So here's what I don't get about the public discourse on manufacturing in the U.S:
When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2].
The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here):
1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI.
2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.
If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.
Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die."
There is a 3rd point, that craftsmanship, machining skills, and logistics experience don’t fall from trees. As the US moves certain “lower” tier manufacturing overseas it can risk losing the experience needed to create tooling for production lines, or the industrial knowledge to build large numbers of ships, etc. The jobs argument on its face falls flat for me, but I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost.
SmarterEveryDay has a whole series[1] on manufacturing that covers how the US is losing/lost the ability to create tooling. I believe the "Smarter Scrubber" episode[2] is the one that explicitly talks about how not only has the US lost manufacturing capacity but it also lost the ability to spin up manufacturing. The tool and die episode also touches on it[3].
It is, and it reveals the pitfalls of trade as a whole to boot. At first order they want to make everything local, second order at least not China. So they order from India and get a drop shipment of Chinese made goods. LOL!
All of the manufacturing economies have started out as "low quality", and "cheap" - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China.
All of them took the feedback onboard and improved the quality of their systems (Continuous Improvement is a practice that was refined in Japan - Toyota)
There's nothing stopping any other country from doing the same.
> I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost
My favourite example from Adam Smith remains the nail maker. At the time, London factories were churning out iron nails by the bushel, whereas the provincial Scottish blacksmith was able to craft perhaps 10 in a day.
Is it so terrible that no one these days knows how to make nails? That our physical and mental capabilities are put to more productive ends?
That’s how I see these skill sets ‘lost’, national security related industries notwithstanding.
Factories need the 10 nails a day option, because factory tooling is custom, and tooling for high-tech has extremely low tolerances, so those 10 nails need to be custom and perfect. Often they also need to be certified/constantly calibrated by the nail maker.
When I was in aerospace management decided to move our fixture guy to a part time contractor instead of meeting him on his salary increase request. Almost every step of the factory other than some sub-assemblies were dependant on the fixtures, the fixtures needed to be constantly re-calibrated, etc. And there was no other fixture guy in the area. We fired like the most important person in the entire factory and hoped he'd stick around for part time contract work. I was no longer working there before it happened, but the first time a fixture needed calibration but he had other contract work, that whole section of the line is down at like $200,000 a day until he can come in. Like OK you scheduled him for the normal maintenance, but what happens when a forklift hits a fixture and he's off at some new clients site for 3 weeks? Or the AC goes out and the heat takes everything out of tolerance before you get it cooled off again.
And with JIT manufacturing having fixtures down throws off the schedule AND you don't have capacity to catch back up because you have capacity for the barest minimum you can get away with. These guys are very very important and yes it is terrible if we don't have their skills available on demand.
The management thinking from your example seemed very natural and not so surprising after all. They just needed someone with a "just in case" mindset, similar to the tailor from one of my favorite scenes/movies "The Hudsucker Proxy" - "The Double Stitch" [0]. I even sometimes act like that character. For example, when the boss says we will drop a feature, I don’t fully kill it, instead, I temporarily disable it because the chances of it coming back are not zero.
Carry your example far enough and the system becomes brittle. We need people who know how to make the machines that make the machines. If you go far enough up the stack components become unique enough that they're unique pieces of engineering.
Correct. Every component made in distant factories all over the world is like micro services model of software development where every function should be its own service.
There is big support of these models from consulting world. If it doesn't work than it just means we need further micro components to make it work but never try back to integrated system.
The problem is that the idiots making their stupid cog in the machine decisions have a financial and ideological incentive not to see themselves, their work and the way they've been trained to approach their work.
Some two bit code monkey screeching "it's not my fault my code shit all over the production database when something upstream of it got a little wonky, I coded to the spec I was given" is no different than some dumbass middle manager or MBA at HQ who's intentionally making the system more shitty for negligible, but measurable, savings so they can fuck off into the sunset with their bonus for hitting KPI before it all comes crashing down.
Alec used modern equipment and high quality 6mm bar stock. It would’ve taken far longer to make 500 nails starting from a large bar of medieval pig iron and using only a traditional coal-fired forge with hammer and anvil.
I've been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous, but being a junior dev first is how you become a senior dev.
But I wonder if the outcome is simply that we drop every known manufacturing technique on the floor and just start from scratch with current adjacent technologies. Basically kill the whole industry and reboot it again.
My sister was a petroleum geologist. She went into oil in the early 2000s because she saw the roughly 30,000 person shortfall of petroleum geologists that was about to happen as the baby boomers aged out of the profession, and was like "Well, they're going to need to hire new blood, that's good for me." And it worked great for about 5 years, she was paid a shit-ton of money because they couldn't get people. But then two layoffs later, what actually happened is that the entire oil industry and associated value chain is dying, and we're replacing it with electricity, solar, batteries, EVs, smart-grids, and a bunch of things that didn't exist in the early 2000s.
Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
>'ve been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous
Well that's the pitch they want to throw at you. Actual studies disagree.
>Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.
I legitmately think we will hit General AI before we have anything close to this. We simply don't have the resources needed on an individual bases to faciliate everyone being a "factory worker at home".
I think AI may actually work really well for CAD. Purely text based prompts won't work. But a mix of touch and AR together with voice input could be extremely productive.
" but being a junior dev first is how you become a senior dev."
If AI keeps improving, I am not so sure about that. Smart people may be able to quickly jump to senior skills. And what we view as senior skills at the moment may become useless.
This feels to me like a very naive statement, you don't just learn something magically because it permeates, it's because of experience and number of failures or actually really playing with a system.
If you are always on crutches and need the AI companion all the steps of the way, you basically offload the most important part of the work which is the whole cognitive work.
That "senior skill" is the debugging of complex systems that often interconnects in unusual ways, why? Because this might be a one off this might not be well documented, or even the code might not really point at the issue because it might be a subtle interplay of hardware and software.
Even if you are smart, it doesn't solve the problem that people still have to learn, and institutional knowledge is more important at times, because this might not be documented or easy to figure out, even with the greatest AI companion...
This. We're in a tough spot because the know-how has atrophied. We're not making the raw inputs anymore.
Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs.
We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot.
Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it.
Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.
Not sure if proposing building a underclass of underpaid jobs that we consider below Americans is the answer. A better answer could be to pay them a couple dollars more an hour so the pay isn't awful. There are also loads of areas of the country where people are struggling because mining and manufacturing jobs went away years ago. Cost of living is generally low in those places, so you don't need to pay California wages but it's still an upgrade compared to the opportunities they currently have.
And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
>We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot.
1. this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time. The contract is broken.
2. LCOL areas in the US still pay better than many other countrie's middle class jobs. That's why the solution for 30 years was to outsource, not to immigrate talent here to run factories. The US lacks many protections, but the bare minimum is paying federal minimum wage.
3. The thing about LCOL areas is that they lack the resources and funds to start such initiatives. What you're really asking for is for the government to invest 10's, 100's of billions of dollars into a project to create the factories, million more to bring in talent to run the factories in what are often less desirable areas, and then billions more to bring in talent in these still less desirable areas. Even with a supporting administration, this would be a difficult proposal.
Costs of Living to some extent are linked to how valuable that land is to begin with; hence, coastlines tend to have more value than arid midwestern desert or bumpy mountainous terrain.
> this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time.
This also means that until and unless we can squash this country's fascist tendencies with something approaching permanency, they're never going to trust that such things will be honored again.
As things stand, that effectively means that the Republican Party needs to go, and be replaced by something much more center-right. (Or, even better, overhaul our voting system so that a two-party system is no longer effectively mathematically guaranteed.)
They jobs don't pay spectacularly well, but they pay better than Mickey D's and other service jobs, so they would be an upgrade to those jobs. Manufacturing tend to have union rep., if that matters. We have lots of underemployed and people working lousy service jobs --we don't really need to import labor that needs additional customs/social and language training.
Interestingly, we favored China's manufacturing over Mexico's "maquilladoras," I think mostly over quality and cost issues due to corruption, lack of education and cartels.
I think mcdonalds pays shockingly well nowadays, like 20 or 25 an hour some areas. I think paying 30 an hour for manufacturing jobs might hurt the economics of it?
Target around here (Bay Area) starts at $20. Regardless, I wouldn't consider below living wage to be "shockingly well". You got used to wage stagnation and are starting to see gentle attempts at countering that.
sure, it's 20 in California because of a recent law passed saying so. But that's often high CoL areas to begin with.
30/hr for manufacturing is exactly why the US ceded its power to China over the decades. if we care about the economics, we're doomed as soon as China makes a move.
I live in des moines and I see mcdonalds offering $16/hr here. Probably more as that was a few years ago and I don't read their signs. I know of a town an hour away where manufacturing offers $16hr.
Are you saying this would produce $0 is economic activity, and after it was spent “we would be out of rich people” or some such nonsense?
That’s explicitly not what the economic research shows.
I’ll also point out that DOGE has produced no prosecutions for “waste” - it turns out that Government work might be a net positive in efficiency, cost, and resultant economic activity. In fact I’d argue that Trump (et. al.)’s economic plans have been shown to be disastrous and misguided - watching the economy shrink in real time as Americans fought for arbitrary regressive taxes isn’t how I expected 2025 to go.
I’ll also point out you could fund tens of thousands of Government jobs a year for the low, low price of Trump’s corruption. One is economically useful, the other isn’t.
Not sure where I fall on that one. In business, it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same? Should low level manufacturing be a core competency of the US? Why? Turning steel into screws is certainly lower margin than turning screws and engines into airplanes.
Because there's no higher power that can prosecute China for antitrust violations if they ever leverage our dependence on them against us. America is making the same mistake Europe made a few decades ago, which is constantly downsizing itself into irrelevancy because "helpful" countries are more than willing to take on the burden of economic domination. When we reach the point that all we make is fiat currency and software then we have nothing to offer the rest of the world and we become decadent and impotent.
Also our airplanes suck, you could not possibly have picked a worse example of American heavy industry than the Boeing corporation.
Except American movies(and entertainment in general) haven't been good for about 10 years now, it's all slop based on established IP from 20-30 years ago.
When I was a kid growing up in the post communist 90-00s, we were going nearly weekly to the cinema to watch the latest American movies: Blade, Shrek, Toy Story, The Matrix trilogy, LotR trilogy, American Pie, Batman trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Fast & Furious, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Scary Movie, Rush Hour, etc
We couldn't get enough of US entertainment, while now everyone here avoids the new US releases like the plague since it's only cash grabs injected with $CURRENT_DAY identity politics, diversity box ticking based on focus group testing, resulting in sterile, predictable, zero-humor, zero-edge, zero-creativity slop that's not even worth pirating.
Americans have no idea how much soft power they lost worldwide by forcing their identity politics and ideologies in entertainment. Japanese anime and Koran movies and TV shows now run rings around the US entertainment industry.
You just listed a set of blockbuster movies mostly aimed at children and teens. You’re not going to relate to that category as much anymore because you’re not a child.
The superhero movies that have filled that niche are by any measures wildly popular.
As is traditional with these weird complaints about diversity in modern movies, most of your good old days classics examples are in fact "slop based on established IP".
I know kids in the target demographic have a place in their heart for them but Star Wars prequels given as a positive example while complaining about 30 year old IP slop?
You may also have missed the subtle subtext in Star Wars about fascism.
> these weird complaints about diversity in modern movies
You're twisting my words to move the narrative goalposts. Nobody complained about diversity in movies (otherwise I wouldn't have praised Rush Hour and Blade). The complaint was about US movies today being solely built around a toxic form of diversity checkbox ticking, masquerading as entertainment, which is not interesting to anyone outside the US crowds of movie goers who care more about seeing $CURRENT_DAY political issues in their movies instead of recognizing entertainment as being fantasy escapism, which causes the US to loose soft power abroad, and judging by how they flop at the box office, US viewers aren't interested in paying for this slop either.
>most of your good old days classics examples are in fact "slop based on established IP".
Source that they're slop?
>but Star Wars prequels given as a positive example while complaining about 30 year old IP slop?
The prequels were considered shit at the time because they were compared to the original masterpieces, but compared to the modern Star Wars that Disney shits out today, they're basically gold. They ended up ageing like wine due to how bad we have it today.
>You may also have missed the subtle subtext in Star Wars about fascism.
In the pandemic there was a lesson I read somewhere that I will always keep with me and repeat: "efficiency" and "resiliency" are opposing points on a spectrum. Once you hear it I think you'll see it everywhere. What you describe is efficient but it isn't resilient.
This. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about national security problems, it's hard to convey how badly the 1980s MBA education failed us as a country. "Greed is good." Sure, Gordon. For who? Who's greed is good for who? How about the people of the country labor for the long term wealth of the nation? How about we all work for the long term wealth of the planet?
> In business, it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest.
In contrast, "Maximally efficient is minimally robust."
Something that business intelligentsia propagates should be given extra scrutiny. Why should you assume that statement about core competencies is correct, a priori? We have lots of evidence that statement isn't true in general. And we have mountains of evidence that such statements tend to be more incorrect the longer a time horizon you account for.
Vertically integrated businesses aren't rare. Everybody loves being a fabless chip company--until an earthquake or a pandemic hits. Designing chips was not a core competency for Apple--until it was and suddenly you have the M1. GE outsourced water heater manufacturing and lost their core competency to design them. etc.
>it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same?
Because a country isn't a business. If a companies falls out, they move on to another company based on the market.
If a country falls out, we go to war and sanction everything. If you can't survive those sanctions, the war is lost before any blood is spilt. Or at least any blood spilt by foreign invaders; the citizens will burn down the country for you instead.
I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase) and they saw what you are describing first hand.
One example they gave, it used to be someone's job to load and unload the silicon wafers into the various etching phases. As time went on more and more of that manual work was replaced with automation. A floor with 50 workers became 25, then 10, then 1.
And, to be clear, this was absolutely a good thing for the product. So many yield issues were caused by manual processes.
The future of any manufacturing is that of high automation. That means low to no jobs. We aren't going back to an economy where a shoe factory employes 500 people.
What's particularly bleak, IMO, is society in the US revolves around work. Every job out there is being automated away. That's not a bad thing for quality, but what it means is there will be increasingly fewer jobs to go around.
> I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase)
A family friend was a chip designer for a large European company. Back in the 2000s he told me he saw the writing on the wall as they moved manufacturing to Asia.
He said he expected design to follow not long after, and sure enough some 5 or so years later he lost his job as they moved design department closer to the factories.
Perhaps it's different now, but as I recall he said there were advantages of chip designers being close to the chip manufacturing folks.
I’ve seen the advantages firsthand. The test guys would drive across town and pick up some chips hot off the fab, put them on the scope under various conditions, and then be pushing updates in a day or two. The designer could actually sit with the test guy and fiddle with the tests to understand the problem better, and then walk upstairs and mess with the simulator. None of this can happen at nearly the fluidity or speed when you’re designing, producing, dicing, packaging, and testing the chips all in different time zones.
Automation lowers costs, which increases consumption. We essentially trade time for dollars, and then dollars for goods that themselves took time to produce. While the exchange rate of time-for-time stays constant, automation means we now get more goods for the same amount of time worked. So it’s not nearly as bleak as you make it out to be.
The real problem lies elsewhere: yes, it is cheaper to buy goods made by automation. People need jobs to make a living--pay rent/mortgage, health insurance, etc. Automation is needed to make a living easy: cheaper housing, cheaper access to health, etc. And this is not possible for the foreseeable future.
If the average person can’t afford any of the products being made, and the inevitable handful of trillionaires have more money that they could possibly spend, society will have a big problem on its hands.
> manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated.
It's interesting that you mention this because most of the small-time inventors I've seen online in the electronics space either build things in their garage by hand or have them fabricated in China (or occasionally another poor country like Vietnam). Custom PCB production and assembly at places like JLCPCB and PCBWay (both in China) appears to be highly automated. But getting the same thing made in the US in smaller quantity is going to cost not a little bit more, but often ten times as much. And it will require "relationship building" with a job shop, rather than just uploading something to a website and paying for airmail delivery. And will likely have a longer lead time. To say nothing of the fact that most of the components you're buying are made in China anyway.
So it may be fine to manufacture a large run finished consumer product in the US, but it's very capital intensive. For new products that aren't attached to an existing massive corporation with domestic production capability, you basically have to outsource to be price competitive and do any kind of volume beyond your own garage. I would be love to be proven wrong and learn about other options in the US but when I looked around I wasn't too impressed.
There is a perspective that I think will crystalize the nature of this:
Try to have a device made without sourcing parts of China. Maybe an assembled PCB. Maybe it's a tool of some sort. You will find that this is impossible, or much more expensive/worse experience than sourcing from China.
Now, imagine a scenario where China collapses. (In the broadest sense). Whether it's a war as you say, or any other scenario. Imagine this happens in a few decades, after we (The world) has committed to this path. We will have lost so much of the tools we build our civilization on, and it will take generations to get this tacit knowledge back.
What's good: We (humanity) can build things cheaper, and higher quality than ever before, thanks to China's exquisite, vertically-integrated, and automated manufacturing capabilities.
What's bad: We are putting our eggs in one basket.
I don't think conclusion matches what we're seeing, though. Real output being flat while population and consumption have massively increased means that much more of our consumed products are being manufactured abroad now. It's not just automation at work. The original article even talks about that, where it mentions how high tech manufacturing is shrinking as a percentage of the economy.
It might well be true that we're never going to see the kind of employment in manufacturing that we used to, but a blanket "the jobs are not coming back" attitude doesn't match the data either.
It seems a bit of a tautology to ask the survivors if things are OK. Of course is is OK for them, they are in an industry segment that survived the trend of moving everything possible to China. If you go ask where the factories were shutdown, you'll find different responses.
The dip in number of manufacturing employees corresponds time-wise to China joining WTO, and the massive CEO hype of shutting down US factories and moving them to China, rather than super-duper automation hitting the scene and automating the factories in place.
I have a suspicion that the displayed manufacturing output chart is in dollars, not amount of stuff, and that is likely bumped up by highly automated IC/chip manufacturing that is high cost/value, but low tonnage work.
I think it’s as simple as the selective pressures in our democratic system push for this rhetoric.
Politicians who pitch “I match your worldview and will implement the simple fixes you want” outcompete “I think your worldview is incomplete and this is what you really want instead”, by a lot.
Some might be very crafty and believe the second while shouting like the first. Many will actually believe the simple solution can work though.
It's obvious that any high end manufacturing in any country capable of sustaining high end manufacturing will not produce jobs like in 1950, '60 or '70. But the same is true of service sector jobs. More is being automated.
That said, we can bring manufacturing back stateside which can be highly automated and have high value while employing workers at wages much better than their service-job counterparts.
In addition, we don't have the same population growth we had in the post-war years, so we don't need to produce millions upon millions of jobs. What we need to do is stem the job losses and increase output.
We can be a bigger version of Switzerland. Sure, things get more expensive, but by and large folks live better.
How come this doesn't match my experience as a customer?
When I buy an iPhone, a vacuum (robotic or handheld), a drone, a camera, a KitchenAid kettle, a silicone brush, an electric fan, a battery-electric drill, just about anything really -- the expensive models might say "designed in USA" but they'll still say "made in China". The US used to be the go-to place to make all of these categories of products. So I don't believe the only thing that's happened is that American factories set up robots, laid off the workers, and got more productive than ever.
If you are a customer, it is almost by definition "low-value manufacturing", because you have only one household's worth of money to spend, and not a Fortune 500 company's or nation-state's budget to spend. If you're buying jet engines or nuclear reactors or jet fighters, they are probably made in the U.S. (I probably erred in choosing "consumer electronics" as an example, because most of those are made abroad. Even so, there are some surprises: I just bought a brand-new Toyota Sienna manufactured in Indiana, and a System76 Thelio workstation manufactured in Colorado.)
Guess what. China is making nuclear reactors and jet engines now. It’s the absolute classic Clayton Christensen situation with countries instead of companies. The incumbent retreats upmarket until they have ceded the entire thing.
Are jet engines and nuclear reactors really being made in lights-out automated production lines? I struggle to believe that the production quantities are anywhere near high enough to justify that.
(Automobiles probably could be, except for their powerful labour unions; automobile production has been highly automated since the 30s.)
It's a nonsensical argument as you've discovered. It's due to the dollar value of things. And yes, jet engines are about as bespoke as you can get - incredibly man-hours intensive and it reflects in the price.
As some point folks will discover that dollars do not actually equal physical goods. Exporting 100 F35s at $100m/ea is not the same value to a country under duress as the capability to manufacture $10B of random consumer goods. Nevermind the supply chain of that F35 is not remotely contained to domestic manufacturing.
You'd have to check specific models but for most of the existence of DSLRs China's been a bit player. High end bodies and lenses are typically still made in Japan, low end stuff got moved to Thailand and Taiwan.
If you're buying jet engines
Less efficient stuff is absolutely made in China and Russia. But high end engines for e.g. airliners are pretty much only made in the US and UK/France.
The problem is there is no pipeline to get people into these highly automated levels of manufacturing. How can you learn about all the steps and how they’re done “manually” and all that, to be able to participate in the high end of manufacturing? It feels like an island. And once the current talent retires it may leave a void even for those highly advanced factories.
I'm split on this. Tradesmen that came up through their apprenticeship say that people need to learn the old manual machines to "feel what the machine is doing", before you can move over to computer controlled machines. But I think that is just the tendency of people to say the path to their current location is the path they took. Not that another path isn't actually a better way to get there for the current environment.
I also think there has been a bit of bias in trade schools towards learning manual processes because it is cheap. You can have a room full of students spend weeks learning to use a file to shape a small block of steel to precise dimensions. A $5 file and $10 of material is easier to supply than a $1XX,XXX computerize manufacturing machine that can process $XXX of material or more per day. But spending weeks to learn how to precision hand file is pretty well a waste of time for modern manufacturing.
You can't improve to N+1 if you don't know N, is the history of technology. You don't have to start at N-25 though, there is a base level to start at that cuts out your enemy.
What exactly is made in the US though? Besides cars and some forged tools, I can’t think of a single thing made in the US.
Edit: I looked it up, it’s a lot of things. Airplanes, military aircraft, helicopters, satellites, rockets, construction/agriculture equipment (Caterpillar, John Deere), ICE and EV cars, chips, medical equipment (MRI, CT scanners), lots of defense stuff, drugs and pharmaceutical, processed agri goods etc.
You'd be surprised. Medical devices, injection molded stuff, custom or small batch machined parts, other kinds of components and/or final assembly and packaging of bulk materials. It's not always very obvious what goes on in all the steel buildings in the parts of town that white collar people don't visit.
So in other words, the US domestic manufacturing economy is very highly dependent on the military industrial complex. That sure dosn't bode well for the rest of the world.
How is chart 1 showing everything is fine? US population and consumption have both increased, meanwhile production is still the same which suggests that these products must be coming from somewhere else.
If you really had an automation boom, this will show up as an increase in output. If there is no increase in output and an increase in demand, the prices/margins improve which might explain why producers are happy but they won’t be able to export their products; which they might not want to do as China has killed any possible margins.
> 2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.
I think that I have seen that this kind of "independence" has been a driving reason for China's strategies too. I don't think that it's necessarily a defence against a war, maybe more of an economic buffer, ensuring that China, and whomever follows the strategy is no longer dependent on any other entity for parts of their supply chain.
One of the things, too, that people seem to forget is that the West (in general) has neglected their manufacturing capability in favour of the "Asian Tigers" doing the work (Japan, Korea, Taiwan), China is just the current holder of the title (for how long is anyone's guess, Japan especially has endured a sustained stagnation of their economy over the last several decades).
Germany, for a while, was a strong manufacturer, and have (so far) been using the resulting economic position to their advantage inside the European Bloc. Perhaps that's the model that the USA (and others) should be looking toward?
Here's a great video by Smarter Every Day that came out a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY . It's about his experience with the atrophying US industrial skillset while he tries to make a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. He brings up a few good points about manufacturing that I personally found compelling:
1. During Covid, medical supplies were in short supply, to the point where the US government was flying in individual airplanes from China full of N95 masks and face shields. The guy making the video knew that Alabama (where he lives) wouldn't be on the priority list for where the masks and face shields would get distributed. His community's initial response was to 3D print face shields and donate them to healthcare facilities, but they knew that they had to step up to actual manufacturing to produce the face shields in necessary volumes. He was only able to find a single aging technician in Alabama capable of producing injection molding tooling, which he then was able to use to mass produce enough face shields to supply Alabama and neighboring states. If that one guy had chosen to retire before Covid, they would have not been able to make the injection mold locally. At a time where global supply chains were massively disrupted, they would have been screwed.
2. When an American company gets their products made overseas, the factory overseas that manufactures the product owns the tooling. This means that they're able to fill your order during the day, then at night make exact clones of your product with lower quality materials and undercut you, and you have no recourse. He brings up an example of a local small business that had this happen to them. Even though they had a design patent, they needed their lawyer to continually send letters to get Amazon to take down no-name clones of their product (and then the seller would just pick a new random set of 6 characters to sell it under). If US companies have no choice but to get their products made in countries that don't care about IP, then we're not just giving up on manufacturing, we're also giving up on designing products in the US.
When he was trying to get the injection mold for his grill scrubber made, lots of companies in the US were willing to do the actual plastic manufacturing in the US, but could only get the injection mold tooling done in China. He brought up that in the past, an American company would build a machine and then ship it away to the developing world to be operated there. We've now reversed this, so the high-skill portion of manufacturing is done overseas and the only Americans involved are just pushing the buttons to operate the machine.
It would seem like the solution for 2 is for an automated takedown process on Amazon, or for Amazon to certify that their seller isn't infringing on said patent.
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment” – Warren G. Bennis
I think you have a flawed assumption. Highly automated manufacturing is only common because of high labor costs. If we are forced by non-profit driven reasons to bring manufacturing back it won't be automated as well. Things that can be highly automated are still being manufactured in the US. The things that can't be are made using human labor in cheap countries.
Even in cheap countries, manufacturing is being automated. This is a problem for countries globally, the only ladder left to uplift their population is services.
Machines don’t take breaks, don’t need holidays, don’t get injured, and when deployed are more consistent and efficient.
Having people work in factories, and get paid is great in a vacuum. However this is a competitive economy, your competition is doing lights out manufacturing, and is making more consistent goods, cheaper, and faster.
And we’re getting better at building robots. The American debate is about 20 years late.
> we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself.
Will we? It appears to me that modern war works substantially like modern factories - you don't actually want a large mass of semiskilled workers to pull the levers, each of which can substitute for a different one on about five minutes' notice. You want relatively few, highly-trained specialists to instruct the ~~robots~~ drones. It is perhaps less true in war than in manufacturing, quantity still has that quality all its own, but it seems very unclear that just raw numbers of soldiers will be an important bottleneck as between Great Powers.
I'm pretty sure most of the robots and drones are manufacturered in China though. Even if they weren't, a lot of critical components for building things come from there now.
My understanding is that this is all about cutting edge manufacturing.
E.g., in semiconductor fabrication - over the past decade, Intel’s chip production and process nodes have lagged 1–2 generations behind leading non-U.S. manufacturers.
That's true for chips but not necessarily for other high-value manufacturing sectors. Americans are still the world leaders in say metallurgy or nuclear engineering, for example: all the jet turbine blades are still made in America, and most nuclear reactors. Also ASML gets all the hype for EUV lithography, but Applied Materials (based out of Santa Clara, CA) is still a critical part of the supply chain for new semiconductor fabs. And the EV industry started in Fremont CA with Tesla, although they've since lost some of their edge to Chinese and Korean manufacturers.
The problem is that the two are equivocated regularly for political points. We want both - highly automated factories for productive output, and middle class jobs. Building the factories will bring some middle class jobs - not a lot, but there's a decent number of maintenance and operating staff even at lights out factories, and the expertise building those factories is a bunch of valuable jobs and experience that we've let China hoover up.
The problem is that these two concepts are treated as one.
>And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself.
Yay. Men get to spill their blood over a country that won't even give them enough pay to cover rent. The robots are cushy at home making weapons to kill more men with. Very good thing.
> If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory, but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.
Yup, just automate out the construction industry while we're at it.
Sorry for the cynicism, but but somehow I don't think even with more houses that we're going to have Gen Z and Gen Alpha survive the way The Boomers and early Gen X did.
If there is one house per person then approximately every person gets a house, because almost everyone is willing and able to pay more for their first house than even a very wealthy person will pay for a second one. If there are 1.5 houses per person then you will have to work quite hard at being homeless.
This is wildly incorrect, wealthy people are far more likely to be able to afford and willing to pay more for excess housing than an average person. Especially if they can turn around and rent those houses at a profit.
Houses are an asset. Wealthy people in search of assets will buy the houses and rent them back to you. Or they will invest in companies that buy the houses and rent them, or banks that buy them and mortgage them for a profit.
That’s still fine. You gotta hire people to maintain the robots, the people to build the robots, and the people for all service companies to service all those people. Then there is infrastructure, entertainment, etc.
And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots. This is alone worth the effort.
I think we're starting to see the pile up that assuming people who worked assembly lines will just become robot tech isn't happening. For the entirety of humans, there have always been a place for low-skilled labour. We had subsistence farming, then as the industrial revolution came on, we ended up with a lot more types of labour jobs. As farms mechanized, we got factories, and as factory output went up, new products were created that needed labour to install them. Now that the remaining factories are requiring smarter workers, farms are pretty well fully automatic, we have a glut of working age people sitting on the sidelines unable to find work that is worthwhile doing.
I think we're at the point where more automation means more loss of work, as opposed to people moving into the new jobs created, for an ever larger portion of the population.
When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2].
The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here):
1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI.
2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.
If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.
Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die."
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP