this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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94
Why American manufacturing is becoming less efficient (www.economist.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Why American manufacturing is becoming less efficient::undefined

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Some have even argued that because America’s software and internet sectors have been so lucrative, talent has been diverted away from older industries.

Please just say the quiet part loudly. Wages in manufacturing are disproportionately lower than other jobs with much less skill required. Tool and die machinists in socal have wages close to McDonald's/Costco workers.

Sorry but how is grinding a punch form within .004mm, (dis) assembling stamping dies with incredible complexity for 10hrs a day without any procedural error premitted comparable with food assembly... One could put the lettuce before the pickles and no one would bat an eye. Put the wrong die in a station and production halts for hours costing hundreds of thousands of lost profits.

I believe the same can be said about construction as well.

Naturally, making physical goods rather than virtual ones mean less margins but of course the C-level executives must have their billion/multimillion salary bonus every year... Wonder what barrel they scrape all that extra money from...hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

Greedy manufacturing oligarchs outsourced jobs, paid their employees the least amount possible, and now they're wondering why their businesses aren't as competitive. Hmmm...

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Anyway we can get a free version of the article? This interests me

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would not be efficient, would it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But it might be profitable.

Was that it? Did we summarize the article...?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't think so. I'm feeling so inefficient right now, even contemplating the losses. Our demise is imminent.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Gift link: https://econ.st/3QVFQbk

I don’t know why but those archive links never work for me. I just get an endless series of captchas.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If you're using cloudflare's public DNS (1.1.1.1, etc) as your upstream they block most of the archive sites so they'll never resolve.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I hit the same thing when I'm connecting to certain sites through CloudFlare via VPN

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Use an adblocker. I have no issues.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

https://web.archive.org/web/20231110232943/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/11/09/why-american-manufacturing-is-increasingly-inefficient

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Spoilers!

industrial productivity growth has slowed across the rich world, even if not by as much as in America (see chart 2). The extra bit of American underperformance is trickier to explain. Economists throw out a boatload of hypotheses. America is known to have laxer antitrust enforcement than its peers; perhaps scrutiny was especially needed in the manufacturing sector. Maybe American manufacturing was more advanced when robots arrived on the scene, so had less to gain. Some have even argued that because America’s software and internet sectors have been so lucrative, talent has been diverted away from older industries.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some have even argued that because America’s software and internet sectors have been so lucrative, talent has been diverted away from older industries.

It's not just that software and internet has been so lucrative, it's also that there are fringe benefits of being a white collar software worker versus a blue collar factory worker. The biggest is absolutely that the blue collar work will fucking ruin your body over time. All my blue collar friends have a plethora of health problems related to doing manual labor their whole lives. Injuries that will never really heal and leave them in chronic pain until they die. None of my white collar working friends in the software sector have any health problems similar to that which were triggered by their job. A few of them have some serious health issues, but nothing caused by the work they did.

Millennials and Gen Z are some of the most educated generations in history, and we're surprised they've recognized this and made the choice to not suffer physically in their old age?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s also easier to be a software developer now than 10 years ago. Modern languages do a lot more of the work for you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, the barrier to entry is lower anyway.

Software also seems to be more complex than it was 10 years ago

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah software is definitely more complex. But modern languages are easier and have more syntactic sugar. And being a junior dev is mostly boiler plating or copy and pasting. A lot of devs don’t even get into the real complicated stuff. I’m a mediocre dev with no degree and I’m constantly surprised at the terminology people who’ve been doing for years don’t understand.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd wager it's a combo of all of those things, plus we've just lost the innovations that come with running that of wider sector since so many things are done in other countries now. Manufacturing jobs in the US are also considered blue collar, and blue collar is not looked at as an enviable job.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

we’ve just lost the innovations that come with running that of wider sector

I'd argue that is not the case at all since manufacturing innovation is a commodity sold to the global market. See manufacturing trade shows. The tech is available, the skilled labor doesn't exist in plentiful numbers to exploit such tech readily.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

It’s cheaper elsewhere. People can throw down all the hypotheses they want, but there is always a single reason: money