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Comment by deaddodo | Hacker News Reader

People always talk about how the US has "lost" manufacturing. It's still the second largest manufacturer by a huge margin (three times the next highest, 15.5% of world output vs 5%), only being beaten out by China (27.5%). And, when compared per capita, it out-manufactures even China.

The numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing#List_of_countrie...

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2nd largest manufacturer by dollar value, not overall activity, employment, share of employment, value relative to other industries, percentage of consumption manufactured domestically, etc etc etc. America's manufacturing is specialized on highly valuable outputs.

So what is the metric we should use to determine whether the U.S. has "lost" manufacturing, or "brought it back"? What should the target be?

I think most people here would say "jobs".

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.

I think the idea that a certain percent of jobs should be "manufacturing jobs" or "blue collar" is a fallacy rooted in nostalgia. The problem is that we talk politically about "jobs" like they're a product consumed by workers, which is false. A job is a position in an organization created naturally by market demand. When there's no demand for that job anymore, it goes away and there's no reason to prop it up artificially. It's like saying we need to keep producing fax machines or VHS players because wouldn't it be a shame if we didn't make those anymore.

I would be interested in seeing a list that would order countries by:

- 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.

US Manufacturing has a high automation rate for the same reason US Agriculture has one of the highest automation rates in the world. No one wants to do those jobs for the wage that would be make them competitive/viable, despite all the political talk surrounding it.

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.

This is not my field at all, but I read this article [1] a few years ago that makes the case that a great deal of this is just:

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-...

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