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The most important paragraph in this piece is last one, which plugs a $22.8 billion bill to support domestic semiconductor manufacturing in the USA and suggests

• api 6y ago
  The US followed the advice of the business schools long ago and outsourced all its core competencies. The US' loss of technical and manufacturing expertise is going to be extremely hard to reverse, and reversing it is going to require a rejection of financial capitalist economic ideology and things like "maximizing shareholder value" as the prime directive. Unfortunately this election gives us a choice between an utterly unacceptable racist crackpot and a bland candidate who belongs to the old guard who still believes that you can have an economy based on nothing. That doesn't make me optimistic.
  • tharne 6y ago
    Don't know why this is getting downvoted. Tone aside, it's a fairly accurate assessment.
    • g-b-r 6y ago
      I'd wager it's because he criticizes Biden (too), but come on, people...
    • evgen 6y ago
      I can't say for certain, but I believe that statement is being downvoted because the first paragraph is factually inaccurate in each sentence: > The US followed the advice of the business schools long ago and outsourced all its core competencies. Bashing metal and low-tech widget-forming has never really been a core competency of the US. It was useful to keep people employed for a 50 years or so but for the past century the US seems to have aimed for technological synthesis and increasingly high-tech production as a core strength. > The US' loss of technical and manufacturing expertise is going to be extremely hard to reverse, and reversing it is going to require a rejection of financial capitalist economic ideology and things like "maximizing shareholder value" as the prime directive. It is unnecessary to reverse something which was not lost in the first place. As others have repeatedly pointed out all over the comments on this article the US has continued to climb up the manufacturing food chain and dominates the top-end. It may employ fewer people, but the productivity and economic benefit of the US manufacturing sector has simply not declined at all and therefore no 'rejection of financial capitalist economic ideology' will be required.
      • michaelt 6y ago
        > Bashing metal and low-tech widget-forming has never really been a core competency of the US. If you think the far east only dominates low-tech widget forming, you should look into where the iPhone and Macbook are manufactured :)
        • evgen 6y ago
          I know where they are assembled. I also know where the displays are actually manufactured, where the RAM comes from, and where the CPU is fabbed, and where the various radio chips are sourced from. I also know where the software is written that makes it all work. I also know that the iPhone and Macbook are not particularly difficult pieces of engineering and that the tech required to make the shiny bit of tech you see in the store is the bit of the iceberg beneath the waterline that represents a lot of the value in what we are talking about.
          • michaelt 6y ago
  • mikequinlan 6y ago
    I don't know about the rest of your comment, but it starts with a false statement. > the advice of the business schools long ago and outsourced all its core competencies. Business schools recommend the opposite. Outsource everything OTHER THAN core competencies. Core competencies are your competitive advantage; keep them in house.
    • erichocean 6y ago
      > Outsource everything OTHER THAN core competencies. The core competency of the US today is finance. We've been actively outsourcing everything else we can.
      • jfk13 6y ago
        > The core competency of the US today is finance. Since when? It didn't look very competent in 2008...
        • erichocean 6y ago
          We're not even competent anymore at our core competencies…
      • mikequinlan 6y ago
        I've looked and it seems that our actual core competency (the thing we do better than others) is raise soybeans, beef, and chicken. https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/07/news/economy/top-us-exports/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/07/news/economy/top-us-exports... for example.
• greedo 6y ago
  US manufacturing has been growing steadily for decades. The US concentrates this in sectors that are high tech, expensive, and profitable. Low margin, low profit manufacturing has been offshored, but manufacturing hasn't been stagnant at all. As a percentage of GDP, manufacturing has been on a downward trend, but that's because of the growth of service industry. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/manufacturing-output https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/manu...
  • wiremine 6y ago
    Does that data set factor in inflation? I could't tell from write up. If not, The 1997 number would be ~$2,200B, after adjusting. That would still only be a slight decline.
    • gilbetron 6y ago
      "Data are in current U.S. dollars."
  • throwawaygh 6y ago
    It's true, US manufacturing output is not in decline. But it is stagnating, in the sense that growth rates are much slower than they used to be. Look at the average from 2000 to 2010 or from 2010 to 2020 and compare to any decade in the 20th century. But that's not really the point. The point is, look at those numbers sans semiconductors and you see a pretty scary decline in manufacturing output. It is totally fair to point out that this has been a strategic choice to focus on profitable industries, and that that's even a good thing. That's sort of the point here: the choice has been made, semiconductors are now a key industry for the US manufacturing sector, and AFAICT we don't have any plans for what would replace semiconductors. IDK if we have a healthy amount of manufacturing output, but it's pretty clear that losing leadership in semiconductor manufacturing would be quite bad for the USA.
    • vonmoltke 6y ago
      > The point is, look at those numbers sans semiconductors and you see a pretty scary decline in manufacturing output. Not at all: https://www.nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/2019-united-states-manufacturing-facts/ https://www.nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/2019-united-sta... Semiconductor manufacturing is a component of the second-largest US manufacturing bucket in 2017, and was only #8 of the top 10 manufacturing buckets for job growth in 2018. It is certainly an important sector for economic and strategic reasons, but you are significantly overstating its importance.
• justapassenger 6y ago
  Semiconductor manufacturing is not what average Joe thinks when they talk manufacturing. It’s highly localized and requires not that many, but very highly educated workers. While I highly support US investing there more, it’s not something that gives US blue collar jobs in the rural America. And push for more manufacturing in USA is about that.
  • phone8675309 6y ago
    For better or for worse, the American model of working in the same paper mill/steel factory/automobile plant/coal mine that your father and grandfather worked at is over. Automation, commodification, and globalization means that the profit margins in these fields are in free-fall and the ability to have the sorts of wages that these professions used to have where workers could be paid sufficient to support their families on a single salary are long gone and they are not coming back. The US should be focusing on decoupling the need to be able to survive (food, housing, healthcare) from holding a job instead of pushing for bringing back these jobs that are not likely to ever come back.
    • tyingq 6y ago
      That's true, though it's interesting that many companies still talk and act like employees should be "loyal". They don't seem to understand how that worked.
      • phone8675309 6y ago
        I cannot fathom being loyal to a company where they expect two weeks notice from me (at a bare minimum) if I'm leaving but where they don't have to give me two minutes notice before terminating me.
    • neutronicus 6y ago
      I wouldn't conclude too much about the steady-state price of manufacturing labor based on the present global market. At the moment regional differences in the price of manufacturing labor are so large that corporations are basically labor market arbitrageurs. But arbitrage opportunities are by their nature kind of ephemeral, ending when the relevant markets stop mis-pricing things. Your POV seems to be that labor is correctly priced in the current cheapest labor market (the "Race to the Bottom" hypothesis) but I don't know that this is automatically true. It's at least possible that one can only arbitrage the price of labor in developing markets for so long until they develop and drive up the local price of labor, and until they are all developed. "The Jobs Ain't Comin' Back" is an appealing position for professional automators like us, because it lays the credit for manufacturing labor market dynamics at our own self-important feet, when in actuality it's shaped largely by brutally exploitative and probably transient (on the scale of decades, though) labor-price arbitrage. In particular the current manufacturing labor market artificially rewards centralization because the profit made by labor-price arbitrage is so large compared to shipping costs. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that manufacturing is either Sweatshops or Robots in the long run.
• tarlinian 6y ago
  IMO your last statement is kind of ridiculous. Intel is literally the only company that does high volume wafer manufacturing in the US at anything approaching leading edge geometries. Are there any other American companies the government could even realistically support? (The only other US company that has any modern wafer fabs in the US is Micron and the only really have R&D and legacy long-life products being manufactured in the US.) Maybe if this program occurred 20 years ago you might have had another option. (And you would have basically looked like an idiot as for the next 10 years Intel pretty much made all the right decisions in manufacturing while everyone else in the US went down dead ends.)
  • Cieplak 6y ago
    Are there any other American companies the government could even realistically support? Micron is perhaps a candidate, though not sure it meets all your criteria.
    • tarlinian 6y ago
      Unlike Intel, Micron has practically outsourced most of their manufacturing to Singapore, Taiwan and Japan. Their only production fabs in the US are in Utah and Virginia both of which are mostly focused on niche or older products. More importantly, they only produce memory. Logic and memory processes are very different.
  • dzonga 6y ago
    does it have to high volume ? lots of semi-conductor companies in the US, some of them flying under the radar. the us stimulus will help these companies invest more capital, talent. hell, I will say any country needs to be manufacturing and designing their own silicon. and like said by ben, not all silicon has to be for pc's.
    • kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      None of them are on cutting edge processes.
  • 6y ago
• valuearb 6y ago
  Government picking winners is corrupting and bad for our economy. It speaks to the intellectual bankruptcy of the supporters of these handouts that they can only look backwards and say we need to fund dinosaurs to steal engineers from new industries of the future and put them to work on do overs for Intel and Boeing.
  • whynotminot 6y ago
    It's only picking winners in the sense that we need to empower players in our market to be able to build here. It's creating the opportunity/playing field for a winner ton exist. Because "winners" in this sense right now just means "who can build it cheaper" -- and there's no intellectual bankruptcy there. The answer is pretty much always "K, build it cheaper? Build it somewhere else then."
    • valuearb 6y ago
      The market is saying the US is better doing other things. It would be as if in the late 70s deciding we had to subsidize supercomputer and mainframe computer development, to hire all these talented engineers who were wasting time building and programming kit computers and “pc”s that could never be as important to our economy, and our “technological leadership”. We can’t industrial plan the future.
      • whynotminot 6y ago
        Right but the market doesn’t have any foresight to say “an adversary is going to take advantage of this dependence the market has created here and strangle us with it.” The “market” like water just flows toward “it’s cheaper to do it this way.” The market doesn’t care if US democracy triumphs over (or even survives) Chinese state managed capitalism. But I think a lot of us have skin in the game on this one. China has long recognized the strategic importance of this kind of thinking, see the massive subsidies they provide many of their industries to create the very dependencies you’re crediting as a natural market efficiency.
        • 6y ago
• hprotagonist 6y ago
  movies, music, and microcode. and let's not forget disruptive pizza delivery services.