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> The only reason this fight has come at all is because of a bunch of displaced factory workers (and areas that did manufacturing) that have been hurt by this t

> The only reason this fight has come at all is because of a bunch of displaced factory workers (and areas that did manufacturing) that have been hurt by this trade... As a layperson watching from the sidelines in the software world, but fascinated by welding, electrical/electronics, mechanical engineering, CNC, machining, etc., it is incomprehensible to me why US business leaders would so willingly cede manufacturing to competitors (Chinese in this thread's context, but could be anyone really, even within the same nation). As a dilettante, I'm seeing parallels in manufacturing to what I experience in software, but maybe I'm just not seeing what those leaders see, so perhaps someone can help clear up my misunderstanding. To think you can divorce yourself cleanly from manufacturing and adopt a "throw it over the fence" mentality, and expect to maintain industry leadership, seems to me as misguided as thinking you can divorce yourself from coding and operational support as a software company, "throw it over the fence", and expect to stay a software leader. That might work for one or three iterations of product lifecycles over a few decades, but there are crucial insights into customer needs and market directions that come about from knowing about what those trenches deal with, that disappear in the fenced-off abstraction layer. You gradually disconnect from your market, your sales and marketing teams lose a critically-grounded, no-bullshit feedback loop from those areas, you lose understanding of the complexities to properly analyze the business problems, you lose metrics those areas gather to inform sales and marketing analytics. Maybe all those factors simply don't matter, or I'm simply wrong about them being factors at all in manufacturing business? In which case, I put on my value investor's hat and ask, what precisely is the defensible moat about giving up in-house manufacturing knowledge (and often accompanying core support functions) and only specializing in design, sales, and marketing for a manufacturer? I've never been able to figure that one out, either. Seems to me in-house manufacturing secrets are easier to come up with (see Japanese electrolytic caps) and protect than this year's trends and important customer segments, but again, I'm just a layperson, so I'm just left wondering what I'm missing.

zepto 7y ago
You aren’t wrong at all. It’s just that it was in the short term advantage of a bunch of managers to adopt this mentality at the expense of the long term health of the economy.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
They didn’t abandon all manufacturing, just low level unskilled dirty manufacturing. American business people were happy to up the value chain to more technical stuff as well as more technical services. And actually, we have to move up this value chain anyways to justify our higher standard of living. America still has a lock on a lot of technical know how that will take the Chinese decades to replicate (eg semi conductor and jet turbine production).
- remarkEon 7y ago
  >And actually, we have to move up this value chain anyways to justify our higher standard of living. This is the part that makes absolutely no sense to me. The farther you move up this value chain, the fewer and fewer people you can find that can actually do those jobs. They require advanced degrees and highly technical specialization and experience. Not everyone can do that. Unless you have a parallel plan to, perhaps magically, mint more and more PhDs every year what is everyone else supposed to do who was just a "low level unskilled dirty manufacturing" worker? >American business people were happy to... You're sure right about that! I think what people are questioning is if, as a state and society, that was a long-term good strategic choice. For the bottomline it absolutely was - for those businessmen and their company's earnings reports.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    > The farther you move up this value chain, the fewer and fewer people you can find that can actually do those jobs. Yep. But that is a problem better solved via some kind of wealth redistribution, rather than maintaining low value jobs that couldn’t pay enough to keep up anyways. China was just the first thing to suck away low value jobs, eventually automation will be much much worse.
    - remarkEon 7y ago
      You mean, the jobs that could support a family on a single income? Those jobs? It's a unique aspect of tech-people that the disappearance of a class of work that was actually able to support people at a reasonable standard of living is cause for advocacy of "more wealth redistribution, please". Where I come from this is viewed as both naive and insulting. I don't mean to imply you were trying to come across that way - but realize that it can. "Look I know we took your dirty disgusting low skilled manufacturing job and shipped it overseas ... but here's a welfare check from Uncle Sam" has not exactly done well as a political strategy for the last few election cycles.

zepto 7y ago

You aren’t wrong at all. It’s just that it was in the short term advantage of a bunch of managers to adopt this mentality at the expense of the long term health of the economy.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

They didn’t abandon all manufacturing, just low level unskilled dirty manufacturing. American business people were happy to up the value chain to more technical stuff as well as more technical services. And actually, we have to move up this value chain anyways to justify our higher standard of living. America still has a lock on a lot of technical know how that will take the Chinese decades to replicate (eg semi conductor and jet turbine production).

remarkEon 7y ago
>And actually, we have to move up this value chain anyways to justify our higher standard of living. This is the part that makes absolutely no sense to me. The farther you move up this value chain, the fewer and fewer people you can find that can actually do those jobs. They require advanced degrees and highly technical specialization and experience. Not everyone can do that. Unless you have a parallel plan to, perhaps magically, mint more and more PhDs every year what is everyone else supposed to do who was just a "low level unskilled dirty manufacturing" worker? >American business people were happy to... You're sure right about that! I think what people are questioning is if, as a state and society, that was a long-term good strategic choice. For the bottomline it absolutely was - for those businessmen and their company's earnings reports.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  > The farther you move up this value chain, the fewer and fewer people you can find that can actually do those jobs. Yep. But that is a problem better solved via some kind of wealth redistribution, rather than maintaining low value jobs that couldn’t pay enough to keep up anyways. China was just the first thing to suck away low value jobs, eventually automation will be much much worse.
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    You mean, the jobs that could support a family on a single income? Those jobs? It's a unique aspect of tech-people that the disappearance of a class of work that was actually able to support people at a reasonable standard of living is cause for advocacy of "more wealth redistribution, please". Where I come from this is viewed as both naive and insulting. I don't mean to imply you were trying to come across that way - but realize that it can. "Look I know we took your dirty disgusting low skilled manufacturing job and shipped it overseas ... but here's a welfare check from Uncle Sam" has not exactly done well as a political strategy for the last few election cycles.