss of manufacturing. Especially when you consider that the manufacturing activity in China is, in large part, US companies gutting their own operations to save a buck. The short-sighted, "well educated" Harvard MBA bean counters aren't taught in school what comes next. After they gut and globalized, China steals their IP and floods the market with clones under a dozen shadow brands.

The bean counters got their salaries and bonuses. Why should they care what happens next?

It seems to me that historically the real controls on our business models were social, not regulatory. And with ethics and conscience removed, we've become a society being slowly devoured by a close relative of paper-clip optimizer AIs, running on distributed and fungible human wetware.

It never dropped in absolute terms. It’s been on a constant upward trend. As a proportion of global manufacturing it dropped but that’s inevitable with other economies growing if you’re as big a part of the global economy as the US is.

Tell that to the rust belt.

My understanding is that a lot of the US' manufacturing output is an artifact of how agencies do statistical adjustments for improvements in computer chips.

Huh, it's strange that they'd consider the EU a "single" manufacturer for the purposes of that list.

It's helpful to do that because it provides like-with-like comparisons.

Functionally the EU operates with zero internal customs etc, free movement of people etc. It also represents a population group of a similar size to the US and China.

In the same way, breaking down manufacturing in the US by state, and comparing each state to China is not helpful, so dealing with each European country invidually in the comparison would not be helpful.

Shouldn’t Canada and Mexico be combined with the United States based on those criteria? NAFTA is still a thing.

I thought of that as well. But while there is a mostly free movement of goods, there isn't a free movement of people.

Plus from a motivational point of view adding in Mexico and Canada does nothing for those keen to improve the state of US manufacturing. Inside Europe there would be similar reports comparing the individual countries - and I suspect at the US state level there might be studies as well.

With the free movement of people though internal competition is less beneficial. (although geographic spread is still desirable.)

Slave labor? Surely the ratio of Chinese laborers who feel enslaved is low enough that it's inappropriate to describe Chinese labor on the whole as slave labor.

Some are literally slaves.

Many are nearly so. Giving people a thin veneer of token but not real freedom and token but not fair salary or decent working conditions doesn't absolve you of abuse.

Raise people in an environment where people learn that how they are being treated is right and make everyone fear dissent and you just won't hear about many peoples feelings from the other side of the world.

Obfuscation is the name of the game in the 21st century, make absolute things grey areas, and add layers of abstraction to the extent that you can't really tell what's being done or whose fault it is so that the same kinds of exploitation can keep going on and it's not so easy to be opposed to it because finding the target is just hard.

Hey, now I understand people who insult people by saying they have savior complex! It’s all about thinking you have agency and other people don’t.

> Many are nearly so. Giving people a thin veneer of token but not real freedom and token but not fair salary or decent working conditions doesn't absolve you of abuse.

“Real freedom”? “Fair salary”? “Decent working conditions”? What makes you think Chinese people can’t make their own choices? They’ve been leaving the countryside nonstop for 70 years. The pay for unskilled labor has been going up pretty much nonstop since Deng opened up. China has a lot bad about it but I doubt you would be pretending Thai people are unthinking automatons and they’re about as rich as Chinese.

> Raise people in an environment where people learn that how they are being treated is right and make everyone fear dissent and you just won't hear about many peoples feelings from the other side of the world.

Indeed. You could make children sit down, shut up and do as they’re told all day five days a week if you just told people it was normal. You could invade and bomb other countries with impunity. You could support other countries in intervening in civil wars to keep them going without end. Good thing we’re free. Good thing we right thinking people would never do anything like that.

That's a whole lot of whataboutism to excuse human rights issues in a brutal and immoral country.

It didn't sound like an excuse to me, but a distinction between slavery and something else. Not all exploitation is slavery.

Go watch American Factory to see what conditions/mentality is like in Chinese factories.

Watching a Netflix documentary is generally not a great way to learn about how the world actually works.

It's a start.

Or just go to any major e-commerce warehouse here in US.

It is not that different when the time you pee is measured and factored in pay

No, I think slavery is significantly different.

It is very different. Go watch the documentary and come back to me.

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