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"We don’t build anything here anymore, outside of tech." Not true. http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-not-dead.html http://www.fivethi

"We don’t build anything here anymore, outside of tech." Not true. http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-not-dead.html http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-n... We make plenty, it's just that (thanks to innovation) we don't have as many workers making the same amount of stuff. So while US manufacturing is healthy in terms of goods produced, there just aren't many manufacturing jobs around any more.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
I stopped reading shortly after this sentence - the secret to speed-reading is to not waste time reading things that have been deduced from false facts. But let me underline: this is no minor factual error. The whole piece appears to be built on falsehood. The author is trying to argue that the USA needs more innovation. But why can we produce more manufactured goods than ever with fewer workers? Increased productivity! And why has productivity increased? Innovation!
- gizmo 16y ago
  If you look for excuses to dismiss an article you're always going to find them. That way you're not likely to learn much, though. The error in this case was minor, because his reasoning doesn't depend on it. The article is making the (rather mundane) point that more innovation is a good thing (premise) and that many of the best students are not going into industry but are lured away by academia and a few well compensated fields (law/medicine) and that the country is worse off because of it. So whether the USA produces much outside of tech isn't that relevant.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    many of the best students are not going into industry but are lured away by academia So, I stopped reading, but did the OP support this with statistics? Because in my world -- the one in which I myself have gone back and forth a couple of times between academia and industry -- there's plenty of people who try to go into academia, but they don't find work because there aren't enough jobs, and those that exist have low pay, because there's high demand but a rather short supply... Meanwhile, the thousands of highly-educated people who can't get into academia try to go into industry. Except that many industries aren't hiring much. Perhaps because their productivity keeps increasing and they don't really need armies of new Ph.Ds to keep cranking out widgets at the rate the market demands. I have a lot of friends with Ph.Ds, and not all of them are happily employed. [1] And that's not even getting into the fact that drawing the line between "academia" and "industry" is increasingly difficult. Every professor has a startup on the side, every major university has a staff of lawyers to manage their intellectual property, and half the grants are industrially funded... or are funded by government grants that are aimed directly at industrially-relevant product development, e.g. drugs. Many industries don't want to do cutting-edge pure research anymore, but instead try to outsource that to academia. In the semiconductor field, a lot of the cutting-edge research gets done in academic labs. E.g. I knew some of the folks who did early OLED research, the product of which now sits inside various Android phones. They were academics, but they are innovating, and their innovations are promptly adopted by industry here and abroad. Similarly, a lot of drugs come out of academic labs and are then pushed through development, testing, and production by industry. --- [1] Though most are, in fact, employed. Don't get me wrong. These days almost any job is a happy job compared to the alternative.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - gizmo 16y ago
      Statistics or references? None are offered. In fact, some of the claims in the article are so ludicrous I can't take them seriously at all. For example: "... so an entire generation of high-school graduates went to college and learned to loathe industry" and "so innovation [in the USA] died, and perhaps nine tenths of the brilliant minds that would have otherwise gone into industry and innovated the hell out of their field, that nine tenths went into the legal profession or the medical field or investment banking.". I just can't take those remarks at face value. I must say though, that the author's claims of disdain for the industry by academia match my experience. The author's complaints about low salaries (relative to law/medicine) in technical fields also match my experience. Where I live (Europe) professors don't have startups on the side, even at the top universities. Different worlds, I suppose.
    - lutorm 16y ago
      I agree with you about the job situation in academia. I think he has a point about talent becoming lawyers, bankers and doctors being lost, though.
  - kragen 16y ago
    It seems to me that the rest of the article is premised on the claim that the USA's manufacturing production has not only ceased to grow quickly, but has actually fallen. This is crucial to establishing his point that "the country is worse off"; isn't it? The article is interesting, and some of his other points about engineering, law, banking, academia, and compensation are interesting; but I wonder if the factual basis for those points is as radically wrong as the basic premise.
- torial 16y ago
  I couldn't find the sentence you were referring to in either article. In particular I searched for "secret" and "the secret". The essay from the OP seems to be what you are talking about wrt innovation. The FiveThirtyEight link provided in the immediately parent post to yours doesn't mention innovation.
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    He was referring to this sentence quoted by the parent: "We don’t build anything here anymore, outside of tech."
    - mechanical_fish 16y ago
      Yeah, that too.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    Yes, I was criticizing the OP, not FiveThirtyEight, of course.
yequalsx 16y ago
You are correct in pointing this out. What people really mean when they say- 'We don't produce anything anymore." - is that it's hard for uneducated worked to find good paying jobs. This has contributed to the belief that one must get a college education in order to find good work. My anecdotal experience is that this has caused an increase in college admissions and this leads to lower standards. Except in the top universities we have a good students being bored in college just like they are in high school. It's not a good long term prospect for the country.
bokonist 16y ago
The statistics Nate Silver uses are extremely problematic. I would not trust them at all. Any index that uses Fisher price indexes introduces huge amounts of subjectivity. For instance, the decision to use an "overlap method" rather than a "direct comparison method" is subjective ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_index ). Choosing one method rather than the other can dramatically alter the resulting index. When you add up a large number of subjective decisions, the resulting numbers simply replicate the assumptions you started with. One government economist writes psuedo-anonymously: "Much of our time is spent 'forecasting,' which basically means making a common-sense appraisal of what some indicator or variable will do in the coming years, and creating a statistical model that confirms it. The second step adds nothing of value to the prediction – the math is just there for show, a means of impressing the innumerate by camouflaging shot-in-the-dark guesses in rigorous clothing." ( http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/03/public_service.html http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/03/public_service.ht... )
- cynicalkane 16y ago
  The claim that such huge increases in manufacturing can be explained by variations in indexing--well, that's a pretty nutty claim to make. For example, the CPI is actually thought to overstate inflation. And not by very much. The PCE/PI--an index the Fed uses that leaves no room for subjective selection of a goods basket--rises by about a third of a percent less than the CPI. This is a lot in the very long run, but over, say, two decades, that compounds to a little over 6%. Tiny differences in inflation measures--and inflation has been, by any measure, pretty tiny for quite a while--cannot possibly be big enough to invalidate Silver's numbers. The changes are just too big.
  - bokonist 16y ago
    Unfortunately I don't have the statistics on hand, but one time I was looking at the average price of cars compared to the price index that had adjustments applied. During a given seven year period, the average price of cars had risen by about 25%. I looked at one specific model (a Corolla) and the price rose by about 15%. But the price index, with adjustments applied, had actually fallen by about 10%. The adjustments applied can make an enormous difference. For example, the CPI is actually thought to overstate inflation. That's not a meaningful statement. Whether CPI overstates or understates inflation depends on the question you are asking, depends on the goods involved, etc. Tiny differences in inflation measures--and inflation has been, by any measure, pretty tiny for quite a while--cannot possibly be big enough to invalidate Silver's numbers. The changes are just too big. Not true, a difference of one percentage point a year compounds, and thus makes a huge difference in long term measurements.
allenp 16y ago
I think the point he was making is that more and more American manufacturing is following a service model itself. As we centralize our manufacturing to a few larger companies (per industry), the only innovation available is really optimization which is not the leaps-and-bounds/change-the-world stuff of tech startups.
billswift 16y ago
The actual amount we manufacture is mostly irrelevant. We are manufacturing much less than we consume, especially compared to previously, witness our terrible balance of trade with the rest of the world. That is the proportion of manufacturing to consumption is too low.

mechanical_fish 16y ago

I stopped reading shortly after this sentence - the secret to speed-reading is to not waste time reading things that have been deduced from false facts. But let me underline: this is no minor factual error. The whole piece appears to be built on falsehood. The author is trying to argue that the USA needs more innovation. But why can we produce more manufactured goods than ever with fewer workers? Increased productivity! And why has productivity increased? Innovation!

gizmo 16y ago
If you look for excuses to dismiss an article you're always going to find them. That way you're not likely to learn much, though. The error in this case was minor, because his reasoning doesn't depend on it. The article is making the (rather mundane) point that more innovation is a good thing (premise) and that many of the best students are not going into industry but are lured away by academia and a few well compensated fields (law/medicine) and that the country is worse off because of it. So whether the USA produces much outside of tech isn't that relevant.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  many of the best students are not going into industry but are lured away by academia So, I stopped reading, but did the OP support this with statistics? Because in my world -- the one in which I myself have gone back and forth a couple of times between academia and industry -- there's plenty of people who try to go into academia, but they don't find work because there aren't enough jobs, and those that exist have low pay, because there's high demand but a rather short supply... Meanwhile, the thousands of highly-educated people who can't get into academia try to go into industry. Except that many industries aren't hiring much. Perhaps because their productivity keeps increasing and they don't really need armies of new Ph.Ds to keep cranking out widgets at the rate the market demands. I have a lot of friends with Ph.Ds, and not all of them are happily employed. [1] And that's not even getting into the fact that drawing the line between "academia" and "industry" is increasingly difficult. Every professor has a startup on the side, every major university has a staff of lawyers to manage their intellectual property, and half the grants are industrially funded... or are funded by government grants that are aimed directly at industrially-relevant product development, e.g. drugs. Many industries don't want to do cutting-edge pure research anymore, but instead try to outsource that to academia. In the semiconductor field, a lot of the cutting-edge research gets done in academic labs. E.g. I knew some of the folks who did early OLED research, the product of which now sits inside various Android phones. They were academics, but they are innovating, and their innovations are promptly adopted by industry here and abroad. Similarly, a lot of drugs come out of academic labs and are then pushed through development, testing, and production by industry. --- [1] Though most are, in fact, employed. Don't get me wrong. These days almost any job is a happy job compared to the alternative.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - gizmo 16y ago
    Statistics or references? None are offered. In fact, some of the claims in the article are so ludicrous I can't take them seriously at all. For example: "... so an entire generation of high-school graduates went to college and learned to loathe industry" and "so innovation [in the USA] died, and perhaps nine tenths of the brilliant minds that would have otherwise gone into industry and innovated the hell out of their field, that nine tenths went into the legal profession or the medical field or investment banking.". I just can't take those remarks at face value. I must say though, that the author's claims of disdain for the industry by academia match my experience. The author's complaints about low salaries (relative to law/medicine) in technical fields also match my experience. Where I live (Europe) professors don't have startups on the side, even at the top universities. Different worlds, I suppose.
  - lutorm 16y ago
    I agree with you about the job situation in academia. I think he has a point about talent becoming lawyers, bankers and doctors being lost, though.
- kragen 16y ago
  It seems to me that the rest of the article is premised on the claim that the USA's manufacturing production has not only ceased to grow quickly, but has actually fallen. This is crucial to establishing his point that "the country is worse off"; isn't it? The article is interesting, and some of his other points about engineering, law, banking, academia, and compensation are interesting; but I wonder if the factual basis for those points is as radically wrong as the basic premise.
torial 16y ago
I couldn't find the sentence you were referring to in either article. In particular I searched for "secret" and "the secret". The essay from the OP seems to be what you are talking about wrt innovation. The FiveThirtyEight link provided in the immediately parent post to yours doesn't mention innovation.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  He was referring to this sentence quoted by the parent: "We don’t build anything here anymore, outside of tech."
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    Yeah, that too.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Yes, I was criticizing the OP, not FiveThirtyEight, of course.

yequalsx 16y ago

You are correct in pointing this out. What people really mean when they say- 'We don't produce anything anymore." - is that it's hard for uneducated worked to find good paying jobs. This has contributed to the belief that one must get a college education in order to find good work. My anecdotal experience is that this has caused an increase in college admissions and this leads to lower standards. Except in the top universities we have a good students being bored in college just like they are in high school. It's not a good long term prospect for the country.

bokonist 16y ago

The statistics Nate Silver uses are extremely problematic. I would not trust them at all. Any index that uses Fisher price indexes introduces huge amounts of subjectivity. For instance, the decision to use an "overlap method" rather than a "direct comparison method" is subjective ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_index ). Choosing one method rather than the other can dramatically alter the resulting index. When you add up a large number of subjective decisions, the resulting numbers simply replicate the assumptions you started with. One government economist writes psuedo-anonymously: "Much of our time is spent 'forecasting,' which basically means making a common-sense appraisal of what some indicator or variable will do in the coming years, and creating a statistical model that confirms it. The second step adds nothing of value to the prediction – the math is just there for show, a means of impressing the innumerate by camouflaging shot-in-the-dark guesses in rigorous clothing." ( http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/03/public_service.html http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2010/03/public_service.ht... )

cynicalkane 16y ago
The claim that such huge increases in manufacturing can be explained by variations in indexing--well, that's a pretty nutty claim to make. For example, the CPI is actually thought to overstate inflation. And not by very much. The PCE/PI--an index the Fed uses that leaves no room for subjective selection of a goods basket--rises by about a third of a percent less than the CPI. This is a lot in the very long run, but over, say, two decades, that compounds to a little over 6%. Tiny differences in inflation measures--and inflation has been, by any measure, pretty tiny for quite a while--cannot possibly be big enough to invalidate Silver's numbers. The changes are just too big.
- bokonist 16y ago
  Unfortunately I don't have the statistics on hand, but one time I was looking at the average price of cars compared to the price index that had adjustments applied. During a given seven year period, the average price of cars had risen by about 25%. I looked at one specific model (a Corolla) and the price rose by about 15%. But the price index, with adjustments applied, had actually fallen by about 10%. The adjustments applied can make an enormous difference. For example, the CPI is actually thought to overstate inflation. That's not a meaningful statement. Whether CPI overstates or understates inflation depends on the question you are asking, depends on the goods involved, etc. Tiny differences in inflation measures--and inflation has been, by any measure, pretty tiny for quite a while--cannot possibly be big enough to invalidate Silver's numbers. The changes are just too big. Not true, a difference of one percentage point a year compounds, and thus makes a huge difference in long term measurements.

allenp 16y ago

I think the point he was making is that more and more American manufacturing is following a service model itself. As we centralize our manufacturing to a few larger companies (per industry), the only innovation available is really optimization which is not the leaps-and-bounds/change-the-world stuff of tech startups.

billswift 16y ago

The actual amount we manufacture is mostly irrelevant. We are manufacturing much less than we consume, especially compared to previously, witness our terrible balance of trade with the rest of the world. That is the proportion of manufacturing to consumption is too low.