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I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. Why? Is this just an isolation

I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. Why? Is this just an isolationist dream? The reductive, absurd, extreme of this is why don't individual people go out and build all their own stuff like cars and houses. Let's all go out and learn how to mine and refine metal ore so we can get started on building the family sedan! There is an argument for what the right balance is, and likely a good argument that at lest some minor capability should exist so we can keep re-assessing the value of that industry, but the notion that we should have it all in-house will just limit us to much more primitive tech since we can't gain the benefit of world wide innovation and build off of that.

slicktux 2y ago
That is a pretty hyperbolic paragraph only to imply that we as a nation would loose out on innovation by doing so; nowhere do we want to isolate as a country. Look at all the jobless Americans in once thriving industrial cities. Generations left without pensions or skills all because we outsource our workers to other countries. That’s one of the many problems that need to be solved and by manufacturing here in the USA it may help resolve or alleviate that problem.
- killingtime74 2y ago
  It may or may not but the cost is definitely huge and it's already arrived. Would you build a new factory, spend a huge amount of effort marketing, hire workers, incur large debts, if you knew that in three and a half years the presidency may change and it would not be competitive again.
  - slicktux 2y ago
    That’s a self fulfilling prophecy…say that is the case. The one thing that won’t change is the jobless and skill less Americans; I understand that the road to hell is paved with good intentions but at this point we can’t help but not ignore the homeless, jobless and skill less problem. Though we can solve it by just creating a UBI, right (sarcasm)?
- no_wizard 2y ago
  >nowhere do we want to isolate as a country. Look at all the jobless Americans in once thriving industrial cities. Generations left without pensions or skills all because we outsource our workers to other countries. And we didn't pay for re-skilling, re-training, re-education. We didn't give them welfare benefits to hold over while they learned these new things. We did near nothing, and expected these areas simply to pick themselves back up organically. Of course that failed. When you do little to nothing, you get little to nothing in return. Tariffs and manufacturing aren't going to solve this fundamental problem, which is as industry demands shift they externalize the cost whenever possible, which leaves workers, cities and states with a poor deal. If you instead plan around the fact you can't micro manage the economy, but you can setup a meaningful floor that catches people when industry shifts and allows them to invest in themselves - without fear of losing their livelihood - to take advantage of the next opportunities or better yet, create new ones - you wouldn't have this problem in the first place. Tariffs won't help. Bringing manufacturing - in whatever capacity does get brought back, it remains to be seen if this will even happen - won't help alleviate this in any meaningful way. On top of all this, the tariffs are here, and there is little plan beyond simply implementing them and...waiting for industry to magically start manufacturing in the US again? What is the actual plan here? I frankly can't understand the undeserved optimism. If we wanted to make things better for formerly industrial cities, we should have invested in them and their citizenry decades ago. We failed to do this meaningfully. Thats the real problem, and they aren't fixing that problem at all
  - squigz 2y ago
    Even if one were to be very generous and assume that this plan will lead to all jobs that were outsourced coming back, that's really only half the problem - technological progress is always going to displace some jobs. Without everything you mentioned, those whose jobs simply do not exist anymore are out of luck... and also now everything is more expensive because of tariffs
  - vharuck 2y ago
    Guaranteeing that families won't go bankrupt due to market forces beyond their control would make so many things so much easier. For example, in my state of Pennsylvania, fracking is a political issue. It's a fossil fuel industry, so ideally we'd be weaning off it. But we actually encourage it by having no severance tax on any extracted energy sources. The state is leaving money on the table, and voters seem to like it that way. But, in truth, they don't care about taxes for fracking companies. They care about not ruining towns economically dependant on fracking. They're terrified of those companies leaving, because a chunk of the town's workforce would fall into poverty and take the town with it. Very few people care about where their electricity and heat come from, as long as they can afford it. There's no good reason to oppose moving to renewables except household economics, which is a very good reason for individual voters. If we made sure they weren't going to freeze and starve if the one big employer left town, that employer wouldn't have such an outsized influence on state politics. In a healthy free market, companies go bust. It just happens: better competitors show up, services or goods aren't needed, plans don't pan out. But we've created a system that keeps companies afloat ala Weekend at Bernie's, instead of what people actually want: keep families afloat.
- deleted 2y ago
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- Aloisius 2y ago
  We manufacture more today than at any time in history. We just do it with a whole lot fewer people. Have jobs been lost to outsourcing? Sure. But far more jobs have been lost to automation and the elimination of obsolete industries. While companies might have avoided investing in automation through the use of cheap labor in other countries, there is little doubt that will change if they re-shore.
  - slicktux 2y ago
    So tariffs shouldn’t be a problem since we “manufacture more than we did ever before”! we’ll be able to buy USA made and avoid high cost of imports; great!
  - amluto 2y ago
    Counterpoint: as far as I know, 30 years ago, a small US company could invent a consumer good and credibly manufacture it here in small to moderate quantities. Today, not so much. If you want an economical contract manufacturer to help you manufacture your product using modern tooling and access to the engineers who know how to set up those tools, as far as I know, you mostly need to look outside the US.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      No way. You need to go back to the 1960s, and that’s a stretch. The age of the mega corp killed all of that stuff. NYC had a few thousand factories, all crushed by bigger, subsidized by tax policy competitors in the US south and then offshored.
    - aj7 2y ago
      Yes, absolutely. Our skill is in design, management, and marketing, and distribution. Making stuff is today’s farming.
  - aj7 2y ago
    Correct.
XorNot 2y ago
It's also just practically not possible: the distribution of resources is that it is, and for the expense of conquering and securing an expansive empire to get them, strategic alliances and diplomacy will be cheaper (not to mention that just because something is within your empire, it hardly means you necessarily exert any real sovereignty or control over it - the conquered peoples will hardly feel like citizens).
dccoolgai 2y ago
Unfortunately, when cheap goods are sourced outside the US "innovation" usually just means "slave labor" or "flouting environmental regulations". Not the case for Europe, etc. but most Americans are better off without competing against slave labor so billionaires can become trillionaires while they lose social security, healthcare, etc. I'll pay an extra 20 percent for well-made things that aren't produced by indentured servants.
- umeshunni 2y ago
  > Unfortunately, when cheap goods are sourced outside the US "innovation" usually just means "slave labor" or "flouting environmental regulations". Eh, China has 20x-ed its GDP per capita in a generation. They're not slaves.
  - tharne 2y ago
    > Eh, China has 20x-ed its GDP per capita in a generation. They're not slaves. Maybe not according-to-hoyle slaves, but they're not in a great spot either: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...
lesuorac 2y ago
It's an economic theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism The general idea is that when you buy stuff you're losing wealth so if you never buy anything then you never get poorer. Since we constantly dig gold up from the ground we still get richer over time even if nobody buys our stuff. This is also why its importantly to gain colonies (Greenland/ Canada) or mineral rights from other countries so that the amount of stuff we have increases. IMO, it's a theory that's missing the forest for the trees but it's historically very popular.
- mindslight 2y ago
  Maybe if we're lucky, one of these sophomores will have an epiphany that military protection and a stable currency are some of the most complex exports, and that getting imports by trading away a self-created currency is a pretty great way to not give away any gold or silver... Just sayin'.
  - Avicebron 2y ago
    > military protection and a stable currency are some of the most complex exports And how come that always seems seem to come wrapped in ways that inexorably seems to concentrate wealth, so that the benefits of those exports seem to be less evenly distributed?
    - lazide 2y ago
      People like to get rich, so any system they create tends to get the people best at creating systems richer. That has been true for every economic system ever - some are just more transparent and fair about it. Would you rather it be people taking bribes, a king, a hereditary merchant class, oligarchs, or people setting up companies? It has been as true about the USSR and Cuba as it has been about Venice, Canada, the USA, etc.
    - mindslight 2y ago
      Because they're centralized sources of power, and power corrupts. In my younger days I used to argue for a non-inflationary currency, and how that would have gone a long way towards not concentrating the wealth from offshorting and technological progress (instead enough money was printed to make price inflation keep occurring in spite of the fundamentals, and most of that new money was just given to banks to pump up the asset bubbles) These days I've kind of just accepted the monetary inflation (cf Gresham's law), like other centralizing but perhaps inevitable dynamics like the economies of scale for electronics manufacturing.
hudon 2y ago
the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. When you can manufacture warships, you can protect your economy. or: If all you sell are financial services, and a pandemic hits and you need to protect your people, where will you find masks? We don't need to build literally everything ourselves, that's a reductionist argument, we just need to become a lot more productive than we are now.
- squigz 2y ago
  Was mask manufacturing capacity during the pandemic an issue?
  - hudon 2y ago
    Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID...
    - manwe150 2y ago
      Both yes and no. It was a brief lack of available local stock from suddenly unexpected demand, followed by a lack of factories willing to stop doing well paid work to switch to making cheap masks, while we waited for even cheaper masks to get made and imported from countries with cheap labor, followed by a surplus of masks (source: a brief chat with a factory manager in my social network who was considering whether he could at least break even on costs and labor if temporarily switching to making masks)
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        Even then, there weren't enough melt spinning machines in North America to make the necessary raw materials, and the lead time on new machines was too long to address the shortage in time to respond to the needs of a pandemic. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-filters/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-fi...
  - 2y ago
xienze 2y ago
> I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks? It’s important to be at least somewhat self-reliant as a nation, especially when the country we are VERY reliant on is not a friendly one.
- tharne 2y ago
  > “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks? I don't why the mainstream media isn't focusing more on this angle. Five years ago the richest, most powerful, country in the world couldn't get basic medical supplies to its citizens during a public health crisis. That should have terrified us into making major policy changes, but instead everyone just seems to have shrugged it off and gone back to business as usual.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    The US can barely get basic medical supplies to much of its population outside of a health crisis - not because of direct supply chain issues, but because the system is designed to put corporate profits over adequate service provision. And in the not so general case, over national security. Is manufacturing the real problem here? Or is it a symptom of decades of systemic mismanagement of opportunity by a culture that values short-sighted opportunism over strategy?
    - banqjls 2y ago
      Way to misdirect a totally valid point
      - Spooky23 2y ago
        How, it’s the elephant in the room.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
There are two main reasons that individuals don't build their own houses and cars from scratch. 1) They don't know how. Specialization is a thing. But this is a thing that applies to individuals rather than nations. You don't need every person to know how to mine ore or hang drywall as long as somebody does. But a country the size of the US could certainly contain someone who knows how to do any given thing. 2) They get paid more to do something else. This is the argument that you get paid $200,000 to be a doctor and people who mine ore get paid $80,000 so it's better for you to do $2000 more work as a doctor and then pay someone $800 for ore than to put on a miner's hat yourself. But this is again something that applies to individuals rather than countries. There are people in the US who already get paid less than $80,000, or less than $30,000, or even who are unemployed. It makes no sense to convert doctors into miners but it makes plenty of sense for the people who are currently doing something that pays even less.
- mechagodzilla 2y ago
  So applying this to China and the USA - the USA has a median household income of ~$80k, and China, in terms of purchasing power parity, has a median household income of $32k. China has a workforce of ~775M people vs 163M people in the USA. The USA has ~7M unemployed people. For the USA to stop importing goods from China, we would need to 1) stop consuming those goods altogether (even if they're intermediate goods that go into things we do manufacture), or 2) employ US workers to make those goods instead of whatever they're currently doing (either employed or unemployed). Employed Americans largely earn a lot more than employed chinese people, and there just aren't very many unemployed Americans. Based on the value of imports to the US from China vs Chinese GDP($440B vs $17.8T), we import about 2.5% of their output, or the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale. I don't think there is any way around the fact that significantly reducing imports from other countries means we significantly reduce our consumption in absolute terms (i.e. we have a poorer standard of living), just out of spite for other countries.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale Or about 12% of the US labor force. Meanwhile the 12th percentile US income is ~$22,000, i.e. less than the $32k median in China, and half of the jobs there are above that median. Obviously these numbers are all useless napkin math and none of it really works like that, but the premise isn't inherently absurd. If China is subsidizing manufacturing in order to capture manufacturing jobs and those jobs pay more than what many in the lowest quartile of the US are currently making, there are people who could be made better off by having those jobs back, and they'd still only be paid about what we're currently paying to China. And this before considering the general arguments about advantages to proximity of manufacturing, e.g. being able to talk to the people in the factory in your timezone in your language assists in product development so the location of the factory has an easier time developing new products. Which allows not just the manufacturing jobs but the whole rest of the company to be there, instead of those jobs starting to get eroded going forward.
michaelhoney 2y ago
the reductive, absurd version of something is reductive and absurd, but that doesn't mean that the nuanced, appropriate version is wrong
- SideQuark 2y ago
  But it provides a tool to see how and why the “nuanced, appropriate version” is actually wrong. When one limits the choices for purchases or sales, one reduces efficiency, whether it’s limiting to products made at your home, in your city, in your state, or even in your country. It’s failed for so many centuries across hundreds of countries and attempts that it’s not even a question except among politicians stoking fear to gain votes.
  - WillPostForFood 2y ago
    The question isn't whether maximum global free trade maximizes efficiency. The question is whether maximizing global economic efficiency creates optimal outcomes for a nation, for groups within a nation, or for individuals in the nation. It is clearly a mixed bag, so there is pushback. Ask these questions. Besides maximizing monetary efficiency: Does free trade maximize a nation's resiliency? Does free trade maximize a nation's employment? Does free trade maximize a nation's security? Does free trade promote equitable distribution of a nation's wealth? Unless the question is yes to every answer, it is fair to have a policy debate about how much you are going to limit free trade. Every nation does it to some degree, no matter how much free trade rhetoric they promote.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      With respect to the US: - We’re the richest nation on the planet and have been until recently been adept in response to many types of disasters. - Unemployment has been <5% for a few years. - The US military reigns supreme. Our 5 air forces are the top 5 in terms of airframes. - We actively pursue fiscal policy to promote inequitable wealth distribution The idiocy of conflict with China is just that. We’re better and richer together.
GS523523 2y ago
> Why? Is this just an isolationist dream? Imagine if Russia produced their own technical components - how much of an effect would sanctions have on them? If Russia relies on our computer chips, we have leverage over them. If we rely on Asian factories and silicon, they have leverage over us. President Biden wouldn't have had to go begging to Prince Mohammad for oil if we had enough production at home. It's the way the world works.
robomartin 2y ago
> I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. Why? Is this just an isolationist dream? No. There needs to be balance. We are way past the balance point, by far. When I say "we" I mean the US and Europe. We have the same problems, and I believe Europe is in far greater danger to be absolutely decimated in the next two to five decades. Example: We are currently working on a robotics project. Just-about the only thing we can buy in the US (or Europe, for that matter) is the aluminum and steel, and only if we are ready to do the fabrication --machining-- ourselves (which we can do). If we have to rely on third parties to manufacture the parts we are sunk. Making anything in the US (and Europe) has become impossible. Wires, cables, circuit boards, motors, encoders, chips, displays, cast iron or aluminum parts, gears, belts, injection molded parts, filters, lubricants, etc. The list is massively long. Again, US and Europe, same problem. The massive imbalance in tariffs and trade restrictions has collapsed entire industries. Try to print books or manuals in the US or Europe at scale. Good luck. Try to make packaging materials. Same problem. I've been manufacturing for about four decades. It has never been worse. It's horrible. And we need to fix it or we'll be left with nothing. You cannot have an economy that is purely based on providing services and writing software. A couple of decades ago, I used to buy a specially-treated antireflective type of glass from the last company making it in the US. The Chinese started to dump and created pricing pressure. Five years later they were out of business. I then bought the same type of glass from the sole remaining western factory in Germany. A couple of years later they discontinued the product. I then had to buy from China. A couple of years later they increased their prices --nearly doubled. That's what we've been dealing with (US and Europe). A predatory and destructive "machine". This isn't about making everything. It's about making enough to have a viable economy in the long run. I find that people who are not in manufacturing cannot grasp this. It isn't about hating China either. They are doing exactly right by their people. I admire their dedication and focus. We (US and Europe) are the idiots.
- aj7 2y ago
  This only stops when China equalizes. The real shame is our country is not such a nice place to live, when we enter our phase as a less-advanced country. We always had brilliant immigrants and democratic ideals to keep the ball rolling. What now?
WtfRuSerious 2y ago
answer: people who solve every problem with war tend to advocate preparing for war... this would include re-implementing all our supply chains currently residing in the coutries we, imagined or not, see ourselves going to war with...
aaron695 2y ago
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tomlockwood 2y ago
This idea of self-reliance has been tried, and probably the greatest example of it is an extremely funny one. North Korea. Their primary ideology is "Juche": "Juche posits that a country will prosper once it has become self-reliant by achieving political, economic, and military independence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche Maybe America can do it better?
briandear 2y ago
Building everything shouldn’t be the goal, however, having a strategic capability shouldn’t be overlooked either. There is also the question of supply chain resilience. Covid taught us that the whims of governments can choke up the entire system.
beloch 2y ago
There was a good blog post on bicycles and tariff's earlier this week[1]. A key point was that volume really matters in what you can onshore. Whether you go for full automation or not, dies, tooling, machinery etc. all need to be amortized across what you sell. High-volume, low-end products are relatively easy to amortize, being both less demanding to manufacture and having higher volume. Such products are usually made in several factories around the world. Specialized, high-end stuff tends to be much harder to sell in large enough quantities to be economically viable. In many cases, one factory serves the entire world and barely makes a profit. The Tariffs and counter-tariffs currently being implemented create a barrier around the U.S. market. If a product is low-end and high-volume, then it may make sense to manufacture it in the U.S. if it wasn't made there before, primarily to bypass the barrier and serve the U.S. market as profitably as possible. Exporting from within the U.S. may not necessarily make sense. Not all low-end, high-volume products will be onshored either. For low-end products in which manufacturing costs are a small portion of the consumer price, simply paying the tariffs may make more sense. Manufacturers of high-end, low-volume products that rely on access to world-wide supply chains and markets are unlikely to move to the U.S.. The U.S. is a big market, but the rest of the world is bigger. High-end, niche manufacturers currently in the U.S. may be forced to consider moving abroad or shutting down. Many high-end, specialized products will become more expensive in the U.S. and there will be no domestic competitor. Some products that are barely profitable now will simply be impossible to make with significant trade barriers around the U.S. market and will cease to be offered anywhere. Dividing up the world market into walled off economic regions is, ultimately, likely to reduce the range of high-end, specialized stuff that the world can produce. If countries insist on a higher degree of self-sufficiency and throw up trade barriers, there will be things we all simply stop making. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43572820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43572820
FloorEgg 2y ago
When a country controls the world reserve currency they need to net export dollars, which means they need to import more goods than they export, satisfying the world's demand for dollars. When a country doesn't control the world reserve currency, and there is no global demand for their currency, they cannot sustain a significant imbalance of importing more than they export without devaluing their own currency and causing hyperinflation. The US controlled the world reserve currency through the bretton woods era with a fixed currency, successfully transitioned to neo liberal era with a floating currency, and is now going through another transition into something new. If the USD loses its reserve currency status, or if it's extremely weakened, then the US may need to reconfigure its economy accordingly in order to prosper again. The administration may say they are doing what they are doing for one reason, the media may make up another, and the actual reason may be yet another.
Thorrez 2y ago
Is the article saying we should build everything here? The article says that machine tools drive manufacturing innovation, and machine tool makers sell them close to home. So if the US doesn't make machine tools, the US will fall behind in manufacturing innovation. The article is saying that the US should desire to have advanced manufacturing. I don't think the article is saying that the US should manufacture everything.
class3shock 2y ago
"and likely a good argument that at lest some minor capability should exist so we can keep re-assessing the value of that industry" But that doesn't work. You need economies of scale and technological advancement for an industry to be competitive. Once you sellout an industry (what government and corporations spent the last half century doing) you've lost a capability forever unless drastic shifts happen and even then it would take years/decades to recover. Why care? I guess I would say, as someone who works with physical products, it's hard to see a good future when we build nothing and buy everything. That is the direction we've been going. It's not about building everything ourselves it's just about building stuff ourselves. I think you touch on this talking about "the right balance".
DeathArrow 2y ago
>I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything Here's another idea. A country should build whatever makes economic sense and it should be able to produce almost anything. It should not depend much on others for key technologies or industries. The idea is not to isolate from others but extract the maximum economic benefits while surviving with if a war starts or alliances start shifting.
ido 2y ago
The argument is war. If china and the us go to war tomorrow, the us is at an industrial disadvantage. Does this mean you need to build “everything”? No, that would be inefficient (and probably unrealistic). But the more critical something is the “closer to home” (geopolitically speaking) it should be able to be sourced. Buying semiconductor manufacturing equipment from Germany and the Netherlands? Fine (same for the rest of the EU, UK, Canada, Australia, etc). Buying it from Taiwan? Probably ok but riskier cause China can impact it in the future (either by conquest, destruction or blocking access). Buying essential equipment or resources from China, Russia or Iran? That’s a risk, long term at least. You don’t want to depend on them.
jollyllama 2y ago
In my country (USA) it was very common for people to build their own houses less than 80 years ago. Also, it was very common for people to fix everything on their own cars. I would argue that this has only changed because of extractive capitalism. The fact that you're saying these things as though they are ridiculous is indicative of a mindset shift that occurred some time in the not-so-distant past, and many of your assumptions do not have to be taken as a given.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> The reductive, absurd, extreme of this is why don't individual people go out and build all their own stuff like cars and houses. This is not absurd: 3D printing is a possible (next) stepping stone towards enabling this long-time dream. The problem rather is (as very, very often) the huge amount of red tape and regulations that prevents individuals from experimenting with such ideas and bringing them forth. So, if you look for the root of an evil in the world, it can often be found in the laws and regulations, and the politicians who passed them.
- notTooFarGone 2y ago
  You act like you should be able to 3D print a car and be allowed to drive it. Let's talk about seatbelts - is this another of those damn regulations????! How about airplane security? I should be allowed to build a helicopter and fly to new york! God damn gubbernment. On the day any of that is allowed I built my hut and leave society for good.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > You act like you should be able to 3D print a car and be allowed to drive it. > I should be allowed to build a helicopter and fly to new york! To me, both of these suggestions don't sound like bad ideas that you make out of them. :-) EDIT: Yes, I am a hacker.
perrygeo 2y ago
I think it's a rational reaction to peak oil. One way or another, we're going to phase out fossil fuels in the next few decades, either through depletion or climate action or market incentives. That implies reduced mobility, higher shipping and travel costs, and shortened supply chains. Preparing for a more local world and reducing reliance on global supply chains seems a prudent long term strategy.

slicktux 2y ago

That is a pretty hyperbolic paragraph only to imply that we as a nation would loose out on innovation by doing so; nowhere do we want to isolate as a country. Look at all the jobless Americans in once thriving industrial cities. Generations left without pensions or skills all because we outsource our workers to other countries. That’s one of the many problems that need to be solved and by manufacturing here in the USA it may help resolve or alleviate that problem.

killingtime74 2y ago
It may or may not but the cost is definitely huge and it's already arrived. Would you build a new factory, spend a huge amount of effort marketing, hire workers, incur large debts, if you knew that in three and a half years the presidency may change and it would not be competitive again.
- slicktux 2y ago
  That’s a self fulfilling prophecy…say that is the case. The one thing that won’t change is the jobless and skill less Americans; I understand that the road to hell is paved with good intentions but at this point we can’t help but not ignore the homeless, jobless and skill less problem. Though we can solve it by just creating a UBI, right (sarcasm)?
no_wizard 2y ago
>nowhere do we want to isolate as a country. Look at all the jobless Americans in once thriving industrial cities. Generations left without pensions or skills all because we outsource our workers to other countries. And we didn't pay for re-skilling, re-training, re-education. We didn't give them welfare benefits to hold over while they learned these new things. We did near nothing, and expected these areas simply to pick themselves back up organically. Of course that failed. When you do little to nothing, you get little to nothing in return. Tariffs and manufacturing aren't going to solve this fundamental problem, which is as industry demands shift they externalize the cost whenever possible, which leaves workers, cities and states with a poor deal. If you instead plan around the fact you can't micro manage the economy, but you can setup a meaningful floor that catches people when industry shifts and allows them to invest in themselves - without fear of losing their livelihood - to take advantage of the next opportunities or better yet, create new ones - you wouldn't have this problem in the first place. Tariffs won't help. Bringing manufacturing - in whatever capacity does get brought back, it remains to be seen if this will even happen - won't help alleviate this in any meaningful way. On top of all this, the tariffs are here, and there is little plan beyond simply implementing them and...waiting for industry to magically start manufacturing in the US again? What is the actual plan here? I frankly can't understand the undeserved optimism. If we wanted to make things better for formerly industrial cities, we should have invested in them and their citizenry decades ago. We failed to do this meaningfully. Thats the real problem, and they aren't fixing that problem at all
- squigz 2y ago
  Even if one were to be very generous and assume that this plan will lead to all jobs that were outsourced coming back, that's really only half the problem - technological progress is always going to displace some jobs. Without everything you mentioned, those whose jobs simply do not exist anymore are out of luck... and also now everything is more expensive because of tariffs
- vharuck 2y ago
  Guaranteeing that families won't go bankrupt due to market forces beyond their control would make so many things so much easier. For example, in my state of Pennsylvania, fracking is a political issue. It's a fossil fuel industry, so ideally we'd be weaning off it. But we actually encourage it by having no severance tax on any extracted energy sources. The state is leaving money on the table, and voters seem to like it that way. But, in truth, they don't care about taxes for fracking companies. They care about not ruining towns economically dependant on fracking. They're terrified of those companies leaving, because a chunk of the town's workforce would fall into poverty and take the town with it. Very few people care about where their electricity and heat come from, as long as they can afford it. There's no good reason to oppose moving to renewables except household economics, which is a very good reason for individual voters. If we made sure they weren't going to freeze and starve if the one big employer left town, that employer wouldn't have such an outsized influence on state politics. In a healthy free market, companies go bust. It just happens: better competitors show up, services or goods aren't needed, plans don't pan out. But we've created a system that keeps companies afloat ala Weekend at Bernie's, instead of what people actually want: keep families afloat.
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Aloisius 2y ago
We manufacture more today than at any time in history. We just do it with a whole lot fewer people. Have jobs been lost to outsourcing? Sure. But far more jobs have been lost to automation and the elimination of obsolete industries. While companies might have avoided investing in automation through the use of cheap labor in other countries, there is little doubt that will change if they re-shore.
- slicktux 2y ago
  So tariffs shouldn’t be a problem since we “manufacture more than we did ever before”! we’ll be able to buy USA made and avoid high cost of imports; great!
- amluto 2y ago
  Counterpoint: as far as I know, 30 years ago, a small US company could invent a consumer good and credibly manufacture it here in small to moderate quantities. Today, not so much. If you want an economical contract manufacturer to help you manufacture your product using modern tooling and access to the engineers who know how to set up those tools, as far as I know, you mostly need to look outside the US.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    No way. You need to go back to the 1960s, and that’s a stretch. The age of the mega corp killed all of that stuff. NYC had a few thousand factories, all crushed by bigger, subsidized by tax policy competitors in the US south and then offshored.
  - aj7 2y ago
    Yes, absolutely. Our skill is in design, management, and marketing, and distribution. Making stuff is today’s farming.
- aj7 2y ago
  Correct.

XorNot 2y ago

It's also just practically not possible: the distribution of resources is that it is, and for the expense of conquering and securing an expansive empire to get them, strategic alliances and diplomacy will be cheaper (not to mention that just because something is within your empire, it hardly means you necessarily exert any real sovereignty or control over it - the conquered peoples will hardly feel like citizens).

dccoolgai 2y ago

Unfortunately, when cheap goods are sourced outside the US "innovation" usually just means "slave labor" or "flouting environmental regulations". Not the case for Europe, etc. but most Americans are better off without competing against slave labor so billionaires can become trillionaires while they lose social security, healthcare, etc. I'll pay an extra 20 percent for well-made things that aren't produced by indentured servants.

umeshunni 2y ago
> Unfortunately, when cheap goods are sourced outside the US "innovation" usually just means "slave labor" or "flouting environmental regulations". Eh, China has 20x-ed its GDP per capita in a generation. They're not slaves.
- tharne 2y ago
  > Eh, China has 20x-ed its GDP per capita in a generation. They're not slaves. Maybe not according-to-hoyle slaves, but they're not in a great spot either: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...

lesuorac 2y ago

It's an economic theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism The general idea is that when you buy stuff you're losing wealth so if you never buy anything then you never get poorer. Since we constantly dig gold up from the ground we still get richer over time even if nobody buys our stuff. This is also why its importantly to gain colonies (Greenland/ Canada) or mineral rights from other countries so that the amount of stuff we have increases. IMO, it's a theory that's missing the forest for the trees but it's historically very popular.

mindslight 2y ago
Maybe if we're lucky, one of these sophomores will have an epiphany that military protection and a stable currency are some of the most complex exports, and that getting imports by trading away a self-created currency is a pretty great way to not give away any gold or silver... Just sayin'.
- Avicebron 2y ago
  > military protection and a stable currency are some of the most complex exports And how come that always seems seem to come wrapped in ways that inexorably seems to concentrate wealth, so that the benefits of those exports seem to be less evenly distributed?
  - lazide 2y ago
    People like to get rich, so any system they create tends to get the people best at creating systems richer. That has been true for every economic system ever - some are just more transparent and fair about it. Would you rather it be people taking bribes, a king, a hereditary merchant class, oligarchs, or people setting up companies? It has been as true about the USSR and Cuba as it has been about Venice, Canada, the USA, etc.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    Because they're centralized sources of power, and power corrupts. In my younger days I used to argue for a non-inflationary currency, and how that would have gone a long way towards not concentrating the wealth from offshorting and technological progress (instead enough money was printed to make price inflation keep occurring in spite of the fundamentals, and most of that new money was just given to banks to pump up the asset bubbles) These days I've kind of just accepted the monetary inflation (cf Gresham's law), like other centralizing but perhaps inevitable dynamics like the economies of scale for electronics manufacturing.

hudon 2y ago

the gist is: When you can manufacture ships, you can also manufacture warships. When you can manufacture warships, you can protect your economy. or: If all you sell are financial services, and a pandemic hits and you need to protect your people, where will you find masks? We don't need to build literally everything ourselves, that's a reductionist argument, we just need to become a lot more productive than we are now.

squigz 2y ago
Was mask manufacturing capacity during the pandemic an issue?
- hudon 2y ago
  Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID...
  - manwe150 2y ago
    Both yes and no. It was a brief lack of available local stock from suddenly unexpected demand, followed by a lack of factories willing to stop doing well paid work to switch to making cheap masks, while we waited for even cheaper masks to get made and imported from countries with cheap labor, followed by a surplus of masks (source: a brief chat with a factory manager in my social network who was considering whether he could at least break even on costs and labor if temporarily switching to making masks)
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Even then, there weren't enough melt spinning machines in North America to make the necessary raw materials, and the lead time on new machines was too long to address the shortage in time to respond to the needs of a pandemic. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-filters/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-fi...
- 2y ago

xienze 2y ago

> I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks? It’s important to be at least somewhat self-reliant as a nation, especially when the country we are VERY reliant on is not a friendly one.

tharne 2y ago
> “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks? I don't why the mainstream media isn't focusing more on this angle. Five years ago the richest, most powerful, country in the world couldn't get basic medical supplies to its citizens during a public health crisis. That should have terrified us into making major policy changes, but instead everyone just seems to have shrugged it off and gone back to business as usual.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  The US can barely get basic medical supplies to much of its population outside of a health crisis - not because of direct supply chain issues, but because the system is designed to put corporate profits over adequate service provision. And in the not so general case, over national security. Is manufacturing the real problem here? Or is it a symptom of decades of systemic mismanagement of opportunity by a culture that values short-sighted opportunism over strategy?
  - banqjls 2y ago
    Way to misdirect a totally valid point
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      How, it’s the elephant in the room.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

There are two main reasons that individuals don't build their own houses and cars from scratch. 1) They don't know how. Specialization is a thing. But this is a thing that applies to individuals rather than nations. You don't need every person to know how to mine ore or hang drywall as long as somebody does. But a country the size of the US could certainly contain someone who knows how to do any given thing. 2) They get paid more to do something else. This is the argument that you get paid $200,000 to be a doctor and people who mine ore get paid $80,000 so it's better for you to do $2000 more work as a doctor and then pay someone $800 for ore than to put on a miner's hat yourself. But this is again something that applies to individuals rather than countries. There are people in the US who already get paid less than $80,000, or less than $30,000, or even who are unemployed. It makes no sense to convert doctors into miners but it makes plenty of sense for the people who are currently doing something that pays even less.

mechagodzilla 2y ago
So applying this to China and the USA - the USA has a median household income of ~$80k, and China, in terms of purchasing power parity, has a median household income of $32k. China has a workforce of ~775M people vs 163M people in the USA. The USA has ~7M unemployed people. For the USA to stop importing goods from China, we would need to 1) stop consuming those goods altogether (even if they're intermediate goods that go into things we do manufacture), or 2) employ US workers to make those goods instead of whatever they're currently doing (either employed or unemployed). Employed Americans largely earn a lot more than employed chinese people, and there just aren't very many unemployed Americans. Based on the value of imports to the US from China vs Chinese GDP($440B vs $17.8T), we import about 2.5% of their output, or the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale. I don't think there is any way around the fact that significantly reducing imports from other countries means we significantly reduce our consumption in absolute terms (i.e. we have a poorer standard of living), just out of spite for other countries.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale Or about 12% of the US labor force. Meanwhile the 12th percentile US income is ~$22,000, i.e. less than the $32k median in China, and half of the jobs there are above that median. Obviously these numbers are all useless napkin math and none of it really works like that, but the premise isn't inherently absurd. If China is subsidizing manufacturing in order to capture manufacturing jobs and those jobs pay more than what many in the lowest quartile of the US are currently making, there are people who could be made better off by having those jobs back, and they'd still only be paid about what we're currently paying to China. And this before considering the general arguments about advantages to proximity of manufacturing, e.g. being able to talk to the people in the factory in your timezone in your language assists in product development so the location of the factory has an easier time developing new products. Which allows not just the manufacturing jobs but the whole rest of the company to be there, instead of those jobs starting to get eroded going forward.

michaelhoney 2y ago

the reductive, absurd version of something is reductive and absurd, but that doesn't mean that the nuanced, appropriate version is wrong

SideQuark 2y ago
But it provides a tool to see how and why the “nuanced, appropriate version” is actually wrong. When one limits the choices for purchases or sales, one reduces efficiency, whether it’s limiting to products made at your home, in your city, in your state, or even in your country. It’s failed for so many centuries across hundreds of countries and attempts that it’s not even a question except among politicians stoking fear to gain votes.
- WillPostForFood 2y ago
  The question isn't whether maximum global free trade maximizes efficiency. The question is whether maximizing global economic efficiency creates optimal outcomes for a nation, for groups within a nation, or for individuals in the nation. It is clearly a mixed bag, so there is pushback. Ask these questions. Besides maximizing monetary efficiency: Does free trade maximize a nation's resiliency? Does free trade maximize a nation's employment? Does free trade maximize a nation's security? Does free trade promote equitable distribution of a nation's wealth? Unless the question is yes to every answer, it is fair to have a policy debate about how much you are going to limit free trade. Every nation does it to some degree, no matter how much free trade rhetoric they promote.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    With respect to the US: - We’re the richest nation on the planet and have been until recently been adept in response to many types of disasters. - Unemployment has been <5% for a few years. - The US military reigns supreme. Our 5 air forces are the top 5 in terms of airframes. - We actively pursue fiscal policy to promote inequitable wealth distribution The idiocy of conflict with China is just that. We’re better and richer together.

GS523523 2y ago

> Why? Is this just an isolationist dream? Imagine if Russia produced their own technical components - how much of an effect would sanctions have on them? If Russia relies on our computer chips, we have leverage over them. If we rely on Asian factories and silicon, they have leverage over us. President Biden wouldn't have had to go begging to Prince Mohammad for oil if we had enough production at home. It's the way the world works.

robomartin 2y ago

> I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything, here is a good one. Why? Is this just an isolationist dream? No. There needs to be balance. We are way past the balance point, by far. When I say "we" I mean the US and Europe. We have the same problems, and I believe Europe is in far greater danger to be absolutely decimated in the next two to five decades. Example: We are currently working on a robotics project. Just-about the only thing we can buy in the US (or Europe, for that matter) is the aluminum and steel, and only if we are ready to do the fabrication --machining-- ourselves (which we can do). If we have to rely on third parties to manufacture the parts we are sunk. Making anything in the US (and Europe) has become impossible. Wires, cables, circuit boards, motors, encoders, chips, displays, cast iron or aluminum parts, gears, belts, injection molded parts, filters, lubricants, etc. The list is massively long. Again, US and Europe, same problem. The massive imbalance in tariffs and trade restrictions has collapsed entire industries. Try to print books or manuals in the US or Europe at scale. Good luck. Try to make packaging materials. Same problem. I've been manufacturing for about four decades. It has never been worse. It's horrible. And we need to fix it or we'll be left with nothing. You cannot have an economy that is purely based on providing services and writing software. A couple of decades ago, I used to buy a specially-treated antireflective type of glass from the last company making it in the US. The Chinese started to dump and created pricing pressure. Five years later they were out of business. I then bought the same type of glass from the sole remaining western factory in Germany. A couple of years later they discontinued the product. I then had to buy from China. A couple of years later they increased their prices --nearly doubled. That's what we've been dealing with (US and Europe). A predatory and destructive "machine". This isn't about making everything. It's about making enough to have a viable economy in the long run. I find that people who are not in manufacturing cannot grasp this. It isn't about hating China either. They are doing exactly right by their people. I admire their dedication and focus. We (US and Europe) are the idiots.

aj7 2y ago
This only stops when China equalizes. The real shame is our country is not such a nice place to live, when we enter our phase as a less-advanced country. We always had brilliant immigrants and democratic ideals to keep the ball rolling. What now?

WtfRuSerious 2y ago

answer: people who solve every problem with war tend to advocate preparing for war... this would include re-implementing all our supply chains currently residing in the coutries we, imagined or not, see ourselves going to war with...

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

tomlockwood 2y ago

This idea of self-reliance has been tried, and probably the greatest example of it is an extremely funny one. North Korea. Their primary ideology is "Juche": "Juche posits that a country will prosper once it has become self-reliant by achieving political, economic, and military independence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche Maybe America can do it better?

briandear 2y ago

Building everything shouldn’t be the goal, however, having a strategic capability shouldn’t be overlooked either. There is also the question of supply chain resilience. Covid taught us that the whims of governments can choke up the entire system.

beloch 2y ago

There was a good blog post on bicycles and tariff's earlier this week[1]. A key point was that volume really matters in what you can onshore. Whether you go for full automation or not, dies, tooling, machinery etc. all need to be amortized across what you sell. High-volume, low-end products are relatively easy to amortize, being both less demanding to manufacture and having higher volume. Such products are usually made in several factories around the world. Specialized, high-end stuff tends to be much harder to sell in large enough quantities to be economically viable. In many cases, one factory serves the entire world and barely makes a profit. The Tariffs and counter-tariffs currently being implemented create a barrier around the U.S. market. If a product is low-end and high-volume, then it may make sense to manufacture it in the U.S. if it wasn't made there before, primarily to bypass the barrier and serve the U.S. market as profitably as possible. Exporting from within the U.S. may not necessarily make sense. Not all low-end, high-volume products will be onshored either. For low-end products in which manufacturing costs are a small portion of the consumer price, simply paying the tariffs may make more sense. Manufacturers of high-end, low-volume products that rely on access to world-wide supply chains and markets are unlikely to move to the U.S.. The U.S. is a big market, but the rest of the world is bigger. High-end, niche manufacturers currently in the U.S. may be forced to consider moving abroad or shutting down. Many high-end, specialized products will become more expensive in the U.S. and there will be no domestic competitor. Some products that are barely profitable now will simply be impossible to make with significant trade barriers around the U.S. market and will cease to be offered anywhere. Dividing up the world market into walled off economic regions is, ultimately, likely to reduce the range of high-end, specialized stuff that the world can produce. If countries insist on a higher degree of self-sufficiency and throw up trade barriers, there will be things we all simply stop making. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43572820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43572820

FloorEgg 2y ago

When a country controls the world reserve currency they need to net export dollars, which means they need to import more goods than they export, satisfying the world's demand for dollars. When a country doesn't control the world reserve currency, and there is no global demand for their currency, they cannot sustain a significant imbalance of importing more than they export without devaluing their own currency and causing hyperinflation. The US controlled the world reserve currency through the bretton woods era with a fixed currency, successfully transitioned to neo liberal era with a floating currency, and is now going through another transition into something new. If the USD loses its reserve currency status, or if it's extremely weakened, then the US may need to reconfigure its economy accordingly in order to prosper again. The administration may say they are doing what they are doing for one reason, the media may make up another, and the actual reason may be yet another.

Thorrez 2y ago

Is the article saying we should build everything here? The article says that machine tools drive manufacturing innovation, and machine tool makers sell them close to home. So if the US doesn't make machine tools, the US will fall behind in manufacturing innovation. The article is saying that the US should desire to have advanced manufacturing. I don't think the article is saying that the US should manufacture everything.

class3shock 2y ago

"and likely a good argument that at lest some minor capability should exist so we can keep re-assessing the value of that industry" But that doesn't work. You need economies of scale and technological advancement for an industry to be competitive. Once you sellout an industry (what government and corporations spent the last half century doing) you've lost a capability forever unless drastic shifts happen and even then it would take years/decades to recover. Why care? I guess I would say, as someone who works with physical products, it's hard to see a good future when we build nothing and buy everything. That is the direction we've been going. It's not about building everything ourselves it's just about building stuff ourselves. I think you touch on this talking about "the right balance".

DeathArrow 2y ago

>I keep seeing people advocating that the idea that we should build everything, and every piece or everything Here's another idea. A country should build whatever makes economic sense and it should be able to produce almost anything. It should not depend much on others for key technologies or industries. The idea is not to isolate from others but extract the maximum economic benefits while surviving with if a war starts or alliances start shifting.

ido 2y ago

The argument is war. If china and the us go to war tomorrow, the us is at an industrial disadvantage. Does this mean you need to build “everything”? No, that would be inefficient (and probably unrealistic). But the more critical something is the “closer to home” (geopolitically speaking) it should be able to be sourced. Buying semiconductor manufacturing equipment from Germany and the Netherlands? Fine (same for the rest of the EU, UK, Canada, Australia, etc). Buying it from Taiwan? Probably ok but riskier cause China can impact it in the future (either by conquest, destruction or blocking access). Buying essential equipment or resources from China, Russia or Iran? That’s a risk, long term at least. You don’t want to depend on them.

jollyllama 2y ago

In my country (USA) it was very common for people to build their own houses less than 80 years ago. Also, it was very common for people to fix everything on their own cars. I would argue that this has only changed because of extractive capitalism. The fact that you're saying these things as though they are ridiculous is indicative of a mindset shift that occurred some time in the not-so-distant past, and many of your assumptions do not have to be taken as a given.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago

> The reductive, absurd, extreme of this is why don't individual people go out and build all their own stuff like cars and houses. This is not absurd: 3D printing is a possible (next) stepping stone towards enabling this long-time dream. The problem rather is (as very, very often) the huge amount of red tape and regulations that prevents individuals from experimenting with such ideas and bringing them forth. So, if you look for the root of an evil in the world, it can often be found in the laws and regulations, and the politicians who passed them.

notTooFarGone 2y ago
You act like you should be able to 3D print a car and be allowed to drive it. Let's talk about seatbelts - is this another of those damn regulations????! How about airplane security? I should be allowed to build a helicopter and fly to new york! God damn gubbernment. On the day any of that is allowed I built my hut and leave society for good.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > You act like you should be able to 3D print a car and be allowed to drive it. > I should be allowed to build a helicopter and fly to new york! To me, both of these suggestions don't sound like bad ideas that you make out of them. :-) EDIT: Yes, I am a hacker.

perrygeo 2y ago

I think it's a rational reaction to peak oil. One way or another, we're going to phase out fossil fuels in the next few decades, either through depletion or climate action or market incentives. That implies reduced mobility, higher shipping and travel costs, and shortened supply chains. Preparing for a more local world and reducing reliance on global supply chains seems a prudent long term strategy.