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
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”