It seems like, at least to an outside observer, Japan and Germany are very good at high precision, high quality stuff. Not necessarily the style I'd want for m

It seems like, at least to an outside observer, Japan and Germany are very good at high precision, high quality stuff. Not necessarily the style I'd want for most items though. China seems to good at defect tolerant, mass producible, hard to break because it's squishy plastic, everything done in software, kind of work, which is my preferred style. America seems to be way behind because all our stuff is heavy. We want stuff to have "A nice weight to it", we'll use wood and steel and cast iron, we make stuff big and bulky and simple and leave the tech to everyone else. We do seem to be pretty good at stuff that needs a ton of paperwork proving it was made a certain way, but half the time "Made in America" seems to mean "Made like it's 1950, with a lot of skill and good materials, but low tech and expensive". All except a few bits of high tech that we seem to do really well on, like CPUs. But that's just what I gather from consumer stuff, I'm sure people who work in more specialized fields notice other patterns.