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And why do people persist in maintaining that US manufacturing is "not strong" in the face of very obvious evidence that it is strong? Because a lot of today's

• hugh3 15y ago
  It's largely sampling bias, though. It seems to us, as regular consumers, that everything is made in China because we buy phones and monitors, but we never buy steel girders and Boeing 777s.
  • mechanical_fish 15y ago
    Indeed, by definition people in the USA don't buy exported goods. And speaking as someone who used to work in the business of building electronics parts in the USA, parts that were then sent to Malaysia for final assembly: Lots of things undergo final assembly overseas because that's one of the least automatable manufacturing processes, so you save a lot of money on hand-assembly by paying lower prices for workers. But that doesn't mean that all the parts of your "made in China" goods - or of the machines that are used to make them - are made overseas. And as Apple's accountants will tell you the profits are not in the assembly step. For example, lots of machines with "Intel inside" are assembled abroad, but the processors are made in the USA - largely by robots - and a lot of the value is in those processors.