So a business used automation to decrease COGS? Doesn’t sound noteworthy.
> It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
Like a coder writing code (by hand!) to make things more efficient somewhere, also seems noteworthy now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing
17%+ with 4% of the world’s population means there must be some kind of automation expertise.
Skills like manual machining, and manual welding have gotten much harder to find and a smaller portion of the economy.
As to if that matters?
What Sharpie did in the US is super simple table stakes for manufacturing anywhere, it’s only notable because it can be used in a larger political story.
Before Boeing had its epic fails, usually they were talked about as the prototypical “we make airplanes instead of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong” example.
But it neglected to show that Boeing outsourced a huge portion of the actual skillsets needed to build each individual component.
There is utterly no comparison to $100B of airplanes being sold a year vs. $100B of various goods of diverse complexity and quality in terms of impact to the economy, workers, manufacturing knowledge, and even national security.
If we had simply gone up market and retained useful engineering and manufacturing skills/talent pipeline/capacity I’d totally agree. But we have not. Not to any appreciable degree by any metric other than numbers on a spreadsheet.
We are talking about this in a thread discussing manufacturing markers in the US as some sort of large win. If this article had been discussed in these contexts 60 years ago it’d have been seen as utterly pathetic.
Which has more industrial might? You need to compare what's actually being made and how much to draw conclusions.