
James Dyson reinvented the vacuum. Now he wants to remake the economy - awk
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europe/james-dyson-reinvented-the-vacuum-now-he-wants-to-remake-the-economy/article2365077/
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cdvonstinkpot
This excerpt mentions a trend I'd rather not see come to fruition: "...the
sort of policies proposed by the Dysons of the world amount to the beginning
of a levelling-down of Western standards to developing-world levels, when the
opposite should be occurring."

I would hope that the leaders of our country don't feel the need to lessen our
standards on working conditions in the name of economic recovery. I think that
would be backward progress.

Another excerpt caught my attention: "After all, it was the financial-services
and property sectors that collapsed; industry-driven economies such as Germany
and Singapore experienced record-breaking export booms and avoided the
crisis."

With that in mind it would seem then that our current troubles are due to many
of our economy's eggs being in one basket, so-to-speak.

It doesn't seem such an attractive idea to make a U-turn back toward making
manufacturing our strong point- it seems to me we have a better chance
building on what seems to be a strong foundation in technology, to make that
our strong point, and then re-invest in manufacturing only to a degree enough
to have a safe amount of diversification in our economy. I've read lately
somewhere about a trend in 'high-tech' manufacturing, which seems like the
kind of industry that would maintain high(er) growth levels.

~~~
lukeschlather
It seems strange to mention Germany when arguing for creating a "worse is
better" job market. Germany has focused on creating high-quality engineering
jobs and giving them to high-quality engineers.

Dyson seems to be arguing that the government should create low-quality
engineering jobs that CEOs can create and get rid of as fast as they can spin
an EC2 instance up and down. That's certainly great from the CEO's point of
view, but from the perspective of the worker that is in and out of a job
before he can buy a month's worth of groceries, it's kind of terrifying.

~~~
drucken
Agreed, lukeschlather. _THIS_ is the key point.

The reason why Germany, Singapore and other strong manufacturing-based
developed countries have succeded so well is NOT because they have taken the
worst elements of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and added back a few factories!

These countries have long had a strong, focus on engineering from education
through to supply-chain all the way to elite managers, executives and
corporate governance.

For example, in the Germanic countries, long-term stakeholders (such as family
founders and employee unions) exist and are powerful. This reduces the impact
of the flighty capital and short-termist control from mere free-standing
shareholders (this includes the share-compensated manager class and private
equity companies). This is important because it is the abililty of a company
to continually _invest_ in its long-term interests that enables them to keep
several steps ahead of the purely labor-intensive efforts from new entrants
such as from China or South America.

Combined with the success of the Mittelstand (Small and Medium Enterprises or
SME's in Anglo-speak), the result is that German companies make high quality
widgets and whole products that are in great demand the world over and to all
intents and purposes irreplaceable.

In addition, it is culturally and financially highly acceptable to be
considered an engineer in those countries.

Even their debt-sparse financial system encourages business which are only
viable if they are able to create cash upfront, which is considerably easier
for a well-run, long-term managed manufacturing business rather than many
service companies.

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Uchikoma
After using a Dyson vacuum cleaner (DC08 Animal) for some years, I now think
I've fallen for marketing, the cleaner isn't a very good one and I'd never buy
one again from Dyson. Dyson is a lot of marketing, not so much product. I like
the hand dryers though.

~~~
jbronn
You're not alone -- in the latest Consumer Reports the Dyson vacuums got some
of the worst reviews.

~~~
ironchef
Odd. The DC28 (Animal) when i bought it (5 or 6 years ago) was rated a very
good (and is still kicking VERY well). I wonder if quality has decreased.

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wallflower
> Dyson played a large part in the election of Mr. Cameron's government: He
> wrote a report, “Innovative Britain,” calling for tax and education systems
> designed to move people into design and manufacturing; it was a major
> subject of the 2010 election, and almost all of its recommendations have
> been implemented.

Too large to summarize. The report, in whole, might be worth skimming.

> Both Professor Holman and David Phillips, Emeritus Professor at Imperial
> College believe that without the stimulation produced by making elements
> combust and fizz, pupils won’t continue science beyond GCSEs. “All the
> evidence points to practical work being the thing that pupils like to do,”
> Prof Holman said. “This isn’t about how do you get more Grade Cs in GCSEs,
> it’s about how you inspire more young people.”

"Ingenious Britain"

[http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/asse...](http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/assets/UK/downloads/IngeniousBritain.PDF)

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DonnyV
The one thing no one ever talks about when they speak of manufacturering
coming back is the pollution that comes with it. We didn't just out source
manufacturering we also out sourced the pollution. How will we deal with that?

~~~
morsch
I guess investing into cleaner manufacturing technology would be a start.
There'd be a much bigger incentive to do that in another country, or in a
China that actually enforced its own laws.

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JVIDEL
It's the chicken and the egg with these guys: we can't get factories because
all the components are made elsewhere, and we can't get the components because
we have no factories...

You can't use trade barriers anymore because if you block someone then you're
getting blocked too. At the same time you can't let companies choose between
local or abroad else those going to dirt-poor countries will have an unfair
competitive edge that may bankrupt the ones that stayed, something that
already happened 20 years ago.

You know what's the biggest industrial innovation right now? Toyota's new
model factory: it's designed to be moved at any time to anywhere in the world,
cheap and fast. It has a lower degree of automation than most car factories,
why? Because Toyota realized it was easier and cheaper to hire people than to
use robots which are still very expensive and need to be reinstalled and
reprogrammed each time you move them.

That's the future of manufacturing: if X place is cheaper than our current
location then we're moving everything there.

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peteretep
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figures/)
\-- seems relevant

~~~
drucken
A poor article based on a very selective and introspective graph.

1\. The graph shows there's been a mere 25% increase in manufacturing output
value since the 70s. The economic value growth of other sectors has been far
greater than that.

2\. It does not show the vastly greater growths in manufacturing from other
_developed_ countries, including the US!

3\. How manufacturing behaves in a downturn is very closely related to how the
business is managed (i.e. during the boom part of the cycle). If industries or
many companies take on large amounts of debt and merely trim costs in the name
of efficiencies during booms, instead of optimising for cash, new investments
or your best assets, they will suffer in the inevitable downturns, etc. The
former practices are common in Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

Thus, the implication that manufacturing necessarily is more volatile during a
downturn than services is superficial. It may be for the UK up till now, but
it does not have to be that way and, even if it were, it may not be enough of
an issue. How do you think some of those productivity gains were previously
made - low hanging fruit?

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jobeirne
> But Mr. Dyson describes it as only one symptom of a larger problem: a
> Western world, especially the former branches of the British Empire such as
> Britain and Canada, that has lost its will to invent and make things.

Excuse me? Apple's pushing the limit of display technology by using layered
pixels. Google has invented and is maintaining an index on the sum of the
world's knowledge. Facebook and Twitter have invented contraptions that make
information dispersal nearly frictionless. And this guy says the Western world
has _lost its will to invent and make things_?

~~~
mvzink
"invent and make things" may make it sound differently, but this article is
purely about manufacture of physical goods. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are
considered service providers, not manufacturers, in this situation. Apple is
the perfect example of what Dyson is talking about though: those cool layered
pixel displays are manufactured primarily in Southeast Asia by LG, Sharp, and
Samsung. Dyson would be lamenting that they aren't _produced_ in the USA, he
isn't saying they aren't being invented in the USA.

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shingen
The west definitely needs to get back to manufacturing. You get rich making
things, and poor buying them.

Robots will, in the next few decades, wipe out all the labor benefit that
China has. Their huge population base value will shift to being a huge
liability.

Bring 5 million manufacturing jobs back to America through 100 million robots
(that never riot, demand wage increases, unionize, go on vacation, can work
24/7, and get better constantly), and the cheap labor advantage that China has
completely disappears. The only question is who will dominate robotic
manufacturing, not whether it'll happen.

<http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/>

~~~
ams6110
Dyson himself says it's not really (or not only) a matter of labor costs. Same
thing in the story a few months ago about why Apple manufactures in China: the
entire supply chain is there. When ALL your component manufacturers are
located in Asia, it makes little sense to do your final assembly elsewhere,
and labor cost has become a pretty small factor in the face of that.

~~~
analyst74
Labour cost might be small for companies like Dyson and Apple, who have very
high margins. It may not be true for lower level products and components,
where a small increase/decrease in cost (labour or not), will affect margin
significantly.

~~~
jf271
It isn't just the labor cost but the whole supply chain costs. If the vendors
that make the parts are in the same country and close to the assembly plant it
costs less to ship from the vendor and there is less red tape around
importation of the parts for assembly. This is one of the big reasons Apple
makes almost everything in China.

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nirvana
"In fact, Mr. Dyson, Britain's most famous manufacturer, doesn't actually
manufacture anything in Britain. He hasn't done so for 10 years, since he was
refused local permission to expand his Wiltshire factory"

That's it right there. He wasn't allowed to expand his factory. Presumably it
was on land he already owned, right? It was an existing factory. He had to get
_permission_ to grow the economy by expanding, and that _permission_ was
denied.

That's the core of it.

So long as you need government permission to do anything, and that permission
comes from someone who has no incentive to give it, and plenty of incentives
to deny it (e.g.: covering their butt) this trend will continue.

The british (and US) culture is "you have to get permission before you do
anything", and that's a form of regulation that is really harmful to growth.
That gives a lot of power to people who can be petty... but it also creates a
lot of make work jobs that are politically very valuable (because , you see,
donate to the right campaigns and your permission comes very easy. Donate to
the wrong person and you have trouble doing anything.)

The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong,
violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished.

Its not like the permit based system is doing any review (that's the excuse
but they rarely are funded well enough to really do this).

I remember a friend who lived in central california who wanted to build a
house. He was in an earthquake area and as a geologist he mapped out the fault
lines and knew the relationship to his property of the nearest fault and thus
the specific danger. He had a house designed that would withstand an
earthquake on that fault and wanted to build it. He wasn't allowed to do
that-- because his design was not the off the shelf slab house design.
Liquifation makes slab houses very poor in an earthquake, but that is what the
kid in the permit office was able to approve. He was literally forced to build
a house that was unsafe to live in, because he couldn't get permits to build a
safe one. They had no interest in doing an engineering review (that costs
money) or in seeing the work of the engineers he'd hired. It was total joke.
His alternative was simply to sell the land and move to another state....
instead he built his house (it was his dream house after all) only on a
foundation that he knows will not survive the earthquake.

~~~
masklinn
Not that I want to distract from you going Galt on us, but wikipedia has
describes the event slightly differently:

> In 2002, the company transferred vacuum cleaner production to Malaysia.
> Dyson claimed that they requested planning permission to expand the factory
> to increase vacuum cleaner production, but that this application failed.
> However, the local government claims that no such permission was ever
> sought, as the land Dyson planned to use was privately owned and the
> original owner did not want to sell.[0]

> Although nearly 800 manufacturing jobs were lost, Dyson states that the cost
> savings from transferring production to Malaysia enabled investment in
> research & development at their Malmesbury head office.[1]

And

> The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong,
> violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished.

That's completely nonsensical, there are millions of things which can not be
fixed when destroyed, the only way to handle them is to _prevent them from
being broken in the first place_. Post-regulation of razing somebody else's
home or of dumping toxic sludge on commons is indefensible.

[0] [http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-
offi...](http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices-
regional/12878932-1.html)

[1] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2282809.stm>

~~~
sbierwagen
First link is 404.

Google cache tells us it's a Lexis Nexis cable-- essentially a press release.
It's probably true, I don't see any real reason to doubt the facts of the
matter, but still, we don't know who actually wrote that puff piece.

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iRobot
I'm guessing nothing has really changed.. Rasberry pi ?

