February 16, 2023

Manufacturing cannot be brought back. It is no longer in the same form it was when it left; so there is nothing to bring back. Bringing manufacturing back would be like bringing the horse and buggy back.

Manufacturers left, because the technology shifted from putting screws in metal to using silicon chips. Silicon technology is not manufactured in one place. The final assembly brings together parts, materials and chemicals from hundreds or thousands of locations, and in a hierarchical manner where subcategories are aggregated into larger categories.

There are two major changes required in going from metal to silicon: One is that the number of workers involved are about three or four billion. The U.S. only has 200 million workers. The second is that an ecology is required. That means strong links and interactions between companies. The interactions are in the Asian language of using characters which westerners cannot learn.

Technical parts require specification sheets. That information is not in a language that westerners can learn. And there has to be a lot of communication across companies, which doesn't work when the deciders are ten thousand miles away in a different culture.

Manufacturers left because they couldn't modernize and expand the way they needed to to meet the competition which was globalizing. They said they couldn't get the employees they needed. Now the assumptions are that leaving was a mistake that can be corrected by getting the manufacturers back. That's like looking for new sources of flint.

Globalizing, expanding and modernizing has progressed for twenty years or more since the decisions were made to leave. Now there is a shortage of labor, and manufacturers are supposedly being brought back with no concept of where the workers are going to come from.

The foreign manufacturers that try to set up in the U.S. don't realize that they can't get their needs met in this country. That means their plans are not going to succeed when they run into obstacles that require more than imagination.

An almost separate encumbrance is that the labor problems in this country are not due to a shortage of available jobs but workers not getting enough pay to live on while being dealt with like machines. Most workers can no longer afford rent, healthcare and education, which are so far out of whack that pay increases won't solve the problems.

Superficially, workers are being ripped off and pushed around; but that problem is not solvable either, because the businesses are also pushed into a corner due to the money supply being drained from the functional economy.

Inreased pay cannot correct the economic imbalance that was created by power mongers draining the economy dry. That means, so much money has been ripped out of the economy that businesses can't make ends meet either.

On top of that problem, incompetent power mongers pushed their way into the social structures including businesses and turned the results into waste, fraud and abuse. Global competitiveness is not possible at that standard. Foreign companies moving in are not going to get that problem fixed, because the aberrations flow through the whole economy and disrupt everything.

The most basic concept that is being missed is that globalization now requires a manufacturing company to expand its market and production from national to global. That transition requires narrow production with high volumes in addition to digitalization. A company designed for domestic purposes only could never survive in the global economy.

Digitalization is no longer possible at national levels. The extreme complexities of high technology require sourcing from all over the world. That means it is not a good idea to apply Trump's art of the deal to the process by kicking everyone else in the face for an advantage. The sourcing is enough of a problem without such disruptiveness.

A related basic problem being missed is that competitiveness in a complex society is not something that gets dictated. Persons who know what they are doing make such progress, or it doesn't get done. Steve Jobs showed how that works in designing the smart phone. He was kicked out of the company that he created until it went bankrupt and let him back in. Now it is the most lucrative company in the world, not because the business administrators figured out how to do that, as rewriters of history try to say, but because Steve Jobs only had a few months of college and was not controlled by the incompetent power mongers who strangle competitiveness.