It will always be like this until scale ramps up and costs come down as infrastructure ramps up. China's advantage is always communicated as cheap labor but it's also the ability to almost infinitely scale production lines in a short period of time. America has mostly lost the muscle memory and tooling to do this. And that ability to scale matters with materials costs.
There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
The blunt tariff sledgehammer that was dropped isn't going to do it. Small experiments like the one in the article will try and mostly fail. Meanwhile producers will find loopholes and workarounds to tariffs. And the margins and viability of domestic designers and businesses will continue to weaken.
Consumers will increasingly eat the cost and lose the convenience.
I think it is worth mentioning how much more cheap capital is available for manufacturing. Chinese state policy—- monetary, fiscal, and social—- pushes up the savings rate, enormously lowering consumption, while restricting the range of consumer financial products. That puts more savings in state banks and keeps interest rates low.
This has come up at the expense of their own consumption however, and a reliance on exports instead. Thankfully China has been focusing on diversifying their export markets along with increasing internal consumption in the last decade.
There are the obvious explicit government initiatives to boost consumption, but they've also made some strides in reducing goods and luxury taxes. An Apple iPhone used to be 20-40% more in China (it is technically imported because it is made in an SEZ), but they are only priced at slightly higher than the states now. Cars used to be a huge splurge but cheap EVs are affordable by anyone with an OK job now (although you might not be able to park it if you live in a big city). On my trip a couple of months ago, the malls were booming in a way that I didn't see in 2016 when I left China.
Factorio taught me about supply chains, manufacturing bottlenecks, and tooling dependencies. These concerns don't really crop up in day-to-day programming, but they reveal a lot about why we struggle manufacturing anything in USA anymore.
If it's about supply chains and the like, Eve Online might be a better fit, it's got the factor of time, deal-making, social interaction, theft, war, blockades, undercutting, etc in there as well.
like, I can see a high school class set up their corporation, get mining set up, maybe own a station, get production running... but then a nullsec alliance is like haha fuck you and completely undercuts them, or the recurring player event where they block / destroy anything coming into or out of the main trade hub starts.
Factorio is pretty predictable... or maybe I've played it too often so I know what to consider for the long term. I should get some mods or change some settings to create calamities like in the old Sim City.
But we don't have a shortage of people who understand those things. You can learn them with a passive interest while hanging around with your laptop on the weekends. We have a shortage of people who understand how to actually make things in a non-copy/paste environment.
There are so many ways that mother nature says "fuck you, fuck your work" that you never get contact with in virtual environments. In fact the whole point of virtual environments it to remove that brutality. We have a dramatic shortage of young people who are interested in learning how to wrangle with mother nature OS rather than computer OS.
When I did IT in manufacturing, we outsourced most of the 'understand how to actually make things' tooling type people jobs. We didn't need them full time and could get way better experts via outsourcing than we could hire.
What we needed were wage slaves paid low enough to make the economics work, even in our small town without many employers that was the tricky bit. Especially every year when health insurance premiums went up. You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government.
To be able to design any manufacturable item, you have to know that a wrench is used to tighten bolts, and a screwdriver must be able to reach the screw. There are people who don't. Some of them graduated engineering school with me.
I think you're both right. If the wood shop class was a class in how to run a wood shop (not just in how to run a lathe) it would be the best of both worlds.
Factorio is often described as a game for software developers (i.e. it feels like you're programming when you play). Are those really the critical skills that allowed China to grow in manufacturing so quickly?
I'm not sure shop classes fill that need either...
We bees to put injection molding machines in schools, CNC machines cutting the tooling, teach people how to make real things in real factories with realistic costs.
This is the expertise that left these shores 20 years ago. Tooling manufacturing, automation, semiconductor etc.
They have, at least in some places. Where I live (Austin TX) I've been in multiple high schools that have extensive Manual machine shop/3d printing/CNC/Electronics/etc labs for students to use. It might even be at the point where the nicest/most complete machine shops in town are actually in the suburban high schools. Go to the local FIRST https://www.firstinspires.org/ competition and talk to the kids from the high schools in the more expensive parts of town where their parents are getting tens of thousands of dollars in donations every year for the teams. Whether any random kid can use them is a different story, but they do 'work' if by success having both of your school's FIRST team leads go to MIT is any indication, as happened last year at the HS my kid graduated from.
So at least some of our students are being given the opportunity, and there are multiple paths to success, but maybe the largest difference is that while truly talented multi disciplinary young engineers (and I work with a few) are rare, they always have been. The real questions are probably around social issues, does giving your kid a phone remove the boredom that encourages them to tinker with stuff in the garage, is there a sweet spot of being able to afford an old car, but to poor to pay to fix it, force kids to learn hands on repair skills. Does being able to stop at radio shack/surplus/frys/metal supply/etc and browse racks of stuff on the way home from school encourage kids to build stuff to impress their friends, or is having it delivered in the mail enough. AKA, like me the other day, I stopped a microcenter to get a pedestrian computer peripheral I could have ordered from amazon, but discovered a ESP camera module that gave me 'ideas'.
I'm afraid we have far more basic problems than that - illiteracy in their fingers. We have people who can't use a knife or scissors, let alone a power tool.
3D printing is an excellent introduction to just making an actual object in the real world. It's cheap and accessible, and has obvious design limitations to fall into and learn from. The step from 3D printing to full CNC is a lot less than the step from nothing to 3D printing.
Not to mention intact families where parents had sufficient discretionary time (i.e. jobs that paid the bills with reasonable weekly hours) and a culture of prioritizing passing down knowledge to children and creating spaces in the home for them to pursue their individual interests and talents. People are not just atomized economic units.
3D is heavily used in China as well for small scale manufacturing and prototyping. It is a good place to start for middle or high school kids, and is pretty accessible and rather safe
The idea isn't to teach working with wood necessarily, the idea is to teach how to handle the myriad common problems that crop up when dealing with physical manufacturing.
3D printing would be good too, because on the surface it's just "model -> filament -> extruder -> built". But as anyone who has done 3D printing knows, it's constantly fighting 20 different parameters to try and coax your print to actually work out well. And even when you have it nailed down there are still 20 different things that can randomly sabotage it. And even with all that accounted for you still sometimes get off prints.
Not just that - the idea is to give students a taste of what it's like to make things with their hands. 3D printing is cool too, but it's much less hands-on.
Went to middle/high school in the 2000s and had not one second of home econ or shop or anything related to it, not even theoretical. The only tools I remember working with other than a pair of scissors, compass and ruler were a glue gun and a scalpel in science labs.
In Factorio you throw iron ore in an electric furnace and it turns into iron plates. In reality you need coal or coke or charcoal to reduce iron to its metal form. Steelmaking is one of the largest single source of CO2 for a reason.
This is just one example among many. The truth is every single facet of industrial production is incredibly complex and there does not exist a single video game that captures all the nuance. Period. Factorio abstracted away all the boring details of industrial production and that is why it is good entertainment. But it’s still just entertainment. To think someone would become knowledge about industrial production because he played Factorio is like thinking someone is a good driver because he played Mario Kart.
Getting kids aware of and interested in a topic is an important step. I mentor a high school robotics team, not because I have an illusion that those students could skip college and walk into a robotics design job, but because it gets them exposed to mechanics, engineering, programming, experimentation, working in a team, competing against nature and other teams, etc. Ultimately, I think it helps them refine their framework for “what do I like [or dislike] doing?”
China's biggest advantage wasn't just the ability to scale (which means available labor), but also having entire supply chains in relative proximity, tons of small manufacturers making all the little parts needed, all located in southern China.
That's a bit less true than it used to be. Shenzhen supposedly used to work that way. When some small factory ran out of capacitors in board assembly, they'd send a runner to Huaqiangbei for another reel. But now ordering has mostly moved online. There's less of a role for all those tiny stalls stocking components.
That just cuts out a layer in the distribution chain. The part you want is probably manufactured not too far away.
The US used to have manufacturing cities where you could get everything you needed in specific industries. There was the New York City garment district for clothes. Mary Quant, inventor of the miniskirt, writes in her autobiography, "Quant by Quant", about her first visit to New York with a native guide. She was getting things set up for manufacturing in days instead of the months it took in the UK.
Detroit had cars, of course. Most of the auto parts suppliers were nearby. Now, the US auto industry is very spread out. "Trenton Makes, the World Takes" is still on a huge sign in Trenton, NJ., but it's more nostalgia then reality. Waterbury, Connecticut had watch manufacturers and other mechanical precision devices.
Those centers of industry are mostly gone. Even Hollywood is in troublel
Cheap labor is the key in that scaling, though? Human labor is still far more flexible than anything else that we have. And a big part of that flexibility is how cheaply you can turn it off. There is a reason seasonal employment is a thing.
I live in Philadelphia. We had a lot of manufacturing here, but most of that vacated the city center in the 1970s and 1980s. I recently was doing some research into urban renewal around my neighborhood, and found a paper about the city's efforts to address a concentrated population of perpetually drunk homeless men, mostly centered in my neighborhood, mostly squatting in abandoned buildings or living in flophouses. The city's approach was effectively to remove them and spread them out - and bulldoze the neighborhood to make way for a federally funded highway, now I-95. A lot of manufacturing businesses just called it quits - the owners had made their money on the backs of cheap labor and hadn't really set up any kind of succession plan, but could retire comfortably. Others moved, mostly out of the city, and by the 90s, that labor was moving overseas.
And that's why I don't really foresee that kind of manufacturing coming back here. In order to survive the race-to-the-bottom pricing that the majority of Americans crave, you need a large labor force that will accept some form of sub-par living conditions. But if you can't earn a living wage, you can't afford to participate in the economy in a way that supports the manufacturing, and then you're back to those mid-century slums.
I'm dramatically oversimplifying things, my main point here is, I didn't really put together how much of early 20th century American manufacturing relied on chronically drunk homeless men.
When a consumer is buying labor embodied in a product, they don’t care whether that labor are unionized or what their wage per hour/day is.
They do care what the wage per unit produced is, which is why we see a lot of US manufacturing moving towards higher levels of automation to let the embodied labor per finished unit be lower and thus competitive in the market.
There are roughly half as many employed in manufacturing compared to 25 years ago. The declining trend started before this. At the same time American manufacturing output is at an all time high, measured in dollars. Wages are up. There are more jobs for things like mechanical engineers and millrights, fewer in packaging and assembly.
It is less a craving and more just a general response to availability? It isn't that people have a craving to spend less on things. But, if something is readily available for less, why would you pay more? Indeed, would you expect people to pay more for your goods, if someone else has equivalent goods for cheaper? Why?
Maybe? Clothing is a big counter to your claim here. As is anything that can be reliably machined.
Yes, there is "cheap" clothing. No, the more expensive clothing isn't necessarily better. A bog standard t-shirt is a bog standard t-shirt. With a minimum of quality control, and anything on top of that is not adding to the utility of it.
The machining revolution really hurts a lot of the idea that labor in is indicative of quality.
As a counterexample, some casual googling about cotton suggests that there is an ideal workflow which will result in superior cotton fibers before harvesting. Here is a quote from the conclusion section of the linked article:
"Cotton fiber quality is shaped by a mix of genetics, growing conditions, and field management techniques. High-grade cotton relies on precise measurements of fiber length, strength, and micronaire, along with maintaining proper color and cleanliness throughout its growth. These elements play a key role in determining processing efficiency and market value across the supply chain."
At the most basic, if one farmer harvests his cotton with no consideration of the above issues, whereas another farmer carefully studies, prepares, tests, etc based on the above considerations, wouldn't there be added value and added cost of production?
I personally believe that in a past era, farmers intuitively learned these factors and competed with each other to make their best harvests, and the bog standard t-shirt got a quality buff as a fringe benefit.
Whereas nowadays, the farmer has to drop quality for quantity to compete with digitally-connected markets.
You can personally believe it, but you also need to provide some evidence to the claim. Farmers that can't afford the R&D team necessary to learn a lot of this stuff will have trouble competing here. Such that, I'm comfortable claiming this sort of advantage will only consolidate the profits into bigger corporations.
And, indeed, if you look into high quality cotton supply, you find there are relatively few names.
Lower cost of a good is a generally good indicator that the good is low quality
Unfortunately the inverse is not true at all
Higher cost on a good is not at all a reliable indicator of whether or not the good is high quality
There is a pretty big incentive for producers and sellers to produce low quality goods and convince consumers they are high quality, so they can sell them for a high margin
Not necessarily, but it's total shit when you buy a t-shirt and it unravels after only wearing it a few times. That QC doesn't always happen is what's the problem, so buying the cheapest isn't wise.
I mean... sure? Has that been happening for you? I have had some shirts that didn't last as long as others. Oddly, I don't think they are the ones I paid the least for.
I'm fortunate that my clothes still last quite a while, so I don't know what to say. Still have some t-shirts from the 90s, oddly.
I can say that if you wash cottons with synthetics, that will shorten the life of the cottons. If you use any "stretch" or "no iron" clothing, you almost certainly have a synthetic mix. It isn't that they are lower quality. Nor are they designed to not last as long. They are designed for that stretch and to look flat as their main goal.
It's the second thing. Americans are proud to pay for things they can afford. They look down on people who aren't paying their "fair share." For example, music and movie piracy was never the domain of the average consumer; it's mostly been for broke young people and enthusiasts who don't like DRM and the limits it puts on use. And part of the reason for that is that Spotify and Netflix et al. made it possible to continue consuming "respectably". If physical media were still the norm, piracy would be rampant, but not because Americans tend towards it naturally; bevause they would have been pushed toward it by the imperative consume wedded with the inability to pay.
A lot of dumb "just so" tales in economics are willful miscategorization of desperation as choice.
> It's where people pay me their excess money and get nothing in return, increasing their desperation
Wait, isn't that called 'campaign finance'?
The problem with competing with entrenched market interests is they can use their economic advantages to make the market impossible for newcomers to enter leading to de facto monopolies.
The anecdote that I heard was about GM, They'd have two guys doing two jobs on the same line, one of them would go off drinking for the day and the other guy just did both jobs half-assed, then they would switch the next day.
The assertion is that during times of high work, you have far fewer of them drinking. Pair that with low cost worker tenements and you are able to scale up manual tasks much more rapidly than what you see in most US locations nowadays.
I'm familiar with that for say, digging a ditch, or the n-martini lunch. Less so with "perpetually drunk and homeless" factory workers operating potentially dangerous machinery.
I interned at Daimler-Benz and assembly line workers had company-employed drink trolleys which would take your order early in the shift for what partially subsidized drinks/snacks you wanted delivered for your breaks during your shift. A tone would sound in the factory and workers would converge on the break area near them and pick up what they’d ordered earlier that day. On the menu was beer and plenty of workers would have multiple beers over the course of their shift.
These weren’t what you picture when someone says “perpetually drunk and homeless”, but I think a lot of Mercedes were assembled by workers with a perpetual low-level of alcohol on-board.
I worked a summer job at a factory that made box cars. 10x10 or larger sheets of 1/4 inch plate steel lifted on stacks with chain hoists, box cars tacked together, then put on a large rotisserie, so it could be turned as all the seams were welded. Anyhow, At lunch we all went out for shots and beers, and perhaps a doobie or two. While I did not see it, people did get squished. I survived my summer, but I did pickup a nicotine habit that lasted 20 years.
China's advantage is, and always will be, that the costs of labor in US are bloated by a huge amount of overhead for every working resident
In 2023, the BLS reported that benefits alone accounted for about 31% of total compensation, with wages and salaries comprising the remaining 69%. [1] This 31% includes direct costs like health insurance, retirement contributions, and paid leave.
Now in addition, consider employer-paid expenses that are not benefits or employee compensation: FICA, FUTA, SUID, SDI, FMLA, etc. That depends on your geography, but it can be up to 25-40% additional costs [2]
The all-in cost is at least 35% or more in additional spend [3]
In addition, none of the above capture indirect costs of compliance/overhead, with varied state and federal schemes.
As you can see, we are at a range of ~35-50% of additional costs for each new hire
Now, importantly, try to imagine the effect of this bloat at a national level: Every US business is effectively carrying deadweight of additional ~35-50% costs on its pricing decisions to its customers. Why? Because the bloat is embedded into every domestic input, like raw materials, services, utilities, you name it. This cost spike may impact a few foreign industries dependent on US inputs, but it certainly explodes over US shores, spiking prices of the inputs that most US producers depend for their final goods and services. Now think of what happens to domestic costs of doing business and operating a physical business in US.
So when your cost of production have additional ~35-50% overhead because of all sort of market-distorting mechanisms, blaming china for "cheap labor" is a convenient scapegoat, when in reality the blame should be on US policy of making our jobs artificially expensive.... to fund the state bloat.
Some of it is China’s willingness to make big capital investments. My wife was shocked at the low price of beech mushrooms at Ren’s Market and I found out these are grown in a huge factory in China where they are very proud that they only have to handle the mushrooms with a forklift. Contrast that to those white button Agricus mushrooms each of which is cut out from the mycelium individually with a knife.
When you look at solar panels and lithium batteries their biggest advantage is that they invest in large scale heavily automated factories. For really labor intensive and low value things like those dog beds Chinese labor is already too expensive and production is going to places like Bangladesh.
We have plenty of capital here. Far more than China.
The problem is the capital cannot be put to good use here. Either because (1) there's too much uncertainty around project progress (think oil pipelines stuck for decades in permitting limbo), or (2) the ROI doesn't work when you pay insanely high bloated compliance costs of hiring US staff.
Even our sky high productivity cannot overcome the large lard deadweight each of us has to carry, on behalf of the elite class
I remember a time when every product sold around the world carried the "MADE IN USA" brand. It included random trinkets.
That would come back quickly, if we all decided we had enough of antiwork laws, enough with all the deadweight, and focused on building instead of regulating.
Perhaps the answer is a combination of a significant UBI (paid for by general federal spending, I could think of many worse reasons to accrue national debt) coupled with a much lower minimum wage? Incentivize companies not to treat labor as a cost sink, while still ensuring that people have enough capital to cover their cost of living. I'd wager productivity would also go up (and mental depression would go down) if things weren't quite as dire as they currently are.
OK. In that case lets not use "bloat", and instead just call it the biggest subsidy for the middle and upper classes, coming from the backs of the unemployed, lower class
Guess who's uninsured? Its not the META employee with fertility benefits.
Satire is whomever cannot see why Trump would be voted by the working class: whomever thinks the status quo was to the benefit of the lower, blue collar class... while the middle and upper class ride their (untouchable) govt benefits (SSN) to a secure retirement because the elite class has a secure bureaucratic job (while the lower classes struggle to find 1 part time job).
Meanwhile, the chinese eat the lunch of the working class who see their jobs being exported abroad, because no employer wants to pay for subsidies/retirement/salaries of an elite bureaucratic deadweight class (that makes the rules for themselves, and forgets the neediest).
The chinese eat the lunch of the working and neediest americans, who see their jobs being exported abroad, because of a huge, elite bureaucratic deadweight DC class that was paid to allow regulatory capture, while enjoying sucking US treasure that funded their benefits and retirement.
That same deadweight class in power right now, pushing this narrative that the meager benefits we have are still too high for what we're worth. As they begin the next phase of destroying and looting our country - Make America Poor Again.
Your narrative completely missed all of the monetary inflation that was created to keep prices from going down due to cheaper manufacturing. That was the wealth received from offshoring, having been centralized as monetary creation. But rather than this wealth being spent on deliberate goals to mitigate the economic damage of that offshoring (individual and industrial), a rallying cry of fake "fiscal responsibility" prevented most such public spending. So the new money was instead simply given away to banks to bid up to the asset bubble, ultimately putting that centralized wealth into private hands of asset holders while pricing wage earners out of the asset markets.
That was the political con of the past thirty+ years. Now that it has run its course, the game shifts to the next con - which seems to be turning America into some kind of impoverished authoritarian work camp where we appreciate being able to do unskilled factory work that China no longer wants to do. Acknowledging the last con gets the rubes to buy right into it. Finally some validation, what a breath of fresh air! Oh, and don't you know the real problem right now is actually them "illegals" ? Definitely not these elites, nope. This current bunch is totally different than that last bunch. See how they don't even respect those laws or norms the previous elites respected? So refreshingly different!
An elite that actively wants to let go of his own government sinecure, power and status (from reduction in team size, the ever-important status power signal at bigcorps) , is very different from an elite that wants to grow his team and status
That's a weird framing making for a very odd conclusion, given that he is expanding the powers of the government, claiming those powers vest directly in him, and increasing the number of enforcers of that power. It's like the CEO of a company eliminating the R&D department, cutting everyone else's pay, and bulking up on security guards to perform random searches looking for pretexts to fire more people. From my perspective, the bureaucracy was an ever growing amount of administrative overhead, but it was at least moderating authoritarian power and keeping the worst impulses of autocracy at bay.
I do agree they are not the same - reverting to autocracy is throwing the towel in on the American experiment. Previous elites in power at least had the decency to view their looting as a symbiotic parasitic relationship. What is the same is the dynamic of distracting the rubes with feel-good populist outrage while shamelessly robbing them blind.
The Netherlands has a social welfare system and it's economy is not collapsing.
However the Dutch government doesn't have an ideological fascination with factories. It has a more rational approach to make money with things that the Netherlands is actually good at.
I think what compounds it is that in the US dead weight States still have political power- when realistically all the bets should be on California,Texas and New York and the rest of the country should be grateful.
In China it is naturally cheap, they have humongous super advanced vertical and horizontal supply chains at their doorstep.
Need plentiful, cheap three phase electricity? - check. Need some obscure part at scale and immediately?- check. Need advanced engineering? - check. etc. etc.
It's at the point where for many industries the risk/reward just do not make any sense at all (it'll just be loss making no matter how you spin it, government supports etc).
The chinese gov't also funds those things - but just not via taxes collected from people's incomes. They collect "profit" off foreign exports, debase the local currency to pay for it.
> taxing individuals directly begets the familiar resentment
but on the other hand, taxing individuals means those individuals should have some say over what taxation gets spent on (in theory), where as an authoritarian regime can simply ignore the populous.
I still think taxing individuals are better, despite it being slower and less agile at adapting.
This take and the article get it utterly wrong. The ONLY real headline is,
"Americans have gotten so used to free money they can no longer even imagine producing anything and selling it at a reasonable price".
I'm a small farmer and can sell my garlic all day for $1 a bulb. But it's A LOT of work. If I bump the price to $5 less people buy but that doesn't mean I get to give up and say, "oh well, can't produce in America I guess... "
It's more than that, we've simultaneously allowed for monopolization and rollup of wholesale markets. So in context of the story, the US manufacturer is in a squeeze play between supply cost escalations through the Trump tax regime, and the on the demand side with the big retailers like Kroger and Walmart.
The "made in USA" stuff is bullshit, the policy people DNGAF. The people actually making stuff are screwed. This about about shifting taxation from income and capital gains to consumption.
Turns out China buys Iranian oil, China makes cheap products out of this oil. China builds lots of new cheap coal plants, west fades theirs out but moves part of their production to China.. etc.
Use of coal in Chinese energy production is not growing, peaked in 2013 according to their stats. They are also building massive solar and nuclear capacity.
But anyway, half of all global coal production is consumed in China. I hope they will manage to get rid of coal in the next 20 years.
It's not just cheap labor. It's labor that is abused, sometimes enslaved.
It's also lack of environmental regulation adherence. China has environmental regulations but they don't always demand compliance. I read about companies paying for scrubbers to be installed in factories and when a team comes to take a tour, still with original filters and low run hours.
Maybe 20 years ago? Wages are rising salaries and employers are playing nice so their employees don't jump ship elsewhere. The day of your employer keeping your ID card captive is long gone (unless you are a naked official).
> China has environmental regulations but they don't always demand compliance.
That was also a lot more common 20 years ago than today. These days, cities/provinces are held accountable for AQI reductions, so pretend inspections no longer help their metrics. But I totally get it, there is a lot of material from 2000 to 2015 or so, and they basically live forever on the internet.
That 8% is only if you include the labor costs of final assembly at the GM plant. But their inputs also were built by labor. GM buys turbochargers not out of thin air, but from Garrett Motion inc., in Plymouth Michigan, who also has sizeable labor costs. Repeat not just for turbochargers, but for the rest of GM's input supply line. If you include only their direct suppliers, the cost of a new car that goes to human wages is about 30-40%.
Chinese turbocharger suppliers have lower labor costs and therefore BYD, Changan, Great Wall and others have more pricing power vs GM and Ford products.
Yes, their song, tang, han, and shark models are all turbocharged.
But my broader point is that their entire supply chain is comprised of lower labor cost inputs. Whether it be the EV batteries, the windshield, or the air valve in each of the four tires.
> Maybe Americans could build cars that people living in Asia actually want? Hint someone in Jakarta doesn't want a 40k pick-up truck.
You'd be surprised. One of the things that really raised my eyebrows in Thailand was slum shacks with a gleaming new muscle pickup parked beside it. For some reason these are really popular and people spend an inordinate amount of income on them.
Counterpoint: cost of living is ridiculously cheaper in China vs. USA. Workers can be paid 3x less and still have a better QoL. It's a vastly more efficient economy in terms of human capital.
Counterpoint: China is the undisputed leader in renewable energy technology, including battery storage. I don't think they are doing it purely for environmental reasons, but they are doing it.
But the main reason why that cost of living is ridiculously cheaper is because human labor is so much less expensive. There's no free lunch - if the output is that much cheaper, that difference has to come out of someone's pocket eventually, even if it's not the person directly manufacturing the thing but someone down the line from them.
Or you can look from it from the opposite direction and imagine what would have happened if there was full freedom of movement between China and US (i.e. no visas etc) and thus an actual free market for labor. If you expect workers in such situation to steadily migrate from China to US but not vice versa (at least until cost of labor equalizes), this implies that the workers in China are somehow worse off in absolute quality of life even when accounting for relative cost-of-life differences. That is, if the relationship between two countries wasn't economically exploitative in some way, we wouldn't need to restrict the free flow of labor at the border.
> But the main reason why that cost of living is ridiculously cheaper is because human labor is so much less expensive.
That's a really bizarre take that is obviously false. The disenfranchised migrant laborer or prison slave producing your American groceries is earning approximately as much as a Chinese peasant, i.e. basically nothing.
There is however a vast difference in what the organization looks like above the laborer. In America: vast profits and consolidation. By contrast, China has more small businesses (think street food) and large enterprises are SOE or otherwise constrained by the political system.
As far as I know, this is not the case for migrant laborers at least, who often get paid more than federal minimum wage (because otherwise they can't get enough people even if they are undocumented immigrants).
In any case, if those were the main two reasons for the disparity, then we wouldn't see the same for other first world countries which have neither cheap migrant labor nor prison slaves. Yet cost of living is still significantly more expensive in, say, Finland than it is in China.
America's cost of living issues are mostly because of bad regulation. The big three rising costs are housing, healthcare, and education, and all 3 have been horribly misregulated by the US gov leading to massive spikes in price.
And why is cost of living ridiculously cheaper in China?
If you pay less in wages, goods cost less.
If you have less environmental regulations/ignore them, goods cost less.
Yes, they are the leader in renewable energy tech. They have also cornered the market with regards to the rare minerals that are some/most of the inputs. The link is not a coincidence.
In the US, housing and real estate have been driven up significantly to the benefit of the really rich. Increased rent, and increased house cost for existing structures just ends up lining the pockets of people rich enough to get priority access to new, cheap debt issuance. Inflation benefits those who are closest to the new money creation, while screwing those furthest away. All the while, everything gets more expensive with increasing rents.
it is exactly the case in china - just with different numbers. It's why shanghai and beijing has some of the highest property price to income ratios. Just like in san fran.
There's cheap property in the USA - rural areas and lower populated areas. Just like there are in china.
I agree. A lot of modern trade for the US is built around arbitrage on purchasing power. If all else costs the same, and you have to decide whether to pay someone $2 per hour to do it or $20, $2 always wins unless shipping it over is more expensive than the difference, which almost always isn’t.
Average salary in China has gone up quite a bit. It might be 1/3 but it's not $2.
I had a friend move his factory to China because the packaging and other costs were so much cheaper. I wish I'd asked for a breakdown. He didn't factor in/expect wages to be much of a savings.
I just pulled a random number but what I intended to say is that as long as differences in purchasing power exist and the dollar is the stronger currency, trade will move to where your dollar has more purchasing power for labor, as long as moving the finished goods back to the US isn’t prohibitively expensive.
That sounds like a very good argument for cracking down on illegal immigration, either by bringing people out of the shadows or by removing them. Currently American is going the removal route.
> China's advantage is always communicated as cheap labor but it's also the ability to almost infinitely scale production lines in a short period of time. America has mostly lost the muscle memory and tooling to do this.
...
>There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
I heard a very compelling argument (at least to me), that the difference, as you say, isn't the labor. The labor cost difference is something like 5% in the China vs 8% in the US. The difference is ramp up time. If you have a product ready to be built, you can get it to market much faster manufacturing in China than the US.
As an example, the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada took about 2 years (June 2014-July 2015)[1]
Tesla Gigafactory in China took 168 days to construct (January 2019-October 2019)[1]
The cost of the factory construction, materials and labor, isn't the biggest loss when deciding where to build your factory. The biggest cost is the opportunity cost of not manufacturing your product for 15 months and the potential of losing any first to market advantage if you have competition.
The time to get your product to market, especially if you're a new company with no income operating on investor money, the time spent trying to manufacture in the US can sink your company. The cost difference is much more manageable and, depending of the product, can often times be overcome by the price of shipping.
There's an attitude shift, too. US manufacturing is stuck in the past. If you want to build a widget, you want it finished, welded assembled and painted. you've got to do a bunch of work and take it to four different places before you're done. China's got a one stop shop attitude to get your widget made.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTjEVB5p2/
I don't know if you're wrong in general, but your dates for the factory construction show 9 months in China vs 13 months in the US, not the 5 months vs two years you claim.
Want to build electronics? You'll need a variety of parts and raw materials that China and its surrounding countries produce, and the US doesn't*.
Want to make clothing? You'll need many different fabrics, buttons, zippers, dyes, etc that China and its surrounding countries produce, and the US doesn't*.
Want to make toys? You'll need plastics, dyes, injection-molding processes, etc that China and its surrounding countries produce or provide, and the US doesn't*.
And this goes all the way back to the mining, the farming, and the refining. The US just doesn't do these things*, even in the cases where we actually have the natural resources here.
This is all way before you even get to the point of engaging with China's skilled manufacturing workforce. (Because yes: these jobs do require skills; you can't just walk in off the street with zero prior experience or training and be correctly assembling widgets or sewing garments within the hour.)
* To counter pedants: Yes, the US may produce some small amounts of some of these things. But we don't produce them at anything like the scale required to ramp up full-on mass production of anything that relies on them to supply the demand of the entire country.
My family runs a small plastic (injection molding) business in the USA. Second, soon to be third generation.
The only reason it still exists is because the products made are too expensive to ship from a country with cheaper labor as they are pretty large and heavy. And it's quite a niche product/vertical.
The biggest problem that the business faces on a day-to-day basis is employees. It's a very low skill manufacturing job. You pull parts out of the mold. The pay is good for a large midwestern MCOL city, plus full health benefits (employees don't pay a cent). It is downright impossible to find and retain reliable employees. The job sucks. I worked there when I was younger helping out and you do the same thing every minute for 8 hours a day in a hot and loud factory. It's not a career - just a job. I'm not sure how you fix that. The American appetite for a low skill manufacturing job is dead - I'm not sure it's a bad thing either.
Even the high skill stuff has already been taken over by China, their process is far more efficient. When the business needs design/tool & die for a new plastic injection mold costs and speed associated with getting that mold designed and made in America are astronomical compared to the Chinese. The Chinese will get back to you with a design proof in 24 hours at a 1/4 of the cost.
If you can't get employees you're not paying enough. What you think you should pay employees is irrelevant, the market defines what "good pay" is. If potential employees have better opportunities you won't be able to hire them unless you make your jobs more appealing than others.
You would think it would be that black and white, and under normal circumstances I would tend to agree, however pay is well above average for the location and skill especially when you factor in the benefit package.
I really think it comes down to the fact that people have no interest in working in low skill manufacturing. The business loses people to Walmart etc. where they get lower pay and no benefits all the time. There is more variety of work and potential for advancement at a company like Walmart. Even at a larger scale low skill manufacturing plant advancement is sparse.
The pay may be above average for that location, but it might still be too low. Back when I had just finished college, my cohort was also judging locations where they would apply to work based on things like the social scene or the climate, in addition to the usual considerations of the kind of work and pay they would be doing. There were plenty that turned down well-paying jobs that were in undesirable locations because they were also seeking to not only establish a career, but a life too.
One of the guys I worked with at my first job was a few years older than me, and he had given up a much better paying job in one of the flyover states for a lower paying one in a higher COL area; His reasoning was that no amount of money could buy him the things he wanted out there, but he did admit that had the pay been significantly higher, he probably would have stuck it out for longer than he did, though again only to save up a bigger nest egg before he moved away from the area.
I dodged a job like this as well. Pay was great, benefits good, however I would have been maintaining legacy perl code and excel sheets (that were functionally databases), doing the same coding day in and out. I did it for a while, while looking for another position to get out of there as quickly as possible.
So you see the problem. Americans wont work these types of jobs at wages that allow businesses to compete with China. Businesses are in a competition. When they raise wages they need to raise prices and they cant do that when competition is knocking at the door.
> The American appetite for a low skill manufacturing job is dead - I'm not sure it's a bad thing either.
It probably isn't a bad thing, as long as we continue to invest in automation and high-skill manufacturing. The Economist wrote about this recently: the fantasy of "low-skill factory jobs for all" is just that, a fantasy: https://archive.is/YoMs1
They have toyed around with automation but the capital required to retrofit for such a small business would be intensive but is coming down.
Interestingly the automation pieces that they have been testing (multi-axis robot arms) have only became cost effective since the Chinese robots entered the market. The Chinese have completely dropped the floor on automation tooling.
Sounds like the employer has created its own problems.
If an employee is doing an unpleasant, dead-end job with no prospect of advancement, they have to make a value judgment. If there's no prospect of advancement or any kind of wage growth (they're "low skill", so they'll be replaced if someone cheaper comes along), let alone security, then why stick around?
If the working conditions (e.g. heat and noise) are unpleasant, they could be improved. A ramp into other positions could be built to make the "job" an entry point to a "career" (e.g. Costco moves people between many different low skill jobs and then recruits from that pool for management).
>If an employee is doing an unpleasant, dead-end job with no prospect of advancement, they have to make a value judgment. If there's no prospect of advancement or any kind of wage growth (they're "low skill", so they'll be replaced if someone cheaper comes along), let alone security, then why stick around?
Exactly my point, and that's what they are doing.
There is no prospect of advancement possible. It's a small operation with 15 or so total employees. Under normal circumstances I would agree on a much larger scale.
The majority of people are not suitable for management, and do not advance in "careers". Most people just work the same job over and over, until the retire or die.
But the cost of everything has got out of hand. Why bother going to work if you're going to be basically homeless anyway? Housing+food+health care has detached significantly from wages and the costs of other goods.
You fix that by automating the repetitive tasks. So one employee can oversee several machines and primarily handle edge cases. A lot of tooling that was impossible or outrageously expensive before is affordable now. I support some food manufactures that use machine vision based industrial automation and QC.
If you’re having trouble retaining employees because they’re bored of pulling parts out of a mold - have any of them considered having a crack at automating that specific bit of the job with say (and yes this is going to sound naive) a programmable robot?
There will be versions of the machine that automate more of the process. But they will cost money and require maintenance too look after and adjust.
I used to work a similar job[1] at a plastics factory. We had about 12 machines in the area I worked. Some machines automated remove stuff from the mold, some removing the excess, some putting though the leak tester. Each stage of automation was an additional thing that had to be configured and adjusted.
Often we'd only make an item for a shift or two. At one point the company bought a new machine (the size of a 2 car garage) that automated some more bits. The machine took 18 months of adjusting before it worked reliably.
[1] Blowmold, ranging from 750ml bottles, 5-20 litre jerry cans, sections of culvert pipe.
> The machine took 18 months of adjusting before it worked reliably
That doesn’t tell the story of the overall ROI. After 18 months of shakiness were those folks able to go do other work? Did the work pay for itself on a 5 year timeline? 10 years? Achieving reliability is huge - did the company spin that for PR?
It was 18 months of somebody working on it full time plus people being flow out from the manufacturer.
From memory once it was going it still didn't live up to all the hype. It worked about as well as the 30 year old machines next to it and required a minimum wage person (ie me) to operate it (plus a fitter for anything technical).
The company I worked for went out of business 10 years later.
This is the sort of machine I'm talking about (although a lot nicer and more uptodate than the ones I used. Faster cycle time too)
The work on your line might "suck" but it is a good paying job with free benefits and requires no college degree, special trade school, or certification.
There are plenty of poorly qualified, undereducated Americans who can fill these low skill jobs.
There is nothing to fix. It is a job. It pays money. Not everyone has the ability to excel in a "career." They simply need a job.
And, no one can compete with China. All companies operating in China, regardless of ownership (state-owned, private, or foreign-owned), are subject to the same political influence. If the government tells a company to do something, the company does it. China also manipulates its currency as a means to drive its predominantly export-oriented economy.
Then tell me where these poorly qualified, undereducated Americans who can fill these low skill jobs are?
The business's biggest success with finding employees was getting in the good graces of the local probation officers who refer ex-cons to us, and that comes with its own set of problems.
Other than paying a premium for temps at a temp agency that's been the only way as of the last 5-10 years to get employees in the door. Normal applications are crickets.
Raise the pay. I get that at a small scale that might not be possible, but if it isn't that just means they don't have a viable business, at least in their current location.
More expensive than made in China, though with the moral price of supporting sweatshop factories. "Too expensive" is a value judgment. Maybe they could get their customers to accept a higher price, or find other customers who are less price-sensitive or will pay for something they can provide that China cannot.
There is no doubt they know more but no matter the business, if you can’t keep employees you either need to pay more or make the job more attractive in some other way and if you can’t do that and still make a profit then you don’t have a viable business.
So, if retailers are resisting raising prices, who will pay the increased costs? Domestically sourced goods can be no more than 55% more expensive (otherwise the imported goods would be cheaper), but we can be sure that locally sourced goods will be priced as close to the full 55% as possible (and as the article points out, some locally manufactured items are probably never going to be less than the overseas cost, even including the tariff tax.)
Now take a look at Walmart's margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit.... Their gross margin is ~25%, with a net around 2%. Even if Walmart decides to eat the tariff cost out of patriotic duty, anywhere near a ~50% hit to supply chain costs would put them out of business. Heck, even a few percent would require a huge business restructuring, if it were even possible.
So prices are going to be higher - it's a given. In the short-medium term, the tariff tax is simply a large regressive transfer of tax obligation onto consumers.
At some point Americans became convinced that the process of organizing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure and millions of people on the task of manufacturing products was “easy.”
50 years on, and fthe generation that knew how to manufacture is gone - their children never built up the same skills at the same scale. Their children’s children didn't bother to learn the STEM and Craft skills required to work at scale.
Restoring manufacture will be a generation away outside of “dark factories”
Americans focused on other things: software, product development, high tech higher value stuff and so on. Our success there might not have been possible without the rise in manufacturing in China to actually make the things designed in the USA, we definitely didn’t have the population to do both, even if we did have the money.
But now we are in a hard spot because China has been focusing on STEM while we’ve been importing a lot of our STEM needs (from places like India and China). China is now in a position to do both, and they have the population, skills, and resources to do both.
I liken this to hanging off a cliff by multiple ropes/leads. Certainly, you can cut a few of them and still not fall, but eventually you'll cut enough rope that you'll plummet to your death. Americans need to feel the pain of poor policy, otherwise nothing will change, and there's almost no rope left to cut.
It's gone. It's the downside of the American vision of capitalism. We collectively flex in front of the mirror and tell ourselves that we are awesome, put light the room by setting the furniture on fire.
Reality is, as people have been pointing out for as long as I've been on this earth, the relentless focus on quarterly and current year fiscal has made the United States less competitive strategically.
I remember years ago a supplier came in to address an issue we had with defective parts in their intermediate supply chain. The VP dude was casually throwing out how all of their new parts get copied in days by their manufacturing partners, who share them with competitors, etc. In our case, a supplier was running a fraudulent third shift to make parts and threw in under-spec units as well. They seemed fine with it.
> Their children’s children didn't bother to learn the STEM and Craft skills required to work at scale.
I mean it's less nobody learned and more the demand was gone. American companies sent manufacturing overseas because back then, it was cheaper, and America is unique among nations in that we can just print money^1 to buy things. The only manufacturing that's still solidly American is products that are too fragile/large for sea shipping at scale (we make a lot of cars in North America, but a lot of that's gone to Canada and Mexico) and anything related to the defense industry. And even then, those companies (like Boeing) are now being eaten from the inside by the same business parasites that ate everything else.
These problems all have solutions but we have to stop giving private businesses a free pass to do anything and everything to starve the government of tax revenue while stripmining the citizenry for every penny they can.
1: Not without risks and problems, but still, no other country on Earth can do this.
That narrative is BS. Kids stopped going into CS in America because of the Dotcom bust. The number didn't recover until 2014. Driven in large part by the Great Recession encouraging more kids to go into STEM -- certainly my Land Grant school in the Deep South could barely keep up with the surge. Kids that did STEM recently? Worst entry-level job market we've maybe ever seen. But the kids who did a different major and likely have better short term prospects are the problem?
But that narrative certainly shifts any blame away from the winners in recent years and onto "flyover state" Americans. And now the same folks who told kids to learn to code want them learning woodshop? Come on.
Nah, the following generation will have all of that, and more, done by “AI”. No need to learn anything anymore, except giving voice commands to a computer. /s
Great post - I recommend reading "Apple in China" to get a great insight into the how the Chinese manufacturing industry (and economy) has developed over the last 30 years.
I have! It's a great book. I don't work in that field at all but I find industrial infrastructure and manufacturing business endlessly fascinating. I wish I worked in it tbh because then I'd have an excuse to visit Shenzhen. It's on my bucket list.
> China literally half a century of heavy investment on the part of it's government in that infrastructure and in it's citizens, and we can't even make bike paths here anymore
This is the part that the vast majority of people don't realize. China's manufacturing advantage did not just happen spontaneously and organically.
As someone who regularly participates in local politics I assure you, this is incredibly still a thing. Every last measure receives vehement criticism from the older cohort of our city because they're certain it will mean a tax increase. We have to explain over, and over, and over again that the projects we're voting on were budgeted in over a year ago, and that money is already allocated.
Most accept this. Some stay mad but just quietly vote no (and are usually outvoted). A minority say if we have money for this then we should be cutting taxes.
Like it's stereotypical I grant you but stereotypes aren't made up in an office somewhere, Severance style. An unfortunate number of the old among us want nothing going to anyone who isn't them, and I fully accept, an amount of that is coming from people who are living on a fixed income, and I have empathy for that. A lot of it is also just coming from people who have sour grapes about only having a 17 foot boat instead of the 19 foot one they wanted, and see our parks and beautification projects as the reason they couldn't have it. Not only is it often BS, it's just anti-social. Like I'm sorry you're apparently too out of shape to enjoy a bike trail, but we have a whole ton of other people who aren't, and putting every measure of improving our city on a menu for you to select which ones you're comfortable paying for is simply not practical.
My entire life my taxes have gone to pay for things that don't benefit me. It's just part of living in a society.
Maybe in another 20 years. We were putting in an elevated light rail system above the highway, but no, it got blocked everywhere outside of the downtown core because “it looked ugly”. Nevermind that it was over a highway.
I think Walmart is too big to fail at this point. If the gold standard for brick and mortar 'low prices' needs some restructuring, then it's time for the house of straw economy to finally see the big bad wolf and go running for the hills.
Walmart will just raise prices and their customers will eat the increased prices through reduced purchasing power or going without, while complaining but doing nothing else (because they have no leverage to do otherwise).
or those same customers may elect the next, even-more-extreme, ill-informed idiotic wingnut that comes along with a pat theory about bringing industry back on-shore in 4 years by tossing out foreigners/applying ludicrous tariffs/whatever... increased prices affect politics - which affects everything.
Probably, not much you can do with people who have a vote but nothing else. All you can do is migrate to more functional governance systems. Let them eat vibes, the evidence is robust that mental models are rigid and even in the face of overwhelming evidence, people can be bought into belief systems that cannot be updated based on facts, data, and evidence.
What immediately sprung out to me is that Amazon isn't held accountable for selling goods that directly violate patent laws, which should protect small business and reward innovation.
The current US administration claims to be concerned about domestic manufacturing and so on, but hasn't even mentioned this issue at all.
I was going to manufacture a line of useful products here in the USA, but decided against it. I'd release the product, then a month later counterfeits would be on Amazon for 10% of the price.
As a small operation, there are 0 affordable resources at my disposal to fight IP theft.
Right, as a small operation patents are rarely worth your bother. You might eventually win in court with a patent, but by then your company is bankrupt. Just make the thing, and hope that you can develop a good name and reputation for quality that keeps you afloat, even if you only are 1% of the market, that can be a lot of money. Avoid selling on Amazon where you are more likely to be noticed by cloners, at least until you already have a business.
You're probably thinking about Target and their Up and Up label where they do that. They also place all of their knockoffs right next to the product they are imitating.
Indeed, but patent infringement too. Although the Cotton Gin was patented, Eli Whitney famously was unable to enjoy those protections. Imitations sprung up all around.
Similarly: though William Jarvis wasn't the first American to import Merino sheep, he was the most successful because he was able to utilize an ongoing war in Spain to circumvent around the Merino export ban in the early 1800s and get a ton of them over here, too. He was even a diplomat to Spain and probably knew better, but did it anyway.
Exactly. All that whining about "intellectual property" is at best funny.
Especially since the US patent office is mostly known for allowing anyone to patent anything, even if there is prior art from the Mayan and Roman empires.
> What immediately sprung out to me is that Amazon isn't held accountable for selling goods that directly violate patent laws, which should protect small business and reward innovation.
(IANAL) This may fall under a DCMA-like concept where sites are not responsible for 'user content'. The 'user' in question is the vendor and their 'profile' of sellable items is the content. Similar to how eBay is not (?) responsible for the items put up for sale.
(Not saying this is (morally) right, just describing the situation. I would really like to see some accountability as well.)
As far as I can tell, consumers have never benefited from patents, and they seem blatantly anti-competitive. Perhaps if only "small business" (whatever that actually denotes) were allowed to hold them it might make sense, but we all know that's not even remotely how patents are wielded today.
Personally I strongly prefer knockoffs. Same quality, but cheaper.
well innovation is where it helps consumer. Innovating new products over time, patents give them some runway to make a profit assuming one can defend those patents. why innovate the next iphone equivalent if someone is just going to steal your idea and make it in china for 1/4 the price
It was not patents that helped the iphone succeed, it was a massive river of cash and keeping the development mostly secret. All patents ensured was that android operated in a visually slightly different manner.
Anyway, where is all this "innovation" that's supposedly worth caring about? It seems to me that patents stymie innovation by holding competitors hands behind their back (or even in the case of medicine, holding it off the market).
> patents give them some runway to make a profit assuming one can defend those patents.
I'd be shocked if this actually described even 1% of patents issued.
Anyway, yea, fuck all intellectual property except maybe the first ten years of copyright held by actual humans.
I watched this and my cynical takeaway was he was trying to make an appeal to emotion. Why buy from China when we can support the good people of Alabama? Their elected senator just called me a rat. Why should I support Alabama over China? They both seem like foreign adversaries to me. At least China is making a sincere effort to reduce their carbon emissions.
I thought it was a good video, but similarly I had an issue with how he discussed the loss of the skilled trades and professions in the US. He did a good job highlighting that these jobs are rare, don't pay well and are important, but he made it seem like we all just accidentally stopped investing in local manufacturing, or that we just let those skills erode. Leaders at these manufacturing companies moved things over seas, laid off the skilled workers, busted up unions, and overall sold off this skill set in order to sell cheaper products and make more money for themselves.
> Why buy from China when we can support the good people of Alabama? Their elected senator just called me a rat. Why should I support Alabama over China?
He just happens to be in Alabama, but the principle applies to someone in Massachusetts or Hawaii as well.
There was a book making the rounds recently that also details some of the discussion around skills being the thing the west exported: https://appleinchina.com/
The author readily admits in a podcast that while Apple plays a big part in the story it's a clickbait title because no one would buy a book titled something along the lines of "supply chains and China."
It's an interesting video, on the other hand it's also 80$ a piece. And I'm pretty sure they do not recoup R&D with those prices on reasonable compensation rates...
Not sure if that does help you though. A business that only exists because it doesn't have to pay taxes kind of shouldn't exist in the first place. At least not as a business
One of the main issues they raise is that the bristles on common brushes can be left behind and are difficult to pick out of food, so the wet rag probably exceeds expectations in that way.
Since I read about bristles in food after cleaning the grill, I've always been checking for remnants after brushing. I never found any. And I wonder: how are those remnants supposed to get into your food? They are metal, so don't they just fall down into the grill, if any break off? Maybe glued into old fat and other gunk? But you want that gone, too, right? Also, don't you use a rag to clean off other dirt, and wouldn't that make sure that bristles are gone?
Is this a myth or actually a problem? Some commenters do call it fear-mongering here, so what is it?
I also think I never read anything about this except in US media, so does this not happen in other countries? Different brushes? Different cleaning habits?
Good discussion from 2016, I think it was Canadian surgeons that made the recommendation and there's at least a couple of comments where people have talked about real-world experiences with bristles.
A bristle can get stuck to some gunk that isn't successfully removed and be in parallel to a bar roughly underneath it. There's no real reason to take risks of excessive hygiene given that hospital admissions occur and simple tools are going to give you a functionally equivalent meal.
Grill brush bristles in your food are the "they went on a vacation and brought back flesh eating bacteria" of the culinary world. The fear-mongering greatly exceeds the danger.
Edit: There are approximately 130 ER visits per year[1] on account of grill brushes. Mowing your lawn (something else people do on about the same frequency in the summer) is far more likely get you, as are god knows how many other things.
That’s definitely enough numbers to change to a different bristle. Basically no effort to change a bristle. If you had to free climb a mountain to get a new bristle, then I would understand.
And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.
>That’s definitely enough numbers to change to a different bristle.
Ah, yes, magical plastic molecules. Exactly what I want between fire and my food.
I'm just about the last person to give a crap about microplastics but cooking temperatures and long weird hydrocarbon molecules are where I draw the line.
>And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.
Given how simple it is to avoid that issue, I will. I can reduce my chance of ingesting a bristle from “minuscule” to “zero” with no downsides. So why not?
It's several orders of magnitude more likely to land you in the ER. I chose it because like grilling, it's done "about weekly" in the summer and most people don't think much of it.
Some people care about how reasonable a price seems even if they can easily afford something, because it's important to them to feel like they're getting a good deal or at least not getting taken advantage of. They're happy to accept some level of inconvenience or discomfort if the savings are big enough, even if they don't particularly need the money
Some people care more about getting exactly the right thing, even if the value proposition is weaker. They'll pay significantly more for apparently trivial differences, because they don't want to buy something they're not happy with; they're spending money anyway and why put up with something they don't want if they can afford something they do want?
Neither of these people are strictly unreasonable.
Lots of smart people get hooked onto extremely specific solutions that aren't even improvements.
I saw it in software development with many things (VIPER and SwiftUI both reduce development velocity compared to MVC and old-school Interface Builder); I've seen it with Musk trying to do tunnels even when roads would be cheaper and safer; there's also (infamously) Juicero; and in the UK in the 80s there was the Sinclair C5.
That said, is this really an example of that?
Myself, I barely use my electric barbecue, so I don't know the best way to clean things (it's not yet become dirty enough to bother cleaning). But I have seen the brushes he's complaining about, and I have not previously considered using tinfoil, so it's not a completely crazy idea that people might want a better brush.
I use an oven cleaner, spray it on, leave it for half an hour or overnight, and stuff just comes off when you wave a cleaning cloth at it. Highly noxious though, probably responsible for insect collapse etc.
I was about to link the same thing - excellent video. It was very insightful and a bit scary to see just how hard it was to get seemingly simple manufacturing done in the US now.
As recently as the 1980s, 70% of domestic clothing was made in the U.S., including by brands like Gap and JC Penny. Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s? Is the cheap, disposable, foreign made “fast fashion” we have today better?
If you watch [this Climate Town video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CkgCYPe68Q), then absolutely not, the disposable fast fashion we have today is not better. It's cheaper, but it's not higher quality, it requires trans-continental shipping, and it absolutely gets thrown away in ridiculous amounts.
Overall, it's worse in just about every metric other than "I can get this fun shirt online at 2am for $6."
Yes, if you forced 2025 americans to live like americans did in the 1980s there would be mass riots. Quality of life has gone up signicantly in many ways.
> Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s (compared to now)?
Nope.
I had plenty of hand me downs, but the majority of stuff I owned lasted for years and years, and I beat TF out of my clothes; so getting three or four years out of a pair of jeans was an achievement. I remember being constantly upset with my parents because when I would ask to get something new, they would tell me I had to wear out the stuff I already had first.
So at the time, paying more for a pair of Levi's or Nike's were worth it because they were built to last for years, not months like they are now. I was in college during the late 90's and even then I had three pairs of shoes that lasted my entire 4 years in college.
Back then stuff was durable and was meant to last for years. The "fast fashion" and "disposable fashion" trends essentially ended monopolies that brands had because kids weren't wearing stuff for more than a few months before discarding it or having it fall apart so they can wear the latest thing.
The textile industry in the US was synonymous with worker abuse and sweatshop conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire is the canonical example. Heavily dependent on immigrant labor.
Well into the 1990s, we made shirts and canned soup in Oregon, a place that had very few immigrants at the time. My wife's dad's family came here before the American revolution and he worked at a Heinz soup plant until NAFTA.
This is an answerable question: the median American household allocates 2-3% less of its household income to clothing in 2025 than it did in the 1980s. That's about $2000, for the median household.
But now both adults need to work to afford a detached house, and the labour participation rate of middle aged men is at an all time low. So, the answer is probably no. I'm sure lots of people would pay and extra $2k for clothing if housing, food, health care, and cars were at similar ratio to wages from the 1980s.
The housing cost thing is generally a canard (houses cost more, but people live in much larger houses than they did before --- cost burden changed, but so did preferences) but that's completely besides the point of whether people in the US do or don't benefit from more efficient clothing production. The jobs supporting inefficient clothing production were not holding up the economy.
I don't think clothing manufacturing is more efficient overseas, it is just cheaper labour. And it is cutting off income stream to lower-skill/intelligence workers in the "advanced" countries. You can see that in the number of working-age men who are no longer in the working population. Not everyone can get a phd and do "advanced, high-value, cutting edge work", any more than everyone could dunk like Michael Jordan if they just trained hard enough.
Also, the financial environment that created "cheap clothes" is also the environment that suppressed middle class wages, and drove the cost of housing up ridiculously. The two are linked. Pretending they aren't is just fantasizing.
Finally, while people are financing larger new houses, the old small houses and apartments are still ripping upward in price. It isn't like people can just choose to pay 1980's prices for 1980's housing stock. They are stuck paying much inflated 2025 pricing for 1980's housing stock.
Today it's also the desire of the customers, as pushed by social media, to follow a fashion changing almost every month. You didn't buy in the 80s stuff to be obsoleted in a few months. And because most of the people cannot afford every few months a new wardrobe made of (halfway) quality items, today's taste requires fast fashion garbage. So here we are, and we can get back to sanity only when we get rid of the influencer-led economy, good luck with that.
I'm amazed how much of the internet economy has turned out to be advertising. People complain about ads when they watch TV, but they'll go out of their way to spend hours watching ads on social media. And lots of kids dream about being an influencer, basically an advertiser, for their work.
One reason why I have no interest in going to facebook anymore is that the vast majority of people's social media activity on there nowadays is advertising... something. People showing their latest purchases, vacations, experiences, etc, all basically showing something they spent money on.
> the desire of the customers, as pushed by social media, to follow a fashion changing almost every month
A lot of it is top down, pushed onto customers by the industry. It's very hard to find timeless classics these days, we are given trendy bits that change every year to speed up obsolescence so they purposely look kitschy.
The desire of costumers is to go well beyond psychotic measures in order to save the tiniest amount of money on a purchase, rather than purchase domestic or locally produced for a bit more expensive. And that applies almost worldwide, not only to Americans.
Plenty of people would buy domestic goods if they were “a bit more expensive”. I’d say 5% on a large ticket item or 15-20% on a small item would be “a bit”.
Rarely is “made in the USA” just a bit more expensive in my experience.
For the very small ticket item you might even have to pay 100% more if you want to support your local community or your nation. Which should be fine, it's just a few dollars. For big ticket item 15-20% is acceptable. But people only think about their own purse.
Frequency matters. A few dollars extra / 100% extra on some small thing you buy a handful of times per year? Sure. If it’s a small ticket item you buy every day, most people aren’t going to be able to spend an extra thousand dollars per year on every single category of thing they buy; they just don’t have that kind of money.
If it's food then it's perfectly acceptable to spend an extra thousand dollars per year to support your community or nation. And your own health.
Except for food, I don't know what anybody would spend money on which isn't utilities, rent or gas. All of which you cannot choose between domestic or imported.
>Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s?
Yes. Ask some of your older relatives who remember that time how often they got hand-me-downs or patched old clothes up and compare it to the wardrobe of an average income American today.
This is not evidence for what you are saying. Handing down stuff, including clothes doesn't equate to poverty, sometimes the opposite. Better clothes also last longer. Check out the Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness. To take this a little literally, for much of my young adulthood, I wore my dad's old snow boots, not because I was poor, but because they were too well made, even at an old age, not to use.
Choosing to buy more, cheaper, clothes is as much an example of consumerism, as anything else.
That's not impoverished; it's just not wasteful. Half my kids' clothes are from Once Upon A Child, and most of my younger one's are hand-me-downs from the older one. For that matter, I'm wearing 20 year old gym shorts right now.
The fault is firmly with the consumer. People are addicted to cheap shit and consuming like crazy.
We had cheap clothes 10 years ago, then Shein and their ilk showed up with even cheaper clothes, and people flocked to them in droves.
And you can still buy good quality clothes, $120 shirts and $150 pants of good quality are readily available. But who wouldn't want to have 10 shirts and 5 pants instead?
Where can I find good quality (by this I mean durable) shirts for $120 and pants for $150? I’ve examined clothing in that price range and it’s virtually just as bad as $20 fast fashion: synthetic fibers mixed with cotton, poor stitching, loose weave on the fabric, etc.
If you have brand names for polo shirts, jeans, and chinos that are durable and long lasting, please share them because I can’t find them. I have yet to place a test order at Bill’s Khakis, I should do that.
So far (only six months in), Normal Brand (https://thenormalbrand.com/) has been good to me. Seems better quality, nothing I have is synthetics, well stitched.
This is correct. On average I go through a pair of jeans and a pair of hiking pants a year. 30 years ago I wore my dad's jeans quite a bit as a teenager, I remember even passing a driving test in them.
Perhaps, but if clothes are cheap, income is disposable and fashion is fast, why bother?
Other than jeans, shoes, socks and underwear, I haven't worn through or grown out of anything in forever, nothing to pass on really.
That said, the textile collection and resale industry is huge; stuff gets sorted, parts go to secondhand shops and charity, part gets baled up and exported, parts get recycled, etc. Same with electronics, it ends up in low-wage countries in Africa and south-Asia where there's thousands of people processing it.
Hand-me-downs are great. My youngest has some hand-me-downs he got from his older brother who got them from my neighbor’s son. Your kids don’t need new clothes.
There is a mattress company called Tuft and Needle. They started right at the early beginning of the mattress-in-a-box trend, but offered a unique product. For the first six months of operation, they made a Japanese-inspired cotton mattress filled with wool batting and was made in the USA. Before I had a chance to order one though, they had already pivoted away from that unique product (that doesn’t exist even today) and were dropshipping the same generic PU foam mattresses made in China as everyone else, with very little change to their website even. I was sad
T&N has such a great product but it was one of those things that failed because the innovation/disruption had no market.
I personally believe that the Japanese futon mat is the healthiest way to sleep, and after you get used to it even extra-firm mattresses are soupy and uncomfortable. Downside though is that it is very difficult to be comfortable on if you are significantly overweight, and it’s a pretty hard sell for couples unless they are both bought into the idea beforehand.
From my personal experience of sleeping on one for the last decade, not having a bed with a mattress on it is beyond the pale. I have a nice townhome that is well decorated. But when people see my bed, they assume I have a health issue, some kind of homelessness trauma, I’m a weeb (definitely not), or that I’m too poor to own a bed. They assume that they could never be comfortable on it, as a pillowy mattress on a high frame is associated in people’s minds with high luxury, angels with harps, royalty, and sexual intrigue. Sleeping on a mat on the floor is associated with camping, homelessness, destitution, and failure.
I think not only has manufacturing gone away, as well as the supply chain, but also choice. The moment you want something slightly different than what is sold in the typical big box stores, it's either non-existent, or costs a fortune.
We bought one and it lasted almost exactly 10 years. When it came time to replace it, I was also sad to discover that it was a short-lived item and they moved on to something else. We ended up going with Sleep Number because that was the firmest mattress I could find delivered to me in a reasonable amount of time.
I have. Definitely one of the better options out there. I recently got a mygreenmattress which are latex and made in Chicago. Still would like a wool one.
Everyone already knows this but the mattress industry is absurdly opaque and most reviews are fake
Textile manufacturing is the absolute bottom of the barrel. The town I grew up in (Manchester, NH) had the largest textile plant at the beginning of WWI but it was out of business by 1933. The industry moved first to the American South and by the time they'd paid the loans of the factories it moved again overseas.
Textiles are something that we cannot automate with current technology. We know how to automate plastics and metals. You can buy off the shelf injection molding machines (3d printers too, but they are rarely used in production). You can buy off the shelf machines to cut and form metals. Even things like steel mills are automated with custom equipment. But sewing two pieces of cloth together is beyond current automation, and thus there is a lot of manual labor.
In the US (and Europe) manual labor is expensive, so to make something you need a lot of automation. Once it is automated the next step is enough volume to pay for the automation (which needs expensive engineers).
Of course maybe this will change. Basic textiles were one of the first things we automated 300+ years ago, but we are only able to go from a bunch of cotton to a bolt of fabric today. As I write this making a shirt (or dog bed as this story) seems beyond what we can automate. Maybe a little investment will fix that, maybe not. I'm not an automation engineer so I can't tell you how solvable the problems are.
Robots that can fold anything might be useful in an industrial cleaning or textile manufacturing setting, but it would compete with humans who can do that in seconds. For towels, there's specialized machines (and have been for years): https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=towel+folding+m...
There are a lot of active research areas. So far progress hasn't been happening. I don't know if it is because the problem is unsolvable (likely), or we are not investing enough into it to solve them (also likely).
towel folding doesn't seem like a step towards automating clothing, any more than building a tall ladder is a step towards ladders tall enough to reach the moon. Anyway https://ruthtillman.com/post/all-clothing-is-handmade/
Getting computer vision and physics models to correctly handle fabric is the hard part of automating what's left in textiles.
Everything else is ultimately just inclined planes and a power rod pulling on levers, which is the stuff that was solved with the Jacquard machine and a whole industry of competing models of sewing machine before we even had electricity let alone electric servos.
It's possibly already changing? 3D-knitting (of shoe uppers is what I have noticed) can make some sewing redundant. How far that can be taken remains to be seen.
Textile manufacturing is basically just a derivative of electricity and labor costs. There isn't much more too it, and per sq meter, it's extremely cheap to ship product around the world.
Textile mills in Bangladesh are able to pay $0.025 US cents per kwh, and factory laborers can be employed for about $150 a month. From their main port to the US west coast, when sent by container ship, costs about $0.10 per sq m. There is no universe where anyone else can compete. It's not within America's comparative advantage anymore.
It's wild to me how this movement wants to bring back all of the lowest paid, least value add, lowest skill jobs back but is totally ok with shipping highly paid, highest value add, highest skill jobs off to India. I understand that it's all a grift, the marks only care about the former jobs, and those jobs are never actually coming back, but still.
There are countries besides USA and China. It was just terrible geopolitics decision for US to depend on 1 country for imports instead of keeping the power balance between countries of the world.
While true, that know-how is misleading. There is a lot of know-how in the US - the US makes more than every before, which means the know-how is still here! It is just focused on the things we already make and do well on, so often you can't get at it.
As someone who works in US manufacturing, let me qualify that by saying "There is a lot of know-how in senior citizens in the US". I really cannot overstate how me, a guy in his late 30's, is consistently the youngest engineer by decades when doing site visits.
Where I work there is a good mix of all ages. Part of that is we got burned far enough back that all the "senior citizens" retired and we were forced to suddenly replace them and the fallout is we changed our practices to ensure there is a mix of ages so that everyone has mentors and time to learn from mistakes.
I just don't know how to get the above into management studies that are taught in business school - there seems to be a lack of interest in long term expertise in those circles.
There is a lot of automation. What used to be done by 2000 men (sexism intended) in 1950 is now done by 150 people. Of course parts come from all over, and go to all over so it is really had to agree on a measure, but there is a lot done in the US.
(Yes, this video is framed and has Italian subtitles, but all the others I found do weird things with panning and clipping to evade censorship filters, and I believe that his body language is an important part of the delivery.)
I have to assume it wasn't a concerted effort to depend mostly on China for imports. Companies are each making the best financial decision for themselves and China turned out to be the more competitive option most of the them.
China was an attractive source for the same reason vietnam and india are today. Large, young, disciplined, literate and organized population with low wages and an accomodating political elite.
All currencies are manipulated. It's a meaningless statement.
> All currencies are manipulated. It's a meaningless statement.
That's probably (mostly) true today, but it wasn't always the case and it doesn't have to be that way. More importantly, just because most countries manipulate their currencies doesn't mean its meaningless to take issue with the practice or to notice when one country does it more aggressively than others.
Nobody does it more aggressively or less aggressively. It's done to an "agreed" upon level. Whether it is china, india, eu, japan, etc, every country pretty much sets the range. It's not like it is a secret. It's out in the open. Just like interest rates.
Okay, those are good points, but I don't think the statement is meaningless. China, as I think most understand, deliberately pumped RMB into the market in a manner that made its resources available to foreign markets by trading a capital account deficit for a trade surplus. It's literally the first thing discussed in the RMB wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi.
Which is a completely fair play in a globalist society when you're a nation with an outstanding capital surplus. The US did this for centuries by exporting the dollar as a reserve currency, up until the gold standard ended and the value of the dollar as fiat started deteriorating.
Imperial economics 101, really. Offer stability in one hand and demand compensation with the other.
Currency debasement is more monetary policy than fiscal policy I think. Either way I didn't read the GP comment as saying China can't do that, just that doing so is what gave them an edge long enough to gobble up a lot of our trade.
The same reason a sovereign state can't act unilaterally in any domain -- diplomacy. If your actions affect another (or even just inspire interest) then the other party may make decisions which affect your country.
What we see is exactly what Uber and Lyft effectively did. China subsidized manufacturing at the cost of their citizens, but in doing so destroyed much of the competition, giving them a monopoly like position in industrial manufacturing cemented by a mastery of economies of scale, which can now be used to exert global power.
Any country which did not abuse their citizens or subsidize their businesses became noncompetitive.
And why would you use old school taxis when uber/lyft were offering $5 rides in a 7x7mile area, and how could old taxi companies compete when they are forced to compete with people not bound by market forces?
Right, that's the difference between a centralised economy and a free market. These thin-vieled calls for a centralised, planned economy (people of my generation had another word for it) are getting more common and in more places.
Advocating for a centralised economy isn't actually common on the left. Most people advocate for Nordic inspired democratic socialism or social democracy. A fair number advocate for various forms of anarchism (e.g. worker owned collectives).
Advocates for a Soviet style centralised economy exist, but they aren't common.
Yet the left (democratic party) nominated a self-avowed socialist for the next NYC mayoral race. One who literally talks about seizing the means of production and opening city-owned groceries that won't have to pay rent. Let's see how it goes.
Are we to assume that because governments run liquor stores any other industry is fair game as well.
The more simple question in my opinion is whether state run liquor stores are an overreach. The industry is already heavily regulated as it is, state stores sure seems like anticompetitive behavior.
Do you think all the people saying capitalism is the problem are advocating Nordic-style Social Democracy (with capitalism intact but regulated)? Is that why they keep quoting Marx?
The Marxist critique of capitalism (the specific real world system dominant in the deceloped West at the time Marx wrote) is quite popular among people whose end goal is not Leninist state capitalism.
Marx himself, prescriptively, wasn’t all to specific beyond the distant end-goal stateless system and the immediate next steps in contemporary states (particularly, in terms of a detailed agenda, Germany, but he made some commentary on some steps other places.) But even where he was, plenty of people that share his critique of capitalism either don’t see his intermediate term prescriptions as realistic areas of concern for organizing current effort, or don't see them as mevessarily desirable at all.
You have missed something: It's not feasible to compete with China on price and availability, compared to any other country. Challenge: Try designing something, and figuring out how to get the parts. Or, try to have a custom circuit board made. You will find the difficulty goes way up for countries that aren't China.
If that isn't enough, imagine you are choosing Hard mode by sourcing non-China, and your competition chose Easy mode.
I haven’t quoted Aisler, but I did talk to three or four US-based PCB/PCBA houses for a hobby project I was working on that ended up selling around 100 units. The US houses were 20-50x JLC/PCBWay at prototype volume and 10-25x at low volume.
Their proto assembly turn times were only a day better. Unless something has to be done in the US for some specific reason (export controls or contractual reasons), I don’t see how to justify doing it on-shore.
I live in EU and like the idea, both as support for local economy and lower environment impact from shipping.
I've tried aisler instead of jlc/pcbway twice and I regret both orders. For more money I got the boards later, of worse quality and with bad customer support experience when one of my orders was lost.
Sorry but they simply are not anywhere close to the chinese options.
Good for him to get the money. I skip all these with sponsorblock, can't trust them to give honest review. Nobody should either.
On the other hand if I already know I want to use a product I search for it on youtube and if I find a video with coupon in the description from a channel I know (or least seems decent) I use it. Make the advertisers think it works and pay more, and I get a discount.
Or OshPark out of Oregon, USA. If you need kiting and assembly of the board there are plenty of board houses on the West Coast that will do it for you.
OshPark is fine for bare PCB, but as you point out, they don't do assembly. What does it cost to get a prototype or small production run of a smallish, assembled PCB using OshPark + one of the West coast board houses?
I want what you say to be true, but I'm suspicious, unless something has changed recently. My research indicates unless you're looking at 10k+ quantity, it will cost OOM more than Shenzhen. But, I'm not familiar with the specific services you mention.
Mexico has been cheaper for a while now. My understanding is that shipping from China was subsidized somehow and that's a big part of why it's still cheaper overall.
I get that this is an example, but I'd like to see other examples. An expensive niche dog bed, niche beverage, etc doesn't seem very representative of the economy. If it is, that's concerning.
These are the sorts of things small companies can actually make and be successful making.
Are they representative of the economy as a whole? Maybe not - the majority of that spend is going to go towards housing (~35%), transportation (~17%), basic food (~13%), and (somewhat surprisingly) insurance/pensions (~12.5%). Those are all incredibly competitive.
High barrier to entry, legally challenging (lots of bureaucratic red tape and hoops), already dominated by large companies with economy of scale in their favor.
So that essentially leaves niche, high margin, products as the ONLY products a small company can competitively make.
So it you want to be a small company selling a physical item... this is the market you tend to play within. You make an expensive niche/luxury product with a limited appeal but higher margins.
We already get plenty of news about how the large corporations say they are going to respond (prices will go up).
And on the third hand, those are things that you cannot buy off the shelf machines to automate. Sewing is an active area of research, but it still needs as much labor as in 1930. Beverage packing is automated but a lot of it is custom machines so you need a lot of up front money. (though it appears their limits were containers - al is made in the US so I'm surprised they cannot order the alloy they need).
It's probably material cost and not the actual manufacturing. The aluminum smelting industry in the US has been in decline (and for other metals too). It was also only 4 cents per can, a 1% increase in end unit price. But how it it affecting the products that can be made with off the shelf machines? How about in sectors other than consumer discretionary, like consumer staples?
I'm just saying, every single example is a consumer discretionary item. Maybe they could pick some examples from other sectors. We already know consumer discretionary spending is a weak sector and will get weaker with tariffs.
That's my thinking as well, these are items where if they cross a certain price point consumers can easily opt to just not get them. They aren't even really luxury items, they are unnecessary luxury items.
A better example I've seen is machinery, like construction equipment. Some contractor on YouTube points out that a Chinese skid steer is every bit as capable as a US made, but that 25 - 33% of the price. If he had to buy US made equipment he wouldn't have a business.
Yes but they are bullshit products. Dog beds? A dog is happy with an old blanket. "Stress-reducing carbonated beverages" no comment. A $65 paper day planner?
These are things that nobody needs. They are the poster children for mindless consumerism, feasible only because they are made in overseas sweatshops.
It's so frustrating that policies to subsidized growth in a targeted way (paid for by our progressive tax system) are ignored and we're stuck with these wide impact regressive policies. As described they're poor policy, and as implemented they're simply a tool for shake downs.
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.
One 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.
Cost 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?
Not 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.
What 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.
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:
Fortunately, 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”
You 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
> 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.
>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
It 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.
The 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.
Just 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").
All 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.
>“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.
The 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
It’s not just too expensive. We need to seriously ask ourselves do we want too, at all, even?
My dad worked in a steel mill all his life so that me and my siblings didn’t have to. We’re he and the other guys at the plant proud of their work? Absolutely. Does nearly everyone wish their kids would do something else? Absolutely.
Industrialism has ipso facto become the soup du jour for thr agrarian myth. The reality is that it’s long, hard, relentless, menial labor. It’s also terrible for just living in general. My dad basically turned the lights off on a steel plant. That was 20 years ago and the land it was on will be unusable for even landfills for another 100 years. It was on a river and the river still smells like chemicals, and fish routinely die when passing through that area due to chemical runoff from the land.
So, I’m sorry, why do we want that here (let alone anywhere)?
I’m not saying that I don’t complain about my work from home job or that there aren’t negative effects but good luck weighing me getting carpal tunnel or taking anxiety meds to the stuff that industrial labor does to your body and our living environments.
>We’re he and the other guys at the plant proud of their work? Absolutely. Does nearly everyone wish their kids would do something else? Absolutely.
Most office work is not terribly satisfying. It turns out that work is work. And while working in AC with a coffee maker is "better" than sweating it out over a crucible, the drudgery is the same.
I spent some time with a large group of teenagers at a summer camp where the kids do a lot of the work, including activity scheduling and such. I worked in the cafeteria kitchen, which was hot, hard work. But the kids that were doing the administration kept coming over to offer to help: mop, sweep, serve food, whatever. I tried to take a mop bucket away from one of them, and she said "I've been staring at spreadsheets all day, I want to do something."
It's not 1850 anymore; we don't have to have industry be dehumanizing quasi-slave labor. If we decide to, we can make things in America again without Triangle Shirtwaist-style horrors.
You’re not wrong on most of your points - and I’m not denying the value of hard work. And I’m also well aware of the drudgery of office work.
That said, have you worked in the kind of factory that will come back? I did a summer stint at my dad’s steel mill as a 19 year old. I’m proud of that summer but that work took a lot of me. When other friends were out doing things, I was too exhausted to hang out. The money wasn’t great either. And that’s a microcosm of most of those older worker’s lives. Many drank heavily. I’m not bemoaning them at all or their work.
I’m just saying that the early 2000s wasn’t the 1850s either.
I don’t deny there’s a better life than office work but let’s not gloss over the kind of hard - as in, really hard - labor that industrialization requires.
Absolutely it's hard work, and dangerous too. In the case of steel, in the early 2000s they would be competing more or less heads-up with foreign steelmakers--mostly Chinese--and that puts a kind of pressure on working conditions.
Most people wouldn't mind hard work if it's rewarded with home and family. It's the idea that we have to work in a sweatshop and live alone in a fifth floor walkup that makes people pause. To avoid that situation isn't easy, there are a ton of factors involved, but it is possible. In the end, a country that doesn't make things is a country beholden to others.
Let's not gloss over the other part of it too though. Not everyone is smart enough to be a doctor or a lawyer, or even a nurse or a paralegal, and those people need jobs too. It shouldn't be backbreaking soul crushing work, but they do need jobs.
One of my hopes is that we can use our environmental and safety regime to do the industrial stuff in a more humane manner. Outsourcing everything to "somewhere else" only moved the externalities to another country. But people still get hurt.
Totally agree but is more environmentally friendly and more humane part of the current political rhetoric?
And absolutely outsourcing to somewhere else hurts somewhere else. But let’s be realistic: the kind of drastic change that would require no one getting hurt is not in the American discourse.
Have you been to a current US factory? All the big-company ones I've been to have safety and environmental compliance departments focused on zero-injuries and zero-environmental incidents.
Looking at what was done in the early to mid-1900's isn't a good guide to the current state of things. We've learned a bunch since then.
Define current. My dad turned the lights off on one factory as recently as 2018, a factory that Trump visited and bragged about saving (it wasn’t saved).
It’s not the same as factories in the 1989s true, but people are still missing fingers or limbs as a result of the work. Not only that but the resentment between workers and management remains extremely antagonistic.
We really need to stop glossing over the dangers of industrial work. It’s not a triangle shirtwaist fire but it’s not some kind of imaginary industrial utopia of pristine machinery.
> So, I’m sorry, why do we want that here (let alone anywhere)?
To the second question, not everything in the modern world is going to be clean and green. If you want things like steel, plastic, computers, etc. there's gonna be some dirty manufacturing involved. No way around it.
To the first, ideally every country wants some amount of self-sufficiency, or at the very least, some amount of redundancy. Remember how badly the world's pants got pulled down during Covid?
And finally -- frankly, not everyone is capable of more than unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Supply-chain redundancy with a side-effect of employing people who might otherwise have very little in the way of employment prospects? That's a good thing!
Why was the steel mill producing a lot of chemical pollution?
Steel makes a lot of mill scale and slag, but those are generally inert. It’s a physically dirty process, but not a chemically dirty one, unless I’m missing something?
And certainly nothing I’m aware of there would make it unsuitable for even landfill.
I looked up the EPA report for the brownsite. It listed arsenic, barium, multiple chromium compounds, 2,4-dimethylphenol ethylbenzen lead, 4-methyl-2-pentanone, methlyene chloride, naphthalene, toluene, and xylene at hazardous levels. It also mentions steel, zinc, and nickel dust and fumes.
I do know that I drove by the old site a few years ago, and you can see the outlines of not just the buildings but the machinery because the dirt is a different color, and there's either no or very little grass or just stubborn weeds growing in those areas.
A lot of steel is coated with grease or oil to avoid rusting. Just by nature of working with it you also need solvents to remove it. The degreasers of the past were magically powerful and environmentally catastrophic. Never mind all the oil/grease used.
> The reality is that it’s long, hard, relentless, menial labor.
Which is perfectly fine to do for some time if the salary is great. Which it should be, considering the high productivity output from those kind of jobs.
Steel mill workers of your dad's generation had a much higher living standard and much more money than service or office workers of today's young generation.
Young people are supposed to work hard and build up their wealth so that they can change to a less taxing job when it's time to make a family. Not waste their time in academic institutions for 20 years and then work for a low salary.
> had a much higher living standard and much more money than service or office workers
I don't see how you could say this with a straight face. We know at this point that factory jobs inflict physical damage to the body, a priceless artifact that no wage could replenish. I find it difficult to address your last paragraph as it's just not based in reality. Anecdotally, many people I know who take an hourly wage at factories never shift elsewhere. There is no waiting, and often they will start their families younger than their salarymen equivalent, 30 years ago or now. Perhaps they failed by your standards?
Not unexpected that people would react strongly against any mention of physical labour on this forum – and immediately take a hostile attitude.
I've done my fair share of these kind of jobs in my life and my body is great. You can do it for some years while you are young. Yes – if you do the same job your entire life you will destroy your body. Especially if you do not take care to listen to it and adapt how you work and how you exercise.
Young people should work hard and be paid well, that's how a healthy economy functions. Not by having manufacturing based on foreign slave labour.
Anecdotally, I know many people who started on the ground floor and then moved on to management or sales with experience. Or switched jobs and careers. People switch jobs all the time, staying at the same post for life is mostly a thing of the past.
It's interesting to me that there was already a manufacturing facility in the US that could readily make something as random as a memory foam dog bed on short notice, even if somewhat more expensively.
I had though all such simple things had been completely outsourced to China or Vietnam or somewhere. That does imply if that if manufacturing economies of scale can be returned to the US, the price could become competitive, even for low value-added products like this.
Volume of the material and volume of the demand for the material, probably.
The foam for the beds is extremely compact when vacuum sealed, and is used in tons of other products.
The standard fabric cover is also probably produced in massive quantities for other products, and also folds down to be quite compact.
Faux fur is basically only used in blankets, pillow and toy linings, and depending on how dense the "fur" is, may add quite a bit more volume (a bigger problem if shipped to the US from a separate supplier than the foam).
With that said, $100 does seem rather steep for the cover. I'm assuming they had to use a specialty version to make it more rugged than the cheaper stuff used for other products to be pet friendly.
Faux fur retail costs 20-45 dollars a yard and requires a multithread overlock machine. Liner fabric costs 1-4 dollars a yard and requires less skill and a plain (single stitch) machine. Obviously they will be paying wholesale prices but the cost difference remains. The real difference in the costs between China and the US is the labour. Americans want cheap prices at the store but a living wage at their job. China is the capital of slave labour and Americans are supporting it with their wallets.
Right now, as for the last century, the USA manufactures identity and all the products that make you feel like YOU. It used to be Levis and Coca-Cola, now it is all the premier tech Hacker News places value FAANG+ (minus TikTok). If the USA continues inventing identity, those identities should be grounded in merchandise only made in the USA.
People point to China's 'cheap labor' but this downplays why this is only possible under its political system and the tremendous human cost involved.
Rather the framing shouldn't be whether its too expensive or cheap but why so many people are willing to arbitrage industrial scale abuse of human labor only possible under an authoritarian regime and then virtue signal about anything else.
Even more puzzling to me is why nobody is making the connection between the dilution of US dollar value via exporting inflation that props up totalitarian regimes and its growing reliance on it to make things its people want to feel they are above others.
They tried Made in the US but customers found it too morally expensive to care as to why making it outside the US is cheaper especially in China.
> industrial scale abuse of human labor only possible under an authoritarian regime
Taylorism definitely originated in the US, and the modern Amazon's worker-related practices (in the US) are direct descendants of it. So while democratic regime makes industrial-scale abuse of human labour harder, it absolutely doesn't preclude it.
None of the three businesses reported actually even build one prototype in the US and the arithmetic doesn't work out for the last example but a lawsuit has been filed.
I think, the issue is about producing the same stuff people already buy overseas.
Can you make a shirt for 10 cents in the USA? Probably, if you get innovative on automation and remove most human labour you might get there in a few years or a decade, but not tomorrow.
If you can get creative with new solutions those products solve, you might get a foot into the door.
What does the shirt solve for a customer? Could there be a (better) alternative that could be built in the USA?
Once you produce everything for 10c locally without human labor, those unemployed human laborers won't buy your 10c thing because they are unemployed. You need more to bring back the production: bring back the employment as well.
There is plenty of employment in the US. What there isn't in the US is employees for someone wanting to pay less than $12/hour - and to get that low you need to find a small rural town in the middle of nowhere with nobody else paying, which in turn means you can only get at most 200 low wage employees in your factory, and you are risking someone else moving in offering more pay. Or you can go to China and pay much less (I don't know wages in China, but I'd guess under $5/hour), or some other poor country and you can pay $1/hour.
Are you arguing against the automation here? Because if so it seems we could bring back a lot of employment by simply getting rid of machines, but would we really be better off? Is it better for humans to spend their short lives working as telephone operator, knowing it an entirely pointless job?
If you're not arguing against automation then I think we need to think about what happens when we expand your timeline a little. Are there really enough 'employment' jobs that can't be automated for billions of humans of different intelligence/physical abilities?
With the automation expanded to the extremes it becomes obvious that you need a new system, society, you name it, a new way of setting up everything. It's not that humans love being a phone operator or creating yet another GUI, but they definitely love to be able to eat. And also love to have a purpose in life. I currently don't see much happening along those lines.
All the economic dimwits (both on the left and right) who constantly harp that real wages have been falling, don't take into account the steep fall in prices of consumer goods due to offshoring.
Ofc. this does mean that US becomes the world's "bitch" eventually following the economics of things, but the alternative is essentially becoming Soviet Union or Argentina.
Probably the most annoying thing about conversations on this topic is peoples ignorance or inability to acknowledge the insane availability of so much stuff are such low prices.
A typical persons load out went from personal possessions that could fit in a microwave sized box to personal possessions that overflow the bedroom and living room of their apartment.
People complaining about real wages are for the most part just out of date. Your data shows about a 0.9% growth compounded per year over the last 10 years - and a 0.17% growth compounded per year over the 35 years before that. The numbers were effectively stagnant for my entire childhood and adolescence. (I'm Canadian, but I imagine the picture has the same basic shape here.)
> don't take into account the steep fall in prices of consumer goods due to offshoring.
The definition of "real wages" takes this into account - because they are indexed by the consumer price index, which tracks the prices of consumer goods.
Some goods have dramatically fallen in price (especially if one takes the so-called "hedonic adjustments" into consideration, i.e. attempts to price increasingly more powerful computers and visually impressive TV displays on a continuous spectrum over time). Others have dramatically risen. "Consumer goods" include things like food (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumer-goods.asp), and certainly cars have also been more expensive of late.
The cost of, say, housing is also clearly not experiencing a "steep fall due to offshoring".
I don't really seen any benefit from buying American. The entire point of being capitalist is to let the market solve these issues, and the market has. I don't have any more loyalty to Americans than to any other people on earth, and I think that impulse is rather odd.
The market has not decided on anything; to employ Americans, you have to pay huge amounts of extra taxes and provide all sorts of legally mandated protections, and to operate an American business, you have to follow all sorts of operational and environmental laws that foreigners don't have to follow. Yet they're allowed to sell their goods in the same venues as Americans.
If there are two ice cream vendors at the park, and the park charges one ice cream vendor a $350/day license and the other one doesn't have to license itself at all, has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?
> has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?
I think recently we've decided it does? Look at Uber versus licensed taxis, Airbnb versus licensed and inspect B&Bs, and many more.
I get what you're saying though, and if there was the will for it then the unlicensed business would be fined such that it would pay more in fines than the cost of a license. It just seems to be going the opposite way.
> If there are two ice cream vendors at the park, and the park charges one ice cream vendor a $350/day license and the other one doesn't have to license itself at all, has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?
I don't know about "superior", but they're certainly going to sell more ice cream.
It has nothing to do with how much ice cream they sell. You cannot determine who would sell more ice cream based on who pays a license fee and who doesn't. What you can say is that the profits from the licensed vendor will be lower because of higher operating costs if they sell the same amount.
A better example would be one ice cream vendor uses ethically sourced milk and pays all it's workers a solid living wage with benefits, effectively functioning as an extra $350/day expense. The other vendor uses minimum wage labor and factory farm milk.
>has the "market" decided that the [unethical] business is superior
Yes, because anyone half paying attention on the ground instead of scrolling self-righteous internet content all day knows that price is actually king above all else.
$18 ethical ice cream cones taste great, but not as great as $4 ice cream cones.
To ground this in reality, look at the insane rise of Shein for clothes.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I think we're making the same point, namely that if one business operates American-style and the other business operates third-world style, the third-world style business will win on price every time, making it incredibly, prohibitively difficult to operate "American-style" at scale.
America itself operated "third-world style" for centuries.
I like supporting my local community - so I guess I don't have much loyalty to a company in Arkansas but I do have loyalty to a company down the street or a town over.
I do see benefit from not buying from China. China is making geopolitical moves that I do not like and suspect will result in war in the future. They are making moving to take Taiwan. They are clearly supporting Russia against Ukraine.
Nobody is perfect, and I won't defend the many dumb things the US has done over the years. Some of them I opposed at the time, some of them on hindsight I now wish I had, but I didn't realize.
However when considering things, we don't know what might have been. Some of the dumb things were the best (at least close to best) among many bad options. As a large powerful country the US often doesn't get the choice of sitting out - those who hate "freedom" are forced to attack us either directly or indirectly since we are standing in the way of their goals, and we are taking those attacks for Sweden allowing you to face less of those bad choices (not none - since Sweden also generally stands for freedom you also face some of those attacks)
All you can do is look at the overall situation. I have concluded that China is worse for the world than the US. However I will not claim perfection. There are things I know of about Sweden that I believe would make the world worse if your country gets it way, but overall Sweden is on the right side and so I generally support them. (you may or may not support your country in those things)
I do what I can to make my country better, but I'm one vote and often outvoted. I'm not a very good writer so I rarely convince anyone of a better way. I have more than once found myself on the wrong side of an issue, and been forced to change my mind to my regret. Which is to say I'm human and trying my best. Hopefully you can be the same and make the world better.
Well, that's your prerogative. I don't like the way most states behave (very much including our own warmongering state), but I'll be damned if this alters where I buy basic goods and services.
If America wanted my money, it wouldn't behave in such a blatantly hypocritical manner. Either we're a free-market society or we're going to take care of each other. We've prioritized crying over business owners for decades while letting people go homeless. Fuck those businesses; where were they when the homeless needed advocacy? They chose to spend their time trying to complain about society rather than contributing to it.
I feel like you're misdiagnosing the problem. One of the key ways in which we've been prioritizing business owners for decades is uncritically accepting their arguments for free trade.
"They tried Made in the USA - it was too expensive for their customers"
Did they (the companies profiled in the article) actually try it
Or did they investigate the possibility of trying it
Did customers have an oportunity to determine it was too expensive
Or did these businesses make that determination themselves
NB. I am not suggesting their determination was incorrect. I am only highlighting how the title refers to something that did not actually happen. A more accurate title might be something like
They considered Made in the USA - they determined it would be too expensive for their customers
In addition to giving free advertising to companies mentioned in the article that are _not_ producing prodducts "Made in the USA", the article could also mention some companies that _are_ producing products "Made in the USA"
One has to wonder how the United States survived before the rise of Asian manufacturing... As recently as the 1980s we had full computers made in the US.
We can get it back, at least the more interesting parts of it. If this movement was being sponsored by another political party, as it used to be the case, we would see a complete inversion of the journalists defending and criticizing it.
The thing about the current movement that draws criticism, I believe, is the wildly unrealistic expectations. The party in question has treated bringing back manufacturing, even that which is skilled and requires large quantities of highly specialized machinery and supply chains and trained workers to supply it, as if it’s something you can flip on like a light switch.
If you factor in building factories, building supply chains, training workers, and regaining lost institutional/tribal knowledge, you’re looking at a monstrously expensive endeavor that’s going to take a long time. Probably at least a decade end-to-end, shorter in some fields and longer than others. No level of tariffs or overconfident statements on social media can change this reality.
And as a cherry on top, companies are supposed to set this all back up without help from the government, despite it being so expensive and time consuming to do so, and despite Chinese manufacturing having benefited immensely from its government pouring vast sums into bolstering its manufacturing capabilities to reach its present position. What corporate leadership is going to see any of that as reasonable or remotely a good deal? They’re more likely to play up investments they’d already planned to make during the previous administration and wait for another dice roll come next election.
TLDR it can happen, but not on a short timeline and not without government incentives to smooth over the massive costs of bring it back.
If you look at the income curve of household income over the last 100 years, you will see that the curve went from clumped around $60k to flattened and rolled out extending up to hundreds of thousands.
Put simply, back in the day everyone earned pretty similar pay. Nowadays pay is much more spread out and lots more families make way more money than they would have 40 years ago. The market really loves these high earning households (not billionairs, I mean $100k+) and naturally gravitates towards catering to them. The $60k households get left out.
IIRC some companies have tried this. The problem is that the stuff made in China is as good, sometimes better, than the stuff that's made in America but costs 4x more. So, revealed preferences shocker: Nobody buys the so-called "Premium" line. You need a better reason to charge more money.
Just an anecdote but as someone who has gone out of their way to buy American as much as I possibly can for many years I’ve found that to be true either never or so rarely I can’t remember. Quality of American products has not been an issue whatsoever, usually quite the opposite.
It’s more about the price than quality. When you can make products that are just as good (outside of some niche areas) in China/etc. for a proportion of the cost there is very little reason not to do that unless you have no competition.
There are some premium brands that can (partially) pull it off like KitchenAid but that’s an exception.
My perspective is that consumers have come to feel that price is far more important than quality whereas I feel exactly the opposite. I take pride in the things I make for a living and I prefer to be surrounded by products of a similar ethos. I buy products to solve a problem and I want the problem optimally solved. In the cases when the quality is a toss up I don’t mind paying a premium to support our domestic economy.
The "Made in America" range is probably mostly made in China too, but with just enough assembly to be able to declare that it isn't, sold with a higher profit to collect the consumer surplus from less price sensitive customers.
Perhaps some people lie, but the "Made in America" designation is specifically regulated by the FTC (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/complying-ma...), and unlike similar regulations in other countries it doesn't permit these kind of final assembly shenanigans. The entire thing has to be made end-to-end in the US with negligible foreign input. One specific example they list is a lamp with an imported base; even though the base is neither a functional component nor a large amount of the cost, the manufacturer may not claim that the lamp as a whole is American-made.
I've actually seen arguments that this is so strong it loops back around to discouraging American manufacturing. Is there any "Made in America" loving consumer who wouldn't be happy to buy that lamp?
True, I saw a bunch of fiber optic components assembled in America that bypassed tariffs (2016-2017 era) where obviously the hard part had been done somewhere overseas. Wasn't even about the Made in America branding.
Same for ie Switzerland. You have these Victorinox and Wengen knives which are proper tourist souvenirs (on top of being fine little knives). Most of them is done in neighboring countries, and only final assembly is done in the country to pass "Made in Switzerland".
Fine products but shady behavior to say the least.
Subsidize capability upkeep - as in if you need it, you still have trained machinists, specialists and retoolable machinery in storage, to copy and buildup a capability at scale.
The question is why do this though? This is basically a defense economics argument. If there's no adversarial conflict, then who cares where something is made?
A tsunami once wiped out the entire world's production capacity for spinning hard drives. Efficiency is always the enemy of robustness, and war is only one kind of disaster. And the way the world is going, adversarial conflict seems to be the new normal.
I can't believe you mentioned the tsunami. It came right after the offshoring happened for unnamed company my father worked for, I'll never forget it, it couldn't have been worse timing. All the investment POOF.
If the latest review of the "end of history" shows one thing- there is always adversarial minds at work. The whole "free world" mindset has collapsed in on itself the moment the us withdrew into isolationism. The world out there, is run by the old landempires gobbling up neighbors again. No progress has been made and to defend against barbaric adversaries, one must keep dependency on them low.
There always is a bill - and business is helping the enemies of liberty to prepare. They are not interested in peaceful coexistence, quite contrary, the conflict is a carrying pillar to upkeep societal/tribal structural integrity. And war & peace is a defector game- only one needs to defect to put the others in the same position as the defector. So "business as usual" with non-free block aligned nations- will always be long-term collusion with the enemy.
> If there's no adversarial conflict, then who cares where something is made?
I think you just answered your question by yourself without realizing: the signs are that an adversarial conflict might come up - so be prepared for it.
That's presuming that such a conflict would be fought as the sort of industrial war that WW1 and WW2 were. But there's little evidence that's the case: the lead times on modern weapons systems are enormous, and the attrition rate of hardware is enormous too (i.e. consider that the Javelin can put a tank out of action permanently).
It is an unproven criteria that it is reasonable or possible to expect to produce the munitions and equipment for a conflict during the conflict if it's the sort of near-peer thing people usually cite for this - i.e. rather you go to war with what you have, and you're unlikely to rebuild that advantage in time if you don't win then.
Which is the point: localizing a bunch of industries on that basis may not make any sense, compared to simply stockpiling from the cheapest accreditable sources.
It took decades to gut American consumer manufacturing. Anyone who thinks it can be brought back without pain is deluded. But nevertheless, it’s worth that pain.
As the Chinese are well aware, every time in history a great financial power and a great industrial power have come into conflict, the industrial power wins.
I’ve often wondered about PPP and why China is cheaper. Deepseek provided interesting answers, and it’s nothing to do with pollution or cheap labour. Turns out socialist policies, investing in free markets, cheap education, open competition, public infrastructure result in competitive manufacturing.
Decades of private equity/vulture capital shipping overseas has allowed for other countries to overtake the USA.
It all boils down to awful pseudoscience pushed by Reaganomics/trickle down economic theory. This pseudoscience has been used to write policy in this country which has only benefited the ultra wealthy.
Right now, there's nearly a 100% chance any "Made in USA" brand is a grift, by direct members of the grifting party. I'm for the idea, done correctly. I'm completely against it in it's current form. They're taking your money rubes. If you want the real thing, you're going to have to help fix the country instead of falling for basic scams, in all areas of life.
I don't think the American small business owners are interested in making bullshit. What you need to do is fully destroy the middle class until you've got an air gapped lower class bent to your will building human doggy beds.
>
Make things that empower people and give them the ability to be class-fluid. That's what the world really needs, after all.
The problem is: by the way you were raised, you have become deeply brainwashed into the social norms of your class for decades. Becoming class-fluid means getting free of this whole brainwashing, and then get a brainwashing for your destination social class. This also implies that you have to give up all your friends (if you keep them, they will back-brainwash you into your old habits; additionally, by the reprogramming these old friends will be unable to get on with you anymore because you have become a "different person" for them).
Wow! You just articulated a feeling I have had but could not put my finger on it until I read that. I grew up in a blue-collar Midwest US city that was decimated by the loss of domestic manufacturing. I went to college and got a CS degree and went on to enjoy 2+ decades of the tech boom and was paid well for it. Thus, allowing me and my family move into a different class i.e. white collar, educated, entrepreneurial, class-fluid. But now at middle age I don’t recognize any of my friends from the “old” neighborhood as I have changed so much, we don’t really know each other anymore. Our views on many things are so different we might as well be strangers. But due to being raised in that blue-collar environment my thoughts and ideas sometimes don’t mesh with the new class of people I find myself socializing with now. Which leaves me in some kind of limbo. I don’t fit in with the people from my past, but I don’t fit in with the people of my present.
Or people making doggy beds and going home to a 3000sq.ft home on a 1/2 acre with a stay at home mom and 3 kids.
We just need to accept that everyone with a dog will need to purchase an $800 bed for their dog. Or since that is obviously untenable, charge billionaires $8 million to buy a bed for their dog.
At this point you might be unsure if this is sarcasm or not. Which is pretty telling about the state of things.
In my opinion, the following are additional factors that are often overlooked when discussing the competitiveness of USA manufacturing:
1) OSHA - if you have more than 10 employees, you're subject to OSHA regulations. Do other countries have comparable regulations for keeping their workers safe and healthy?
2) Decline of shop classes - shop/industrial classes used to be widespread in high schools. Not as much these days. Why?
3) Litigious society - our society is quick to sue and the legal standard used in civil trials is "more likely than not".
4) Drug addictions - look at any job posting for manufacturing, labor, construction, etc. and you'll see mention about drug screening.
5) Fat, dumb, and happy society - we care more about Super Bowl Sunday, Hollywood, reality shows, etc. On average, we're lazy and care more about being entertained.
>5) Fat, dumb, and happy society - we care more about Super Bowl Sunday, Hollywood, reality shows, etc. On average, we're lazy and care more about being entertained.
Respectfully, people care about supporting their families, having health care coverage, paying off their student loans, having a safe job that they can get to easily and cheaply and have general good work conditions. The first 4 points may be true, but the 5th point is an unfair characterisation.
Ok, I'll bite. What would be some solutions to these supposed factors? What policy are you suggesting?
I notice that these "additional factors" happen to align with right wing politics, which implies to me that you may be smuggeling something in along with these "additional factors" I should also consider.
"Consider that working people may just be lazy drug addicts, and why do you care about their workplace safety?" Is not really something I want to consider.
You read more into my comments than you should have. I'll expand on my points:
1) OSHA - I'm delighted and proud that we have OSHA! OSHA regulations have saved lives and prevented serious accidents/sicknesses and continue to do so. Does Vietnam, China, India, etc. have comparable regulations? I don't know the answer to this question, but my guess is largely 'no'. There is a cost associated with OSHA compliance and it's worth it. Is it ok that a factory worker is killed or maimed in some other country for your low prices?
2) Decline of shop classes - I don't know why they're not as prevalent as they used to be. To be honest, a shop class of 2025 should not look the same as a shop class of 1970. In my opinion, a modern shop/industrial class would include robotics, 3D printing, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), etc. I honestly don't see how anyone would consider this to be a bad thing.
3) Litigious society - I'm not passing judgement, just calling it like I see it. Many lawsuits are deserved and many likely result in better processes and procedures. I don't have an axe to grind, just stating that the US probably has more lawsuits and judgements than most other countries.
4) Drug addictions - I don't think that drug addictions are good for anyone. I know that this is a very complicated topic. I'm just pointing out that it may be more difficult to hire manufacturing workers in the US who don't use illegal drugs than in other countries.
5) Fat, dumb, and happy society - I'm just calling it as I see it. A huge part is because as a country we don't eat healthy enough and get enough exercise. Look at the skyrocketing cases of diabetes. It's a huge problem. Dumb because it seems we continue watering down our schools to make it easier for kids to get through.
If you read everything I wrote above, please tell me where I'm right-wing or left-wing. Of the 5 factors I listed, the only one that I would advocate for a policy change is (2). I would like to see broad funding for shop/industrial classes in high schools throughout the country. Again, these shops would not look like they did in 1970, although they would likely still have some of the same tools. However, they would also have modernized, high-tech ones like robotics, 3D printing, etc.
Where am I so off-base? Where did I make value judgements (aside from fat, dumb, lazy one) about Americans? Am I promoting some right-wing agenda with my comments? I believe that these are honest points that should be discussed and debated.
I've been thinking about the decline of shop classes. It would be nice if schools just had more stuff; basic proper calipers and micrometers, 3D printers, vinyl cutting machines, fountain pens, Rubik's Cubes, etc.. Somehow the trend of cheap goods just didn't make it to the classroom for whatever reason.
It will always be like this until scale ramps up and costs come down as infrastructure ramps up. China's advantage is always communicated as cheap labor but it's also the ability to almost infinitely scale production lines in a short period of time. America has mostly lost the muscle memory and tooling to do this. And that ability to scale matters with materials costs.
There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
The blunt tariff sledgehammer that was dropped isn't going to do it. Small experiments like the one in the article will try and mostly fail. Meanwhile producers will find loopholes and workarounds to tariffs. And the margins and viability of domestic designers and businesses will continue to weaken.
Consumers will increasingly eat the cost and lose the convenience.
I think it is worth mentioning how much more cheap capital is available for manufacturing. Chinese state policy—- monetary, fiscal, and social—- pushes up the savings rate, enormously lowering consumption, while restricting the range of consumer financial products. That puts more savings in state banks and keeps interest rates low.
This has come up at the expense of their own consumption however, and a reliance on exports instead. Thankfully China has been focusing on diversifying their export markets along with increasing internal consumption in the last decade.
Thank you for raising that point. I would love any recommendations you have to learn more about internal consumption shifts in the last decade.
There are the obvious explicit government initiatives to boost consumption, but they've also made some strides in reducing goods and luxury taxes. An Apple iPhone used to be 20-40% more in China (it is technically imported because it is made in an SEZ), but they are only priced at slightly higher than the states now. Cars used to be a huge splurge but cheap EVs are affordable by anyone with an OK job now (although you might not be able to park it if you live in a big city). On my trip a couple of months ago, the malls were booming in a way that I didn't see in 2016 when I left China.
Thanks for sharing your experience. That is very interesting to hear.
All high school students should be required to complete the Factorio tutorial before graduating.
Factorio is just a programming game with a manufacturing texture pack.
What we want is wood shop and machine shop classes.
Humbly and politely disagree.
Factorio taught me about supply chains, manufacturing bottlenecks, and tooling dependencies. These concerns don't really crop up in day-to-day programming, but they reveal a lot about why we struggle manufacturing anything in USA anymore.
If it's about supply chains and the like, Eve Online might be a better fit, it's got the factor of time, deal-making, social interaction, theft, war, blockades, undercutting, etc in there as well.
like, I can see a high school class set up their corporation, get mining set up, maybe own a station, get production running... but then a nullsec alliance is like haha fuck you and completely undercuts them, or the recurring player event where they block / destroy anything coming into or out of the main trade hub starts.
Factorio is pretty predictable... or maybe I've played it too often so I know what to consider for the long term. I should get some mods or change some settings to create calamities like in the old Sim City.
But we don't have a shortage of people who understand those things. You can learn them with a passive interest while hanging around with your laptop on the weekends. We have a shortage of people who understand how to actually make things in a non-copy/paste environment.
There are so many ways that mother nature says "fuck you, fuck your work" that you never get contact with in virtual environments. In fact the whole point of virtual environments it to remove that brutality. We have a dramatic shortage of young people who are interested in learning how to wrangle with mother nature OS rather than computer OS.
When I did IT in manufacturing, we outsourced most of the 'understand how to actually make things' tooling type people jobs. We didn't need them full time and could get way better experts via outsourcing than we could hire.
What we needed were wage slaves paid low enough to make the economics work, even in our small town without many employers that was the tricky bit. Especially every year when health insurance premiums went up. You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government.
To be able to design any manufacturable item, you have to know that a wrench is used to tighten bolts, and a screwdriver must be able to reach the screw. There are people who don't. Some of them graduated engineering school with me.
Second this, I have stories...
I think you're both right. If the wood shop class was a class in how to run a wood shop (not just in how to run a lathe) it would be the best of both worlds.
Factorio is often described as a game for software developers (i.e. it feels like you're programming when you play). Are those really the critical skills that allowed China to grow in manufacturing so quickly?
I'm not sure shop classes fill that need either...
We manufacture plenty of stuff in the good ol' USA, what we struggle with is manufacturing cheap things which require large labor input.
Do you work in manufacturing?
Maybe we should just skip directly to 3D printing? Wood shop probably isn’t the place to start, but there is a starting point for kids somewhere.
No, this doesn't solve the right problem.
We bees to put injection molding machines in schools, CNC machines cutting the tooling, teach people how to make real things in real factories with realistic costs.
This is the expertise that left these shores 20 years ago. Tooling manufacturing, automation, semiconductor etc.
They have, at least in some places. Where I live (Austin TX) I've been in multiple high schools that have extensive Manual machine shop/3d printing/CNC/Electronics/etc labs for students to use. It might even be at the point where the nicest/most complete machine shops in town are actually in the suburban high schools. Go to the local FIRST https://www.firstinspires.org/ competition and talk to the kids from the high schools in the more expensive parts of town where their parents are getting tens of thousands of dollars in donations every year for the teams. Whether any random kid can use them is a different story, but they do 'work' if by success having both of your school's FIRST team leads go to MIT is any indication, as happened last year at the HS my kid graduated from.
So at least some of our students are being given the opportunity, and there are multiple paths to success, but maybe the largest difference is that while truly talented multi disciplinary young engineers (and I work with a few) are rare, they always have been. The real questions are probably around social issues, does giving your kid a phone remove the boredom that encourages them to tinker with stuff in the garage, is there a sweet spot of being able to afford an old car, but to poor to pay to fix it, force kids to learn hands on repair skills. Does being able to stop at radio shack/surplus/frys/metal supply/etc and browse racks of stuff on the way home from school encourage kids to build stuff to impress their friends, or is having it delivered in the mail enough. AKA, like me the other day, I stopped a microcenter to get a pedestrian computer peripheral I could have ordered from amazon, but discovered a ESP camera module that gave me 'ideas'.
Exactly, your post read like a highlight film from my childhood and engineering upbringing. Thank you.
I'm afraid we have far more basic problems than that - illiteracy in their fingers. We have people who can't use a knife or scissors, let alone a power tool.
3D printing is an excellent introduction to just making an actual object in the real world. It's cheap and accessible, and has obvious design limitations to fall into and learn from. The step from 3D printing to full CNC is a lot less than the step from nothing to 3D printing.
MythBusters-types of people can only exist in a country with garages and residential suburbs.
I think what most changed music and mechanics was the transition from suburbia to flatsharing in the city centers.
Not to mention intact families where parents had sufficient discretionary time (i.e. jobs that paid the bills with reasonable weekly hours) and a culture of prioritizing passing down knowledge to children and creating spaces in the home for them to pursue their individual interests and talents. People are not just atomized economic units.
3D is heavily used in China as well for small scale manufacturing and prototyping. It is a good place to start for middle or high school kids, and is pretty accessible and rather safe
The idea isn't to teach working with wood necessarily, the idea is to teach how to handle the myriad common problems that crop up when dealing with physical manufacturing.
3D printing would be good too, because on the surface it's just "model -> filament -> extruder -> built". But as anyone who has done 3D printing knows, it's constantly fighting 20 different parameters to try and coax your print to actually work out well. And even when you have it nailed down there are still 20 different things that can randomly sabotage it. And even with all that accounted for you still sometimes get off prints.
Not just that - the idea is to give students a taste of what it's like to make things with their hands. 3D printing is cool too, but it's much less hands-on.
As an 8th grader, we had multiple years of wood shop, but that was in the late 1980's.
Went to middle/high school in the 2000s and had not one second of home econ or shop or anything related to it, not even theoretical. The only tools I remember working with other than a pair of scissors, compass and ruler were a glue gun and a scalpel in science labs.
Congressmen should be required to complete the Factorio tutorial before taking office
In Factorio you throw iron ore in an electric furnace and it turns into iron plates. In reality you need coal or coke or charcoal to reduce iron to its metal form. Steelmaking is one of the largest single source of CO2 for a reason.
This is just one example among many. The truth is every single facet of industrial production is incredibly complex and there does not exist a single video game that captures all the nuance. Period. Factorio abstracted away all the boring details of industrial production and that is why it is good entertainment. But it’s still just entertainment. To think someone would become knowledge about industrial production because he played Factorio is like thinking someone is a good driver because he played Mario Kart.
Getting kids aware of and interested in a topic is an important step. I mentor a high school robotics team, not because I have an illusion that those students could skip college and walk into a robotics design job, but because it gets them exposed to mechanics, engineering, programming, experimentation, working in a team, competing against nature and other teams, etc. Ultimately, I think it helps them refine their framework for “what do I like [or dislike] doing?”
Sounds like a good argument for Pyanodon....
Thats the most dangerous thing to turn kids into. They want them dumb and barely powered drill capable.
China's biggest advantage wasn't just the ability to scale (which means available labor), but also having entire supply chains in relative proximity, tons of small manufacturers making all the little parts needed, all located in southern China.
That's a bit less true than it used to be. Shenzhen supposedly used to work that way. When some small factory ran out of capacitors in board assembly, they'd send a runner to Huaqiangbei for another reel. But now ordering has mostly moved online. There's less of a role for all those tiny stalls stocking components.
That just cuts out a layer in the distribution chain. The part you want is probably manufactured not too far away.
The US used to have manufacturing cities where you could get everything you needed in specific industries. There was the New York City garment district for clothes. Mary Quant, inventor of the miniskirt, writes in her autobiography, "Quant by Quant", about her first visit to New York with a native guide. She was getting things set up for manufacturing in days instead of the months it took in the UK.
Detroit had cars, of course. Most of the auto parts suppliers were nearby. Now, the US auto industry is very spread out. "Trenton Makes, the World Takes" is still on a huge sign in Trenton, NJ., but it's more nostalgia then reality. Waterbury, Connecticut had watch manufacturers and other mechanical precision devices.
Those centers of industry are mostly gone. Even Hollywood is in troublel
Cheap labor is the key in that scaling, though? Human labor is still far more flexible than anything else that we have. And a big part of that flexibility is how cheaply you can turn it off. There is a reason seasonal employment is a thing.
I live in Philadelphia. We had a lot of manufacturing here, but most of that vacated the city center in the 1970s and 1980s. I recently was doing some research into urban renewal around my neighborhood, and found a paper about the city's efforts to address a concentrated population of perpetually drunk homeless men, mostly centered in my neighborhood, mostly squatting in abandoned buildings or living in flophouses. The city's approach was effectively to remove them and spread them out - and bulldoze the neighborhood to make way for a federally funded highway, now I-95. A lot of manufacturing businesses just called it quits - the owners had made their money on the backs of cheap labor and hadn't really set up any kind of succession plan, but could retire comfortably. Others moved, mostly out of the city, and by the 90s, that labor was moving overseas.
And that's why I don't really foresee that kind of manufacturing coming back here. In order to survive the race-to-the-bottom pricing that the majority of Americans crave, you need a large labor force that will accept some form of sub-par living conditions. But if you can't earn a living wage, you can't afford to participate in the economy in a way that supports the manufacturing, and then you're back to those mid-century slums.
I'm dramatically oversimplifying things, my main point here is, I didn't really put together how much of early 20th century American manufacturing relied on chronically drunk homeless men.
Everything in economics is a paradox because everything is two sided, often with yourself on more than one side.
Selling your labor? You want high wages, unions, worker protection laws, etc.
Buying something? Now you want to cut wages and bust unions, at least if you tend to choose the cheaper item.
When a consumer is buying labor embodied in a product, they don’t care whether that labor are unionized or what their wage per hour/day is.
They do care what the wage per unit produced is, which is why we see a lot of US manufacturing moving towards higher levels of automation to let the embodied labor per finished unit be lower and thus competitive in the market.
The Canadian movie Goin' Down the Road (1970), is related to this. It's fictional, but seemed to capture the less rosy aspects of that time.
There are roughly half as many employed in manufacturing compared to 25 years ago. The declining trend started before this. At the same time American manufacturing output is at an all time high, measured in dollars. Wages are up. There are more jobs for things like mechanical engineers and millrights, fewer in packaging and assembly.
> In order to survive the race-to-the-bottom pricing that the majority of Americans crave
I do wonder if this is an inherent "craving" or just tied to the reality that Americans cannot really afford things anymore
The middle class being eaten means that most people have much less discretionary spending, so every single purchase must be a bargain
It is less a craving and more just a general response to availability? It isn't that people have a craving to spend less on things. But, if something is readily available for less, why would you pay more? Indeed, would you expect people to pay more for your goods, if someone else has equivalent goods for cheaper? Why?
> someone else has equivalent goods for cheaper
They are never actually equivalent goods though
They are cheaper goods
Maybe? Clothing is a big counter to your claim here. As is anything that can be reliably machined.
Yes, there is "cheap" clothing. No, the more expensive clothing isn't necessarily better. A bog standard t-shirt is a bog standard t-shirt. With a minimum of quality control, and anything on top of that is not adding to the utility of it.
The machining revolution really hurts a lot of the idea that labor in is indicative of quality.
As a counterexample, some casual googling about cotton suggests that there is an ideal workflow which will result in superior cotton fibers before harvesting. Here is a quote from the conclusion section of the linked article:
"Cotton fiber quality is shaped by a mix of genetics, growing conditions, and field management techniques. High-grade cotton relies on precise measurements of fiber length, strength, and micronaire, along with maintaining proper color and cleanliness throughout its growth. These elements play a key role in determining processing efficiency and market value across the supply chain."
At the most basic, if one farmer harvests his cotton with no consideration of the above issues, whereas another farmer carefully studies, prepares, tests, etc based on the above considerations, wouldn't there be added value and added cost of production?
I personally believe that in a past era, farmers intuitively learned these factors and competed with each other to make their best harvests, and the bog standard t-shirt got a quality buff as a fringe benefit.
Whereas nowadays, the farmer has to drop quality for quantity to compete with digitally-connected markets.
https://cottongins.org/blog/ultimate-guide-to-cotton-fiber-q...
You can personally believe it, but you also need to provide some evidence to the claim. Farmers that can't afford the R&D team necessary to learn a lot of this stuff will have trouble competing here. Such that, I'm comfortable claiming this sort of advantage will only consolidate the profits into bigger corporations.
And, indeed, if you look into high quality cotton supply, you find there are relatively few names.
Lower cost of a good is a generally good indicator that the good is low quality
Unfortunately the inverse is not true at all
Higher cost on a good is not at all a reliable indicator of whether or not the good is high quality
There is a pretty big incentive for producers and sellers to produce low quality goods and convince consumers they are high quality, so they can sell them for a high margin
This is unfortunately very common in clothing
Not necessarily, but it's total shit when you buy a t-shirt and it unravels after only wearing it a few times. That QC doesn't always happen is what's the problem, so buying the cheapest isn't wise.
I mean... sure? Has that been happening for you? I have had some shirts that didn't last as long as others. Oddly, I don't think they are the ones I paid the least for.
most of my newer clothes don't last as long as my older clothes.
I'm fortunate that my clothes still last quite a while, so I don't know what to say. Still have some t-shirts from the 90s, oddly.
I can say that if you wash cottons with synthetics, that will shorten the life of the cottons. If you use any "stretch" or "no iron" clothing, you almost certainly have a synthetic mix. It isn't that they are lower quality. Nor are they designed to not last as long. They are designed for that stretch and to look flat as their main goal.
It's the second thing. Americans are proud to pay for things they can afford. They look down on people who aren't paying their "fair share." For example, music and movie piracy was never the domain of the average consumer; it's mostly been for broke young people and enthusiasts who don't like DRM and the limits it puts on use. And part of the reason for that is that Spotify and Netflix et al. made it possible to continue consuming "respectably". If physical media were still the norm, piracy would be rampant, but not because Americans tend towards it naturally; bevause they would have been pushed toward it by the imperative consume wedded with the inability to pay.
A lot of dumb "just so" tales in economics are willful miscategorization of desperation as choice.
> A lot of dumb "just so" tales in economics are willful miscategorization of desperation as choice
This is a great way of describing it, I like it
Incidentally, I'm starting a new business model to capture this market opportunity, I call it "DAAS", desperation as a service
It's where people pay me their excess money and get nothing in return, increasing their desperation
> It's where people pay me their excess money and get nothing in return, increasing their desperation
Wait, isn't that called 'campaign finance'?
The problem with competing with entrenched market interests is they can use their economic advantages to make the market impossible for newcomers to enter leading to de facto monopolies.
If you adjusted your business model to make other people miserable, you can sell yourself as a marketing agency
The anecdote that I heard was about GM, They'd have two guys doing two jobs on the same line, one of them would go off drinking for the day and the other guy just did both jobs half-assed, then they would switch the next day.
Were the drunk/hl folks the ones working in the factory? Doesn’t sound practical.
The assertion is that during times of high work, you have far fewer of them drinking. Pair that with low cost worker tenements and you are able to scale up manual tasks much more rapidly than what you see in most US locations nowadays.
From the 1500s through 1930 or so, in any place you could see working men, you could see drunk ones.
From 1930 through 1970, it was less common but just as tolerated.
MADD did what Prohibition could not.
I'm familiar with that for say, digging a ditch, or the n-martini lunch. Less so with "perpetually drunk and homeless" factory workers operating potentially dangerous machinery.
I interned at Daimler-Benz and assembly line workers had company-employed drink trolleys which would take your order early in the shift for what partially subsidized drinks/snacks you wanted delivered for your breaks during your shift. A tone would sound in the factory and workers would converge on the break area near them and pick up what they’d ordered earlier that day. On the menu was beer and plenty of workers would have multiple beers over the course of their shift.
These weren’t what you picture when someone says “perpetually drunk and homeless”, but I think a lot of Mercedes were assembled by workers with a perpetual low-level of alcohol on-board.
I worked a summer job at a factory that made box cars. 10x10 or larger sheets of 1/4 inch plate steel lifted on stacks with chain hoists, box cars tacked together, then put on a large rotisserie, so it could be turned as all the seams were welded. Anyhow, At lunch we all went out for shots and beers, and perhaps a doobie or two. While I did not see it, people did get squished. I survived my summer, but I did pickup a nicotine habit that lasted 20 years.
selt driving cars ftw?
No. The "cheap labor" myth needs to die quickly.
China's advantage is, and always will be, that the costs of labor in US are bloated by a huge amount of overhead for every working resident
In 2023, the BLS reported that benefits alone accounted for about 31% of total compensation, with wages and salaries comprising the remaining 69%. [1] This 31% includes direct costs like health insurance, retirement contributions, and paid leave.
Now in addition, consider employer-paid expenses that are not benefits or employee compensation: FICA, FUTA, SUID, SDI, FMLA, etc. That depends on your geography, but it can be up to 25-40% additional costs [2]
The all-in cost is at least 35% or more in additional spend [3]
In addition, none of the above capture indirect costs of compliance/overhead, with varied state and federal schemes.
As you can see, we are at a range of ~35-50% of additional costs for each new hire
Now, importantly, try to imagine the effect of this bloat at a national level: Every US business is effectively carrying deadweight of additional ~35-50% costs on its pricing decisions to its customers. Why? Because the bloat is embedded into every domestic input, like raw materials, services, utilities, you name it. This cost spike may impact a few foreign industries dependent on US inputs, but it certainly explodes over US shores, spiking prices of the inputs that most US producers depend for their final goods and services. Now think of what happens to domestic costs of doing business and operating a physical business in US.
So when your cost of production have additional ~35-50% overhead because of all sort of market-distorting mechanisms, blaming china for "cheap labor" is a convenient scapegoat, when in reality the blame should be on US policy of making our jobs artificially expensive.... to fund the state bloat.
[1] https://www.bluedotcorp.com/blog/2023-trend-the-rising-price...
[2] https://www.sba.gov/blog/how-much-does-employee-cost-you
[3] https://www.footholdamerica.com/blog/what-is-the-real-cost-o...
Some of it is China’s willingness to make big capital investments. My wife was shocked at the low price of beech mushrooms at Ren’s Market and I found out these are grown in a huge factory in China where they are very proud that they only have to handle the mushrooms with a forklift. Contrast that to those white button Agricus mushrooms each of which is cut out from the mycelium individually with a knife.
The good news is that they’re building one here
https://finc-sh.com/tag/new/
When you look at solar panels and lithium batteries their biggest advantage is that they invest in large scale heavily automated factories. For really labor intensive and low value things like those dog beds Chinese labor is already too expensive and production is going to places like Bangladesh.
We have plenty of capital here. Far more than China.
The problem is the capital cannot be put to good use here. Either because (1) there's too much uncertainty around project progress (think oil pipelines stuck for decades in permitting limbo), or (2) the ROI doesn't work when you pay insanely high bloated compliance costs of hiring US staff.
Even our sky high productivity cannot overcome the large lard deadweight each of us has to carry, on behalf of the elite class
I remember a time when every product sold around the world carried the "MADE IN USA" brand. It included random trinkets.
That would come back quickly, if we all decided we had enough of antiwork laws, enough with all the deadweight, and focused on building instead of regulating.
Perhaps the answer is a combination of a significant UBI (paid for by general federal spending, I could think of many worse reasons to accrue national debt) coupled with a much lower minimum wage? Incentivize companies not to treat labor as a cost sink, while still ensuring that people have enough capital to cover their cost of living. I'd wager productivity would also go up (and mental depression would go down) if things weren't quite as dire as they currently are.
Calling health insurance, retirement and paid leave "bloat" sounds like a satire of a 19th century factory/mine/sweatshop owner. Wow.
OK. In that case lets not use "bloat", and instead just call it the biggest subsidy for the middle and upper classes, coming from the backs of the unemployed, lower class
Guess who's uninsured? Its not the META employee with fertility benefits.
Satire is whomever cannot see why Trump would be voted by the working class: whomever thinks the status quo was to the benefit of the lower, blue collar class... while the middle and upper class ride their (untouchable) govt benefits (SSN) to a secure retirement because the elite class has a secure bureaucratic job (while the lower classes struggle to find 1 part time job).
Meanwhile, the chinese eat the lunch of the working class who see their jobs being exported abroad, because no employer wants to pay for subsidies/retirement/salaries of an elite bureaucratic deadweight class (that makes the rules for themselves, and forgets the neediest).
The fact that these are not covered by your taxes is even more satirical. Instead they're paying for escapades in the Middle East.
It is crazy that the current pro-capitalists are totally fine publicly saying they are psychopaths. But it's OK because money.
The chinese eat the lunch of the working and neediest americans, who see their jobs being exported abroad, because of a huge, elite bureaucratic deadweight DC class that was paid to allow regulatory capture, while enjoying sucking US treasure that funded their benefits and retirement.
Who's the psychopath ?
Tim Cook. He invested $55 billion per year into China, dwarfing both the Marshal Plan and the CHIPS act.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/books/review/apple-in-chi...
That same deadweight class in power right now, pushing this narrative that the meager benefits we have are still too high for what we're worth. As they begin the next phase of destroying and looting our country - Make America Poor Again.
Your narrative completely missed all of the monetary inflation that was created to keep prices from going down due to cheaper manufacturing. That was the wealth received from offshoring, having been centralized as monetary creation. But rather than this wealth being spent on deliberate goals to mitigate the economic damage of that offshoring (individual and industrial), a rallying cry of fake "fiscal responsibility" prevented most such public spending. So the new money was instead simply given away to banks to bid up to the asset bubble, ultimately putting that centralized wealth into private hands of asset holders while pricing wage earners out of the asset markets.
That was the political con of the past thirty+ years. Now that it has run its course, the game shifts to the next con - which seems to be turning America into some kind of impoverished authoritarian work camp where we appreciate being able to do unskilled factory work that China no longer wants to do. Acknowledging the last con gets the rubes to buy right into it. Finally some validation, what a breath of fresh air! Oh, and don't you know the real problem right now is actually them "illegals" ? Definitely not these elites, nope. This current bunch is totally different than that last bunch. See how they don't even respect those laws or norms the previous elites respected? So refreshingly different!
An elite that actively wants to let go of his own government sinecure, power and status (from reduction in team size, the ever-important status power signal at bigcorps) , is very different from an elite that wants to grow his team and status
They are not the same
That's a weird framing making for a very odd conclusion, given that he is expanding the powers of the government, claiming those powers vest directly in him, and increasing the number of enforcers of that power. It's like the CEO of a company eliminating the R&D department, cutting everyone else's pay, and bulking up on security guards to perform random searches looking for pretexts to fire more people. From my perspective, the bureaucracy was an ever growing amount of administrative overhead, but it was at least moderating authoritarian power and keeping the worst impulses of autocracy at bay.
I do agree they are not the same - reverting to autocracy is throwing the towel in on the American experiment. Previous elites in power at least had the decency to view their looting as a symbiotic parasitic relationship. What is the same is the dynamic of distracting the rubes with feel-good populist outrage while shamelessly robbing them blind.
The Netherlands has a social welfare system and it's economy is not collapsing.
However the Dutch government doesn't have an ideological fascination with factories. It has a more rational approach to make money with things that the Netherlands is actually good at.
I think what compounds it is that in the US dead weight States still have political power- when realistically all the bets should be on California,Texas and New York and the rest of the country should be grateful.
The same people. Your statement changes nothing and is an incredibly weak justification.
Your job is not artificially expensive.
In China it is naturally cheap, they have humongous super advanced vertical and horizontal supply chains at their doorstep.
Need plentiful, cheap three phase electricity? - check. Need some obscure part at scale and immediately?- check. Need advanced engineering? - check. etc. etc.
It's at the point where for many industries the risk/reward just do not make any sense at all (it'll just be loss making no matter how you spin it, government supports etc).
> naturally cheap
you mean artificially cheap? State subsidized electricity, loans and the ability to hire/fire people flexibly.
No I mean naturally cheap. There's completely vertical and horizontal integration. You don't need subsidies, it's next door!
USA's workers directly fund our safety net (such as it is) and public health.
Who pays for all that stuff in China?
The chinese gov't also funds those things - but just not via taxes collected from people's incomes. They collect "profit" off foreign exports, debase the local currency to pay for it.
Yes and: USA taxing individuals directly begets the familiar resentment, reactionary impulses.
(I have no knowledge or opinions about taxing exports, debasing one's own currency.)
> taxing individuals directly begets the familiar resentment
but on the other hand, taxing individuals means those individuals should have some say over what taxation gets spent on (in theory), where as an authoritarian regime can simply ignore the populous.
I still think taxing individuals are better, despite it being slower and less agile at adapting.
gosh, if only someone would think of the small business owners.
This take and the article get it utterly wrong. The ONLY real headline is, "Americans have gotten so used to free money they can no longer even imagine producing anything and selling it at a reasonable price".
I'm a small farmer and can sell my garlic all day for $1 a bulb. But it's A LOT of work. If I bump the price to $5 less people buy but that doesn't mean I get to give up and say, "oh well, can't produce in America I guess... "
Lol, Americans :(
It's more than that, we've simultaneously allowed for monopolization and rollup of wholesale markets. So in context of the story, the US manufacturer is in a squeeze play between supply cost escalations through the Trump tax regime, and the on the demand side with the big retailers like Kroger and Walmart.
The "made in USA" stuff is bullshit, the policy people DNGAF. The people actually making stuff are screwed. This about about shifting taxation from income and capital gains to consumption.
I agree with most of that.
But companies have been incentivized to offshore production for decades. In many cases policy decisions have immensely rewarded them for doing so.
The end result is those countries (mainly China) have grown into infinite scaling machines. It probably won't unwind any time soon.
And in China retail/consumption is not nearly as consolidated/monopolistic as it is in the US.
Agree, especially with the BS of "Made in the USA". Consumers really don't care; they just want the most bang for their buck. Period.
I look for it and will pay a fair premium. "Assembled in USA" is hot garbage though.
Turns out China buys Iranian oil, China makes cheap products out of this oil. China builds lots of new cheap coal plants, west fades theirs out but moves part of their production to China.. etc.
Use of coal in Chinese energy production is not growing, peaked in 2013 according to their stats. They are also building massive solar and nuclear capacity.
But anyway, half of all global coal production is consumed in China. I hope they will manage to get rid of coal in the next 20 years.
Not true, latest peak is 2024 also for CO2 Emissions.
It's not just cheap labor. It's labor that is abused, sometimes enslaved.
It's also lack of environmental regulation adherence. China has environmental regulations but they don't always demand compliance. I read about companies paying for scrubbers to be installed in factories and when a team comes to take a tour, still with original filters and low run hours.
> It's labor that is abused, sometimes enslaved.
Maybe 20 years ago? Wages are rising salaries and employers are playing nice so their employees don't jump ship elsewhere. The day of your employer keeping your ID card captive is long gone (unless you are a naked official).
> China has environmental regulations but they don't always demand compliance.
That was also a lot more common 20 years ago than today. These days, cities/provinces are held accountable for AQI reductions, so pretend inspections no longer help their metrics. But I totally get it, there is a lot of material from 2000 to 2015 or so, and they basically live forever on the internet.
No, still very ongoing.
https://www.economist.com/china/2024/05/30/the-evolution-of-...
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/against-their-will-the-sit...
https://www.politico.eu/article/forced-labor-still-haunts-ch...
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-05-29/chi...
Those articles seem to be mostly retrospective, so you are agreeing?
Labor is like 8% of the price of a car. That's not the difference between 25k and 65k.
While China does have an advantage over northern states in labor prices it's not why it's so cheap.
That 8% is only if you include the labor costs of final assembly at the GM plant. But their inputs also were built by labor. GM buys turbochargers not out of thin air, but from Garrett Motion inc., in Plymouth Michigan, who also has sizeable labor costs. Repeat not just for turbochargers, but for the rest of GM's input supply line. If you include only their direct suppliers, the cost of a new car that goes to human wages is about 30-40%.
Chinese turbocharger suppliers have lower labor costs and therefore BYD, Changan, Great Wall and others have more pricing power vs GM and Ford products.
Is BYD using turbochargers in their electric cars?
Yes, their song, tang, han, and shark models are all turbocharged.
But my broader point is that their entire supply chain is comprised of lower labor cost inputs. Whether it be the EV batteries, the windshield, or the air valve in each of the four tires.
> Yes, their song, tang, han, and shark models are all turbocharged.
Pretty sure that only applies to the ICE versions of those cars and not the purely electric ones.
...naturally
Your comment would be funny if not only half of BYD vehicles are fully electric.
Maybe Americans could build cars that people living in Asia actually want? Hint someone in Jakarta doesn't want a 40k pick-up truck.
Tangentially related China is located in the region with largest economic growth. Power is shifting from Europe and North America.
> Maybe Americans could build cars that people living in Asia actually want? Hint someone in Jakarta doesn't want a 40k pick-up truck.
You'd be surprised. One of the things that really raised my eyebrows in Thailand was slum shacks with a gleaming new muscle pickup parked beside it. For some reason these are really popular and people spend an inordinate amount of income on them.
Counterpoint: cost of living is ridiculously cheaper in China vs. USA. Workers can be paid 3x less and still have a better QoL. It's a vastly more efficient economy in terms of human capital.
Counterpoint: China is the undisputed leader in renewable energy technology, including battery storage. I don't think they are doing it purely for environmental reasons, but they are doing it.
But the main reason why that cost of living is ridiculously cheaper is because human labor is so much less expensive. There's no free lunch - if the output is that much cheaper, that difference has to come out of someone's pocket eventually, even if it's not the person directly manufacturing the thing but someone down the line from them.
Or you can look from it from the opposite direction and imagine what would have happened if there was full freedom of movement between China and US (i.e. no visas etc) and thus an actual free market for labor. If you expect workers in such situation to steadily migrate from China to US but not vice versa (at least until cost of labor equalizes), this implies that the workers in China are somehow worse off in absolute quality of life even when accounting for relative cost-of-life differences. That is, if the relationship between two countries wasn't economically exploitative in some way, we wouldn't need to restrict the free flow of labor at the border.
> But the main reason why that cost of living is ridiculously cheaper is because human labor is so much less expensive.
That's a really bizarre take that is obviously false. The disenfranchised migrant laborer or prison slave producing your American groceries is earning approximately as much as a Chinese peasant, i.e. basically nothing.
There is however a vast difference in what the organization looks like above the laborer. In America: vast profits and consolidation. By contrast, China has more small businesses (think street food) and large enterprises are SOE or otherwise constrained by the political system.
As far as I know, this is not the case for migrant laborers at least, who often get paid more than federal minimum wage (because otherwise they can't get enough people even if they are undocumented immigrants).
In any case, if those were the main two reasons for the disparity, then we wouldn't see the same for other first world countries which have neither cheap migrant labor nor prison slaves. Yet cost of living is still significantly more expensive in, say, Finland than it is in China.
America's cost of living issues are mostly because of bad regulation. The big three rising costs are housing, healthcare, and education, and all 3 have been horribly misregulated by the US gov leading to massive spikes in price.
How about the rest of the First World then?
And why is cost of living ridiculously cheaper in China?
If you pay less in wages, goods cost less.
If you have less environmental regulations/ignore them, goods cost less.
Yes, they are the leader in renewable energy tech. They have also cornered the market with regards to the rare minerals that are some/most of the inputs. The link is not a coincidence.
In the US, housing and real estate have been driven up significantly to the benefit of the really rich. Increased rent, and increased house cost for existing structures just ends up lining the pockets of people rich enough to get priority access to new, cheap debt issuance. Inflation benefits those who are closest to the new money creation, while screwing those furthest away. All the while, everything gets more expensive with increasing rents.
I don't know if that is also the case in China.
> I don't know if that is also the case in China.
it is exactly the case in china - just with different numbers. It's why shanghai and beijing has some of the highest property price to income ratios. Just like in san fran.
There's cheap property in the USA - rural areas and lower populated areas. Just like there are in china.
I agree. A lot of modern trade for the US is built around arbitrage on purchasing power. If all else costs the same, and you have to decide whether to pay someone $2 per hour to do it or $20, $2 always wins unless shipping it over is more expensive than the difference, which almost always isn’t.
Average salary in China has gone up quite a bit. It might be 1/3 but it's not $2.
I had a friend move his factory to China because the packaging and other costs were so much cheaper. I wish I'd asked for a breakdown. He didn't factor in/expect wages to be much of a savings.
I just pulled a random number but what I intended to say is that as long as differences in purchasing power exist and the dollar is the stronger currency, trade will move to where your dollar has more purchasing power for labor, as long as moving the finished goods back to the US isn’t prohibitively expensive.
> It's labor that is abused, sometimes enslaved
Sounds like average American gig worker.
That is rich from Americans, who exploit illegal immigrants for cheap labour!
That sounds like a very good argument for cracking down on illegal immigration, either by bringing people out of the shadows or by removing them. Currently American is going the removal route.
Who said OP was american.
> China's advantage is always communicated as cheap labor but it's also the ability to almost infinitely scale production lines in a short period of time. America has mostly lost the muscle memory and tooling to do this.
...
>There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
I heard a very compelling argument (at least to me), that the difference, as you say, isn't the labor. The labor cost difference is something like 5% in the China vs 8% in the US. The difference is ramp up time. If you have a product ready to be built, you can get it to market much faster manufacturing in China than the US.
As an example, the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada took about 2 years (June 2014-July 2015)[1]
Tesla Gigafactory in China took 168 days to construct (January 2019-October 2019)[1]
The cost of the factory construction, materials and labor, isn't the biggest loss when deciding where to build your factory. The biggest cost is the opportunity cost of not manufacturing your product for 15 months and the potential of losing any first to market advantage if you have competition.
The time to get your product to market, especially if you're a new company with no income operating on investor money, the time spent trying to manufacture in the US can sink your company. The cost difference is much more manageable and, depending of the product, can often times be overcome by the price of shipping.
[1] https://manufacturingdigital.com/digital-factory/timeline-te...
> The labor cost difference is something like 5% in the China vs 8% in the US.
Those percentages don't make sense to me. 5% and 8% of what? Final assembly? Labor costs are also built into all material costs in the supply chain.
There's an attitude shift, too. US manufacturing is stuck in the past. If you want to build a widget, you want it finished, welded assembled and painted. you've got to do a bunch of work and take it to four different places before you're done. China's got a one stop shop attitude to get your widget made. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTjEVB5p2/
I don't know if you're wrong in general, but your dates for the factory construction show 9 months in China vs 13 months in the US, not the 5 months vs two years you claim.
Based off the cited article, it was a typo and it's supposed to be "July 2016", not "July 2015".
No. It won't ever go away till socialism is evenly distributed.
You won't get made in the USA as unless you're determined to have subclasses of citizens.
It's not just the labor, though.
It's the supply chains.
Want to build electronics? You'll need a variety of parts and raw materials that China and its surrounding countries produce, and the US doesn't*.
Want to make clothing? You'll need many different fabrics, buttons, zippers, dyes, etc that China and its surrounding countries produce, and the US doesn't*.
Want to make toys? You'll need plastics, dyes, injection-molding processes, etc that China and its surrounding countries produce or provide, and the US doesn't*.
And this goes all the way back to the mining, the farming, and the refining. The US just doesn't do these things*, even in the cases where we actually have the natural resources here.
This is all way before you even get to the point of engaging with China's skilled manufacturing workforce. (Because yes: these jobs do require skills; you can't just walk in off the street with zero prior experience or training and be correctly assembling widgets or sewing garments within the hour.)
* To counter pedants: Yes, the US may produce some small amounts of some of these things. But we don't produce them at anything like the scale required to ramp up full-on mass production of anything that relies on them to supply the demand of the entire country.
My family runs a small plastic (injection molding) business in the USA. Second, soon to be third generation.
The only reason it still exists is because the products made are too expensive to ship from a country with cheaper labor as they are pretty large and heavy. And it's quite a niche product/vertical.
The biggest problem that the business faces on a day-to-day basis is employees. It's a very low skill manufacturing job. You pull parts out of the mold. The pay is good for a large midwestern MCOL city, plus full health benefits (employees don't pay a cent). It is downright impossible to find and retain reliable employees. The job sucks. I worked there when I was younger helping out and you do the same thing every minute for 8 hours a day in a hot and loud factory. It's not a career - just a job. I'm not sure how you fix that. The American appetite for a low skill manufacturing job is dead - I'm not sure it's a bad thing either.
Even the high skill stuff has already been taken over by China, their process is far more efficient. When the business needs design/tool & die for a new plastic injection mold costs and speed associated with getting that mold designed and made in America are astronomical compared to the Chinese. The Chinese will get back to you with a design proof in 24 hours at a 1/4 of the cost.
If you can't get employees you're not paying enough. What you think you should pay employees is irrelevant, the market defines what "good pay" is. If potential employees have better opportunities you won't be able to hire them unless you make your jobs more appealing than others.
You would think it would be that black and white, and under normal circumstances I would tend to agree, however pay is well above average for the location and skill especially when you factor in the benefit package.
I really think it comes down to the fact that people have no interest in working in low skill manufacturing. The business loses people to Walmart etc. where they get lower pay and no benefits all the time. There is more variety of work and potential for advancement at a company like Walmart. Even at a larger scale low skill manufacturing plant advancement is sparse.
The pay may be above average for that location, but it might still be too low. Back when I had just finished college, my cohort was also judging locations where they would apply to work based on things like the social scene or the climate, in addition to the usual considerations of the kind of work and pay they would be doing. There were plenty that turned down well-paying jobs that were in undesirable locations because they were also seeking to not only establish a career, but a life too.
One of the guys I worked with at my first job was a few years older than me, and he had given up a much better paying job in one of the flyover states for a lower paying one in a higher COL area; His reasoning was that no amount of money could buy him the things he wanted out there, but he did admit that had the pay been significantly higher, he probably would have stuck it out for longer than he did, though again only to save up a bigger nest egg before he moved away from the area.
I dodged a job like this as well. Pay was great, benefits good, however I would have been maintaining legacy perl code and excel sheets (that were functionally databases), doing the same coding day in and out. I did it for a while, while looking for another position to get out of there as quickly as possible.
No, by paying high salary you are not going to retain smart people on dumb physically challenging job.
And they say they can get employees, as pay is decent for low skilled job.
Did you miss where they said "it's downright impossible to find and retain reliable employees"?
So you see the problem. Americans wont work these types of jobs at wages that allow businesses to compete with China. Businesses are in a competition. When they raise wages they need to raise prices and they cant do that when competition is knocking at the door.
> The American appetite for a low skill manufacturing job is dead - I'm not sure it's a bad thing either.
It probably isn't a bad thing, as long as we continue to invest in automation and high-skill manufacturing. The Economist wrote about this recently: the fantasy of "low-skill factory jobs for all" is just that, a fantasy: https://archive.is/YoMs1
Fascinating article.
They have toyed around with automation but the capital required to retrofit for such a small business would be intensive but is coming down.
Interestingly the automation pieces that they have been testing (multi-axis robot arms) have only became cost effective since the Chinese robots entered the market. The Chinese have completely dropped the floor on automation tooling.
Sounds like the employer has created its own problems.
If an employee is doing an unpleasant, dead-end job with no prospect of advancement, they have to make a value judgment. If there's no prospect of advancement or any kind of wage growth (they're "low skill", so they'll be replaced if someone cheaper comes along), let alone security, then why stick around?
If the working conditions (e.g. heat and noise) are unpleasant, they could be improved. A ramp into other positions could be built to make the "job" an entry point to a "career" (e.g. Costco moves people between many different low skill jobs and then recruits from that pool for management).
>If an employee is doing an unpleasant, dead-end job with no prospect of advancement, they have to make a value judgment. If there's no prospect of advancement or any kind of wage growth (they're "low skill", so they'll be replaced if someone cheaper comes along), let alone security, then why stick around?
Exactly my point, and that's what they are doing.
There is no prospect of advancement possible. It's a small operation with 15 or so total employees. Under normal circumstances I would agree on a much larger scale.
The majority of people are not suitable for management, and do not advance in "careers". Most people just work the same job over and over, until the retire or die.
But the cost of everything has got out of hand. Why bother going to work if you're going to be basically homeless anyway? Housing+food+health care has detached significantly from wages and the costs of other goods.
> because the products made are too expensive to ship from a country with cheaper labor
This particular issue could be solved by producing in Mexico and trucking your product into the US.
You fix that by automating the repetitive tasks. So one employee can oversee several machines and primarily handle edge cases. A lot of tooling that was impossible or outrageously expensive before is affordable now. I support some food manufactures that use machine vision based industrial automation and QC.
If you’re having trouble retaining employees because they’re bored of pulling parts out of a mold - have any of them considered having a crack at automating that specific bit of the job with say (and yes this is going to sound naive) a programmable robot?
Could be something they try out of hours.
There will be versions of the machine that automate more of the process. But they will cost money and require maintenance too look after and adjust.
I used to work a similar job[1] at a plastics factory. We had about 12 machines in the area I worked. Some machines automated remove stuff from the mold, some removing the excess, some putting though the leak tester. Each stage of automation was an additional thing that had to be configured and adjusted.
Often we'd only make an item for a shift or two. At one point the company bought a new machine (the size of a 2 car garage) that automated some more bits. The machine took 18 months of adjusting before it worked reliably.
[1] Blowmold, ranging from 750ml bottles, 5-20 litre jerry cans, sections of culvert pipe.
> The machine took 18 months of adjusting before it worked reliably
That doesn’t tell the story of the overall ROI. After 18 months of shakiness were those folks able to go do other work? Did the work pay for itself on a 5 year timeline? 10 years? Achieving reliability is huge - did the company spin that for PR?
It was 18 months of somebody working on it full time plus people being flow out from the manufacturer.
From memory once it was going it still didn't live up to all the hype. It worked about as well as the 30 year old machines next to it and required a minimum wage person (ie me) to operate it (plus a fitter for anything technical).
The company I worked for went out of business 10 years later.
This is the sort of machine I'm talking about (although a lot nicer and more uptodate than the ones I used. Faster cycle time too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMjxBw4bFaA
> you do the same thing every minute for 8 hours a day in a hot and loud factory
Sounds like a robot should do it.
The work on your line might "suck" but it is a good paying job with free benefits and requires no college degree, special trade school, or certification.
There are plenty of poorly qualified, undereducated Americans who can fill these low skill jobs.
There is nothing to fix. It is a job. It pays money. Not everyone has the ability to excel in a "career." They simply need a job.
And, no one can compete with China. All companies operating in China, regardless of ownership (state-owned, private, or foreign-owned), are subject to the same political influence. If the government tells a company to do something, the company does it. China also manipulates its currency as a means to drive its predominantly export-oriented economy.
Then tell me where these poorly qualified, undereducated Americans who can fill these low skill jobs are?
The business's biggest success with finding employees was getting in the good graces of the local probation officers who refer ex-cons to us, and that comes with its own set of problems.
Other than paying a premium for temps at a temp agency that's been the only way as of the last 5-10 years to get employees in the door. Normal applications are crickets.
Raise the pay. I get that at a small scale that might not be possible, but if it isn't that just means they don't have a viable business, at least in their current location.
I hear China's labor costs are lower. If your point is that Made in USA is maybe too expensive, we've gone full circle.
More expensive than made in China, though with the moral price of supporting sweatshop factories. "Too expensive" is a value judgment. Maybe they could get their customers to accept a higher price, or find other customers who are less price-sensitive or will pay for something they can provide that China cannot.
Or maybe they cant and this is the best they can do? Maybe they know more about their business than you do?
There is no doubt they know more but no matter the business, if you can’t keep employees you either need to pay more or make the job more attractive in some other way and if you can’t do that and still make a profit then you don’t have a viable business.
Then we are back to the beginning. Labor intense manufacturing is not viable in the united states.
This is the whole argument for tariffs.
If you are paying people $7.25 an hour, then perhaps you deserve to go out of business.
Line work in the conditions you describe should be paying $16 to $26 per hour, with an average of about $18 per hour.
Surely that's in a LCOL area like some small rural town, right? $18 is what teens around here get for flipping burgers and running cash registers.
So, if retailers are resisting raising prices, who will pay the increased costs? Domestically sourced goods can be no more than 55% more expensive (otherwise the imported goods would be cheaper), but we can be sure that locally sourced goods will be priced as close to the full 55% as possible (and as the article points out, some locally manufactured items are probably never going to be less than the overseas cost, even including the tariff tax.)
Now take a look at Walmart's margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit.... Their gross margin is ~25%, with a net around 2%. Even if Walmart decides to eat the tariff cost out of patriotic duty, anywhere near a ~50% hit to supply chain costs would put them out of business. Heck, even a few percent would require a huge business restructuring, if it were even possible.
So prices are going to be higher - it's a given. In the short-medium term, the tariff tax is simply a large regressive transfer of tax obligation onto consumers.
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At some point Americans became convinced that the process of organizing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure and millions of people on the task of manufacturing products was “easy.”
50 years on, and fthe generation that knew how to manufacture is gone - their children never built up the same skills at the same scale. Their children’s children didn't bother to learn the STEM and Craft skills required to work at scale.
Restoring manufacture will be a generation away outside of “dark factories”
Americans focused on other things: software, product development, high tech higher value stuff and so on. Our success there might not have been possible without the rise in manufacturing in China to actually make the things designed in the USA, we definitely didn’t have the population to do both, even if we did have the money.
But now we are in a hard spot because China has been focusing on STEM while we’ve been importing a lot of our STEM needs (from places like India and China). China is now in a position to do both, and they have the population, skills, and resources to do both.
I liken this to hanging off a cliff by multiple ropes/leads. Certainly, you can cut a few of them and still not fall, but eventually you'll cut enough rope that you'll plummet to your death. Americans need to feel the pain of poor policy, otherwise nothing will change, and there's almost no rope left to cut.
It's gone. It's the downside of the American vision of capitalism. We collectively flex in front of the mirror and tell ourselves that we are awesome, put light the room by setting the furniture on fire.
Reality is, as people have been pointing out for as long as I've been on this earth, the relentless focus on quarterly and current year fiscal has made the United States less competitive strategically.
I remember years ago a supplier came in to address an issue we had with defective parts in their intermediate supply chain. The VP dude was casually throwing out how all of their new parts get copied in days by their manufacturing partners, who share them with competitors, etc. In our case, a supplier was running a fraudulent third shift to make parts and threw in under-spec units as well. They seemed fine with it.
> Their children’s children didn't bother to learn the STEM and Craft skills required to work at scale.
I mean it's less nobody learned and more the demand was gone. American companies sent manufacturing overseas because back then, it was cheaper, and America is unique among nations in that we can just print money^1 to buy things. The only manufacturing that's still solidly American is products that are too fragile/large for sea shipping at scale (we make a lot of cars in North America, but a lot of that's gone to Canada and Mexico) and anything related to the defense industry. And even then, those companies (like Boeing) are now being eaten from the inside by the same business parasites that ate everything else.
These problems all have solutions but we have to stop giving private businesses a free pass to do anything and everything to starve the government of tax revenue while stripmining the citizenry for every penny they can.
1: Not without risks and problems, but still, no other country on Earth can do this.
The rest of the west did it too. More to do with the idea that being post industrial is an advance.
I have bad news about a certain "big beautiful bill"
Not surprising the entire fuckin thing is bad news.
That narrative is BS. Kids stopped going into CS in America because of the Dotcom bust. The number didn't recover until 2014. Driven in large part by the Great Recession encouraging more kids to go into STEM -- certainly my Land Grant school in the Deep South could barely keep up with the surge. Kids that did STEM recently? Worst entry-level job market we've maybe ever seen. But the kids who did a different major and likely have better short term prospects are the problem?
But that narrative certainly shifts any blame away from the winners in recent years and onto "flyover state" Americans. And now the same folks who told kids to learn to code want them learning woodshop? Come on.
Nah, the following generation will have all of that, and more, done by “AI”. No need to learn anything anymore, except giving voice commands to a computer. /s
Great post - I recommend reading "Apple in China" to get a great insight into the how the Chinese manufacturing industry (and economy) has developed over the last 30 years.
I have! It's a great book. I don't work in that field at all but I find industrial infrastructure and manufacturing business endlessly fascinating. I wish I worked in it tbh because then I'd have an excuse to visit Shenzhen. It's on my bucket list.
Another advantage a Chinese factory may have is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
996 was more a white collar phenomenon than a blue collar one.
> China literally half a century of heavy investment on the part of it's government in that infrastructure and in it's citizens, and we can't even make bike paths here anymore
This is the part that the vast majority of people don't realize. China's manufacturing advantage did not just happen spontaneously and organically.
> Boomers screaming and shitting themselves to death about socialism.
At some point this stops becoming an actual thing, and just becomes an internet boogeyman.
As someone who regularly participates in local politics I assure you, this is incredibly still a thing. Every last measure receives vehement criticism from the older cohort of our city because they're certain it will mean a tax increase. We have to explain over, and over, and over again that the projects we're voting on were budgeted in over a year ago, and that money is already allocated.
Most accept this. Some stay mad but just quietly vote no (and are usually outvoted). A minority say if we have money for this then we should be cutting taxes.
Like it's stereotypical I grant you but stereotypes aren't made up in an office somewhere, Severance style. An unfortunate number of the old among us want nothing going to anyone who isn't them, and I fully accept, an amount of that is coming from people who are living on a fixed income, and I have empathy for that. A lot of it is also just coming from people who have sour grapes about only having a 17 foot boat instead of the 19 foot one they wanted, and see our parks and beautification projects as the reason they couldn't have it. Not only is it often BS, it's just anti-social. Like I'm sorry you're apparently too out of shape to enjoy a bike trail, but we have a whole ton of other people who aren't, and putting every measure of improving our city on a menu for you to select which ones you're comfortable paying for is simply not practical.
My entire life my taxes have gone to pay for things that don't benefit me. It's just part of living in a society.
I've started telling these kinds of people "you'll be dead soon, so I don't really care about your opinion".
Sure, it burns a bridge but the apoplectic response from them is worth it.
Maybe in another 20 years. We were putting in an elevated light rail system above the highway, but no, it got blocked everywhere outside of the downtown core because “it looked ugly”. Nevermind that it was over a highway.
I think Walmart is too big to fail at this point. If the gold standard for brick and mortar 'low prices' needs some restructuring, then it's time for the house of straw economy to finally see the big bad wolf and go running for the hills.
Walmart will just raise prices and their customers will eat the increased prices through reduced purchasing power or going without, while complaining but doing nothing else (because they have no leverage to do otherwise).
https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-price-increases-item... | https://archive.today/4Kcqf
or those same customers may elect the next, even-more-extreme, ill-informed idiotic wingnut that comes along with a pat theory about bringing industry back on-shore in 4 years by tossing out foreigners/applying ludicrous tariffs/whatever... increased prices affect politics - which affects everything.
Probably, not much you can do with people who have a vote but nothing else. All you can do is migrate to more functional governance systems. Let them eat vibes, the evidence is robust that mental models are rigid and even in the face of overwhelming evidence, people can be bought into belief systems that cannot be updated based on facts, data, and evidence.
fair!
SmarterEveryday is trying this right now too.
He details all the challenges, and it's a pretty good watch.
The grill brush they made is a bit on the expensive side, but I bought one.
https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=TP1ez9tIEkpEu1Xf
What immediately sprung out to me is that Amazon isn't held accountable for selling goods that directly violate patent laws, which should protect small business and reward innovation.
The current US administration claims to be concerned about domestic manufacturing and so on, but hasn't even mentioned this issue at all.
I was going to manufacture a line of useful products here in the USA, but decided against it. I'd release the product, then a month later counterfeits would be on Amazon for 10% of the price.
As a small operation, there are 0 affordable resources at my disposal to fight IP theft.
Right, as a small operation patents are rarely worth your bother. You might eventually win in court with a patent, but by then your company is bankrupt. Just make the thing, and hope that you can develop a good name and reputation for quality that keeps you afloat, even if you only are 1% of the market, that can be a lot of money. Avoid selling on Amazon where you are more likely to be noticed by cloners, at least until you already have a business.
I thought Walmart was infamous for making a house brand of competitor products.
You're probably thinking about Target and their Up and Up label where they do that. They also place all of their knockoffs right next to the product they are imitating.
The US textile industry was built on ignoring UK patents though :)
The 19th century US cotton industry was built on far worse crimes than patent infringement.
Indeed, but patent infringement too. Although the Cotton Gin was patented, Eli Whitney famously was unable to enjoy those protections. Imitations sprung up all around.
Similarly: though William Jarvis wasn't the first American to import Merino sheep, he was the most successful because he was able to utilize an ongoing war in Spain to circumvent around the Merino export ban in the early 1800s and get a ton of them over here, too. He was even a diplomat to Spain and probably knew better, but did it anyway.
So one past illegal activity allows future illegal activities?
precedent is a real thing, de jure and de facto
No, but it does make people crying about competition very difficult to sympathize with.
Exactly. All that whining about "intellectual property" is at best funny.
Especially since the US patent office is mostly known for allowing anyone to patent anything, even if there is prior art from the Mayan and Roman empires.
> What immediately sprung out to me is that Amazon isn't held accountable for selling goods that directly violate patent laws, which should protect small business and reward innovation.
(IANAL) This may fall under a DCMA-like concept where sites are not responsible for 'user content'. The 'user' in question is the vendor and their 'profile' of sellable items is the content. Similar to how eBay is not (?) responsible for the items put up for sale.
(Not saying this is (morally) right, just describing the situation. I would really like to see some accountability as well.)
Which is funny because he could drive a stake through Bezos' heart with some sweet FTC rule making.
As far as I can tell, consumers have never benefited from patents, and they seem blatantly anti-competitive. Perhaps if only "small business" (whatever that actually denotes) were allowed to hold them it might make sense, but we all know that's not even remotely how patents are wielded today.
Personally I strongly prefer knockoffs. Same quality, but cheaper.
well innovation is where it helps consumer. Innovating new products over time, patents give them some runway to make a profit assuming one can defend those patents. why innovate the next iphone equivalent if someone is just going to steal your idea and make it in china for 1/4 the price
It was not patents that helped the iphone succeed, it was a massive river of cash and keeping the development mostly secret. All patents ensured was that android operated in a visually slightly different manner.
Anyway, where is all this "innovation" that's supposedly worth caring about? It seems to me that patents stymie innovation by holding competitors hands behind their back (or even in the case of medicine, holding it off the market).
> patents give them some runway to make a profit assuming one can defend those patents.
I'd be shocked if this actually described even 1% of patents issued.
Anyway, yea, fuck all intellectual property except maybe the first ten years of copyright held by actual humans.
> si=TP1ez9tIEkpEu1Xf
PSA: the si parameter, along with pp, are for tracking purposes. Consider trimming them when doing a copy-paste if possible.
I watched this and my cynical takeaway was he was trying to make an appeal to emotion. Why buy from China when we can support the good people of Alabama? Their elected senator just called me a rat. Why should I support Alabama over China? They both seem like foreign adversaries to me. At least China is making a sincere effort to reduce their carbon emissions.
I thought it was a good video, but similarly I had an issue with how he discussed the loss of the skilled trades and professions in the US. He did a good job highlighting that these jobs are rare, don't pay well and are important, but he made it seem like we all just accidentally stopped investing in local manufacturing, or that we just let those skills erode. Leaders at these manufacturing companies moved things over seas, laid off the skilled workers, busted up unions, and overall sold off this skill set in order to sell cheaper products and make more money for themselves.
> Why buy from China when we can support the good people of Alabama? Their elected senator just called me a rat. Why should I support Alabama over China?
He just happens to be in Alabama, but the principle applies to someone in Massachusetts or Hawaii as well.
Same. Got one as a gift for someone.
There was a book making the rounds recently that also details some of the discussion around skills being the thing the west exported: https://appleinchina.com/
The author readily admits in a podcast that while Apple plays a big part in the story it's a clickbait title because no one would buy a book titled something along the lines of "supply chains and China."
Decent (if superficial) interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAj9zB4vaZc
The interview he does on the Odd Lots podcast is a lot more in-depth, and I found it a great listen:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5gJazFZZaZ0OGKf516XpeO
It's an interesting video, on the other hand it's also 80$ a piece. And I'm pretty sure they do not recoup R&D with those prices on reasonable compensation rates...
Corporate R&D is a tax write off per section 174.
Not sure if that does help you though. A business that only exists because it doesn't have to pay taxes kind of shouldn't exist in the first place. At least not as a business
> is a tax write off per section 174.
Was. I'm not sure if the new bill restores it.
How does it compare to a wet rag with tongs?
One of the main issues they raise is that the bristles on common brushes can be left behind and are difficult to pick out of food, so the wet rag probably exceeds expectations in that way.
Since I read about bristles in food after cleaning the grill, I've always been checking for remnants after brushing. I never found any. And I wonder: how are those remnants supposed to get into your food? They are metal, so don't they just fall down into the grill, if any break off? Maybe glued into old fat and other gunk? But you want that gone, too, right? Also, don't you use a rag to clean off other dirt, and wouldn't that make sure that bristles are gone?
Is this a myth or actually a problem? Some commenters do call it fear-mongering here, so what is it?
I also think I never read anything about this except in US media, so does this not happen in other countries? Different brushes? Different cleaning habits?
Good discussion from 2016, I think it was Canadian surgeons that made the recommendation and there's at least a couple of comments where people have talked about real-world experiences with bristles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409425
A bristle can get stuck to some gunk that isn't successfully removed and be in parallel to a bar roughly underneath it. There's no real reason to take risks of excessive hygiene given that hospital admissions occur and simple tools are going to give you a functionally equivalent meal.
Grill brush bristles in your food are the "they went on a vacation and brought back flesh eating bacteria" of the culinary world. The fear-mongering greatly exceeds the danger.
Edit: There are approximately 130 ER visits per year[1] on account of grill brushes. Mowing your lawn (something else people do on about the same frequency in the summer) is far more likely get you, as are god knows how many other things.
[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/ama...
That’s definitely enough numbers to change to a different bristle. Basically no effort to change a bristle. If you had to free climb a mountain to get a new bristle, then I would understand.
And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.
>That’s definitely enough numbers to change to a different bristle.
Ah, yes, magical plastic molecules. Exactly what I want between fire and my food.
I'm just about the last person to give a crap about microplastics but cooking temperatures and long weird hydrocarbon molecules are where I draw the line.
>And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.
This is true for just about everything.
There are other options than plastics I’m sure..who uses that any more.
Risk / reward tradeoff. There are other options that are as good, as cheap, as easy.
Why pick one with a significant, unpredictable, often unknown flaw. Where if it happens you end up needing major surgery?
Given how simple it is to avoid that issue, I will. I can reduce my chance of ingesting a bristle from “minuscule” to “zero” with no downsides. So why not?
It may be rare, but it happened to a friend of mine while we were eating at a restaurant.
Lawn mowing seems like one of the more dangerous things that a typical person does. It's the snow shoveling of the summer.
It's several orders of magnitude more likely to land you in the ER. I chose it because like grilling, it's done "about weekly" in the summer and most people don't think much of it.
Even the plastic ones leave bristles behind and aren’t much fun to chew on.
Why take the risk when grill stones exist?
Or scrunched up tin foil at ~$2 / 100 ft.
Look, I love Destin, watch all his stuff recommend it all the time.
But I'm never going to buy this product, it's just too expensive for what it does compared to the alternatives.
And I know he knows that. He's clearly at least 'not stupid'.
So something isn't squaring with this.
Some people care about how reasonable a price seems even if they can easily afford something, because it's important to them to feel like they're getting a good deal or at least not getting taken advantage of. They're happy to accept some level of inconvenience or discomfort if the savings are big enough, even if they don't particularly need the money
Some people care more about getting exactly the right thing, even if the value proposition is weaker. They'll pay significantly more for apparently trivial differences, because they don't want to buy something they're not happy with; they're spending money anyway and why put up with something they don't want if they can afford something they do want?
Neither of these people are strictly unreasonable.
> So something isn't squaring with this.
Lots of smart people get hooked onto extremely specific solutions that aren't even improvements.
I saw it in software development with many things (VIPER and SwiftUI both reduce development velocity compared to MVC and old-school Interface Builder); I've seen it with Musk trying to do tunnels even when roads would be cheaper and safer; there's also (infamously) Juicero; and in the UK in the 80s there was the Sinclair C5.
That said, is this really an example of that?
Myself, I barely use my electric barbecue, so I don't know the best way to clean things (it's not yet become dirty enough to bother cleaning). But I have seen the brushes he's complaining about, and I have not previously considered using tinfoil, so it's not a completely crazy idea that people might want a better brush.
I use an oven cleaner, spray it on, leave it for half an hour or overnight, and stuff just comes off when you wave a cleaning cloth at it. Highly noxious though, probably responsible for insect collapse etc.
I was about to link the same thing - excellent video. It was very insightful and a bit scary to see just how hard it was to get seemingly simple manufacturing done in the US now.
As recently as the 1980s, 70% of domestic clothing was made in the U.S., including by brands like Gap and JC Penny. Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s? Is the cheap, disposable, foreign made “fast fashion” we have today better?
https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/7939/madeinamerica
If you watch [this Climate Town video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CkgCYPe68Q), then absolutely not, the disposable fast fashion we have today is not better. It's cheaper, but it's not higher quality, it requires trans-continental shipping, and it absolutely gets thrown away in ridiculous amounts.
Overall, it's worse in just about every metric other than "I can get this fun shirt online at 2am for $6."
And helped spread microsplastics to every corner of the Earth
> Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s?
Absolutely not.
What we have today is the ability to buy/own tons more "stuff", much of which is cheap junk. That does _not_ translate into better quality of life.
Yes, if you forced 2025 americans to live like americans did in the 1980s there would be mass riots. Quality of life has gone up signicantly in many ways.
> Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s (compared to now)?
Nope.
I had plenty of hand me downs, but the majority of stuff I owned lasted for years and years, and I beat TF out of my clothes; so getting three or four years out of a pair of jeans was an achievement. I remember being constantly upset with my parents because when I would ask to get something new, they would tell me I had to wear out the stuff I already had first.
So at the time, paying more for a pair of Levi's or Nike's were worth it because they were built to last for years, not months like they are now. I was in college during the late 90's and even then I had three pairs of shoes that lasted my entire 4 years in college.
Back then stuff was durable and was meant to last for years. The "fast fashion" and "disposable fashion" trends essentially ended monopolies that brands had because kids weren't wearing stuff for more than a few months before discarding it or having it fall apart so they can wear the latest thing.
The textile industry in the US was synonymous with worker abuse and sweatshop conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire is the canonical example. Heavily dependent on immigrant labor.
Well into the 1990s, we made shirts and canned soup in Oregon, a place that had very few immigrants at the time. My wife's dad's family came here before the American revolution and he worked at a Heinz soup plant until NAFTA.
That fire was in 1911.
This is an answerable question: the median American household allocates 2-3% less of its household income to clothing in 2025 than it did in the 1980s. That's about $2000, for the median household.
But now both adults need to work to afford a detached house, and the labour participation rate of middle aged men is at an all time low. So, the answer is probably no. I'm sure lots of people would pay and extra $2k for clothing if housing, food, health care, and cars were at similar ratio to wages from the 1980s.
The housing cost thing is generally a canard (houses cost more, but people live in much larger houses than they did before --- cost burden changed, but so did preferences) but that's completely besides the point of whether people in the US do or don't benefit from more efficient clothing production. The jobs supporting inefficient clothing production were not holding up the economy.
I don't think clothing manufacturing is more efficient overseas, it is just cheaper labour. And it is cutting off income stream to lower-skill/intelligence workers in the "advanced" countries. You can see that in the number of working-age men who are no longer in the working population. Not everyone can get a phd and do "advanced, high-value, cutting edge work", any more than everyone could dunk like Michael Jordan if they just trained hard enough.
Also, the financial environment that created "cheap clothes" is also the environment that suppressed middle class wages, and drove the cost of housing up ridiculously. The two are linked. Pretending they aren't is just fantasizing.
Finally, while people are financing larger new houses, the old small houses and apartments are still ripping upward in price. It isn't like people can just choose to pay 1980's prices for 1980's housing stock. They are stuck paying much inflated 2025 pricing for 1980's housing stock.
Seems like a just-so story to me.
Today it's also the desire of the customers, as pushed by social media, to follow a fashion changing almost every month. You didn't buy in the 80s stuff to be obsoleted in a few months. And because most of the people cannot afford every few months a new wardrobe made of (halfway) quality items, today's taste requires fast fashion garbage. So here we are, and we can get back to sanity only when we get rid of the influencer-led economy, good luck with that.
I'm amazed how much of the internet economy has turned out to be advertising. People complain about ads when they watch TV, but they'll go out of their way to spend hours watching ads on social media. And lots of kids dream about being an influencer, basically an advertiser, for their work.
One reason why I have no interest in going to facebook anymore is that the vast majority of people's social media activity on there nowadays is advertising... something. People showing their latest purchases, vacations, experiences, etc, all basically showing something they spent money on.
> the desire of the customers, as pushed by social media, to follow a fashion changing almost every month
A lot of it is top down, pushed onto customers by the industry. It's very hard to find timeless classics these days, we are given trendy bits that change every year to speed up obsolescence so they purposely look kitschy.
The desire of costumers is to go well beyond psychotic measures in order to save the tiniest amount of money on a purchase, rather than purchase domestic or locally produced for a bit more expensive. And that applies almost worldwide, not only to Americans.
Plenty of people would buy domestic goods if they were “a bit more expensive”. I’d say 5% on a large ticket item or 15-20% on a small item would be “a bit”.
Rarely is “made in the USA” just a bit more expensive in my experience.
For the very small ticket item you might even have to pay 100% more if you want to support your local community or your nation. Which should be fine, it's just a few dollars. For big ticket item 15-20% is acceptable. But people only think about their own purse.
Frequency matters. A few dollars extra / 100% extra on some small thing you buy a handful of times per year? Sure. If it’s a small ticket item you buy every day, most people aren’t going to be able to spend an extra thousand dollars per year on every single category of thing they buy; they just don’t have that kind of money.
If it's food then it's perfectly acceptable to spend an extra thousand dollars per year to support your community or nation. And your own health.
Except for food, I don't know what anybody would spend money on which isn't utilities, rent or gas. All of which you cannot choose between domestic or imported.
>Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s?
Yes. Ask some of your older relatives who remember that time how often they got hand-me-downs or patched old clothes up and compare it to the wardrobe of an average income American today.
This is not evidence for what you are saying. Handing down stuff, including clothes doesn't equate to poverty, sometimes the opposite. Better clothes also last longer. Check out the Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness. To take this a little literally, for much of my young adulthood, I wore my dad's old snow boots, not because I was poor, but because they were too well made, even at an old age, not to use.
Choosing to buy more, cheaper, clothes is as much an example of consumerism, as anything else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
That's not impoverished; it's just not wasteful. Half my kids' clothes are from Once Upon A Child, and most of my younger one's are hand-me-downs from the older one. For that matter, I'm wearing 20 year old gym shorts right now.
Could this be due to how low quality many clothes are nowadays and they are simply not lasting long enough to become hand-me-downs?
The fault is firmly with the consumer. People are addicted to cheap shit and consuming like crazy.
We had cheap clothes 10 years ago, then Shein and their ilk showed up with even cheaper clothes, and people flocked to them in droves.
And you can still buy good quality clothes, $120 shirts and $150 pants of good quality are readily available. But who wouldn't want to have 10 shirts and 5 pants instead?
Where can I find good quality (by this I mean durable) shirts for $120 and pants for $150? I’ve examined clothing in that price range and it’s virtually just as bad as $20 fast fashion: synthetic fibers mixed with cotton, poor stitching, loose weave on the fabric, etc.
If you have brand names for polo shirts, jeans, and chinos that are durable and long lasting, please share them because I can’t find them. I have yet to place a test order at Bill’s Khakis, I should do that.
So far (only six months in), Normal Brand (https://thenormalbrand.com/) has been good to me. Seems better quality, nothing I have is synthetics, well stitched.
Thanks, this fits my style and budget, I’ll give this place a shot!
Can you really get $120 shirts and $150 pants of good quality? J. Crew and Brooks Brothers and the like have gone downhill.
This is correct. On average I go through a pair of jeans and a pair of hiking pants a year. 30 years ago I wore my dad's jeans quite a bit as a teenager, I remember even passing a driving test in them.
Perhaps, but if clothes are cheap, income is disposable and fashion is fast, why bother?
Other than jeans, shoes, socks and underwear, I haven't worn through or grown out of anything in forever, nothing to pass on really.
That said, the textile collection and resale industry is huge; stuff gets sorted, parts go to secondhand shops and charity, part gets baled up and exported, parts get recycled, etc. Same with electronics, it ends up in low-wage countries in Africa and south-Asia where there's thousands of people processing it.
What? It’s the 80s not the 50s. Hand me downs might have been a cultural thing, but “average” people weren’t wearing them out of necessity.
I think you’re conflating a culture that did not see everything as disposable with a lack of wealth.
The hard stats since I looked them up:
Median income increases by 1/3 in inflation adjusted (“real”) dollars from late 80s until 2020. The country is definitely more wealthy.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n
Hand-me-downs are great. My youngest has some hand-me-downs he got from his older brother who got them from my neighbor’s son. Your kids don’t need new clothes.
Yes and yes.
There is a mattress company called Tuft and Needle. They started right at the early beginning of the mattress-in-a-box trend, but offered a unique product. For the first six months of operation, they made a Japanese-inspired cotton mattress filled with wool batting and was made in the USA. Before I had a chance to order one though, they had already pivoted away from that unique product (that doesn’t exist even today) and were dropshipping the same generic PU foam mattresses made in China as everyone else, with very little change to their website even. I was sad
T&N has such a great product but it was one of those things that failed because the innovation/disruption had no market.
I personally believe that the Japanese futon mat is the healthiest way to sleep, and after you get used to it even extra-firm mattresses are soupy and uncomfortable. Downside though is that it is very difficult to be comfortable on if you are significantly overweight, and it’s a pretty hard sell for couples unless they are both bought into the idea beforehand.
From my personal experience of sleeping on one for the last decade, not having a bed with a mattress on it is beyond the pale. I have a nice townhome that is well decorated. But when people see my bed, they assume I have a health issue, some kind of homelessness trauma, I’m a weeb (definitely not), or that I’m too poor to own a bed. They assume that they could never be comfortable on it, as a pillowy mattress on a high frame is associated in people’s minds with high luxury, angels with harps, royalty, and sexual intrigue. Sleeping on a mat on the floor is associated with camping, homelessness, destitution, and failure.
To each their own I guess
I think not only has manufacturing gone away, as well as the supply chain, but also choice. The moment you want something slightly different than what is sold in the typical big box stores, it's either non-existent, or costs a fortune.
AFAIK Nolah mattresses are made in Arizona
https://nolahsleep.com/pages/about-us
We bought one and it lasted almost exactly 10 years. When it came time to replace it, I was also sad to discover that it was a short-lived item and they moved on to something else. We ended up going with Sleep Number because that was the firmest mattress I could find delivered to me in a reasonable amount of time.
Have you looked at Avocado mattresses? They state they make them in California.
I have. Definitely one of the better options out there. I recently got a mygreenmattress which are latex and made in Chicago. Still would like a wool one.
Everyone already knows this but the mattress industry is absurdly opaque and most reviews are fake
Textile manufacturing is the absolute bottom of the barrel. The town I grew up in (Manchester, NH) had the largest textile plant at the beginning of WWI but it was out of business by 1933. The industry moved first to the American South and by the time they'd paid the loans of the factories it moved again overseas.
Textiles are something that we cannot automate with current technology. We know how to automate plastics and metals. You can buy off the shelf injection molding machines (3d printers too, but they are rarely used in production). You can buy off the shelf machines to cut and form metals. Even things like steel mills are automated with custom equipment. But sewing two pieces of cloth together is beyond current automation, and thus there is a lot of manual labor.
In the US (and Europe) manual labor is expensive, so to make something you need a lot of automation. Once it is automated the next step is enough volume to pay for the automation (which needs expensive engineers).
Of course maybe this will change. Basic textiles were one of the first things we automated 300+ years ago, but we are only able to go from a bunch of cotton to a bolt of fabric today. As I write this making a shirt (or dog bed as this story) seems beyond what we can automate. Maybe a little investment will fix that, maybe not. I'm not an automation engineer so I can't tell you how solvable the problems are.
Robots that can fold towels are an active research area
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/22/1130552239/robot-folding-laun...
Robots that can fold anything might be useful in an industrial cleaning or textile manufacturing setting, but it would compete with humans who can do that in seconds. For towels, there's specialized machines (and have been for years): https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=towel+folding+m...
There are a lot of active research areas. So far progress hasn't been happening. I don't know if it is because the problem is unsolvable (likely), or we are not investing enough into it to solve them (also likely).
towel folding doesn't seem like a step towards automating clothing, any more than building a tall ladder is a step towards ladders tall enough to reach the moon. Anyway https://ruthtillman.com/post/all-clothing-is-handmade/
Getting computer vision and physics models to correctly handle fabric is the hard part of automating what's left in textiles.
Everything else is ultimately just inclined planes and a power rod pulling on levers, which is the stuff that was solved with the Jacquard machine and a whole industry of competing models of sewing machine before we even had electricity let alone electric servos.
I think at the root textiles just don't go where you want them to go the way, say, a rigid object or a fluid does.
> Of course maybe this will change.
It's possibly already changing? 3D-knitting (of shoe uppers is what I have noticed) can make some sewing redundant. How far that can be taken remains to be seen.
ah there are already sweaters made using this technology it seems: https://www.oliver-charles.com/pages/3d-knitting
Textile manufacturing is basically just a derivative of electricity and labor costs. There isn't much more too it, and per sq meter, it's extremely cheap to ship product around the world.
Textile mills in Bangladesh are able to pay $0.025 US cents per kwh, and factory laborers can be employed for about $150 a month. From their main port to the US west coast, when sent by container ship, costs about $0.10 per sq m. There is no universe where anyone else can compete. It's not within America's comparative advantage anymore.
It's wild to me how this movement wants to bring back all of the lowest paid, least value add, lowest skill jobs back but is totally ok with shipping highly paid, highest value add, highest skill jobs off to India. I understand that it's all a grift, the marks only care about the former jobs, and those jobs are never actually coming back, but still.
There are countries besides USA and China. It was just terrible geopolitics decision for US to depend on 1 country for imports instead of keeping the power balance between countries of the world.
The problem has become less about cheap labor and more about general know how. China simply leads the world in manufacturing know how.
https://youtu.be/L9f5SQQKr5o
While true, that know-how is misleading. There is a lot of know-how in the US - the US makes more than every before, which means the know-how is still here! It is just focused on the things we already make and do well on, so often you can't get at it.
>There is a lot of know-how in the US
As someone who works in US manufacturing, let me qualify that by saying "There is a lot of know-how in senior citizens in the US". I really cannot overstate how me, a guy in his late 30's, is consistently the youngest engineer by decades when doing site visits.
Where I work there is a good mix of all ages. Part of that is we got burned far enough back that all the "senior citizens" retired and we were forced to suddenly replace them and the fallout is we changed our practices to ensure there is a mix of ages so that everyone has mentors and time to learn from mistakes.
I just don't know how to get the above into management studies that are taught in business school - there seems to be a lack of interest in long term expertise in those circles.
> the US makes more than every before
How true is this? Is this financial sleight-of-hand? We assemble the parts after the hard part was already done?
There is a lot of automation. What used to be done by 2000 men (sexism intended) in 1950 is now done by 150 people. Of course parts come from all over, and go to all over so it is really had to agree on a measure, but there is a lot done in the US.
And slave labour. Nobody cares that their cheap products are the fruit of slave labour.
Louis CK deserves credit for calling this out in a brilliant bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl-1jc1oDRk
(Yes, this video is framed and has Italian subtitles, but all the others I found do weird things with panning and clipping to evade censorship filters, and I believe that his body language is an important part of the delivery.)
This is because they are the largest thieves of intellectual property on the planet. They steal everything because they cannot do it themselves.
that _may_ have been true 20 years ago, but at this point they are driving
I work in Incident Response. They are prolific.
I have to assume it wasn't a concerted effort to depend mostly on China for imports. Companies are each making the best financial decision for themselves and China turned out to be the more competitive option most of the them.
I've always understood China's currency manipulation to play an initial role in making it an attractive source of commodity products.
China was an attractive source for the same reason vietnam and india are today. Large, young, disciplined, literate and organized population with low wages and an accomodating political elite.
All currencies are manipulated. It's a meaningless statement.
> All currencies are manipulated. It's a meaningless statement.
That's probably (mostly) true today, but it wasn't always the case and it doesn't have to be that way. More importantly, just because most countries manipulate their currencies doesn't mean its meaningless to take issue with the practice or to notice when one country does it more aggressively than others.
Nobody does it more aggressively or less aggressively. It's done to an "agreed" upon level. Whether it is china, india, eu, japan, etc, every country pretty much sets the range. It's not like it is a secret. It's out in the open. Just like interest rates.
Okay, those are good points, but I don't think the statement is meaningless. China, as I think most understand, deliberately pumped RMB into the market in a manner that made its resources available to foreign markets by trading a capital account deficit for a trade surplus. It's literally the first thing discussed in the RMB wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi.
Which is a completely fair play in a globalist society when you're a nation with an outstanding capital surplus. The US did this for centuries by exporting the dollar as a reserve currency, up until the gold standard ended and the value of the dollar as fiat started deteriorating.
Imperial economics 101, really. Offer stability in one hand and demand compensation with the other.
Why can't a sovereign state control their fiscal policy? Who should decide what the value of the Renminbi should be if not the PBC?
Currency debasement is more monetary policy than fiscal policy I think. Either way I didn't read the GP comment as saying China can't do that, just that doing so is what gave them an edge long enough to gobble up a lot of our trade.
The same reason a sovereign state can't act unilaterally in any domain -- diplomacy. If your actions affect another (or even just inspire interest) then the other party may make decisions which affect your country.
What we see is exactly what Uber and Lyft effectively did. China subsidized manufacturing at the cost of their citizens, but in doing so destroyed much of the competition, giving them a monopoly like position in industrial manufacturing cemented by a mastery of economies of scale, which can now be used to exert global power.
Any country which did not abuse their citizens or subsidize their businesses became noncompetitive.
And why would you use old school taxis when uber/lyft were offering $5 rides in a 7x7mile area, and how could old taxi companies compete when they are forced to compete with people not bound by market forces?
Right, that's the difference between a centralised economy and a free market. These thin-vieled calls for a centralised, planned economy (people of my generation had another word for it) are getting more common and in more places.
Advocating for a centralised economy isn't actually common on the left. Most people advocate for Nordic inspired democratic socialism or social democracy. A fair number advocate for various forms of anarchism (e.g. worker owned collectives).
Advocates for a Soviet style centralised economy exist, but they aren't common.
Yet the left (democratic party) nominated a self-avowed socialist for the next NYC mayoral race. One who literally talks about seizing the means of production and opening city-owned groceries that won't have to pay rent. Let's see how it goes.
Like the existing state-owned liquor stores in many states?
Are we to assume that because governments run liquor stores any other industry is fair game as well.
The more simple question in my opinion is whether state run liquor stores are an overreach. The industry is already heavily regulated as it is, state stores sure seems like anticompetitive behavior.
> Like the existing state-owned liquor stores in many states?
State-owned liquor stores pay rent or own property.
Grocery stores are a business with 5%-8% margins, how much more should they cede?
Do you think all the people saying capitalism is the problem are advocating Nordic-style Social Democracy (with capitalism intact but regulated)? Is that why they keep quoting Marx?
The Marxist critique of capitalism (the specific real world system dominant in the deceloped West at the time Marx wrote) is quite popular among people whose end goal is not Leninist state capitalism.
Marx himself, prescriptively, wasn’t all to specific beyond the distant end-goal stateless system and the immediate next steps in contemporary states (particularly, in terms of a detailed agenda, Germany, but he made some commentary on some steps other places.) But even where he was, plenty of people that share his critique of capitalism either don’t see his intermediate term prescriptions as realistic areas of concern for organizing current effort, or don't see them as mevessarily desirable at all.
You have missed something: It's not feasible to compete with China on price and availability, compared to any other country. Challenge: Try designing something, and figuring out how to get the parts. Or, try to have a custom circuit board made. You will find the difficulty goes way up for countries that aren't China.
If that isn't enough, imagine you are choosing Hard mode by sourcing non-China, and your competition chose Easy mode.
Custom PCBs can be gotten from Aisler, based in the Netherlands
I haven’t quoted Aisler, but I did talk to three or four US-based PCB/PCBA houses for a hobby project I was working on that ended up selling around 100 units. The US houses were 20-50x JLC/PCBWay at prototype volume and 10-25x at low volume.
Their proto assembly turn times were only a day better. Unless something has to be done in the US for some specific reason (export controls or contractual reasons), I don’t see how to justify doing it on-shore.
I live in EU and like the idea, both as support for local economy and lower environment impact from shipping.
I've tried aisler instead of jlc/pcbway twice and I regret both orders. For more money I got the boards later, of worse quality and with bad customer support experience when one of my orders was lost.
Sorry but they simply are not anywhere close to the chinese options.
You should probably let GreatScott know that so he stops getting sponsorships from them :P
Good for him to get the money. I skip all these with sponsorblock, can't trust them to give honest review. Nobody should either.
On the other hand if I already know I want to use a product I search for it on youtube and if I find a video with coupon in the description from a channel I know (or least seems decent) I use it. Make the advertisers think it works and pay more, and I get a discount.
Or OshPark out of Oregon, USA. If you need kiting and assembly of the board there are plenty of board houses on the West Coast that will do it for you.
OshPark is fine for bare PCB, but as you point out, they don't do assembly. What does it cost to get a prototype or small production run of a smallish, assembled PCB using OshPark + one of the West coast board houses?
I want what you say to be true, but I'm suspicious, unless something has changed recently. My research indicates unless you're looking at 10k+ quantity, it will cost OOM more than Shenzhen. But, I'm not familiar with the specific services you mention.
Is it geopolitics that is at fault here or rather corporations?
I think Coca Cola might be a counter example if we look at how they procure their sugar.
The thinking at the time was that China would turn into a democracy by liberalizing the economy.
Mexico has been cheaper for a while now. My understanding is that shipping from China was subsidized somehow and that's a big part of why it's still cheaper overall.
"White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the Trump administration remains committed to reviving U.S. manufacturing"
Irrelevant since the point is to grow US manufacturing, not manufacturing in "countries besides USA and China".
Isn't this how capitalism works? What the USA claims to be the best at?
I get that this is an example, but I'd like to see other examples. An expensive niche dog bed, niche beverage, etc doesn't seem very representative of the economy. If it is, that's concerning.
I guess a counterview here:
These are the sorts of things small companies can actually make and be successful making.
Are they representative of the economy as a whole? Maybe not - the majority of that spend is going to go towards housing (~35%), transportation (~17%), basic food (~13%), and (somewhat surprisingly) insurance/pensions (~12.5%). Those are all incredibly competitive.
High barrier to entry, legally challenging (lots of bureaucratic red tape and hoops), already dominated by large companies with economy of scale in their favor.
So that essentially leaves niche, high margin, products as the ONLY products a small company can competitively make.
So it you want to be a small company selling a physical item... this is the market you tend to play within. You make an expensive niche/luxury product with a limited appeal but higher margins.
We already get plenty of news about how the large corporations say they are going to respond (prices will go up).
And on the third hand, those are things that you cannot buy off the shelf machines to automate. Sewing is an active area of research, but it still needs as much labor as in 1930. Beverage packing is automated but a lot of it is custom machines so you need a lot of up front money. (though it appears their limits were containers - al is made in the US so I'm surprised they cannot order the alloy they need).
It's probably material cost and not the actual manufacturing. The aluminum smelting industry in the US has been in decline (and for other metals too). It was also only 4 cents per can, a 1% increase in end unit price. But how it it affecting the products that can be made with off the shelf machines? How about in sectors other than consumer discretionary, like consumer staples?
I'm just saying, every single example is a consumer discretionary item. Maybe they could pick some examples from other sectors. We already know consumer discretionary spending is a weak sector and will get weaker with tariffs.
That's my thinking as well, these are items where if they cross a certain price point consumers can easily opt to just not get them. They aren't even really luxury items, they are unnecessary luxury items.
A better example I've seen is machinery, like construction equipment. Some contractor on YouTube points out that a Chinese skid steer is every bit as capable as a US made, but that 25 - 33% of the price. If he had to buy US made equipment he wouldn't have a business.
Yes but they are bullshit products. Dog beds? A dog is happy with an old blanket. "Stress-reducing carbonated beverages" no comment. A $65 paper day planner?
These are things that nobody needs. They are the poster children for mindless consumerism, feasible only because they are made in overseas sweatshops.
It's so frustrating that policies to subsidized growth in a targeted way (paid for by our progressive tax system) are ignored and we're stuck with these wide impact regressive policies. As described they're poor policy, and as implemented they're simply a tool for shake downs.
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.
One 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.
Cost 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?
You are both right.
A valuable dollar kills exports and high paying sectors brain-drain lower paying ones.
Is this even bad, though? High-margin, productive sectors paying high wages seems like a good thing?
Not 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.
What 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.
Reposted 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
Sorry, 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?
You 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.
Fortunately, 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”
> China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry
Which one is easier to nab?
Tbh I have no idea… financial services, I’m guessing from the way the question was asked?
Music, movies, microcode and high speed pizza delivery.
Don't forget spaceflight. The US (well, SpaceX) dominates in both manned and unmanned cost to orbit and time to orbit.
You 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
It's a quote from Snow Crash.
> 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.
And before that, "Made in Japan" meant cheap junk, even within my lifetime.
Yeah, it seems to start out that way.
>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
Let’s see.. higher ed, which Trump is trying to eliminate.
Come on Paul. I hope that's not the one and only. Without raw experience how useful is the higher ed?
It 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.
The 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.
Just 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").
How bad was the American stuff?? "Made in china" has always meant garbage in my country.
All 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.
>“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.
The 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
It’s not just too expensive. We need to seriously ask ourselves do we want too, at all, even?
My dad worked in a steel mill all his life so that me and my siblings didn’t have to. We’re he and the other guys at the plant proud of their work? Absolutely. Does nearly everyone wish their kids would do something else? Absolutely.
Industrialism has ipso facto become the soup du jour for thr agrarian myth. The reality is that it’s long, hard, relentless, menial labor. It’s also terrible for just living in general. My dad basically turned the lights off on a steel plant. That was 20 years ago and the land it was on will be unusable for even landfills for another 100 years. It was on a river and the river still smells like chemicals, and fish routinely die when passing through that area due to chemical runoff from the land.
So, I’m sorry, why do we want that here (let alone anywhere)?
I’m not saying that I don’t complain about my work from home job or that there aren’t negative effects but good luck weighing me getting carpal tunnel or taking anxiety meds to the stuff that industrial labor does to your body and our living environments.
>We’re he and the other guys at the plant proud of their work? Absolutely. Does nearly everyone wish their kids would do something else? Absolutely.
Most office work is not terribly satisfying. It turns out that work is work. And while working in AC with a coffee maker is "better" than sweating it out over a crucible, the drudgery is the same.
I spent some time with a large group of teenagers at a summer camp where the kids do a lot of the work, including activity scheduling and such. I worked in the cafeteria kitchen, which was hot, hard work. But the kids that were doing the administration kept coming over to offer to help: mop, sweep, serve food, whatever. I tried to take a mop bucket away from one of them, and she said "I've been staring at spreadsheets all day, I want to do something."
It's not 1850 anymore; we don't have to have industry be dehumanizing quasi-slave labor. If we decide to, we can make things in America again without Triangle Shirtwaist-style horrors.
You’re not wrong on most of your points - and I’m not denying the value of hard work. And I’m also well aware of the drudgery of office work.
That said, have you worked in the kind of factory that will come back? I did a summer stint at my dad’s steel mill as a 19 year old. I’m proud of that summer but that work took a lot of me. When other friends were out doing things, I was too exhausted to hang out. The money wasn’t great either. And that’s a microcosm of most of those older worker’s lives. Many drank heavily. I’m not bemoaning them at all or their work.
I’m just saying that the early 2000s wasn’t the 1850s either.
I don’t deny there’s a better life than office work but let’s not gloss over the kind of hard - as in, really hard - labor that industrialization requires.
Absolutely it's hard work, and dangerous too. In the case of steel, in the early 2000s they would be competing more or less heads-up with foreign steelmakers--mostly Chinese--and that puts a kind of pressure on working conditions.
Most people wouldn't mind hard work if it's rewarded with home and family. It's the idea that we have to work in a sweatshop and live alone in a fifth floor walkup that makes people pause. To avoid that situation isn't easy, there are a ton of factors involved, but it is possible. In the end, a country that doesn't make things is a country beholden to others.
Let's not gloss over the other part of it too though. Not everyone is smart enough to be a doctor or a lawyer, or even a nurse or a paralegal, and those people need jobs too. It shouldn't be backbreaking soul crushing work, but they do need jobs.
One of my hopes is that we can use our environmental and safety regime to do the industrial stuff in a more humane manner. Outsourcing everything to "somewhere else" only moved the externalities to another country. But people still get hurt.
Totally agree but is more environmentally friendly and more humane part of the current political rhetoric?
And absolutely outsourcing to somewhere else hurts somewhere else. But let’s be realistic: the kind of drastic change that would require no one getting hurt is not in the American discourse.
Have you been to a current US factory? All the big-company ones I've been to have safety and environmental compliance departments focused on zero-injuries and zero-environmental incidents.
Looking at what was done in the early to mid-1900's isn't a good guide to the current state of things. We've learned a bunch since then.
Define current. My dad turned the lights off on one factory as recently as 2018, a factory that Trump visited and bragged about saving (it wasn’t saved).
It’s not the same as factories in the 1989s true, but people are still missing fingers or limbs as a result of the work. Not only that but the resentment between workers and management remains extremely antagonistic.
We really need to stop glossing over the dangers of industrial work. It’s not a triangle shirtwaist fire but it’s not some kind of imaginary industrial utopia of pristine machinery.
Industrial work is dangerous menial labor.
> So, I’m sorry, why do we want that here (let alone anywhere)?
To the second question, not everything in the modern world is going to be clean and green. If you want things like steel, plastic, computers, etc. there's gonna be some dirty manufacturing involved. No way around it.
To the first, ideally every country wants some amount of self-sufficiency, or at the very least, some amount of redundancy. Remember how badly the world's pants got pulled down during Covid?
And finally -- frankly, not everyone is capable of more than unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Supply-chain redundancy with a side-effect of employing people who might otherwise have very little in the way of employment prospects? That's a good thing!
Why was the steel mill producing a lot of chemical pollution?
Steel makes a lot of mill scale and slag, but those are generally inert. It’s a physically dirty process, but not a chemically dirty one, unless I’m missing something?
And certainly nothing I’m aware of there would make it unsuitable for even landfill.
I looked up the EPA report for the brownsite. It listed arsenic, barium, multiple chromium compounds, 2,4-dimethylphenol ethylbenzen lead, 4-methyl-2-pentanone, methlyene chloride, naphthalene, toluene, and xylene at hazardous levels. It also mentions steel, zinc, and nickel dust and fumes.
I do know that I drove by the old site a few years ago, and you can see the outlines of not just the buildings but the machinery because the dirt is a different color, and there's either no or very little grass or just stubborn weeds growing in those areas.
Thanks, that was very informative.
A lot of steel is coated with grease or oil to avoid rusting. Just by nature of working with it you also need solvents to remove it. The degreasers of the past were magically powerful and environmentally catastrophic. Never mind all the oil/grease used.
Steel is alloyed with a lot of things, some of them toxic (lead comes to mind). If any of that spills.
I think some additives to the steel can be really poisonous? Chrome?
I guess you get a lot of heavy metal slag?
AI is going to reduce the number of white collar jobs available.
Manufacturing may be a lot more important to future job seekers.
> The reality is that it’s long, hard, relentless, menial labor.
Which is perfectly fine to do for some time if the salary is great. Which it should be, considering the high productivity output from those kind of jobs.
Steel mill workers of your dad's generation had a much higher living standard and much more money than service or office workers of today's young generation.
Young people are supposed to work hard and build up their wealth so that they can change to a less taxing job when it's time to make a family. Not waste their time in academic institutions for 20 years and then work for a low salary.
> had a much higher living standard and much more money than service or office workers
I don't see how you could say this with a straight face. We know at this point that factory jobs inflict physical damage to the body, a priceless artifact that no wage could replenish. I find it difficult to address your last paragraph as it's just not based in reality. Anecdotally, many people I know who take an hourly wage at factories never shift elsewhere. There is no waiting, and often they will start their families younger than their salarymen equivalent, 30 years ago or now. Perhaps they failed by your standards?
Not unexpected that people would react strongly against any mention of physical labour on this forum – and immediately take a hostile attitude.
I've done my fair share of these kind of jobs in my life and my body is great. You can do it for some years while you are young. Yes – if you do the same job your entire life you will destroy your body. Especially if you do not take care to listen to it and adapt how you work and how you exercise.
Young people should work hard and be paid well, that's how a healthy economy functions. Not by having manufacturing based on foreign slave labour.
Anecdotally, I know many people who started on the ground floor and then moved on to management or sales with experience. Or switched jobs and careers. People switch jobs all the time, staying at the same post for life is mostly a thing of the past.
I’m glad our country doesn’t make plastic dog beds for adults.
Yeah this is a serious issue (loss of manufacturing capacity) but also,a lot of these products don't need to exist.
Loss of cheap manufacturing resources may be a end of ZIRP- like event for consumer goods.
Landfill is not going to fill itself.
It's interesting to me that there was already a manufacturing facility in the US that could readily make something as random as a memory foam dog bed on short notice, even if somewhat more expensively.
I had though all such simple things had been completely outsourced to China or Vietnam or somewhere. That does imply if that if manufacturing economies of scale can be returned to the US, the price could become competitive, even for low value-added products like this.
>$100 overall cost to make the beds in China
>faux fur lining for the cover, which would still need to be imported from China—adding another $100 per unit.
How is the cost of a part the same as the whole product?
Volume of the material and volume of the demand for the material, probably.
The foam for the beds is extremely compact when vacuum sealed, and is used in tons of other products.
The standard fabric cover is also probably produced in massive quantities for other products, and also folds down to be quite compact.
Faux fur is basically only used in blankets, pillow and toy linings, and depending on how dense the "fur" is, may add quite a bit more volume (a bigger problem if shipped to the US from a separate supplier than the foam).
With that said, $100 does seem rather steep for the cover. I'm assuming they had to use a specialty version to make it more rugged than the cheaper stuff used for other products to be pet friendly.
Faux fur retail costs 20-45 dollars a yard and requires a multithread overlock machine. Liner fabric costs 1-4 dollars a yard and requires less skill and a plain (single stitch) machine. Obviously they will be paying wholesale prices but the cost difference remains. The real difference in the costs between China and the US is the labour. Americans want cheap prices at the store but a living wage at their job. China is the capital of slave labour and Americans are supporting it with their wallets.
Because of these new tariffs.
Right now, as for the last century, the USA manufactures identity and all the products that make you feel like YOU. It used to be Levis and Coca-Cola, now it is all the premier tech Hacker News places value FAANG+ (minus TikTok). If the USA continues inventing identity, those identities should be grounded in merchandise only made in the USA.
People point to China's 'cheap labor' but this downplays why this is only possible under its political system and the tremendous human cost involved.
Rather the framing shouldn't be whether its too expensive or cheap but why so many people are willing to arbitrage industrial scale abuse of human labor only possible under an authoritarian regime and then virtue signal about anything else.
Even more puzzling to me is why nobody is making the connection between the dilution of US dollar value via exporting inflation that props up totalitarian regimes and its growing reliance on it to make things its people want to feel they are above others.
They tried Made in the US but customers found it too morally expensive to care as to why making it outside the US is cheaper especially in China.
> industrial scale abuse of human labor only possible under an authoritarian regime
Taylorism definitely originated in the US, and the modern Amazon's worker-related practices (in the US) are direct descendants of it. So while democratic regime makes industrial-scale abuse of human labour harder, it absolutely doesn't preclude it.
So, what I get from the article is that all US business is initiated by Shark Tank? LOL
None of the three businesses reported actually even build one prototype in the US and the arithmetic doesn't work out for the last example but a lawsuit has been filed.
I think, the issue is about producing the same stuff people already buy overseas.
Can you make a shirt for 10 cents in the USA? Probably, if you get innovative on automation and remove most human labour you might get there in a few years or a decade, but not tomorrow.
If you can get creative with new solutions those products solve, you might get a foot into the door.
What does the shirt solve for a customer? Could there be a (better) alternative that could be built in the USA?
But yeah, you won't compete on price...
Once you produce everything for 10c locally without human labor, those unemployed human laborers won't buy your 10c thing because they are unemployed. You need more to bring back the production: bring back the employment as well.
There is plenty of employment in the US. What there isn't in the US is employees for someone wanting to pay less than $12/hour - and to get that low you need to find a small rural town in the middle of nowhere with nobody else paying, which in turn means you can only get at most 200 low wage employees in your factory, and you are risking someone else moving in offering more pay. Or you can go to China and pay much less (I don't know wages in China, but I'd guess under $5/hour), or some other poor country and you can pay $1/hour.
Are you arguing against the automation here? Because if so it seems we could bring back a lot of employment by simply getting rid of machines, but would we really be better off? Is it better for humans to spend their short lives working as telephone operator, knowing it an entirely pointless job?
If you're not arguing against automation then I think we need to think about what happens when we expand your timeline a little. Are there really enough 'employment' jobs that can't be automated for billions of humans of different intelligence/physical abilities?
With the automation expanded to the extremes it becomes obvious that you need a new system, society, you name it, a new way of setting up everything. It's not that humans love being a phone operator or creating yet another GUI, but they definitely love to be able to eat. And also love to have a purpose in life. I currently don't see much happening along those lines.
Duh.
All the economic dimwits (both on the left and right) who constantly harp that real wages have been falling, don't take into account the steep fall in prices of consumer goods due to offshoring.
Ofc. this does mean that US becomes the world's "bitch" eventually following the economics of things, but the alternative is essentially becoming Soviet Union or Argentina.
Probably the most annoying thing about conversations on this topic is peoples ignorance or inability to acknowledge the insane availability of so much stuff are such low prices.
A typical persons load out went from personal possessions that could fit in a microwave sized box to personal possessions that overflow the bedroom and living room of their apartment.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Real wages haven’t fallen at all. We’re far wealthier in real terms now than ever before.
People complaining about real wages are for the most part just out of date. Your data shows about a 0.9% growth compounded per year over the last 10 years - and a 0.17% growth compounded per year over the 35 years before that. The numbers were effectively stagnant for my entire childhood and adolescence. (I'm Canadian, but I imagine the picture has the same basic shape here.)
Being able to consume .2% compounded more per year with no increase in labor just for free is pretty nice!
> don't take into account the steep fall in prices of consumer goods due to offshoring.
The definition of "real wages" takes this into account - because they are indexed by the consumer price index, which tracks the prices of consumer goods.
Some goods have dramatically fallen in price (especially if one takes the so-called "hedonic adjustments" into consideration, i.e. attempts to price increasingly more powerful computers and visually impressive TV displays on a continuous spectrum over time). Others have dramatically risen. "Consumer goods" include things like food (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumer-goods.asp), and certainly cars have also been more expensive of late.
The cost of, say, housing is also clearly not experiencing a "steep fall due to offshoring".
I prefer option 1. the world's policeman being a public servant instead of the feudal warlord that we currently seem to have.
For any given thing produced abroad USA could produce it domestically. But you simply cannot produce ALL the things domestically.
Population matters. There's not enough Americans, not even going into how many want to work a blue-collar job and how much you'd have to pay them.
I don't really seen any benefit from buying American. The entire point of being capitalist is to let the market solve these issues, and the market has. I don't have any more loyalty to Americans than to any other people on earth, and I think that impulse is rather odd.
The market has not decided on anything; to employ Americans, you have to pay huge amounts of extra taxes and provide all sorts of legally mandated protections, and to operate an American business, you have to follow all sorts of operational and environmental laws that foreigners don't have to follow. Yet they're allowed to sell their goods in the same venues as Americans.
If there are two ice cream vendors at the park, and the park charges one ice cream vendor a $350/day license and the other one doesn't have to license itself at all, has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?
> has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?
I think recently we've decided it does? Look at Uber versus licensed taxis, Airbnb versus licensed and inspect B&Bs, and many more.
I get what you're saying though, and if there was the will for it then the unlicensed business would be fined such that it would pay more in fines than the cost of a license. It just seems to be going the opposite way.
> If there are two ice cream vendors at the park, and the park charges one ice cream vendor a $350/day license and the other one doesn't have to license itself at all, has the "market" decided that the unlicensed business is superior?
I don't know about "superior", but they're certainly going to sell more ice cream.
It has nothing to do with how much ice cream they sell. You cannot determine who would sell more ice cream based on who pays a license fee and who doesn't. What you can say is that the profits from the licensed vendor will be lower because of higher operating costs if they sell the same amount.
A better example would be one ice cream vendor uses ethically sourced milk and pays all it's workers a solid living wage with benefits, effectively functioning as an extra $350/day expense. The other vendor uses minimum wage labor and factory farm milk.
>has the "market" decided that the [unethical] business is superior
Yes, because anyone half paying attention on the ground instead of scrolling self-righteous internet content all day knows that price is actually king above all else.
$18 ethical ice cream cones taste great, but not as great as $4 ice cream cones.
To ground this in reality, look at the insane rise of Shein for clothes.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I think we're making the same point, namely that if one business operates American-style and the other business operates third-world style, the third-world style business will win on price every time, making it incredibly, prohibitively difficult to operate "American-style" at scale.
America itself operated "third-world style" for centuries.
I like supporting my local community - so I guess I don't have much loyalty to a company in Arkansas but I do have loyalty to a company down the street or a town over.
I do see benefit from not buying from China. China is making geopolitical moves that I do not like and suspect will result in war in the future. They are making moving to take Taiwan. They are clearly supporting Russia against Ukraine.
I, as a Swede, also see the same reasons for not buying American.
Nobody is perfect, and I won't defend the many dumb things the US has done over the years. Some of them I opposed at the time, some of them on hindsight I now wish I had, but I didn't realize.
However when considering things, we don't know what might have been. Some of the dumb things were the best (at least close to best) among many bad options. As a large powerful country the US often doesn't get the choice of sitting out - those who hate "freedom" are forced to attack us either directly or indirectly since we are standing in the way of their goals, and we are taking those attacks for Sweden allowing you to face less of those bad choices (not none - since Sweden also generally stands for freedom you also face some of those attacks)
All you can do is look at the overall situation. I have concluded that China is worse for the world than the US. However I will not claim perfection. There are things I know of about Sweden that I believe would make the world worse if your country gets it way, but overall Sweden is on the right side and so I generally support them. (you may or may not support your country in those things)
I do what I can to make my country better, but I'm one vote and often outvoted. I'm not a very good writer so I rarely convince anyone of a better way. I have more than once found myself on the wrong side of an issue, and been forced to change my mind to my regret. Which is to say I'm human and trying my best. Hopefully you can be the same and make the world better.
Well, that's your prerogative. I don't like the way most states behave (very much including our own warmongering state), but I'll be damned if this alters where I buy basic goods and services.
If America wanted my money, it wouldn't behave in such a blatantly hypocritical manner. Either we're a free-market society or we're going to take care of each other. We've prioritized crying over business owners for decades while letting people go homeless. Fuck those businesses; where were they when the homeless needed advocacy? They chose to spend their time trying to complain about society rather than contributing to it.
I feel like you're misdiagnosing the problem. One of the key ways in which we've been prioritizing business owners for decades is uncritically accepting their arguments for free trade.
"They tried Made in the USA - it was too expensive for their customers"
Did they (the companies profiled in the article) actually try it
Or did they investigate the possibility of trying it
Did customers have an oportunity to determine it was too expensive
Or did these businesses make that determination themselves
NB. I am not suggesting their determination was incorrect. I am only highlighting how the title refers to something that did not actually happen. A more accurate title might be something like
They considered Made in the USA - they determined it would be too expensive for their customers
In addition to giving free advertising to companies mentioned in the article that are _not_ producing prodducts "Made in the USA", the article could also mention some companies that _are_ producing products "Made in the USA"
Would that be unfair
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/01...
If the retailer they normally sell to say they want stock the product at the given price, then you don't get to try?
If you could sell it for more using a different avenue, you probably should have done that before.
Tariffs this way will kill a lot of small businesses.
Some people are actually trying
https://www.smartereveryday.com/smarterscrubber
One has to wonder how the United States survived before the rise of Asian manufacturing... As recently as the 1980s we had full computers made in the US.
We can get it back, at least the more interesting parts of it. If this movement was being sponsored by another political party, as it used to be the case, we would see a complete inversion of the journalists defending and criticizing it.
The thing about the current movement that draws criticism, I believe, is the wildly unrealistic expectations. The party in question has treated bringing back manufacturing, even that which is skilled and requires large quantities of highly specialized machinery and supply chains and trained workers to supply it, as if it’s something you can flip on like a light switch.
If you factor in building factories, building supply chains, training workers, and regaining lost institutional/tribal knowledge, you’re looking at a monstrously expensive endeavor that’s going to take a long time. Probably at least a decade end-to-end, shorter in some fields and longer than others. No level of tariffs or overconfident statements on social media can change this reality.
And as a cherry on top, companies are supposed to set this all back up without help from the government, despite it being so expensive and time consuming to do so, and despite Chinese manufacturing having benefited immensely from its government pouring vast sums into bolstering its manufacturing capabilities to reach its present position. What corporate leadership is going to see any of that as reasonable or remotely a good deal? They’re more likely to play up investments they’d already planned to make during the previous administration and wait for another dice roll come next election.
TLDR it can happen, but not on a short timeline and not without government incentives to smooth over the massive costs of bring it back.
If you look at the income curve of household income over the last 100 years, you will see that the curve went from clumped around $60k to flattened and rolled out extending up to hundreds of thousands.
Put simply, back in the day everyone earned pretty similar pay. Nowadays pay is much more spread out and lots more families make way more money than they would have 40 years ago. The market really loves these high earning households (not billionairs, I mean $100k+) and naturally gravitates towards catering to them. The $60k households get left out.
Trying to make all your products domestically may be the wrong approach for many. Instead make specific lines domestically.
There are lots of companies who standard ranges are made in China, but they also have a Made in America/other for their premium range.
That way customers who are less price sensitive can choose to pay more. And those who can't still buy regardless.
IIRC some companies have tried this. The problem is that the stuff made in China is as good, sometimes better, than the stuff that's made in America but costs 4x more. So, revealed preferences shocker: Nobody buys the so-called "Premium" line. You need a better reason to charge more money.
Just an anecdote but as someone who has gone out of their way to buy American as much as I possibly can for many years I’ve found that to be true either never or so rarely I can’t remember. Quality of American products has not been an issue whatsoever, usually quite the opposite.
It’s more about the price than quality. When you can make products that are just as good (outside of some niche areas) in China/etc. for a proportion of the cost there is very little reason not to do that unless you have no competition.
There are some premium brands that can (partially) pull it off like KitchenAid but that’s an exception.
My perspective is that consumers have come to feel that price is far more important than quality whereas I feel exactly the opposite. I take pride in the things I make for a living and I prefer to be surrounded by products of a similar ethos. I buy products to solve a problem and I want the problem optimally solved. In the cases when the quality is a toss up I don’t mind paying a premium to support our domestic economy.
Many do succeed - All-Clad for example make their stuff in USA and China. I own the American made frying pan of theirs, as do many.
The "Made in America" range is probably mostly made in China too, but with just enough assembly to be able to declare that it isn't, sold with a higher profit to collect the consumer surplus from less price sensitive customers.
Perhaps some people lie, but the "Made in America" designation is specifically regulated by the FTC (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/complying-ma...), and unlike similar regulations in other countries it doesn't permit these kind of final assembly shenanigans. The entire thing has to be made end-to-end in the US with negligible foreign input. One specific example they list is a lamp with an imported base; even though the base is neither a functional component nor a large amount of the cost, the manufacturer may not claim that the lamp as a whole is American-made.
I've actually seen arguments that this is so strong it loops back around to discouraging American manufacturing. Is there any "Made in America" loving consumer who wouldn't be happy to buy that lamp?
> Is there any "Made in America" loving consumer who wouldn't be happy to buy that lamp?
Perhaps they need to have everyone agree on labeling that fairly describes the product but is still flattering enough to motivate consumer decisions.
True, I saw a bunch of fiber optic components assembled in America that bypassed tariffs (2016-2017 era) where obviously the hard part had been done somewhere overseas. Wasn't even about the Made in America branding.
Same for ie Switzerland. You have these Victorinox and Wengen knives which are proper tourist souvenirs (on top of being fine little knives). Most of them is done in neighboring countries, and only final assembly is done in the country to pass "Made in Switzerland".
Fine products but shady behavior to say the least.
Subsidize capability upkeep - as in if you need it, you still have trained machinists, specialists and retoolable machinery in storage, to copy and buildup a capability at scale.
The question is why do this though? This is basically a defense economics argument. If there's no adversarial conflict, then who cares where something is made?
A tsunami once wiped out the entire world's production capacity for spinning hard drives. Efficiency is always the enemy of robustness, and war is only one kind of disaster. And the way the world is going, adversarial conflict seems to be the new normal.
I can't believe you mentioned the tsunami. It came right after the offshoring happened for unnamed company my father worked for, I'll never forget it, it couldn't have been worse timing. All the investment POOF.
If the latest review of the "end of history" shows one thing- there is always adversarial minds at work. The whole "free world" mindset has collapsed in on itself the moment the us withdrew into isolationism. The world out there, is run by the old landempires gobbling up neighbors again. No progress has been made and to defend against barbaric adversaries, one must keep dependency on them low.
There always is a bill - and business is helping the enemies of liberty to prepare. They are not interested in peaceful coexistence, quite contrary, the conflict is a carrying pillar to upkeep societal/tribal structural integrity. And war & peace is a defector game- only one needs to defect to put the others in the same position as the defector. So "business as usual" with non-free block aligned nations- will always be long-term collusion with the enemy.
> If there's no adversarial conflict, then who cares where something is made?
I think you just answered your question by yourself without realizing: the signs are that an adversarial conflict might come up - so be prepared for it.
That's presuming that such a conflict would be fought as the sort of industrial war that WW1 and WW2 were. But there's little evidence that's the case: the lead times on modern weapons systems are enormous, and the attrition rate of hardware is enormous too (i.e. consider that the Javelin can put a tank out of action permanently).
It is an unproven criteria that it is reasonable or possible to expect to produce the munitions and equipment for a conflict during the conflict if it's the sort of near-peer thing people usually cite for this - i.e. rather you go to war with what you have, and you're unlikely to rebuild that advantage in time if you don't win then.
Which is the point: localizing a bunch of industries on that basis may not make any sense, compared to simply stockpiling from the cheapest accreditable sources.
It took decades to gut American consumer manufacturing. Anyone who thinks it can be brought back without pain is deluded. But nevertheless, it’s worth that pain.
As the Chinese are well aware, every time in history a great financial power and a great industrial power have come into conflict, the industrial power wins.
I’ve often wondered about PPP and why China is cheaper. Deepseek provided interesting answers, and it’s nothing to do with pollution or cheap labour. Turns out socialist policies, investing in free markets, cheap education, open competition, public infrastructure result in competitive manufacturing.
Decades of private equity/vulture capital shipping overseas has allowed for other countries to overtake the USA.
It all boils down to awful pseudoscience pushed by Reaganomics/trickle down economic theory. This pseudoscience has been used to write policy in this country which has only benefited the ultra wealthy.
Right now, there's nearly a 100% chance any "Made in USA" brand is a grift, by direct members of the grifting party. I'm for the idea, done correctly. I'm completely against it in it's current form. They're taking your money rubes. If you want the real thing, you're going to have to help fix the country instead of falling for basic scams, in all areas of life.
I don't think the American small business owners are interested in making bullshit. What you need to do is fully destroy the middle class until you've got an air gapped lower class bent to your will building human doggy beds.
Some destruction is necessary for all creation, but generally its a bad idea to destroy the middle class instead of shoring it up.
>making bullshit
Make things that empower people and give them the ability to be class-fluid. That's what the world really needs, after all.
> Make things that empower people and give them the ability to be class-fluid. That's what the world really needs, after all.
The problem is: by the way you were raised, you have become deeply brainwashed into the social norms of your class for decades. Becoming class-fluid means getting free of this whole brainwashing, and then get a brainwashing for your destination social class. This also implies that you have to give up all your friends (if you keep them, they will back-brainwash you into your old habits; additionally, by the reprogramming these old friends will be unable to get on with you anymore because you have become a "different person" for them).
Thus, I believe only very few people want that.
Wow! You just articulated a feeling I have had but could not put my finger on it until I read that. I grew up in a blue-collar Midwest US city that was decimated by the loss of domestic manufacturing. I went to college and got a CS degree and went on to enjoy 2+ decades of the tech boom and was paid well for it. Thus, allowing me and my family move into a different class i.e. white collar, educated, entrepreneurial, class-fluid. But now at middle age I don’t recognize any of my friends from the “old” neighborhood as I have changed so much, we don’t really know each other anymore. Our views on many things are so different we might as well be strangers. But due to being raised in that blue-collar environment my thoughts and ideas sometimes don’t mesh with the new class of people I find myself socializing with now. Which leaves me in some kind of limbo. I don’t fit in with the people from my past, but I don’t fit in with the people of my present.
Work on not seeing class at all - this is the ultimate fluidity.
Embrace differing views. It can be done in a way that makes everyone win.
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Or people making doggy beds and going home to a 3000sq.ft home on a 1/2 acre with a stay at home mom and 3 kids.
We just need to accept that everyone with a dog will need to purchase an $800 bed for their dog. Or since that is obviously untenable, charge billionaires $8 million to buy a bed for their dog.
At this point you might be unsure if this is sarcasm or not. Which is pretty telling about the state of things.
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You only get to pick one: labor laws or a manufacturing industry.
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This headline is a lie. It's not a matter of being "too expensive for customers", it's a matter of undesirable profit margin for the company.
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In my opinion, the following are additional factors that are often overlooked when discussing the competitiveness of USA manufacturing:
>5) Fat, dumb, and happy society - we care more about Super Bowl Sunday, Hollywood, reality shows, etc. On average, we're lazy and care more about being entertained.
Respectfully, people care about supporting their families, having health care coverage, paying off their student loans, having a safe job that they can get to easily and cheaply and have general good work conditions. The first 4 points may be true, but the 5th point is an unfair characterisation.
Ok, I'll bite. What would be some solutions to these supposed factors? What policy are you suggesting?
I notice that these "additional factors" happen to align with right wing politics, which implies to me that you may be smuggeling something in along with these "additional factors" I should also consider.
"Consider that working people may just be lazy drug addicts, and why do you care about their workplace safety?" Is not really something I want to consider.
You read more into my comments than you should have. I'll expand on my points:
If you read everything I wrote above, please tell me where I'm right-wing or left-wing. Of the 5 factors I listed, the only one that I would advocate for a policy change is (2). I would like to see broad funding for shop/industrial classes in high schools throughout the country. Again, these shops would not look like they did in 1970, although they would likely still have some of the same tools. However, they would also have modernized, high-tech ones like robotics, 3D printing, etc.Where am I so off-base? Where did I make value judgements (aside from fat, dumb, lazy one) about Americans? Am I promoting some right-wing agenda with my comments? I believe that these are honest points that should be discussed and debated.
I've been thinking about the decline of shop classes. It would be nice if schools just had more stuff; basic proper calipers and micrometers, 3D printers, vinyl cutting machines, fountain pens, Rubik's Cubes, etc.. Somehow the trend of cheap goods just didn't make it to the classroom for whatever reason.