Comment by mitthrowaway2 2 days ago
> US manufacturing has pretty much been constantly growing
By dollar value, perhaps, but that mostly means the US makes lot of high-value microchips, a field that has made (well-documented) exponential progress over the past decades. It is still consistent with US manufacturing capabilities regressing in other key aspects, such as machine tools, injection molding, shipbuilding, consumer goods, and so on.
Yes. Here's an example: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...
Excerpt:
> "The computer industry, in turn, is an outlier and statistical anomaly. Its extraordinary output and productivity growth reflect the way statistical agencies account for improvements in selected products produced in this industry, particularly computers and semiconductors. Rapid productivity growth in this industry—and by extension the above-average productivity growth in the manufacturing sector—has little to do with automation of the production process. Nor is extraordinary real output and productivity growth an indicator of the competitiveness of domestic manufacturing in the computer industry; rather, the locus of production of the industry’s core products has shifted to Asia"
The whole document is well worth a read.
Here's another article: https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
Not sure what podcast you're talking about, but since we're trading vague recollections, my recollection was opposite. Manufacturing as % of GDP certainly went down, but gross value added did not.
Also, hedonic adjustments are typically applied to CPI figures, not figures like GDP or value added, so I suspect you have some facts crossed.
Note I think this evidence and discussion is all ambiguous, but hedonic adjustments absolutely affect real GDP.
When comparing to a past year's GDP, you need to make an adjustment for the differing value of money, and you can't calculate the differing value of money without considering the changes in the qualities of what you can buy with it.
We were only temporarily good at shipbuilding in the world wars. The United States just don't have much of an aspiration to be world class in building ships.
Given that we have the largest navy in the world, it would behooves us to grow our shipbuilding capabilities to be at least competitive.
> Well, you can (partially) thank the Jones Act for US ship building being so abysmal.
Or you can thank it for there being any shipbuilding left at all.
I would like to hear the case for how repealing the Jones Act would strengthen the US shipbuilding industry. I imagine it would be quite amusing.
It's pretty easy to make a limited case that should convince you, though not very amusing, I'm afraid.
> [The Jones Act] requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships that have been constructed in the United States and that fly the U.S. flag, are owned by U.S. citizens, and are crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents.
Repeal all provisions save for the requirement of having to be constructed in the US.
It's not what I would suggest (an outright repeal would be better), but it's easy to see how this partial repeal would strengthen the US shipbuilding industry: you are making their products more useful and cheaper to operate.
For comparison, you can have a look at eg German shipbuilding. Germany isn't exactly a low-cost country, has no equivalent of the Jones Act, and is doing some shipbuilding. (They aren't the biggest player in building whole ships, but the world loves to import German Diesel engines. Division of labour and all that.)
The US was a shipbuilding superpower because it had what Europe did not, access to vast untapped timber. It wasn't until globalization that the US lost its shipbuilding industry.
> The US was a shipbuilding superpower because it had what Europe did not, access to vast untapped timber. It wasn't until globalization that the US lost its shipbuilding industry.
Where did you get this information? The Spanish-American war wasn't considered much of a war by Americans at the time since the American fleet had been built with steel vs the Spanish that still used wooden ships. Those ships were run on coal. The US lost its shipbuilding industry because of cheaper competition from Japan and S. Korea in the civilian sector and Congress favors aircraft carriers over smaller ships like frigates and destroyers from what I read.
It was the same situation for Spain. Its rise as a naval superpower in the 15th and 16th centuries came at a high environmental cost too. To build its fleet, including those iconic Spanish galleons, Spain logged high amounts of oak and pine, especially from northern regions like Cantabria and the Basque Country.
As ship production ramped up, there were growing concerns about resource depletion. To the point that by the late 16th century, Spain was forced to start importing timber from its colonies to keep up with demand.
They didn't have enough.
>The Swedish Navy planted oak trees on the island beginning in 1831 to provide strategically important timber for future ship construction. Once the timber was ready to harvest it was no longer required for ship construction.
We have forests, but not like the US. We had to carefully manage our forests in order to keep them.
how is this measured? Because if it's by total vessels it's a poor comparison. If it's by total aircraft carrier, it's also a poor comparison.
Basically measuring this is difficult, but this is contrary to my only knowledge of this which was a Wendover video (that was an enjoyable watch), but I wouldn't hold in the highest standard.
Before adding up ship tonnage, we should subtract one US carrier for every, I dunno, two ASBMs possessed by the PRC, and if (lol, I mean when) we get to zero, move on to, say, the Arleigh Burke class.
I guess we can give the US some bonus points here for each SM-6 they have, but pretty sure those'll run out in a week too.
On the "plus" side, China is food-insecure, so the US can cause millions of civilian deaths via famine. So it can/would still win, just via genocide. It would take a decade though, and require a strong campaign by the media to maintain domestic support.
Actually, no, I'm overstating things. The strategy would not be so much to kill so many people, as to "make the economy scream" (as in South and Central America), so as to hopefully bring about regime change. The net result might actually be an increase in immigration from China to the US (to the extent that people are able to make that migration). In the long run that'd be a net win for the US, actually.
Indeed, you could say that the first shots of that campaign have already happened. Look at Chinese youth unemployment.
I think the number is a lot higher than two ASBM per carrier. There's always a group of carrier, cruiser, and a destroyer squadron that provide a layered defense. So it's probably not that simple.
https://totalmilitaryinsight.com/aircraft-carrier-defense-sy...
America innovates. China replicates.
China and the US have been at war for decades now. Both an economic war and cyber war. Chinese nation-state hackers have hacked into tons of Fortune 500, Aerospace and defense companies, and tech companies to steal R&D from them. They take this R&D and use it for themselves but additionally, they also give it to private industry to use for themselves as well. China plays the long con game. Whatever it takes to make China the number one super power country eventually.
"There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode
high-speed pizza delivery”
-― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992
Excellent quote. While the effect of American music is huge without a doubt let me go off on a personal tangent because it's related.
I have immigrated from my homeland (first to Canada and then Malta) and I usually say "I had the bad luck to be born in Hungary but I fixed that when I could". In other words, I am not particularly fond of the country / people living in there. But it being my mother tongue, growing up there has an interesting effect: some Hungarian songs have a much stronger emotional effect than any in say English. These are not even songs I knew as a child. I am actually quite curious whether there has been scientific research in this.
Nelson Mandela had a famous quote about the power of speaking someone's native language:
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."
The idea here is pretty straightforward: speaking to someone in a language they merely understand reaches them intellectually, but speaking in their mother tongue resonates on a deeper, emotional level. You can imagine now why songs in Hungarian resonate more to you than the ones in English.
I shall follow you down your personal/Hungarian tangent...
There was a guy called Jackie Orszaczky who was a Hungarian jazz/funk musician - bass player, bandleader, and singer - here (in Sydney, Australia) who made some of my most loved jazz/funk music.
This is one of his bands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hydb0dyB9GQ
Sadly, he died about 15 years back, way too early. Fuck Cancer.
Apparently he was "a big deal" in Hungary, at least amongst music circles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Orszaczky
Update: https://reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/1fjo6f7/song_lyrics_in_... this is a very helpful comment pointing out there is, indeed research on the subject.
> Markets cease to function efficiently in the presence of massive concentrations of wealth
Why?
> US manufacturing capabilities regressing in other key aspects, such as machine tools, injection molding, shipbuilding, consumer goods, and so on.
But this is exactly what Econ 101 tells you to expect to happen (and I teach Econ 101 ;) . Countries specialize to maximize comparative advantage. If you are the US and can manufacture high value items at a lower opportunity cost (or high value services at a lower opportunity cost), you will, but this means giving up on doing other things you could use the resources for.
The net result is that US manufacturing output in real dollars has increased 4x, in the past 70 years. At the same time, its share of the economy has shrunk (because other sectors have outgrown it), and many lower value manufacturing subsectors have been largely abandoned.
Maybe our economic policy should go deeper than 101-level economics then! Because comparative advantage is a dynamic quantity which changes over time, and while some advantages (like geography) are fixed, others are built by investment.
Here's a video [1] which explains why, in 1955, manufacturing household goods was cheaper to make in the US than in China (and why, at the time, they thought this manufacturing dominance was the thing that backed the US position as a global superpower). It's not because Americans worked more cheaply than Chinese workers, it's because American factories had a well-developed tool-and-die expertise, which meant that when anyone in the world wanted to make something, they were well-advised to travel the US to get it made.
Econ 101's comparative advantage is true at an instantaneous point in time, which is a good start, but if perhaps it's just "knowing enough to be dangerous". Economic policymakers (and company leaders) would do well to think about comparative advantage as planning an optimal trajectory over time, which can mean sacrificing a short-term optimum in exchange for a long-term optimum, and if there even is a textbook solution for that, it's going to look less like a 101-level intersection of straight lines, and more like an iterative optimization over nonlinear differential equations.
> it's because American factories had a well-developed tool-and-die expertise, which meant that when anyone in the world wanted to make something, they were well-advised to travel the US to get it made.
Also because you couldn't offshore production to China or most other places even if you could provide all that due to various geopolitical, economic, social, institutional and other reasons.
I think you're missing the point of what I'm saying. The US has steadily moved away from those past competencies because there was more profit to be made elsewhere.
And, sure, there are absolutely network effects with related goods and industries that have steepened that movement. If it was a win to change the allocation of resources when e.g. steelmaking was strong in the US, it's even more of a win after steelmaking withered.
> and if there even is a textbook solution for that,
It's not quite what you're saying, but the closest work I have read is 'Dynamic Optimization: The calculus of variations and optimal control in economics and management' by Kamien et al. It is all about estimating gradients and plotting trajectories in dynamical economic systems.
The feeling of misunderstanding is mutual! I agree that there was more profit to be made elsewhere. But I'm arguing that those profits were short-term profits which may well have come at long-term expense. If you follow the local gradient of profitability, you'll always find great short-term returns selling off your seed corn. Unlike what Econ 101 asserts about maximizing comparative advantage being the most profitable strategy, there is absolutely no guarantee that following a locally-optimal comparative-advantage strategy is globally optimal over a long-term window, where advantages are path-dependent.
Manufacturing is the core example of path-dependent advantages, because (unlike what any econ 101 textbook teaches), marginal costs decline with increasing production quantity in the manufacturing sector. This means the more you make, the better you are at making more things!
They didn't do a very good job of pricing in politics.
Just because they're "lower value" subsectors doesn't mean they have significant real-world impacts.
This sort of announcement will inevitably be used shortsightedly for political reasons. Someone will interpret "We have 3nm at home" as "We can do something foolhardy with Taiwan" or "We can throw up a big, non-surgical tariff". This will soon be followed by "did anyone mention that the 3nm chip is useless without a galaxy of half-cent supporting parts that we outsourced decades ago?" or "people consume products other than highly binned silicon dies, and now we have supply crunches and price spikes from televisions to toasters to turmeric?"
> The net result is that US manufacturing output in real dollars has increased 4x, in the past 70 years.
All of that manufacturing growth is semiconductors, and most of that measured semiconductors growth is simply Moore's law. I don't think anybody would say that the US is worse at making transistors today than it was in 1970, but that's table stakes; everybody is better at making transistors than they were in 1970. Automotive manufacturing has also done well (in part thanks to trade barriers). When it comes to everything else -- vacuum cleaners, fans, washing machines -- that manufacturing output is not doing so well.
The US is worse at manufacturing discrete transistors. It is almost all offshore with all the other commodity parts.
I don't teach economics 101 nor taken a class. What about the other corporate departments that are being outsource?
The company I previously worked for not only outsourced product manufacturing to South Korea with assembly in the USA, after I left. They also outsourced customer service (CSR) to south Asia. Texas VCs bought the company and are trying to maximize all returns on their investment.
Companies like American, that produce branded products, have a whole department that helps their sales reps with moving customer support, be it email, physical letter, and or phone, to south Asia to reduce office management costs in the USA. They also could just be outsourcing invoicing while CSR is a local provider.
Manufacturing is a simple concept that is heavily politically pushed. The other departments that are needed to support products seem to be ignored. ML has a great likelihood of perpetuating this with real-time vocal transitioning. The CSR in India can sound like some person from New Jersey and break the accent barrier. This would put the customer at ease when sharing the same vocal tones. Consumers would be none the wiser.
At the end of the day, everything but 1) product development (R&D) and 2) corporate leadership are fungible and prone to outsourcing to the lowest cost locations until they get moved to a place where quality drops off enough that the company backpedals a bit. All those corporate departments are largely filled with commodity staff, so this shouldn't be surprising.
I'm not saying that in a judgmental or harshly negative way -- I've personally worked in cost centers for most of my career, and although I think highly of myself and my peers, we're still just assessed bluntly as part of COGS.
> but this means giving up on doing other things you could use the resources for.
Aka giving up the security and being more vulnerable to volatility. The pendulum can swing too far, as resilience cannot be measured in dollars.
Up until recently we all naively believed 'a rising tide lifts all ships' meant we'd all choose to get along and everyone would benefit.
Indeed, by revenue the U.K. is a bigger manufacturer than it has ever been. But it’s all things like jet engines and other high value items. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is a matter for protracted debate.