[HN Gopher] America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to ...
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America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it
Author : mjn
Score : 13 points
Date : 2023-09-16 21:32 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (americanaffairsjournal.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (americanaffairsjournal.org)
| peepeepoopoo36 wrote:
| [flagged]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I work in one of the last remaining large industrial
| manufacturing labs in the US. Some of my colleagues worked at
| Bell before that was shuttered.
|
| My sense from talking to the previous generation is that
| financialization of the US has started (finally) failing the
| American people.
|
| The previous generation cashed in on major profits by off shoring
| (Kodak), but we overdid it.
|
| In a round about way our company is run by pension funds, and I
| work on projects that would get 8-9 figure investments if we were
| doing this in APEC, but we would rather have stock buybacks, so
| we end up getting 6 figures and puttering along.
|
| Meanwhile the higher ups wonder 'what happened to R&D?!'
| version_five wrote:
| I work on projects that would get 8-9 figure investments if we
| were doing this in APEC
|
| Are the apac equivalents of those projects generating returns
| commensurate with the extra investment? Or is it a strategic
| choice that they typically focus more on advanced manufacturing
| while the US focuses more on software? I'm just wondering what
| the right way to think about this is.
| lemonwaterlime wrote:
| The key topics missing from this article are management and
| culture. Manufacturing companies by and large are stubborn with
| outdated practices that haven't kept up with the times. The
| number of mechanical engineers who switched to web development,
| for instance, because of poor pay and improper management is
| insane. And during the pandemic, even more either fled or were
| pushed out from lack of opportunity. It's easy to blame these
| policies and say that industries aren't connected, but when these
| firms are refusing to embrace new technologies and take
| calculated risks, they do this to themselves all by themselves.
|
| They commonly keep employees using the simplest heuristics that
| someone at some point in the past developed which worked then, so
| why break it? And they push this mediocrity throughout the entire
| organization and industry. Then they swap out one failed CEO for
| the same person with a different name like a pair of gloves,
| wondering what ever happened as there was nothing more that could
| be done. Meanwhile their ageist management policies block out the
| insights of the young, all but ensuring that no new ideas are
| brought into the mix--all until it's time for another bailout.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Here are the key points the article suggests (it spends quite a
| long time explaining how we got here):
|
| 1) Improve the [government sponsored] Manufacturing Institutes
|
| 2) [federally] Back R&D for manufacturing technologies
|
| 3) Provide scale-up financing [by the government]
|
| 4) Use government procurement power to promote new manufacturing
| technologies
|
| 5) Direct production support [to sectors deemed critical]
|
| 6) Provide both "top-down" [gov picks a tech and supports
| development of it] and "bottom-up" [broad incentives like IRA]
| support
|
| 7) Build a manufacturing focus into existing industrial policy
| programs
|
| 8) Map and fill gaps in supply chains
|
| 9) Fix workforce education [by refocusing on legitimate
| vocational tracks]
|
| 10) Put someone in charge [of coordinating agencies, budgets, and
| efforts]
|
| This is all effectively trying to copy large segments of the
| China playbook, but in my opinion it misses some rather important
| points. Namely, protectionism and implicit incentives. On the
| first point, you can't really compete with China when it is
| actively hostile to foreign companies and de facto encourages
| outright theft of knowledge and expertise in exchange for access
| to its market. As long as we have a significant portion of people
| yelling about "trade wars don't solve anything" any time someone
| proposes leveling the playing field, competition is a nonstarter.
|
| On the second point, the elephant in the room is that smart
| people in the US can make 2-3X as much in software or finance as
| they can in manufacturing, so what do you think they're going to
| pick? Which company is private investment going to fund - the
| SaaS co. with 40% margins and rapid growth or the manufacturing
| co. scraping 10% margins and 5% CAGR? It's hard to see where the
| skilled labor and private investment side of the equation is
| supposed to come from when the incentives are so mismatched - you
| almost have to find a way to decrease incentives in the currently
| lucrative pools first.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > On the second point, the elephant in the room is that smart
| people in the US can make 2-3X as much in software or finance
| as they can in manufacturing, so what do you think they're
| going to pick?
|
| Make unions stronger and kill off all of Wall Street finance
| shenanigans that's purely devoted to creating money out of thin
| air or skimming (especially HFT). That house of cards is going
| to crash hard anyway, so best tear it down in a controlled
| fashion than risk _yet another_ 2008-style uncontrolled
| implosion.
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