abe_m (u/abe_m) - Readit News

abe_m commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

graeme · 19 days ago

Unfortunately I think that's just aging of the population. There's no upper age limit in that calculation. It includes retirees as "not in the labour force".

If you look at the participation rate of people aged 25-54 it's near all time highs.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

abe_m · 19 days ago

Something is weird there, as the 55+ was increasing in the period of about 1995 to 2010, while the overall was down in point 2000, and 25-54 was flat. Weird.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230

abe_m commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

nostrademons · 20 days ago

So here's what I don't get about the public discourse on manufacturing in the U.S:

When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2].

The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here):

1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI.

2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.

If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.

Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die."

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

abe_m · 19 days ago

It seems a bit of a tautology to ask the survivors if things are OK. Of course is is OK for them, they are in an industry segment that survived the trend of moving everything possible to China. If you go ask where the factories were shutdown, you'll find different responses.

The dip in number of manufacturing employees corresponds time-wise to China joining WTO, and the massive CEO hype of shutting down US factories and moving them to China, rather than super-duper automation hitting the scene and automating the factories in place.

I have a suspicion that the displayed manufacturing output chart is in dollars, not amount of stuff, and that is likely bumped up by highly automated IC/chip manufacturing that is high cost/value, but low tonnage work.

abe_m commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

hypeatei · 19 days ago

With the US unemployment rate being so low, with birth rates below replacement levels, and with anti-immigration sentiment: how do proponents of "bring everything back" plan to deal with the human capital problem?

Besides that, bringing everything back would surely raise prices quite substantially and we've seen how voters reacted to COVID inflation.

abe_m · 19 days ago

While official unemployment is low, that is only people actively looking for work. Labour force participation is way down from it's highs when it peaked in the late 90's. From a peak of around 67%, the US is currently at 62%[1], and the fall off corresponds to the time when imports from China were rising hard and it was the trendy thing to do among executives to shutdown US plants and move production to China.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART/

Many people and towns that lost work in the manufacturing shut downs still don't have replacement work, and I think part of that is we lost a lot of low-skilled labour work as the factories left.

Now a question would be, if the work does come back, will it be low skilled enough to be able to hire the same pool of people formerly employed?

abe_m commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

SilverElfin · 19 days ago

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

abe_m · 19 days ago

I'm split on this. Tradesmen that came up through their apprenticeship say that people need to learn the old manual machines to "feel what the machine is doing", before you can move over to computer controlled machines. But I think that is just the tendency of people to say the path to their current location is the path they took. Not that another path isn't actually a better way to get there for the current environment.

I also think there has been a bit of bias in trade schools towards learning manual processes because it is cheap. You can have a room full of students spend weeks learning to use a file to shape a small block of steel to precise dimensions. A $5 file and $10 of material is easier to supply than a $1XX,XXX computerize manufacturing machine that can process $XXX of material or more per day. But spending weeks to learn how to precision hand file is pretty well a waste of time for modern manufacturing.

abe_m commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

markus_zhang · 19 days ago

That’s still fine. You gotta hire people to maintain the robots, the people to build the robots, and the people for all service companies to service all those people. Then there is infrastructure, entertainment, etc.

And on top of it you retain the knowledge to build, assemble and maintain these robots. This is alone worth the effort.

abe_m · 19 days ago

I think we're starting to see the pile up that assuming people who worked assembly lines will just become robot tech isn't happening. For the entirety of humans, there have always been a place for low-skilled labour. We had subsistence farming, then as the industrial revolution came on, we ended up with a lot more types of labour jobs. As farms mechanized, we got factories, and as factory output went up, new products were created that needed labour to install them. Now that the remaining factories are requiring smarter workers, farms are pretty well fully automatic, we have a glut of working age people sitting on the sidelines unable to find work that is worthwhile doing.

I think we're at the point where more automation means more loss of work, as opposed to people moving into the new jobs created, for an ever larger portion of the population.

abe_m commented on Six months into congestion pricing, more cars are off the road ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/... · Posted by u/geox

gonzalohm · 2 months ago

Public services like public transport shouldn't be seen as for-profit entities. For some reason Americans don't seem to understand that

abe_m · 2 months ago

But the current state of a lot of public transport being money losing entities indicates their costs are out of control. Public services shouldn't just help themselves to endless taxpayer money rather than put their house in order and provide value.

abe_m commented on They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers reuters.com/business/they... · Posted by u/petethomas

tptacek · 2 months ago

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.

abe_m · 2 months ago

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.

abe_m commented on They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers reuters.com/business/they... · Posted by u/petethomas

superultra · 2 months ago

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.

abe_m · 2 months ago

There could be some legacy places out there that are stuck in the 50's. Also, small businesses seem to be more likely to not have good programs for safety than large outfits. But I've been working in industrial settings for 20 years on 3 continents, and all the big places have had extensive environmental and safety programs. Having said that, I've never been to a steel mill. The workers themselves can be their own worst enemy though. Places that have a large contingent of workers that started in the 70's and 80's tend to think the safety stuff is 'gay', and forced upon them by management.

abe_m commented on They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers reuters.com/business/they... · Posted by u/petethomas

superultra · 2 months ago

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.

abe_m · 2 months ago

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.

abe_m commented on They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers reuters.com/business/they... · Posted by u/petethomas

tptacek · 2 months ago

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.

abe_m · 2 months ago

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.