I believe you are correct. As decades go by in which the construction of a particular "thing" is no longer done, the skills, knowledge, experience, and even the

I believe you are correct. As decades go by in which the construction of a particular "thing" is no longer done, the skills, knowledge, experience, and even the institutions that are a part of it wither away. Unfortunately our lost abilities is not limited to big infrastructure projects. Even the manufacture of something as small as a simple screw is difficult in America. Here's an excerpt of what I mean. > In 2012, Apple attempted to move production, or at least assembly, of the Mac Pro back to Texas. It found it couldn’t domestically source a tiny screw needed for the Mac, indicative of the challenges of trying to produce things in the United States. According to the New York Times account of the fiasco, in China Apple could turn to any number of factories that could produce custom screws.9 Texas had almost none. Further, as said by none other than CEO Tim Cook himself: “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Eventually, Apple had to import the screws from China, and this was merely one production bottleneck among many. In June 2019, Apple announced that the next version of the Mac Pro will be produced in China.10 > If even the mighty Apple can’t source simple things such as screws in the United States, or find enough tooling engineers, we shouldn’t expect one company to solve what is now a systemic problem. It is not rational to expect individual CEOs to expose their companies to the higher costs and bottlenecks that come with reshoring. We should not expect the market to fix this suboptimal Nash equilibrium problem, either, nor can a one-time injection of taxpayer’s money, however large. These coordination, demand, and financial problems are just too staggering for even our most powerful corporations to solve by themselves. source: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/reshoring-supply-chains-a-practical-policy-agenda/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/reshoring-supply-... It is concerning to me our increasing inability to produce material things.