America didn't lose manufacturing jobs it sold them
The whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US
The whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US
By requiring the US to rely on often adversarial countries to supply some of its most crucial military components like rare earth minerals, the US couldn’t really go toe to toe with those countries.
I’m just not sure if they factored in the rapid technological rise of those adversarial countries like China.
Or maybe it really is the simplest answer that it was all purely in effort to obtain the greatest profit margins…
Indulging in conspiracy at least allows you to pretend that the "top level" had a plan here.
It's much more comforting to think there was a positive intention for the way things turned out, and not just greed and short-sightedness.
Lots of people have written about "the cycles of empires".
This kind of psychologizing can be used to subjectively argue either case.
For example, I could say that it's much more comforting to think that current circumstances are artifacts of greedy fools rather than coordination by malevolent and powerful actors.
> that the "top level" had a plan here
You're also being somewhat reductive here. Sure, entry-level conspiracies rely on an all-powerful council with top-down authority, but there are more nuanced understandings where they can arrive out of alliances of convenience between rival factions.
1) more economic engagement would somehow make China democratic
2) an economically integrated China would be more interested in maintaining international stability
3) WTO membership would force China to follow trade rules
Being self-sufficient prevents you from conflict both in preventing external politics from potentially cutting off from critical supplies, and by making the potential fruits of conquest and war fairly limited. Like who is going to go to war over 5% cheaper steel? You will trade for that deal, but likely not kill. But the trading could be part of the source of the problem because it can hollow out your own native industry over enough time, or prevent native industry from being built when it can be bought cheap.
The US built the SR-71 Blackbird in using titanium from the Soviet Union during the cold war; I don't think international cooperation was the seen as needed, just Reaganist margin maximalism taking root.
Who gives a shit about sovereign capability if you can have a real good earnings report?
Addendum: I think this is bad.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
We did lose manufacturing jobs, but not because we "sold" them, it's because productivity has increased so much. This happens to all mature economies, where services and knowledge work become a larger percent of GDP as productivity, education, and living standards increase. It's a sign of progress that we have more people working in offices and fewer people working in hazardous conditions for low pay.
It's because of both.
Mature economies would do well to hold onto some basic manufacturing capacity as a matter of national security. Or at the very least, retain some of that capacity within the sphere of close and trusted allies, assuming allies of that type can even be maintained by the US at this point.
The numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing#List_of_countrie...
While it's true the US is a massive producer, it focuses on automation, which means more productivity per job.
And this is the crux of it all. US factory jobs weren't Los "overseas" as much as they were lost to machines. Each production line needs fewer and fewer workers.
Yes, you can cherry-pick examples (software jobs going to India or coal mines closing etc) but even mines use much less labor today per ton of say coal than they did 50 years ago.
So really, I think, the sense is that good blue-collar union jobs are what's dwindling. It's less about raw output and more about job losses.
- a sheer number of assembly lines,
- number of SKUs,
- automation engineer jobs.
Something more fuzzy: mean/median wait time from a fully specced project to a 10,000 unit batch. Of course only for products where such a batch number makes sense, but probably it could be divided to a few groups of batch magnitudes. For this to be an interesting metric it would require to pick several specific classes of products. For example: per Integrated Circuit number magnitude, per price point, a car, a smartphone, a TV, a home radiator, a bathtub, etc.
Companies in those industries invest millions into automation lines and robotics and pay some maintenance staff and specialists 65-120k/yr because it's cheaper and (more damnedly) more reliable than hiring 1-2k individuals on at 25-40usd/hr.
The outcome is a result of laborers (and capitalism), not the other way around.
1) the added value in final assembly of components made elsewhere (ie. $10 in components being turned into a $100 final product means $90 in "manufacturing") 2) increases in computing power being value-adjusted in the data as increases in output volume, which is defensible but has grown to dominate the numbers to obscure real losses in manufacturing
I think when people talk about manufacturing, there's some expectation that they are talking about real ability to make things with some degree of self-sufficiency. Saying manufacturing jobs are "lost to automation" seems to disguise that it is largely not the same manufacturing which is being automated.
1. https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
I did not intend to imply it's good or bad what happened, it's just the capital exchanges and consequences are obvious
Not really about the political/ finance jargon to me but the change in ground truth for us
Now what?
https://aeon.co/essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-...
We just do the last mile "human work"? Mow lawns, make zines, hack RPis for fun and teach maintenance of the robots. Cook and socialize but the robots make sure neighborhood grocery and hardware store are full?
Semantics aside giving everyone a direct handle to submit issues also can act like MAD nuke policy: https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-mak...
I mean what're the Founders and our living but aging elders going to do? Stick around and make sure we stick to the script? The Founders didn't even either.
Law and code that feeds the fed gov AI could conceivably be built and deployed be blocked like usual by need for sufficient sign offs given a geographic region
So I mean; the language impediments and language that doesn't currently exist can be changed. I mean we don't default to Latin; evolution of social language is not gonna stop with us. We could be intentional about it same as we are with code.
Because when these plants and facilities come up for reinvestment the rules and laws have inevitably made a piecemeal sell out the only financially viable move.
The environmentalists point at the financiers. The financiers point at the environmentalists. It's like the two party system.
Worse, there was always some degree of unwritten understanding between government and big business. Like if big business built out a factory they would expect to use it for 50-100yr with refreshes every 30 or so. When the government started crapping on that sort of thing to the degree that various investments became wholly non-viable it became risky to make those investments, less of them, less to spread any risk over, more expensive, it's a spiral. And so if you can't be sure your facility will be allowed to be viable in the long term you've gotta milk what you can each quarter.
Manufacturing jobs are killed by automation. Robots replaced people in plants.
This is happening in Europe and Asia too.
People "dreaming" or cushy well paid union jobs assembling stuff are talking nonsense nostalgia.
What are we making more of than we did 40 years ago? Are there a few high dollar value categories overwhelming everything else?
Do rare earths even count as manufactured goods? I think they are usually considered a raw material, right?
It's a bit like crowd dynamics. Each individual human is sentient, but if you observe a large enough crowd, there is no sign of sentience in its behavior.
People who are actively involved in politics and advocacy, as well as some terminally online people, often end up adopting the views of their peers. Because they are stuck in their bubbles, they don't consider other viewpoints plausible.
But most people are not like that. In most issues, they are exposed to multiple viewpoints they could plausibly adopt. The choices they make are ultimately their own. Of course, if you know the distribution of people's opinions and situations and the messaging they are exposed to, you can try to predict the distribution of choices. But those are still people's individual choices.
Yes, but most people also come to the same pretty naive conclusions separately and then it looks like they just copy each other. It is pretty hard to tell the difference between low effort thinking and parrots.
Except this time it's neither left-wing or right wing, and sonia harder to harness as a political dynamo.
You cannot afford this in the era of the modern regulatory state. You need projections showing you will be in the black in 5-10 to get financing most of the time. Anything you get after that is just gravy.
There are some exceptions for government intertwined industry (energy, farming, etc) but even then the long term risk is pooled and counter-balanced through financialization so nobody is holding the bag the whole time.
1 - Way more polluting than anybody even considered possible before.