4 ms·

Is this really about military spending? The US used to make so many products and appliances domestically - everything from steel to uranium to doorknobs to refr

by avalys 1y ago

Is this really about military spending? The US used to make so many products and appliances domestically - everything from steel to uranium to doorknobs to refrigerators to chemicals to CRT displays to roofing shingles, and everything in between. The military benefited from the massive industrial base that supported this production - but it didn’t create it. And now the loss of that domestic manufacturing base is largely why military production - and indeed, any kind of large-scale endeavor in the US, including construction - is slow and expensive.

bad_haircut72 1y ago
its not specifically military spending, just good government. If they pivoted after the cold war back into the space race or something, we would still have a high tech sector and it need not necessarily be military focussed
- speed_spread 1y ago
  Could also have invested in public education and healthcare but noooo
  - laughing_man 1y ago
    The US spends twice what we spent in 1970 on education per student, in constant dollars. I don't know how to make the schools better, but money sure didn't do it. And we're going broke paying for health care. I don't know how much more we spend, but it's multiples.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      you're a decade too early. Compare it to 1980 and you see how it flattens out very quickly. Compare it to 1990 and you see the cost per student has basically flatlined. Spending diverted from government funding of schools to student loans, so even that's misleading. >And we're going broke paying for health care. Signing a bill giving trillions to billionaires certainly does make it hard to fund healthcare. Especially when the wealth concentration these days has the top 10% making 50% of the money. I wonder how we solve that...
      - laughing_man 1y ago
        A decade too early for what? Sure, it flattens out, but the fact remains we're spending a whole lot more money on schools than we did when the students were objectively learning more. And what bill was it that gave trillions to billionaires?
  - 9337throwaway 1y ago
    The US is I the top ten of spring per pupil in the world. We also have more public school "administrators" per pupil than anywhere in the world. Spending isn't the problem.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Spending isn't the problem, when you ignore how the spending is composed. We flattened out decades ago, and that's because we went from subsidizing schools to funding loans. The money makeup per studnet won't look different... until the student graduates and can't pay it off. So our solution was obvious: make it so they can't bankrupt and stay in debt forever. Great way to build an educated citizenship.
    - smelendez 1y ago
      We have an enormous K-12 administration level partly because we have so many local school districts, each of which typically needs to separately buy textbooks, serve food, apply for state and federal funding and handle compliance, run HR and physical plant operations and janitorial and IT, manage transportation, respond to inquiries from the public, etc. It’s very hard politically to merge school districts because even beyond labor considerations, people have a sense that their district is superior to the one next door and think a merger will create immediate chaos and long term harm to their kids’ educations and their property values.
derefr 1y ago
An interesting rabbit-hole I fell into the other day, was researching the French company Vantiva, the maker of my ISP's fiber ONT (and many previous cable modems I've had from other ISPs, under their previous names Technicolor / Thomson.) If you trace out why Vantiva makes modems, it turns out that it's because all the patents for cable modems / coaxial carrier-network signal modulation and amplification were filed by RCA; GE bought RCA; and then GE divested its own + RCA's consumer-electronics businesses (including these patents!), selling that unit to Vantiva. Presumably, cable modems were the kind of industry that only support a few big players, because there's not enough margin there after licensing costs are paid to patent-holders. The default winner of such a market would be a vertically-integrated player who holds those patents and can therefore make cable modems without licensing them. That player was RCA (American); then GE (American); but is now Vantiva (French). Vantiva released the cable-modem patents into a free IP sharing consortium kind of thing 15+ years ago now; but only once they already had an extremely dominant position in the space, with existing contracts with pretty much every ISP, such that they could be assured continued dominance even without the weight of licensing pressing down on all their competitors' backs. Whenever I read about tech IP, I run into similar stories to this one. Some American company owned some tech innovation, but sold it to an overseas buyer some time in the late 80s / early 90s. And now it's not worth it to make that thing in America any more, because doing so would require licensing that IP from its current overseas owner. (Perhaps, if America wants to be competitive, the government should encourage American firms with lots of free cash to [re-]acquire foreign companies that hold especially-valuable IP. Then, at least the IP incentives would lean in favor of vertical integration of manufacturing within the US.)
laughing_man 1y ago
The article identifies three areas as "high tech manufacturing": Computer and electronic products, Pharmaceuticals & medicine, and Aerospace products and parts. It's likely microchip development would have happened somewhere else without large US defense contracts. The industry was literally created by defense contracts for things like spy satellites, combat aircraft, and ICBMs. Same with aerospace. The entire commercial aerospace industry exists because of bomber development in WW II, and all the engine tech since was initially developed and deployed in military aircraft. Carbon fiber, radar, fly-by-wire, plus the entire manufacturing process that produces aircraft that work the first time were all technologies developed or made practical to manufacture for the military. There's a reason passenger aircraft aren't manufactured in countries without a lot of military spending - companies like Boeing, Airbus, UAC, and Comac all depend on military contracts to pay development costs. What constitutes high tech manufacturing is probably a bit different today. I would include sectors like exotic materials (superconductors, boutique alloys, and almost-here stuff like graphene and CNTs) and battery tech.

by avalys 1y ago

bad_haircut72 1y ago

its not specifically military spending, just good government. If they pivoted after the cold war back into the space race or something, we would still have a high tech sector and it need not necessarily be military focussed

speed_spread 1y ago
Could also have invested in public education and healthcare but noooo
- laughing_man 1y ago
  The US spends twice what we spent in 1970 on education per student, in constant dollars. I don't know how to make the schools better, but money sure didn't do it. And we're going broke paying for health care. I don't know how much more we spend, but it's multiples.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    you're a decade too early. Compare it to 1980 and you see how it flattens out very quickly. Compare it to 1990 and you see the cost per student has basically flatlined. Spending diverted from government funding of schools to student loans, so even that's misleading. >And we're going broke paying for health care. Signing a bill giving trillions to billionaires certainly does make it hard to fund healthcare. Especially when the wealth concentration these days has the top 10% making 50% of the money. I wonder how we solve that...
    - laughing_man 1y ago
      A decade too early for what? Sure, it flattens out, but the fact remains we're spending a whole lot more money on schools than we did when the students were objectively learning more. And what bill was it that gave trillions to billionaires?
- 9337throwaway 1y ago
  The US is I the top ten of spring per pupil in the world. We also have more public school "administrators" per pupil than anywhere in the world. Spending isn't the problem.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    Spending isn't the problem, when you ignore how the spending is composed. We flattened out decades ago, and that's because we went from subsidizing schools to funding loans. The money makeup per studnet won't look different... until the student graduates and can't pay it off. So our solution was obvious: make it so they can't bankrupt and stay in debt forever. Great way to build an educated citizenship.
  - smelendez 1y ago
    We have an enormous K-12 administration level partly because we have so many local school districts, each of which typically needs to separately buy textbooks, serve food, apply for state and federal funding and handle compliance, run HR and physical plant operations and janitorial and IT, manage transportation, respond to inquiries from the public, etc. It’s very hard politically to merge school districts because even beyond labor considerations, people have a sense that their district is superior to the one next door and think a merger will create immediate chaos and long term harm to their kids’ educations and their property values.

derefr 1y ago

An interesting rabbit-hole I fell into the other day, was researching the French company Vantiva, the maker of my ISP's fiber ONT (and many previous cable modems I've had from other ISPs, under their previous names Technicolor / Thomson.) If you trace out why Vantiva makes modems, it turns out that it's because all the patents for cable modems / coaxial carrier-network signal modulation and amplification were filed by RCA; GE bought RCA; and then GE divested its own + RCA's consumer-electronics businesses (including these patents!), selling that unit to Vantiva. Presumably, cable modems were the kind of industry that only support a few big players, because there's not enough margin there after licensing costs are paid to patent-holders. The default winner of such a market would be a vertically-integrated player who holds those patents and can therefore make cable modems without licensing them. That player was RCA (American); then GE (American); but is now Vantiva (French). Vantiva released the cable-modem patents into a free IP sharing consortium kind of thing 15+ years ago now; but only once they already had an extremely dominant position in the space, with existing contracts with pretty much every ISP, such that they could be assured continued dominance even without the weight of licensing pressing down on all their competitors' backs. Whenever I read about tech IP, I run into similar stories to this one. Some American company owned some tech innovation, but sold it to an overseas buyer some time in the late 80s / early 90s. And now it's not worth it to make that thing in America any more, because doing so would require licensing that IP from its current overseas owner. (Perhaps, if America wants to be competitive, the government should encourage American firms with lots of free cash to [re-]acquire foreign companies that hold especially-valuable IP. Then, at least the IP incentives would lean in favor of vertical integration of manufacturing within the US.)

laughing_man 1y ago

The article identifies three areas as "high tech manufacturing": Computer and electronic products, Pharmaceuticals & medicine, and Aerospace products and parts. It's likely microchip development would have happened somewhere else without large US defense contracts. The industry was literally created by defense contracts for things like spy satellites, combat aircraft, and ICBMs. Same with aerospace. The entire commercial aerospace industry exists because of bomber development in WW II, and all the engine tech since was initially developed and deployed in military aircraft. Carbon fiber, radar, fly-by-wire, plus the entire manufacturing process that produces aircraft that work the first time were all technologies developed or made practical to manufacture for the military. There's a reason passenger aircraft aren't manufactured in countries without a lot of military spending - companies like Boeing, Airbus, UAC, and Comac all depend on military contracts to pay development costs. What constitutes high tech manufacturing is probably a bit different today. I would include sectors like exotic materials (superconductors, boutique alloys, and almost-here stuff like graphene and CNTs) and battery tech.