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Comment by psychlops | Hacker News Reader

Manufacturing is noticeably absent from the list of successes.

US manufacturing continues to grow almost monotonically, it is wildly successful. The only thing that has declined is manufacturing jobs due to the high levels of automation used in American manufacturing.

what are some successful stories of American manufacturing?

The arms industry?

SpaceX?

Tesla certainly. Most of Intel's fabs are in the US.

Boeing, the modern car industry, Macbooks, Pratt and Whitney, Cummins, Caterpillar, the Norfolk Ship Yards,, the modern cardboard/"fiber" packaging industry, our incredibly green Forestry industry, the growing modular housing industry.

Apple Google Amazon Rocketdyne Tesla HP Cisco Systems

The Permian basin uses technology that is almost all made in America and is now the largest oil producer on Earth. The industrial base in TX is absolutely incredible and rarely discussed.

Likely a big reason SpaceX moved there.

But America bet on the winning horse. Manufacturing no longer brings in the big bucks. We are living in the information age. In particular, there is only so much growth that you can have in a well developed industrial sector.

Information is an illusion. What are you going to do with pure information? Nothing.

For information to be worthwhile it must be actualized into physical reality.

There is huge practical evidence for this. China. The technological rise of China is unlike anything ever before seen in history. The reason why china rose is because of the massive transfer of industrial knowhow of manufacturing aka the actualizing information. We gave them the means of becoming powerful while we ourselves moved higher up the stack.

The USA manufactures more than it ever has. The horse we bet on is relying on our tech to automate much of it so factory workers are unbelievably productive. Whatever we can’t automate we ship out to China, etc.

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