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I’m guessing most people these days don’t remember when everything moved to China to begin with. People blamed it on globalization but the trend existed long be
by fnordpiglet 1y ago
I’m guessing most people these days don’t remember when everything moved to China to begin with. People blamed it on globalization but the trend existed long before that because Americans didn’t produce a quality product. “Made in the USA” became synonymous with poor quality and high prices after the corporate mavens of the 1980’s hollowed out manufacturing for quality along with the factory workers pension plans. It’s not like America didn’t do it to itself - globalization just allowed specialization to set in and efficiency to dominate. Chinese manufacturing struck a middle ground between very high quality in Germany and Japan and very low quality in America then scaled it up and out to ensure a total vertical integration. For segments of the supply chain that were inefficient the state assumed the losses to ensure an ever increasing capture of the end to end ability to produce in an entirely integrated regional manufacturing center. I think instead of getting our panties in a wad and wishing for the 1950’s to return - which weren’t that great to begin with despite our rose colored glasses - we need to lean into our strengths and specialized role. The question though of what are people to do who are “displaced” by globalization, automation, and now AI has never been answered and leaves us where we are today. I don’t have the answer either. But it’s become more destabilizing than I imagined as I saw things unfolding.
- franktankbank 1y agoWhat are our strengths/specializations in your opinion? My main concern as a millennial, who rightly put didn't witness this transformation, is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely.
- PaulHoule 1y agoLet’s see.. higher ed, which Trump is trying to eliminate.
- franktankbank 1y agoCome on Paul. I hope that's not the one and only. Without raw experience how useful is the higher ed?
- PaulHoule 1y agoIt changed my life but my son decided to go the blue-collar route and I love him just the same. In terms of foreign trade, higher-ed is one of our greatest exports. Many other nations would like to knock us off the top, none could come close until Trump scored an own goal.
- franktankbank 1y agoYea I've got kids I've got to think about here, quite a few. I get very heated trying to understand the whole global aspect. All I see in the US is a vast resource getting stomped upon. I wish your boy the best and any others. Trump as I see him is a wrecking ball, I'm not sure where it ends up.
- PaulHoule 1y agoI'm proud that Vera Rubin discovered evidence for dark matter at my Uni. I'm proud that Douglas Osheroff discovered Superfluid Helium 3. I'm proud that Gerald Salton invented full text search and that Ivan Sutherland invented 3-d graphics rendering as used in video games. I'm even more proud that our ag school is helping farmers in New York and the rest of the world make money and feed a growing population that expects to eat better (however they define "better") in a challenging climate. That our vet school trains vets and farriers. That our ROTC trains officers for all of our armed services. I don't see a contradiction that I'm also proud that Catholic priest and activist Daniel Berrigan against the Vietnam war escaped the FBI in the same building where those officers train.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoI know these tribal feelings but I also felt... a wider sense of gratitude when at Leiden I saw enshrined Onnes' equipment for discovering superconductivity, or that otherwise insignificant suburban streets were named after Snell, Leeuwenhoek, Huyghens, Rembrandt, .. and other people I ought to have learnt about There's something to be said for the way pioneers of the hand and mind are remembered as political operators or donors are.. Sure bureaucrats set those up but the exceptionality pointed at there felt inclusive People can feel whatever they want about the achievements at their own institutions, .. it just feels purer when the institution is just a backdrop for these universal achievements .. plus I can go into any Leidse bakery and introduce myself as a scientist without bracing for sideeye (doesn't happen even on HN!) That's not pride, that's just a sense of belonging Why I chose this example. Somehow the Calvinist ressentiment "let no man be greater than I", which is equally present in NL as in the anglo heart/hinterlands.. makes a singular exception for intellectual achievements (as opposed to some purely emotional ones, like some particularly potent puns) Don't know if villages in China will remember their current & future groundbreakers :) There's hope: DeepSeek's hometown put up laudatory red banners for him.. nonironically.. is that like confetti for Apollo 11? I think not. In the latter case, there's a serious case to be made that NASA deserved the confetti more.. that's how ressentiment "works"
- potato3732842 1y agoThe institution that created all the people who told us that globalization would make us all richer and the world freer when it seems to have done the opposite on a timeline just barely longer than the careers of those people while that industry goes on to severely lighten the pockets of every subsequent generation? From where I'm sitting it looks like the bully finally made his way around to picking on someone who had it coming.
- danaris 1y agoJust because all the people who touted globalization went to college doesn't mean that college was the reason for it. That's ridiculously surface-level thinking. Higher education also gave us all the people who told us that was a bad idea, with graphs, and sources, and evidence. Higher education also gave us all the people who did the research that created the technologies we're using today. Higher education also gave us all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and literally every other highly skilled worker we have. Higher education is absolutely vital to any functioning modern society. From where I'm sitting it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder against higher education, and are attempting to reduce the entire sector—which is incredibly diverse—to a single genuinely bad viewpoint that you don't even provide any evidence higher education produced (as opposed to simply "a few ideologically motivated people who received higher education produced").
- potato3732842 1y agoEvery time a civil war erupts in the middle east there's some warmongers screeching "but what about the <ethnic/religious minority in the relevant country>, we ought to care about them" as a pretext for getting involved. You are engaging in the exact same. The primary reason academic labs churn out technological advancement for Microsoft, Exxon, etc, etc, is because the tax code makes it preferential to do that rather than run the same thing in-house. Also, I would like to note the slight of hand you just pulled between education and academia. There is no problem with doctors and lawyers getting their training. But that is absolutely distinct from professional academia. Those people are the customers. They are in and out. The institutions themselves are absolutely corrupt. It is very comparable to the catholic church scooping up all the wealth in europe in the 13-1500s and justifying it by embedding themselves in mundane parts of society and then screeching "but without us who will do the thing" as if that justified everything else they were up to. (Though to be fair, academia is not the only institution subject to such criticism these days).
- wiredfool 1y agoMusic, movies, microcode and high speed pizza delivery.
- dotancohen 1y agoDon't forget spaceflight. The US (well, SpaceX) dominates in both manned and unmanned cost to orbit and time to orbit.
- dylan604 1y agoYou say movies while a sibling comment mentioned media. However, more and more movies are not shot in the USA. Productions have been moving out of Hollywood for a really long time, and some of it is in other states, but more and more are leaving the US altogether. This is why Trump shot off that late night tweet/truth about placing tariffs on movies made outside the US. The only thing the US still has on movies is the mystique of Hollywood. The ability to shoot a film is not unique to the US at all
- shawn_w 1y agoIt's a quote from Snow Crash.
- Esophagus4 1y agoFortunately, there are still plenty: financial services / capital markets, tech, biotech / pharma, media / entertainment, e-commerce, higher ed. Obviously, there are lots of players in those categories, but the U.S. is at or near top of the pack there. We just happen to be optimizing for the wrong thing right now. I heard a columnist say, incredulously, “China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry”
- franktankbank 1y ago> China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry Which one is easier to nab?
- Esophagus4 1y agoTbh I have no idea… financial services, I’m guessing from the way the question was asked?
- franktankbank 1y agoNo I'm asking also. I guess financial services is based primarily on trust/enforcement. Industry is based on toxic backbreaking labor and deep knowhow. Maybe I'm missing something about financial services, maybe its our ruthless military backing? I don't know man.
- Esophagus4 1y agoWell I don’t know much about manufacturing tbh, but for China to take a chunk of our financial services industry would be very difficult. The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency by a long way, American capital markets are still the world’s largest and safest, and investors do not like capricious governments that don’t always adhere to established practices and rule of law (see: Ant Financial). Investors don’t want to put money in a place where saying the wrong thing or associating with the wrong person could negatively impact your ability to transact in that country (also see: Russia c. 1990). So I would assume it would take decades for China to maneuver the world away from American financial services.
- skeezyboy 1y ago>is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely. you exist on americas economic downslope, sadly. an ever declining standard of living in a post manufacturing economy. china and everyone after can just copy your progress and basically be America in its boom days
- like_any_other 1y ago> What are our strengths/specializations in your opinion? Not static. The parent post reminds us that "Made in USA" meant low quality. But so did "Made in China". These things change, but if the national-level policy is "let the market figure it out" (the polar opposite of China's approach), they don't change for the better.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoAnd before that, "Made in Japan" meant cheap junk, even within my lifetime.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYeah, it seems to start out that way.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoReposted because 1)you might have been too young to have read it (1992) 2)outsourcing and trade balance was in the full quote >When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery --Snow Crash,1992
- franktankbank 1y agoSorry, I'm not sure the relevance of a fiction from 30+ years ago. I know I sound like a dick but seriously why should I care about it?
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoYou don't have to care about the book. The point of a quote is the quote. Why should you care about a quote from any time period? Because it expresses something well. Why should you care about an older quote? Because it expresses something well enough to have endured.
- franktankbank 1y agoIt's a quote from a fiction of a bygone era though. You think China can't write microcode? You think only USA has big breasted women and men with chiseled abs? None of this makes any sense. High speed pizza had to be tongue in cheek as written. Maybe you missed the point and it was all written tongue in cheek because who truly cares about those things if you don't have all your other bases covered? Maybe I missed the point. Are we already pinched off?
- lemoncookiechip 1y ago>“Made in the USA” became synonymous with poor quality and high prices. This. It's like everyone collectively forgot. If that time period had the internet meme culture of today, “Made in the USA” would've become one the same way "Made in China" did. Capitalism wreaked havoc on quality goods, while prices skyrocketed. Then when given the chance, they all packed up shop of their own free will to create even cheaper goods while politicians did nothing to stop it, and in-fact incentivized it. Now we blame those countries for "taking away" manufacturing, when it was the greedy capitalistic US company CEOs, shareholders and US politicians who did it, while those countries simply capitalized on the opportunity and built themselves up.
- dylan604 1y agoThe biggest push of “Made in the USA” that I remember was from Walmart back in the 80s. They were fighting the stigma of selling Chinese goods. So the cheap/poorly made products with that label was fitting. Eventually, even Wallyworld gave up on it and just leaned into the Chinese made products while they offered lower prices because they knew in the end customers only cared about price. The “Made in USA” became a meme back then with people joke the “Made in USA” labels were made in China. The point is, people say they don’t like Chinese made goods with one side of their mouth while the other side is saying they don’t really care at all as they continue shopping and purchasing these Chinese goods. Walmart and Amazon really laid the groundwork to the point that the SHEIN and Temus of the world happened. Consumers just don’t care about any other than price
- OgsyedIE 1y agoOne of the biggest shocks to the competitiveness of American labor is cost disease. Because they share a currency with high value-add services clusters like the Bay Area their prices are dragged upwards by the productivity gains of unrelated sectors, in an analogous mechanism to gentrification.
- aleph_minus_one 1y agoNot everybody has the capabilities that are necessary for the tech industry. So do your industrial production somewhere else in the USA where additionally the cost of living is low.
- rahimnathwani 1y agoCost disease isn't driven by a shared currency, but by a common labor market. When hyper-productive sectors, say, tech in the Bay Area, start paying top dollar, everyone else in the same talent pool eventually needs to follow suit. Even industries with stagnant labour productivity, like K-12 education, have to hike their wages to attract and retain staff. They can't offset these higher costs with efficiency gains, and that's where the "disease" kicks in. If you think this is caused by a common currency, consider labour costs in developing countries which use the US dollar. Do those costs go up when labour productivity in the Bay Area goes up?
- Workaccount2 1y agoYou are both right. A valuable dollar kills exports and high paying sectors brain-drain lower paying ones.
- freeone3000 1y agoIs this even bad, though? High-margin, productive sectors paying high wages seems like a good thing?
- Workaccount2 1y ago
- HK-NC 1y agoHow bad was the American stuff?? "Made in china" has always meant garbage in my country.
- bluGill 1y agoAll over the map. There were a lot of high quality brands that in the 1980s reduced quality trying to compete on price, and those earned a bad reputation over time. There are a lot of brands that remain the same high quality (or more likely better) that they had all along that are still going strong - however those brands do not try to compete on price and now are very expensive. Another thing foreign makers did was be more flexible to needs. Some great brands refused to reduce quality, but they were so focused on quality at low prices that they were not responsible to needs. They started making things in batches which reduced costs but if you want a different model you had to wait for that batch. If you have to order something a year in advance while Taiwan can get it to you in a couple months (including shipping via boat!) for some that mattered. Foreign manufactures often did innovate more as well. Sometimes features on the foreign product were enough better (for some definition of better) as to be important for your needs. Note that for every example above you can find a company in the US that has been doing exactly that "bad thing" and they have survived against foreign competition. Every product is different, with different needs. The real failure is always not recognizing correctly what is the correct path for you. Often there is more than one "correct path" mixed in with the bad, but you can only choose one. Sometimes a competitor choosing one path fills the niche of that path and if you choose the same both of you will fail.