It’s a long article lamenting that onshore manufacturing doesn’t work. But, maybe it’s just they weren’t good at it? Maybe their leadership was poor? Perhaps their technical automation solutions were poor? I refuse to believe that the only way to make things is on effectively slave labour.
It is not the only way, it is the most cost-effective way. Our system is designed to evolve for cost, which inevitably means harm to workers, by rewarding slavish work in cheap places to live and discouraging American work. We absolutely can do loads of stuff onshore with some investment, but it clashes with our system at a deeply fundamental level. If there is one singlular solitary sentiment I agree with hard-conservatives on, it's "America first" (or really just the idea of "<our society> first" in general). Scrubbed of the oft-hinted disdain for others, of course.
>We absolutely can do loads of stuff onshore with some investment
"Some" investment is a gross understatement.
Manufacturing is highly skilled work. This project failed because they simply did not have enough people involved who understood the forging process; they tried to build an automated system to perform a process that they did not fully understand. Making metal into shapes involves a near-infinite array of subtleties, nuances and gotchas; automating that work requires a deep understanding of all those edge cases. HN readers should be able to draw clear parallels with the failure modes of large software projects.
The fundamental bottleneck in any effort to reshore manufacturing is the supply of skilled labor. Skilled American manufacturing workers are retiring faster than they are entering the workplace. We are plugging the gap with automation, but that only gets you so far, as this example illustrates. Reversing that decline will take a generation or two, because there's a chicken-and-egg problem. Good manufacturing workers need years of on-the-job experience, but the number of manufacturing jobs is limited by the lack of skilled workers to fill the vacancies that already exist.
"America first" is a jingoistic slogan that devalues the manufacturing workforce. China did an incredible job of creating a world-class manufacturing economy. Cheap labor was an important stepping stone towards that, but it's no longer the decisive factor. If you don't respect your rivals, you can't understand how to compete. American manufacturing has a network effects problem and there's no quick or easy solution to that.
It’s also about driving everything to the bottom. Why does society need a cheap throwaway tool? What if only high quality, well made tools were available that truly reflected their production cost - both materially, environmentally and in terms of complete labour cost (as in, well paid employees with adequate 401k, holidays, etc). Not everyone needs a cheap tool, what if the tool reflected the true cost and it was very expensive and only a few have them? What happens? You borrow one. You save up for one. You pay a professional who has all the right tools.
I’m pretty sure this is (put very simply), how it always worked until globalization was sold as a good idea. It’s funny how democracy attempted to trickle down into materialism - as in we think it’s our god damn right to own whatever we want at the lowest possible cost regardless of its effects.
I think there's a weird situation here. People don't actually want 'cheap' things made in America (because that's what China et al do), but then complain it's too expensive to make locally.
This is very difficult to solve: allow cheap locally made products while still allowing pride in the 'locally made' label...
I suspect that it has more to do with the desire to have tools. No one in the year 1900 would have said they did not want tools. They were essential, and even if you had no particular need for a tool yourself, it was something to loan for favor trading. If someone would've have given them high quality tools, it'd be like gifting you or me a spaceship.
Today? Who wants a tool, they live in places where they can't even keep more than the tiniest assortment of tools, and they use them infrequently enough for them to be more of a burden than an asset.
If such people do not want tools, they sure as hell don't want expensive, high quality tools. Those are like the cheap ones, but they cost more and you cry more when you lose them moving to the next apartment. And if no one wants high quality tools...
Well, no one's going to bother to sell them.
If I'm honest, it's a little bit of what you say and the two effects play off on each other as it spirals down into the void.
> Today? Who wants a tool, they live in places where they can't even keep more than the tiniest assortment of tools, and they use them infrequently enough for them to be more of a burden than an asset.
In this case, tool lending libraries are a great solution. You can see if there is one near you at:
Globalism wasn't "sold" as a good idea. Shareholders of companies that make tools just realized they profit more by increasing the difference between cost of production and final sale price.
Of course it was sold - by the means you mentioned, but also, those profits were then quickly deployed into decades long marketing strategies - which has led to a world addicted to low quality, cheap goods - an addiction we cannot be weaned off of. So much so, as the article laments, we can't even make a wrench.
My memory is everyone just loved buying cheaper things like flatscreens. This “selling” business is made up hindsight and I hear it a lot. “Do you think globalism is a good idea”. No idea but weren’t you just at Black Friday buying $300 TVs, wear fast fashion, and buy cheap tools?
They don't exactly go around telling us that it's cementing centralisation of large corporations, leveraging slave/cheap labour as much as possible until caught while reducing local opportunities and knowledge, environmental impact of mass packaging and supply chains, bringing wonderful tax avoidance opportunities and flouting quality controls and regulations.
But of course, blame the consumer, because it was sold with full warnings but they didn't listen ..
Because, I'm a consumer, who needs a screwdriver maybe every 3 years. I don't care if it's lower quality because i never do more than tighten the hinges on my door frame.
Instead of spending $20 on a top of the line screwdriver, I can spend $3 and it still does everything I need it to.
If you had to buy the top quality $20 screwdriver, maybe it'd eventually be passed on to one of our children, or go to someone else. I know that sounds kind of silly when we're talking about screwdrivers, but hopefully it'd still mean a world that needs to manufacture a few less items.
If the only screwdrivers were $20, a lot of people would use butter knifes to screw in a lot more things. They're not good screwdrivers, but they're not $20 either.
What would happen is screwdrivers would rarely break, all the necessary screwdrivers would be made, we'd get cheap screwdrivers secondhand that had been straightened or re-shaped. The market would shrink considerably and the companies making screwdrivers would be at risk of closing. Repair shops would increase, resource usage would decrease, there'd be far less need of recycling.
Capitalism is completely incompatible with economy and environmentalism.
There is a significant second-hand market for good quality tools that were built to last. But you have to be reasonably informed in the first place as a consumer to know what's good and what's bad.
The system optimizes for cost because most customers shop for cost.
When you are working you want wages as high as possible. When you are shopping you implicitly want others wages as low as possible.
Almost everything in economics is a paradox like that because it’s a machine made of feedback loops and control systems. A standard control system has something pushing one way and something else pushing the other way.
> When you are shopping you implicitly want others wages as low as possible.
Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but this isn't true stated like this. I'm surely not representative of most shoppers, but I don't want wages lower, I want the actual workers to get the largest cut of what I spend. Higher ups are salaried and have a guaranteed stable income which is not anything like an hourly wage. Lowering prices by simply cutting bonuses to people who already have a stable income is not at all the same as wanting hourly employees to take pay cuts to make your junk cheaper.
Yet people complain loudly about the one case where we can directly affect the worker's pay who are doing the actual work - tipping culture is widely derided as some sort of societal ill.
No, some of us complain bitterly about tipping culture because the waitstaff should be paid a living wage without having to be tipped. And some of us complain even more bitterly because the pittance they are paid doesn't keep up with the cost of living and so the amount of the tip as a percentage of the bill has to keep going up.
To be clear: I tip well when I eat out. My irritation at the system is not something I take out on the people serving my food.
Valid point but usually in manufacturing labor and materials are the largest costs. Management can be in some cases less than 10% for a large operation, though it depends on scale and how efficient it is.
C suite people are often overpaid but this is still usually a small cost center for a really big company, and most consumer products are made by large companies. Also those inflated compensation packages often include a bunch of stock and other non-cash compensation.
Sure. I guess also the worry in the hyper capitalist world we now live in, is that our very lives are optimized to shop. Every minute of life has become financialized. We are these hunks of meat walking around trying to optimize everything. Shame.
I’ll blame private equity. Made in U.S.A. brand gets bought by PE that uses a pile of debt. Then they just dump all that debt on the company, and no shit, “we can’t afford to make things in the USA anymore”, because we loaded up the brand with 80% of its worth in debt, with no material gain for the actual manufacture of goods, and now we gotta service the debt!!
Raising the price of imported goods via tariffs is designed to make domestic products comparatively price-competitive. Once you've driven all of your manufacturing offshore, tariffs won't work. While there are a few toolmakers left in the US, there are, for example, no cellphone makers, etc.
Use of protective tariffs to shelter domestic production whilst developing that production capacity is in fact A Thing, and is actually a principle component of what is known as the American School of economics, which strongly influenced US economic policy from the 1790s through the 1970s, and had as a chief proponent Friedrich List (1789--1846).
A modern proponent is Ha-Joon Chang, particularly in his books Kicking Away the Ladder and Bad Samaterians.
No, it doesn't matter that there's no domestic manufacturing of X today. If you put a sufficiently high tariff on X you'll get it made locally sooner than later.
Tarrifs are crude but very effective centrally planned price signals.
Perhaps this isn't just a case of labor costs and failure of automation but also a story of business venture that simply failed due to a once-in-a-century pandemic and our government's poor handling of it (by two administrations):
"Executives said at Stanley’s May 2019 investor day that the factory would be in production in 18 months. Former employees said that timetable, thrown off by the pandemic, meant the system wasn’t properly tested before being brought up to scale. "
Consequently:
"By then, Stanley had already announced it was divesting its security business, its oil-and-gas unit and a door-making division in a bid to become a more focused company. An earnings call in July 2022 revealed that the core tool business had suffered a sudden drop in demand after the boom times of the pandemic."
This idea that "the USA can't manufacture anything any more" is bullshit. Just looks at all the stuff we DO manufacture like Boeing aircraft, the latest microprocessors, and most advanced spacecraft.
Also you don't have to either, you really only have to make airplanes, ships, weapons and missiles, everything else is kind of unnecessary if you have those. As long as you have the bigger stick nothing else really matters, of course you'll be hated by everyone else but that's not really a problem. You just call that stick "liberalism" and call it a day.
The response is always: "Oh, well, we're not making enough profit to justify staying open." Are you serious? It's greed manifest at sociopathic levels.
When employees quit to take a higher paying job elsewhere, do you feel the same way? They weren’t making enough to “justify staying open” at their old job, so they changed and we celebrate them for their action (as we should, IMO).
When we use a coupon or shop on Black Friday, we’re being smart, frugal purchasers. When companies do the equivalent, what are they doing?
Most companies frown on employees working multiple full time jobs, so yeah, gotta quit the existing job to take a new one. Companies can operate multiple lines of business.
Unless they’re hourly. Then sure, go work another shift elsewhere as long as you can keep your eyes open here. Wooooah, FTE and want to tend bar on the weekend? Forget it.
We don't have to have the same rules for people as for companies. There's absolutely nothing preventing us from saying "If person does X, it's fine. If company does X, it's bad."
For regular commodities economics obviously matter, it makes sense to produce goods where it is done most efficiently, both for the buyer as well as for the producer. A wrench isn't a cutting edge semiconductor, if you're going to ignore price signals what's next, state level wrench patriotism because those bastards in Ohio can't get away with stealing our wrench industry in Tennessee? Business should focus on what they're profitable at, that's just indicates proper allocation of resources.
