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How do people expect to maintain an advantage in design and engineering when they have outsourced production? Where are the younger generations going to learn t

How do people expect to maintain an advantage in design and engineering when they have outsourced production? Where are the younger generations going to learn the things they don't teach you in university? Isn't it a huge advantage for a designer when you are the one getting your prototypes from the factory down the street?

dmix 7y ago
The issue is more about why not than why they should. The biggest reasons are the loss of domestic experience curves [1] to other countries when we shifted to a service based economy. The second is the hyper politicized process of even creating a factory, let alone operating one, even when you have the direct backing of the executive branch [2]. The other one (allegedly) is the idea that the local labor workforce won't want to do any of the hard/dirty jobs or can't do them cost effectively, often because 1 and 2 but other reasons. So there are higher initial costs for automation. But otherwise there are plenty of good reasons to operate production domestically once the technical and political environment supports such a thing. Which might happen in the future, although few mainstream parties seem to actually want that to happen without their idealized or prior worldview being appeased. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-06/inside-wisconsin-s-disastrous-4-5-billion-deal-with-foxconn https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-06/inside-wi...
bluGill 7y ago
What makes you think manufacturing isn't done in the US? China has a lot of cheap labor so things that are best done by cheap labor move there. (less so now as China is moving up). There is a lot of manufacturing that remains in the US, anything that benefits from automation and cheap reliable energy is best done in the US where energy is cheap and reliable and there are automation engineers.
- jbay808 7y ago
  There are also automation engineers in China, and they have the significant advantage of being able to easily observe the manual processes that they need to automate!

dmix 7y ago

The issue is more about why not than why they should. The biggest reasons are the loss of domestic experience curves [1] to other countries when we shifted to a service based economy. The second is the hyper politicized process of even creating a factory, let alone operating one, even when you have the direct backing of the executive branch [2]. The other one (allegedly) is the idea that the local labor workforce won't want to do any of the hard/dirty jobs or can't do them cost effectively, often because 1 and 2 but other reasons. So there are higher initial costs for automation. But otherwise there are plenty of good reasons to operate production domestically once the technical and political environment supports such a thing. Which might happen in the future, although few mainstream parties seem to actually want that to happen without their idealized or prior worldview being appeased. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-06/inside-wisconsin-s-disastrous-4-5-billion-deal-with-foxconn https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-06/inside-wi...

bluGill 7y ago

What makes you think manufacturing isn't done in the US? China has a lot of cheap labor so things that are best done by cheap labor move there. (less so now as China is moving up). There is a lot of manufacturing that remains in the US, anything that benefits from automation and cheap reliable energy is best done in the US where energy is cheap and reliable and there are automation engineers.

jbay808 7y ago
There are also automation engineers in China, and they have the significant advantage of being able to easily observe the manual processes that they need to automate!