6 ms·

So here's what I don't get about the public discourse on manufacturing in the U.S: When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufac

So here's what I don't get about the public discourse on manufacturing in the U.S: When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2]. The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here): 1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI. 2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war. If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody. Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die." [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

mattnewton 1y ago
I think it’s as simple as the selective pressures in our democratic system push for this rhetoric. Politicians who pitch “I match your worldview and will implement the simple fixes you want” outcompete “I think your worldview is incomplete and this is what you really want instead”, by a lot. Some might be very crafty and believe the second while shouting like the first. Many will actually believe the simple solution can work though.
patagurbon 1y ago
There is a 3rd point, that craftsmanship, machining skills, and logistics experience don’t fall from trees. As the US moves certain “lower” tier manufacturing overseas it can risk losing the experience needed to create tooling for production lines, or the industrial knowledge to build large numbers of ships, etc. The jobs argument on its face falls flat for me, but I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost.
- echelon 1y ago
  This. We're in a tough spot because the know-how has atrophied. We're not making the raw inputs anymore. Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs. We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot. Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it. Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.
  - forgotoldacc 1y ago
    Not sure if proposing building a underclass of underpaid jobs that we consider below Americans is the answer. A better answer could be to pay them a couple dollars more an hour so the pay isn't awful. There are also loads of areas of the country where people are struggling because mining and manufacturing jobs went away years ago. Cost of living is generally low in those places, so you don't need to pay California wages but it's still an upgrade compared to the opportunities they currently have. And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
  - 1y ago
cogman10 1y ago
I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase) and they saw what you are describing first hand. One example they gave, it used to be someone's job to load and unload the silicon wafers into the various etching phases. As time went on more and more of that manual work was replaced with automation. A floor with 50 workers became 25, then 10, then 1. And, to be clear, this was absolutely a good thing for the product. So many yield issues were caused by manual processes. The future of any manufacturing is that of high automation. That means low to no jobs. We aren't going back to an economy where a shoe factory employes 500 people. What's particularly bleak, IMO, is society in the US revolves around work. Every job out there is being automated away. That's not a bad thing for quality, but what it means is there will be increasingly fewer jobs to go around.
- bushbaba 1y ago
  Automation lowers costs, which increases consumption. We essentially trade time for dollars, and then dollars for goods that themselves took time to produce. While the exchange rate of time-for-time stays constant, automation means we now get more goods for the same amount of time worked. So it’s not nearly as bleak as you make it out to be.
  - sitzkrieg 1y ago
    but if my income is $0/yr, how am i suppose to subscribe to platforms and internet and consume ads
  - raincom 1y ago
    The real problem lies elsewhere: yes, it is cheaper to buy goods made by automation. People need jobs to make a living--pay rent/mortgage, health insurance, etc. Automation is needed to make a living easy: cheaper housing, cheaper access to health, etc. And this is not possible for the foreseeable future.
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  > I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase) A family friend was a chip designer for a large European company. Back in the 2000s he told me he saw the writing on the wall as they moved manufacturing to Asia. He said he expected design to follow not long after, and sure enough some 5 or so years later he lost his job as they moved design department closer to the factories. Perhaps it's different now, but as I recall he said there were advantages of chip designers being close to the chip manufacturing folks.
SilverElfin 1y ago
The problem is there is no pipeline to get people into these highly automated levels of manufacturing. How can you learn about all the steps and how they’re done “manually” and all that, to be able to participate in the high end of manufacturing? It feels like an island. And once the current talent retires it may leave a void even for those highly advanced factories.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- abe_m 1y ago
  I'm split on this. Tradesmen that came up through their apprenticeship say that people need to learn the old manual machines to "feel what the machine is doing", before you can move over to computer controlled machines. But I think that is just the tendency of people to say the path to their current location is the path they took. Not that another path isn't actually a better way to get there for the current environment. I also think there has been a bit of bias in trade schools towards learning manual processes because it is cheap. You can have a room full of students spend weeks learning to use a file to shape a small block of steel to precise dimensions. A $5 file and $10 of material is easier to supply than a $1XX,XXX computerize manufacturing machine that can process $XXX of material or more per day. But spending weeks to learn how to precision hand file is pretty well a waste of time for modern manufacturing.
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    You can't improve to N+1 if you don't know N, is the history of technology. You don't have to start at N-25 though, there is a base level to start at that cuts out your enemy.
awesome_dude 1y ago
> 2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war. I think that I have seen that this kind of "independence" has been a driving reason for China's strategies too. I don't think that it's necessarily a defence against a war, maybe more of an economic buffer, ensuring that China, and whomever follows the strategy is no longer dependent on any other entity for parts of their supply chain. One of the things, too, that people seem to forget is that the West (in general) has neglected their manufacturing capability in favour of the "Asian Tigers" doing the work (Japan, Korea, Taiwan), China is just the current holder of the title (for how long is anyone's guess, Japan especially has endured a sustained stagnation of their economy over the last several decades). Germany, for a while, was a strong manufacturer, and have (so far) been using the resulting economic position to their advantage inside the European Bloc. Perhaps that's the model that the USA (and others) should be looking toward?
- yupitsme123 1y ago
  I think a big component of China's imperialist strategy is to de-infustrialize the world, much like what's happened to the US.
mc32 1y ago
It's obvious that any high end manufacturing in any country capable of sustaining high end manufacturing will not produce jobs like in 1950, '60 or '70. But the same is true of service sector jobs. More is being automated. That said, we can bring manufacturing back stateside which can be highly automated and have high value while employing workers at wages much better than their service-job counterparts. In addition, we don't have the same population growth we had in the post-war years, so we don't need to produce millions upon millions of jobs. What we need to do is stem the job losses and increase output. We can be a bigger version of Switzerland. Sure, things get more expensive, but by and large folks live better.
GauntletWizard 1y ago
The problem is that the two are equivocated regularly for political points. We want both - highly automated factories for productive output, and middle class jobs. Building the factories will bring some middle class jobs - not a lot, but there's a decent number of maintenance and operating staff even at lights out factories, and the expertise building those factories is a bunch of valuable jobs and experience that we've let China hoover up. The problem is that these two concepts are treated as one.
givemeethekeys 1y ago
Let's say we manage to bring ever more fully automated factories back to the US - wouldn't that create many more jobs to fix the robots?
markus_zhang 1y ago
That’s still fine. You gotta hire people to maintain the robots, the people to build the robots, and the people for all service companies to service all those people. Then there is infrastructure, entertainment, etc. And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots. This is alone worth the effort.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots. Not with these constant layoffs and high turnover. We're not working like a country that wants to last long term.
- abe_m 1y ago
  I think we're starting to see the pile up that assuming people who worked assembly lines will just become robot tech isn't happening. For the entirety of humans, there have always been a place for low-skilled labour. We had subsistence farming, then as the industrial revolution came on, we ended up with a lot more types of labour jobs. As farms mechanized, we got factories, and as factory output went up, new products were created that needed labour to install them. Now that the remaining factories are requiring smarter workers, farms are pretty well fully automatic, we have a glut of working age people sitting on the sidelines unable to find work that is worthwhile doing. I think we're at the point where more automation means more loss of work, as opposed to people moving into the new jobs created, for an ever larger portion of the population.
alberth 1y ago
My understanding is that this is all about cutting edge manufacturing. E.g., in semiconductor fabrication - over the past decade, Intel’s chip production and process nodes have lagged 1–2 generations behind leading non-U.S. manufacturers.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  That's true for chips but not necessarily for other high-value manufacturing sectors. Americans are still the world leaders in say metallurgy or nuclear engineering, for example: all the jet turbine blades are still made in America, and most nuclear reactors. Also ASML gets all the hype for EUV lithography, but Applied Materials (based out of Santa Clara, CA) is still a critical part of the supply chain for new semiconductor fabs. And the EV industry started in Fremont CA with Tesla, although they've since lost some of their edge to Chinese and Korean manufacturers.
  - alberth 1y ago
    Many Americans under estimate how good (and leading) China is in many manufacturing and engineering disciplines. The top 2 universities to study nuclear engineering are both in China. https://edurank.org/engineering/nuclear/ https://edurank.org/engineering/nuclear/
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. Yay. Men get to spill their blood over a country that won't even give them enough pay to cover rent. The robots are cushy at home making weapons to kill more men with. Very good thing. > If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory, but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody. Yup, just automate out the construction industry while we're at it. Sorry for the cynicism, but but somehow I don't think even with more houses that we're going to have Gen Z and Gen Alpha survive the way The Boomers and early Gen X did.
- kingofmen 1y ago
  If there is one house per person then approximately every person gets a house, because almost everyone is willing and able to pay more for their first house than even a very wealthy person will pay for a second one. If there are 1.5 houses per person then you will have to work quite hard at being homeless.
  - hattmall 1y ago
    This is wildly incorrect, wealthy people are far more likely to be able to afford and willing to pay more for excess housing than an average person. Especially if they can turn around and rent those houses at a profit.
  - tdeck 1y ago
    Houses are an asset. Wealthy people in search of assets will buy the houses and rent them back to you. Or they will invest in companies that buy the houses and rent them, or banks that buy them and mortgage them for a profit.
    - watwut 1y ago
      You can not mortage for profit if there is excess of house or other item. Ultimately the price will go down. You can mortgage to profit when the asset is scarce.
gonzobonzo 1y ago
I don't think conclusion matches what we're seeing, though. Real output being flat while population and consumption have massively increased means that much more of our consumed products are being manufactured abroad now. It's not just automation at work. The original article even talks about that, where it mentions how high tech manufacturing is shrinking as a percentage of the economy. It might well be true that we're never going to see the kind of employment in manufacturing that we used to, but a blanket "the jobs are not coming back" attitude doesn't match the data either.
MengerSponge 1y ago
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment” – Warren G. Bennis
mitthrowaway2 1y ago
How come this doesn't match my experience as a customer? When I buy an iPhone, a vacuum (robotic or handheld), a drone, a camera, a KitchenAid kettle, a silicone brush, an electric fan, a battery-electric drill, just about anything really -- the expensive models might say "designed in USA" but they'll still say "made in China". The US used to be the go-to place to make all of these categories of products. So I don't believe the only thing that's happened is that American factories set up robots, laid off the workers, and got more productive than ever.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  If you are a customer, it is almost by definition "low-value manufacturing", because you have only one household's worth of money to spend, and not a Fortune 500 company's or nation-state's budget to spend. If you're buying jet engines or nuclear reactors or jet fighters, they are probably made in the U.S. (I probably erred in choosing "consumer electronics" as an example, because most of those are made abroad. Even so, there are some surprises: I just bought a brand-new Toyota Sienna manufactured in Indiana, and a System76 Thelio workstation manufactured in Colorado.)
  - mitthrowaway2 1y ago
    Are jet engines and nuclear reactors really being made in lights-out automated production lines? I struggle to believe that the production quantities are anywhere near high enough to justify that. (Automobiles probably could be, except for their powerful labour unions; automobile production has been highly automated since the 30s.)
    - phil21 1y ago
      It's a nonsensical argument as you've discovered. It's due to the dollar value of things. And yes, jet engines are about as bespoke as you can get - incredibly man-hours intensive and it reflects in the price. As some point folks will discover that dollars do not actually equal physical goods. Exporting 100 F35s at $100m/ea is not the same value to a country under duress as the capability to manufacture $10B of random consumer goods. Nevermind the supply chain of that F35 is not remotely contained to domestic manufacturing. It's hand-wavy financialization of America speak.
dyauspitr 1y ago
What exactly is made in the US though? Besides cars and some forged tools, I can’t think of a single thing made in the US. Edit: I looked it up, it’s a lot of things. Airplanes, military aircraft, helicopters, satellites, rockets, construction/agriculture equipment (Caterpillar, John Deere), ICE and EV cars, chips, medical equipment (MRI, CT scanners), lots of defense stuff, drugs and pharmaceutical, processed agri goods etc.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  You'd be surprised. Medical devices, injection molded stuff, custom or small batch machined parts, other kinds of components and/or final assembly and packaging of bulk materials. It's not always very obvious what goes on in all the steel buildings in the parts of town that white collar people don't visit.
- killjoywashere 1y ago
  A buddy from Bridgepoint made a point to me once: maybe we're not number one in every industry, but find me a sector where we're not in the top 10.
- hattmall 1y ago
  Guns are a pretty large domestic manufacturing segment.
- tdeck 1y ago
  So in other words, the US domestic manufacturing economy is very highly dependent on the military industrial complex. That sure dosn't bode well for the rest of the world.
kingofmen 1y ago
> we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. Will we? It appears to me that modern war works substantially like modern factories - you don't actually want a large mass of semiskilled workers to pull the levers, each of which can substitute for a different one on about five minutes' notice. You want relatively few, highly-trained specialists to instruct the ~~robots~~ drones. It is perhaps less true in war than in manufacturing, quantity still has that quality all its own, but it seems very unclear that just raw numbers of soldiers will be an important bottleneck as between Great Powers.
- yupitsme123 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure most of the robots and drones are manufacturered in China though. Even if they weren't, a lot of critical components for building things come from there now.
ndiddy 1y ago
Here's a great video by Smarter Every Day that came out a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY . It's about his experience with the atrophying US industrial skillset while he tries to make a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. He brings up a few good points about manufacturing that I personally found compelling: 1. During Covid, medical supplies were in short supply, to the point where the US government was flying in individual airplanes from China full of N95 masks and face shields. The guy making the video knew that Alabama (where he lives) wouldn't be on the priority list for where the masks and face shields would get distributed. His community's initial response was to 3D print face shields and donate them to healthcare facilities, but they knew that they had to step up to actual manufacturing to produce the face shields in necessary volumes. He was only able to find a single aging technician in Alabama capable of producing injection molding tooling, which he then was able to use to mass produce enough face shields to supply Alabama and neighboring states. If that one guy had chosen to retire before Covid, they would have not been able to make the injection mold locally. At a time where global supply chains were massively disrupted, they would have been screwed. 2. When an American company gets their products made overseas, the factory overseas that manufactures the product owns the tooling. This means that they're able to fill your order during the day, then at night make exact clones of your product with lower quality materials and undercut you, and you have no recourse. He brings up an example of a local small business that had this happen to them. Even though they had a design patent, they needed their lawyer to continually send letters to get Amazon to take down no-name clones of their product (and then the seller would just pick a new random set of 6 characters to sell it under). If US companies have no choice but to get their products made in countries that don't care about IP, then we're not just giving up on manufacturing, we're also giving up on designing products in the US. When he was trying to get the injection mold for his grill scrubber made, lots of companies in the US were willing to do the actual plastic manufacturing in the US, but could only get the injection mold tooling done in China. He brought up that in the past, an American company would build a machine and then ship it away to the developing world to be operated there. We've now reversed this, so the high-skill portion of manufacturing is done overseas and the only Americans involved are just pushing the buttons to operate the machine.
- rediguanayum 1y ago
abe_m 1y ago
It seems a bit of a tautology to ask the survivors if things are OK. Of course is is OK for them, they are in an industry segment that survived the trend of moving everything possible to China. If you go ask where the factories were shutdown, you'll find different responses. The dip in number of manufacturing employees corresponds time-wise to China joining WTO, and the massive CEO hype of shutting down US factories and moving them to China, rather than super-duper automation hitting the scene and automating the factories in place. I have a suspicion that the displayed manufacturing output chart is in dollars, not amount of stuff, and that is likely bumped up by highly automated IC/chip manufacturing that is high cost/value, but low tonnage work.
the__alchemist 1y ago
There is a perspective that I think will crystalize the nature of this: Try to have a device made without sourcing parts of China. Maybe an assembled PCB. Maybe it's a tool of some sort. You will find that this is impossible, or much more expensive/worse experience than sourcing from China. Now, imagine a scenario where China collapses. (In the broadest sense). Whether it's a war as you say, or any other scenario. Imagine this happens in a few decades, after we (The world) has committed to this path. We will have lost so much of the tools we build our civilization on, and it will take generations to get this tacit knowledge back. What's good: We (humanity) can build things cheaper, and higher quality than ever before, thanks to China's exquisite, vertically-integrated, and automated manufacturing capabilities. What's bad: We are putting our eggs in one basket.
csomar 1y ago
How is chart 1 showing everything is fine? US population and consumption have both increased, meanwhile production is still the same which suggests that these products must be coming from somewhere else. If you really had an automation boom, this will show up as an increase in output. If there is no increase in output and an increase in demand, the prices/margins improve which might explain why producers are happy but they won’t be able to export their products; which they might not want to do as China has killed any possible margins.
hattmall 1y ago
I think you have a flawed assumption. Highly automated manufacturing is only common because of high labor costs. If we are forced by non-profit driven reasons to bring manufacturing back it won't be automated as well. Things that can be highly automated are still being manufactured in the US. The things that can't be are made using human labor in cheap countries.
- intended 1y ago
  Even in cheap countries, manufacturing is being automated. This is a problem for countries globally, the only ladder left to uplift their population is services. Machines don’t take breaks, don’t need holidays, don’t get injured, and when deployed are more consistent and efficient. Having people work in factories, and get paid is great in a vacuum. However this is a competitive economy, your competition is doing lights out manufacturing, and is making more consistent goods, cheaper, and faster. And we’re getting better at building robots. The American debate is about 20 years late.
vivzkestrel 1y ago
you forgot to cover the other 12 reasons https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-difficulty-of-bringing-manufacturing-back https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d... one of them being physical fitness of workers and their willingness to slog
tdeck 1y ago
> manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. It's interesting that you mention this because most of the small-time inventors I've seen online in the electronics space either build things in their garage by hand or have them fabricated in China (or occasionally another poor country like Vietnam). Custom PCB production and assembly at places like JLCPCB and PCBWay (both in China) appears to be highly automated. But getting the same thing made in the US in smaller quantity is going to cost not a little bit more, but often ten times as much. And it will require "relationship building" with a job shop, rather than just uploading something to a website and paying for airmail delivery. And will likely have a longer lead time. To say nothing of the fact that most of the components you're buying are made in China anyway. So it may be fine to manufacture a large run finished consumer product in the US, but it's very capital intensive. For new products that aren't attached to an existing massive corporation with domestic production capability, you basically have to outsource to be price competitive and do any kind of volume beyond your own garage. I would be love to be proven wrong and learn about other options in the US but when I looked around I wasn't too impressed.

mattnewton 1y ago

I think it’s as simple as the selective pressures in our democratic system push for this rhetoric. Politicians who pitch “I match your worldview and will implement the simple fixes you want” outcompete “I think your worldview is incomplete and this is what you really want instead”, by a lot. Some might be very crafty and believe the second while shouting like the first. Many will actually believe the simple solution can work though.

patagurbon 1y ago

There is a 3rd point, that craftsmanship, machining skills, and logistics experience don’t fall from trees. As the US moves certain “lower” tier manufacturing overseas it can risk losing the experience needed to create tooling for production lines, or the industrial knowledge to build large numbers of ships, etc. The jobs argument on its face falls flat for me, but I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost.

echelon 1y ago
This. We're in a tough spot because the know-how has atrophied. We're not making the raw inputs anymore. Since the jobs are low paying, we should create a new class of worker visa and bring over folks from developing nations to work these jobs. We should build the exact same factories they have in China, but staff them with immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The wages wouldn't be great, but we could build the factories in LCOL areas and extend citizenship as an additional carrot. Bringing the factories on shore would let us be prepared for the upside of eventually automating it all. I don't think we can do that unless the factories are already here -- you can't will fully automated factories into existence from nothing, with no demand and no know-how. We can manufacture that demand now if there's enough political will for it. Immigration has always been our real superpower... We should double down and get people to immigrate and work in new factories we spin up within CONUS.
- forgotoldacc 1y ago
  Not sure if proposing building a underclass of underpaid jobs that we consider below Americans is the answer. A better answer could be to pay them a couple dollars more an hour so the pay isn't awful. There are also loads of areas of the country where people are struggling because mining and manufacturing jobs went away years ago. Cost of living is generally low in those places, so you don't need to pay California wages but it's still an upgrade compared to the opportunities they currently have. And saying "see these manufacturing jobs that your family used to have? The government is giving these only to foreigners and giving them citizenship too" most certainly will not help the growing anti-immigrant tendencies.
- 1y ago

cogman10 1y ago

I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase) and they saw what you are describing first hand. One example they gave, it used to be someone's job to load and unload the silicon wafers into the various etching phases. As time went on more and more of that manual work was replaced with automation. A floor with 50 workers became 25, then 10, then 1. And, to be clear, this was absolutely a good thing for the product. So many yield issues were caused by manual processes. The future of any manufacturing is that of high automation. That means low to no jobs. We aren't going back to an economy where a shoe factory employes 500 people. What's particularly bleak, IMO, is society in the US revolves around work. Every job out there is being automated away. That's not a bad thing for quality, but what it means is there will be increasingly fewer jobs to go around.

bushbaba 1y ago
Automation lowers costs, which increases consumption. We essentially trade time for dollars, and then dollars for goods that themselves took time to produce. While the exchange rate of time-for-time stays constant, automation means we now get more goods for the same amount of time worked. So it’s not nearly as bleak as you make it out to be.
- sitzkrieg 1y ago
  but if my income is $0/yr, how am i suppose to subscribe to platforms and internet and consume ads
- raincom 1y ago
  The real problem lies elsewhere: yes, it is cheaper to buy goods made by automation. People need jobs to make a living--pay rent/mortgage, health insurance, etc. Automation is needed to make a living easy: cheaper housing, cheaper access to health, etc. And this is not possible for the foreseeable future.
magicalhippo 1y ago
> I have coworkers that used to work in chip manufacturing (used to being the key phrase) A family friend was a chip designer for a large European company. Back in the 2000s he told me he saw the writing on the wall as they moved manufacturing to Asia. He said he expected design to follow not long after, and sure enough some 5 or so years later he lost his job as they moved design department closer to the factories. Perhaps it's different now, but as I recall he said there were advantages of chip designers being close to the chip manufacturing folks.

SilverElfin 1y ago

The problem is there is no pipeline to get people into these highly automated levels of manufacturing. How can you learn about all the steps and how they’re done “manually” and all that, to be able to participate in the high end of manufacturing? It feels like an island. And once the current talent retires it may leave a void even for those highly advanced factories.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
abe_m 1y ago
I'm split on this. Tradesmen that came up through their apprenticeship say that people need to learn the old manual machines to "feel what the machine is doing", before you can move over to computer controlled machines. But I think that is just the tendency of people to say the path to their current location is the path they took. Not that another path isn't actually a better way to get there for the current environment. I also think there has been a bit of bias in trade schools towards learning manual processes because it is cheap. You can have a room full of students spend weeks learning to use a file to shape a small block of steel to precise dimensions. A $5 file and $10 of material is easier to supply than a $1XX,XXX computerize manufacturing machine that can process $XXX of material or more per day. But spending weeks to learn how to precision hand file is pretty well a waste of time for modern manufacturing.
- franktankbank 1y ago
  You can't improve to N+1 if you don't know N, is the history of technology. You don't have to start at N-25 though, there is a base level to start at that cuts out your enemy.

awesome_dude 1y ago

> 2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war. I think that I have seen that this kind of "independence" has been a driving reason for China's strategies too. I don't think that it's necessarily a defence against a war, maybe more of an economic buffer, ensuring that China, and whomever follows the strategy is no longer dependent on any other entity for parts of their supply chain. One of the things, too, that people seem to forget is that the West (in general) has neglected their manufacturing capability in favour of the "Asian Tigers" doing the work (Japan, Korea, Taiwan), China is just the current holder of the title (for how long is anyone's guess, Japan especially has endured a sustained stagnation of their economy over the last several decades). Germany, for a while, was a strong manufacturer, and have (so far) been using the resulting economic position to their advantage inside the European Bloc. Perhaps that's the model that the USA (and others) should be looking toward?

yupitsme123 1y ago
I think a big component of China's imperialist strategy is to de-infustrialize the world, much like what's happened to the US.

mc32 1y ago

It's obvious that any high end manufacturing in any country capable of sustaining high end manufacturing will not produce jobs like in 1950, '60 or '70. But the same is true of service sector jobs. More is being automated. That said, we can bring manufacturing back stateside which can be highly automated and have high value while employing workers at wages much better than their service-job counterparts. In addition, we don't have the same population growth we had in the post-war years, so we don't need to produce millions upon millions of jobs. What we need to do is stem the job losses and increase output. We can be a bigger version of Switzerland. Sure, things get more expensive, but by and large folks live better.

GauntletWizard 1y ago

The problem is that the two are equivocated regularly for political points. We want both - highly automated factories for productive output, and middle class jobs. Building the factories will bring some middle class jobs - not a lot, but there's a decent number of maintenance and operating staff even at lights out factories, and the expertise building those factories is a bunch of valuable jobs and experience that we've let China hoover up. The problem is that these two concepts are treated as one.

givemeethekeys 1y ago

Let's say we manage to bring ever more fully automated factories back to the US - wouldn't that create many more jobs to fix the robots?

markus_zhang 1y ago

That’s still fine. You gotta hire people to maintain the robots, the people to build the robots, and the people for all service companies to service all those people. Then there is infrastructure, entertainment, etc. And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots. This is alone worth the effort.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots. Not with these constant layoffs and high turnover. We're not working like a country that wants to last long term.
abe_m 1y ago
I think we're starting to see the pile up that assuming people who worked assembly lines will just become robot tech isn't happening. For the entirety of humans, there have always been a place for low-skilled labour. We had subsistence farming, then as the industrial revolution came on, we ended up with a lot more types of labour jobs. As farms mechanized, we got factories, and as factory output went up, new products were created that needed labour to install them. Now that the remaining factories are requiring smarter workers, farms are pretty well fully automatic, we have a glut of working age people sitting on the sidelines unable to find work that is worthwhile doing. I think we're at the point where more automation means more loss of work, as opposed to people moving into the new jobs created, for an ever larger portion of the population.

alberth 1y ago

My understanding is that this is all about cutting edge manufacturing. E.g., in semiconductor fabrication - over the past decade, Intel’s chip production and process nodes have lagged 1–2 generations behind leading non-U.S. manufacturers.

nostrademons 1y ago
That's true for chips but not necessarily for other high-value manufacturing sectors. Americans are still the world leaders in say metallurgy or nuclear engineering, for example: all the jet turbine blades are still made in America, and most nuclear reactors. Also ASML gets all the hype for EUV lithography, but Applied Materials (based out of Santa Clara, CA) is still a critical part of the supply chain for new semiconductor fabs. And the EV industry started in Fremont CA with Tesla, although they've since lost some of their edge to Chinese and Korean manufacturers.
- alberth 1y ago
  Many Americans under estimate how good (and leading) China is in many manufacturing and engineering disciplines. The top 2 universities to study nuclear engineering are both in China. https://edurank.org/engineering/nuclear/ https://edurank.org/engineering/nuclear/

johnnyanmac 1y ago

>And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. Yay. Men get to spill their blood over a country that won't even give them enough pay to cover rent. The robots are cushy at home making weapons to kill more men with. Very good thing. > If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory, but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody. Yup, just automate out the construction industry while we're at it. Sorry for the cynicism, but but somehow I don't think even with more houses that we're going to have Gen Z and Gen Alpha survive the way The Boomers and early Gen X did.

kingofmen 1y ago
If there is one house per person then approximately every person gets a house, because almost everyone is willing and able to pay more for their first house than even a very wealthy person will pay for a second one. If there are 1.5 houses per person then you will have to work quite hard at being homeless.
- hattmall 1y ago
  This is wildly incorrect, wealthy people are far more likely to be able to afford and willing to pay more for excess housing than an average person. Especially if they can turn around and rent those houses at a profit.
- tdeck 1y ago
  Houses are an asset. Wealthy people in search of assets will buy the houses and rent them back to you. Or they will invest in companies that buy the houses and rent them, or banks that buy them and mortgage them for a profit.
  - watwut 1y ago
    You can not mortage for profit if there is excess of house or other item. Ultimately the price will go down. You can mortgage to profit when the asset is scarce.

gonzobonzo 1y ago

I don't think conclusion matches what we're seeing, though. Real output being flat while population and consumption have massively increased means that much more of our consumed products are being manufactured abroad now. It's not just automation at work. The original article even talks about that, where it mentions how high tech manufacturing is shrinking as a percentage of the economy. It might well be true that we're never going to see the kind of employment in manufacturing that we used to, but a blanket "the jobs are not coming back" attitude doesn't match the data either.

MengerSponge 1y ago

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment” – Warren G. Bennis

mitthrowaway2 1y ago

How come this doesn't match my experience as a customer? When I buy an iPhone, a vacuum (robotic or handheld), a drone, a camera, a KitchenAid kettle, a silicone brush, an electric fan, a battery-electric drill, just about anything really -- the expensive models might say "designed in USA" but they'll still say "made in China". The US used to be the go-to place to make all of these categories of products. So I don't believe the only thing that's happened is that American factories set up robots, laid off the workers, and got more productive than ever.

nostrademons 1y ago
If you are a customer, it is almost by definition "low-value manufacturing", because you have only one household's worth of money to spend, and not a Fortune 500 company's or nation-state's budget to spend. If you're buying jet engines or nuclear reactors or jet fighters, they are probably made in the U.S. (I probably erred in choosing "consumer electronics" as an example, because most of those are made abroad. Even so, there are some surprises: I just bought a brand-new Toyota Sienna manufactured in Indiana, and a System76 Thelio workstation manufactured in Colorado.)
- mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  Are jet engines and nuclear reactors really being made in lights-out automated production lines? I struggle to believe that the production quantities are anywhere near high enough to justify that. (Automobiles probably could be, except for their powerful labour unions; automobile production has been highly automated since the 30s.)
  - phil21 1y ago
    It's a nonsensical argument as you've discovered. It's due to the dollar value of things. And yes, jet engines are about as bespoke as you can get - incredibly man-hours intensive and it reflects in the price. As some point folks will discover that dollars do not actually equal physical goods. Exporting 100 F35s at $100m/ea is not the same value to a country under duress as the capability to manufacture $10B of random consumer goods. Nevermind the supply chain of that F35 is not remotely contained to domestic manufacturing. It's hand-wavy financialization of America speak.

dyauspitr 1y ago

What exactly is made in the US though? Besides cars and some forged tools, I can’t think of a single thing made in the US. Edit: I looked it up, it’s a lot of things. Airplanes, military aircraft, helicopters, satellites, rockets, construction/agriculture equipment (Caterpillar, John Deere), ICE and EV cars, chips, medical equipment (MRI, CT scanners), lots of defense stuff, drugs and pharmaceutical, processed agri goods etc.

SoftTalker 1y ago
You'd be surprised. Medical devices, injection molded stuff, custom or small batch machined parts, other kinds of components and/or final assembly and packaging of bulk materials. It's not always very obvious what goes on in all the steel buildings in the parts of town that white collar people don't visit.
killjoywashere 1y ago
A buddy from Bridgepoint made a point to me once: maybe we're not number one in every industry, but find me a sector where we're not in the top 10.
hattmall 1y ago
Guns are a pretty large domestic manufacturing segment.
tdeck 1y ago
So in other words, the US domestic manufacturing economy is very highly dependent on the military industrial complex. That sure dosn't bode well for the rest of the world.

kingofmen 1y ago

> we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. Will we? It appears to me that modern war works substantially like modern factories - you don't actually want a large mass of semiskilled workers to pull the levers, each of which can substitute for a different one on about five minutes' notice. You want relatively few, highly-trained specialists to instruct the ~~robots~~ drones. It is perhaps less true in war than in manufacturing, quantity still has that quality all its own, but it seems very unclear that just raw numbers of soldiers will be an important bottleneck as between Great Powers.

yupitsme123 1y ago
I'm pretty sure most of the robots and drones are manufacturered in China though. Even if they weren't, a lot of critical components for building things come from there now.

ndiddy 1y ago

Here's a great video by Smarter Every Day that came out a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY . It's about his experience with the atrophying US industrial skillset while he tries to make a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. He brings up a few good points about manufacturing that I personally found compelling: 1. During Covid, medical supplies were in short supply, to the point where the US government was flying in individual airplanes from China full of N95 masks and face shields. The guy making the video knew that Alabama (where he lives) wouldn't be on the priority list for where the masks and face shields would get distributed. His community's initial response was to 3D print face shields and donate them to healthcare facilities, but they knew that they had to step up to actual manufacturing to produce the face shields in necessary volumes. He was only able to find a single aging technician in Alabama capable of producing injection molding tooling, which he then was able to use to mass produce enough face shields to supply Alabama and neighboring states. If that one guy had chosen to retire before Covid, they would have not been able to make the injection mold locally. At a time where global supply chains were massively disrupted, they would have been screwed. 2. When an American company gets their products made overseas, the factory overseas that manufactures the product owns the tooling. This means that they're able to fill your order during the day, then at night make exact clones of your product with lower quality materials and undercut you, and you have no recourse. He brings up an example of a local small business that had this happen to them. Even though they had a design patent, they needed their lawyer to continually send letters to get Amazon to take down no-name clones of their product (and then the seller would just pick a new random set of 6 characters to sell it under). If US companies have no choice but to get their products made in countries that don't care about IP, then we're not just giving up on manufacturing, we're also giving up on designing products in the US. When he was trying to get the injection mold for his grill scrubber made, lots of companies in the US were willing to do the actual plastic manufacturing in the US, but could only get the injection mold tooling done in China. He brought up that in the past, an American company would build a machine and then ship it away to the developing world to be operated there. We've now reversed this, so the high-skill portion of manufacturing is done overseas and the only Americans involved are just pushing the buttons to operate the machine.

rediguanayum 1y ago

abe_m 1y ago

It seems a bit of a tautology to ask the survivors if things are OK. Of course is is OK for them, they are in an industry segment that survived the trend of moving everything possible to China. If you go ask where the factories were shutdown, you'll find different responses. The dip in number of manufacturing employees corresponds time-wise to China joining WTO, and the massive CEO hype of shutting down US factories and moving them to China, rather than super-duper automation hitting the scene and automating the factories in place. I have a suspicion that the displayed manufacturing output chart is in dollars, not amount of stuff, and that is likely bumped up by highly automated IC/chip manufacturing that is high cost/value, but low tonnage work.

the__alchemist 1y ago

There is a perspective that I think will crystalize the nature of this: Try to have a device made without sourcing parts of China. Maybe an assembled PCB. Maybe it's a tool of some sort. You will find that this is impossible, or much more expensive/worse experience than sourcing from China. Now, imagine a scenario where China collapses. (In the broadest sense). Whether it's a war as you say, or any other scenario. Imagine this happens in a few decades, after we (The world) has committed to this path. We will have lost so much of the tools we build our civilization on, and it will take generations to get this tacit knowledge back. What's good: We (humanity) can build things cheaper, and higher quality than ever before, thanks to China's exquisite, vertically-integrated, and automated manufacturing capabilities. What's bad: We are putting our eggs in one basket.

csomar 1y ago

How is chart 1 showing everything is fine? US population and consumption have both increased, meanwhile production is still the same which suggests that these products must be coming from somewhere else. If you really had an automation boom, this will show up as an increase in output. If there is no increase in output and an increase in demand, the prices/margins improve which might explain why producers are happy but they won’t be able to export their products; which they might not want to do as China has killed any possible margins.

hattmall 1y ago

I think you have a flawed assumption. Highly automated manufacturing is only common because of high labor costs. If we are forced by non-profit driven reasons to bring manufacturing back it won't be automated as well. Things that can be highly automated are still being manufactured in the US. The things that can't be are made using human labor in cheap countries.

intended 1y ago
Even in cheap countries, manufacturing is being automated. This is a problem for countries globally, the only ladder left to uplift their population is services. Machines don’t take breaks, don’t need holidays, don’t get injured, and when deployed are more consistent and efficient. Having people work in factories, and get paid is great in a vacuum. However this is a competitive economy, your competition is doing lights out manufacturing, and is making more consistent goods, cheaper, and faster. And we’re getting better at building robots. The American debate is about 20 years late.

vivzkestrel 1y ago

you forgot to cover the other 12 reasons https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-difficulty-of-bringing-manufacturing-back https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d... one of them being physical fitness of workers and their willingness to slog

tdeck 1y ago

> manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. It's interesting that you mention this because most of the small-time inventors I've seen online in the electronics space either build things in their garage by hand or have them fabricated in China (or occasionally another poor country like Vietnam). Custom PCB production and assembly at places like JLCPCB and PCBWay (both in China) appears to be highly automated. But getting the same thing made in the US in smaller quantity is going to cost not a little bit more, but often ten times as much. And it will require "relationship building" with a job shop, rather than just uploading something to a website and paying for airmail delivery. And will likely have a longer lead time. To say nothing of the fact that most of the components you're buying are made in China anyway. So it may be fine to manufacture a large run finished consumer product in the US, but it's very capital intensive. For new products that aren't attached to an existing massive corporation with domestic production capability, you basically have to outsource to be price competitive and do any kind of volume beyond your own garage. I would be love to be proven wrong and learn about other options in the US but when I looked around I wasn't too impressed.