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.
