There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country.
For example -- suppose one could snap one's fingers and "bring back" millions of manufacturing jobs. What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning? Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
Similarly, if we want widespread prosperity, there is no reason service jobs should not be "good jobs." There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. If we re-shore jobs, what would make anyone think we would treat those jobs differently?
> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
There is, in fact. Baumol's Cost Disease, and it's a real bitch.
Manufacturing has compounding productivity gains - one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't. You can't make a caregiver 10x more productive through better tooling. The productivity ceiling is fixed by the nature of the work.
Wages across sectors compete for workers. So service-sector wages only rise when they have to bid workers away from high-productivity sectors. This predicts: service wages are borrowed from productivity gains elsewhere in the economy.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't want caregivers paid well. It means wanting isn't a mechanism. The mechanism is productivity growth in tradeable sectors pulling wages up economy-wide.
Well we still have demand in the equation. If demand for service workers grows, so will their compensation. (And so will the cost for those services.) So the possibility is there.
People with more disposable income (the high-productivity ones I guess) demand more services. The question will be whether that demand will grow sufficiently to raise the compensation to where we want it to be.
What I also don't know is how we will respond to service jobs being automated. "Premium" service usually shuns automation. Will we have fewer fast food workers and more massage therapists?
I thought about addressing this in the original post, but I want to address part of your response:
> one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't
Indeed, this is a core component of Capital vs Labor issue I mentioned. Productivity increases, workers generate more value, but Capital's share of the results increases nonetheless. The change in this relationship is why I would expect a reinvigorated manufacturing sector to be dominated by Bad Jobs instead of the Good Jobs everybody hopes for.
(There's also a measurement issue in comparing those two. The benefits of e.g. caregiving are measured by the ability of other workers to be productive. For ex if a high-wage worker has to stay home to care for someone, then they are not doing high-wage work, which reduces the overall GDP potential of the country.)
What you’re overlooking is that productivity doesn’t increase uniformly. The low paying service sector jobs aren’t any more productive today than they were 50 years ago.
You're overlooking the main thrust of what I am saying from my top comment to the one you replied to, which is the relationship between Labor and Capital:
> Productivity increases, workers generate more value, but Capital's share of the results increases nonetheless.
To your point, this is even more true for the jobs where productivity has increased the most. Agriculture is vastly more productive today, and the share of profit captured by Capital increases every year. The main point is that productivity gains do not really matter to Labor because the benefits of those gains rarely accrue to Labor.
Put another way: there was a value capture split operant in 1950s manufacturing that contributed to factory jobs being Good Jobs. That split hasn't been operative for decades. In all likelihood, re-shoring factory jobs today would just create crappy sweatshop jobs.
Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them.
The area where I live, Greenville, SC used to be the textile capital of the world and then became essentially destitute when the entire industry offshored.
BMW and Michelin locating their US HQ here essentially rebuilt this entire corner of the state with jobs and associated supply chains. Now, Greenville is booming with a more diverse economy but all that manufacturing is the root system of prosperity here.
> Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them.
Not really... Manufacturing today is a global process and the entire supply chain is usually spread around the world.
One example for a cotton shirt (https://apps.npr.org/tshirt/): the cotton is grown in Mississippi. It's then shipped to Indonesia to spin the cotton into yarn. The yarn is shipped to Bangladesh for rough cut and sewing. The shirt is shipped to Colombia for final assembly. And finally it's shipped to the USA for purchase. Move any one of those steps to the USA, and the other steps may still be located elsewhere.
Same is true of other items, like cars. Ford may "manufacture" in the US, but the parts and tooling are sourced from elsewhere. It can't manufacture the chips here, because the tooling and process are exclusive to Taiwan. Even if you bought the plant and moved it here, the making of the tools and the processes are still specific to Taiwan. And some steps may be impossible to "bring home", either because some other country has all the raw materials, or all the expertise, or local laws prohibit some part of the process being done here.
For return to happen you need to have a creative economy, not an extractive economy.
Offshoring happened for the simple, dumb reason that it's cheaper and more profitable.
For all the rarara about "America", shareholder patriotism extends exactly as far as quarterly returns. If that means selling out ordinary US workers - do it. Give me the bag.
What offshoring revealed is that the US is not a culturally integrated country. The culture of the top 5% or so considers itself completely separate to the rest.
It's a political fault line that was always latent, was somewhat suppressed from the New Deal to Carter, and then came roaring back with Reagan.
Now it's operating at pathological, self-harming levels. The marrow of the country has been chewed out, and a few dysfunctional shell oligopolies, propped up by a bubble, are keeping the lie spinning.
There won't be any significant reshoring until there's a cultural change. Reshoring is just too expensive for the owner class to do more than tinker with it. Without a cultural change the owner class doesn't care enough to change that.
Offshoring happened because people dont want to buy goods that cost 3x as much just because they were made in the US. If a clothing company tries manufacturing domestically no one will buy their clothes unless theyre already an expensive brand.
Partially true, but it also happened because companies wanted to reduce cost and logistics are cheap. Sometimes this was a necessity to stay competitive. You either prohibit some trade with taxes or it is a race to the bottom to concentrate all production into countries with the lowest possible wages.
Ecological factors from logistics are missed technological development opportunity from not having local production are not factored in here as well.
I think if the wealth class wants to avoid communism and heads on pikes in the longer run, they should absolutely start to be more concerned with community and move beyond the tunnel blinders of the next quarter over long term stability.
This goes for govt doing anything but working to ensure domestic production and dual/multi sourcing of essential infrastructure.
As long as the ownership class can continue tricking half the population into directing their lust for violence towards scapegoats like illegal immigrants, there's very little reason for them to change course. The remaining half of the population then gets most of their energy used up defending against "culture war" bullshit, with many even going on the aggressive there because it's one of the few types of allowable wins in the very narrow Overton window.
Illegal immigration isn't just a scapegoat... it's a large impact on social welfare spending, infrastructure costs and housing availability. Especially when considering an increase of over 5% of the population in under 5 years without an accompanying growth in production and wealth generation in general relative to inflation.
There are limits on migration for a reason... that doesn't even consider the impacts on the larger society by weakening social cohesion.
Even then, there's plenty of indication of movement from those who want a Communist society... you only need to look at the NYC election, and the Venezuela protests to see that. Without a longer term consideration for society as part of where business/corporations operate, you will only see more drift in that direction.
Sure, it's not just a scapegoat. I'm actually pretty ambivalent about the immigration issue itself [0]. But it is still a scapegoat - the people who were violently angry about economic disenfranchisement (due to overfinancialization and massively monetary inflation) are currently all-in on cheering for the New York financial con artist for performatively going after those scapegoats while making the real problems worse, right? That right there is the pressure valve popping off, and even if the tribal buntings change and those people go back to seeing the system as their enemy in ten years, history shows they will just get hoodwinked again.
If this tiny movement towards "communism" amounts to anything of note in 20 years, I will be surprised. The pattern I've seen is that even if the current push is headed by idealistic leaders who don't give in to self-interested expedience (ie corruption), the next crop won't be. And the corporatist structure has been very good at neutralizing any real reforms, especially in the US.
[0] given equity with things like people who have been here for quite some time - those are undocumented Americans. For comparison, adverse possession, by which you can gain exclusive title to a piece of real estate by breaking the law usually only requires a few decades
Unfortunately that's a wall street problem. I don't think wall street can be fixed, at least I don't have any clue on how it's possible to fix it outside of destroying it.
You’re cherry-picking examples. Manufacturers can and do relocate the entire chain (or a super majority of it). I live outside of Greenville, SC also (previously Charleston) and when Boeing or BMW or Mercedes or Volvo bring a product out here they also bring hundreds of small time suppliers with them. Maybe the cotton for the cloth seats still come from Egypt but this is immaterial to the overall operation and the jobs it brings to a community.
They didn't have those steps outside the USA in 1960, yet people wore shirts. Those steps can come back.
For cars I found it interesting that my water pump on my Dodge Ram is stamped with Made in Italy. Yet the part is fairly small that even if Italy continues to make it, they can ship 50k water pumps in one shipping container to Detroit, and the truck can still be assembled here. That's not an issue. The issue is when the truck is made in Mexico entirely (which I think they still are). I know that's not "the entire supply chain" but it certainly becomes a center of gravity.
Last year many people were talking about dev shops changing their "center of gravity" from the US to other places like Poland. In other words, CEO here, EVERYTHING else is in Poland. Wherever that center of gravity is, that's the country that will benefit the most. They may even hire a remote worker in the US that is up all night - but it will be the exception, not the rule to hire US people.
Clothes are much cheaper than they were in 1960. You could bring the garment industry back to the US but you wouldnt be able to sell your products because they wouldnt be price competitive with sweatshop products.
Protectionism has been proven time and again to fail. Over time inflation rises, trade gets worse, prices get higher, fewer choices, then the economy fails; it's a shitshow.
Even if we wanted to buy domestic-only, wealth inequality is so fucked that our people couldn't afford it. The way to solve that is higher wages, smaller corporate profits, cheaper healthcare and cost of living. But you know that ain't happening. Our economy is built around corporate profits. We're basically one large hedge fund with a lot of uber drivers.
So while you can get away with protectionism during the reign of an insane person for 4 years, you eventually need to move stuff back overseas, because nobody here can afford the stuff you make here. (You could export all your goods, but then what's the point of the protectionism?)
>> Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them. > Not really... Manufacturing today is a global process and the entire supply chain is usually spread around the world.
You're both right but you appear to differ on particularities, like if it's good to bring all manufacturing onshore.
I'd rather address Jensen's could-be-apology which pretty much mimics Grok's "Oops, I made some pedo images, sorry... but move on, nothing to see here."
Yes, Nvidia, Apple and AMD are the companies that drove the US chip manufacturing overseas. The problem is, thanks to that, they are now forcing us to pay for their enormous margins and for bringing chip production back here, all the while they swim in money.
On top of that, we are now supposed to appreciate their newly acquired wisdom and be thankful when they lecture us about what's good for America.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against, isn't that the point of the GP? That we can bring all that stuff back? Tesla makes things predominantly in-house and didn't use a supply chain all over the world. There are still garments grown and made entirely in the US, eg Duckworth. They're just expensive because there's not a lot of it left.
For manufacturing in the US to be economically competitive on the global stage (or even on the domestic stage), the actual work will mostly be performed by robots, not by humans. This will bring back profits, but not a lot of jobs.
In the specific case of these chips, the offshoring was to Taiwan, a democracy, and one of our geopolitically closest allies. This business went to TSMC because they did a better job producing these chips than either Intel or AMD (or AMD's successor, Global Foundries). The Twinscan machines that fab the chips are from ASML in the Netherlands, another democracy and geopolitical ally. The parts for those machines come from a truly global supply chain. Modern chip manufacturing is an absolute marvel of global integration.
American consumers and businesses benefited from this arrangement in the form of very competitively priced hardware. Most of the manufacturing was in Asia, but most of the profits were to American companies. This is why America is today the richest country on Earth. It simply would not have happened like it did without free trade.
China's low wages and integrated supply chain can beat American manufacturing. China cannot beat the combined talent of the free world. Along with immigration, from the likes of Taiwanese-American Jensen Huang, free trade and an open economy was what once made America great.
> In the specific case of these chips, the offshoring was to Taiwan
In the context of Jensen's would-be-apology, it doesn't matter where the offshoring went. Nvidia, Apple and AMD drove the US chip manufacturing overseas, and thanks to that, they are now a virtual cartel which commands enormous margins, so they can "mercifully" argue about bringing chip production back here... at our expense of course.
While paying through the nose, we're also supposed to appreciate their crocodile tears and listen to their drivel about what's good for America.
Yep. I live here, too, and it's a great place. My primary concern is that we're pretty reliant on just those two companies. If they decide to leave or make major changes, the impact on me (even though I work remotely as a software engineer) would be huge. I hope we manage to diversify.
To answer the GP, you'll have to take a look at why the entire industry offshored at the same time.
What makes you think the problem that caused the industry to go won't also cause it to fail if somebody forces them to stay or tries to bring them back? Also, why one industry leaving made people there destitute?
Those things are always more complicated than they seem.
Yep, it's definitely complicated from an economic standpoint.
There was a strong dollar making imports cheaper and exports more expensive. At the same time there were reductions in tariffs (Tokyo Round of GATT) as well as increased quota allowances from other countries, particularly China, than were previously allowed (the Multi-Fiber Arrangement).
At the time, this particular area of the country had turned into a global textile hub and it was devastated as a byproduct (over-saturation of a single industry). Now if you come to the area, you will see all of the old mills converted into apartment complexes, coworking spaces, wedding venues, etc just to preserve the architecture.
The whole area is beautiful now and has been one of the fastest growing parts of the country for almost a decade. I moved here 25 years ago when the changes were just starting but the natives will tell you the whole story. I think a PBS documentary was being made about it too.
We should still differentiate between low value and high value add manufacturing though. Building automobiles and automobile parts, great. Relatively high skill, high value add jobs. Spinning cotton, not so much.
If we have an infinite supply of labor with no better place to allocate them then sure, any additional job is good. But that's not the case. We have a constrained labor supply, so is it better overall to focus on high value, high pay jobs, even in manufacturing instead of aiming for the entire supply chain for everything?
So European companies brought new jobs and prosperity to Greenville, SC, and the local Americans thanked Europe by voting 60% for Trump in the last election.
How do you explain that? Why do the locals vote against the countries that provide them the jobs? Are you also pro-Trump because you live in that town?
To be fair -- there are a lot of people in the southern US who do the same thing to various demographics that HN users are likely to belong to. You can actually see serving politicians do that on TV, and have been able to see that for a long time. Not everyone does it, but not everyone on HN does it either. Indiscriminately doing the same thing back isn't good, but that kind of ugly seems to just be human nature.
I'm a liberal and I've lived in Texas (Austin) for 20 years. It is infuriating when I am on some liberal-oriented forum, someone says we should force Texas out of the union or whatever, and everyone cheers. ~40% of Texans didn't vote for Trump, and in absolute numbers are a greater number of liberals than most other states in their entirety ... yet my supposed fellows want to write us off. Ugly indeed.
Am I saying they should be disenfranchised from the country? Have I said they I have no empathy for their concerns and hope the worst for them? No.
What I said was it was infuriating when they are doing those things to the ~40% of Texans who are liberal. I didn't say it happens on all liberal forums, I'm complaining about the cases where it does happen. And please don't shift things because I said "everyone cheers" because it should be obvious it is a common phrase and doesn't literally mean I checked and every person on the forum commented.
Would you even call HN a liberal forum? It is full to the brim with profiteers who have no ethical framework except making money for US-based VCs.
The past years have shown that many have no problem to change affiliation with the zeitgeist. I feel many Americans are secretly pro-Trump as long as they make money. If there would be more liberals in US tech we would see much more leaks coming from companies such as Apple, Facebook, Reddit, Google, about how the senior leadership is supporting the government policies.
For example with Facebook it needed a woman to get sexually harrassed out of her job and write a book called "careless people" so that it is reported that Facebook engineers were actively embedded with the Trump campaign while at the same time democrat voters (black people) were shown literal fake news ads to keep them away from voting.
I have not seen one Facebook senior engineer being ostracized on HN for working on the trump campaign. Everbody made their millions and joined the next big thing, with us worshipping their amazing FAANG credentials.
If the people who worked on DOGE do a "SHOW HN:" nobody would call it out.
I just look at the patterns of things that are downvoted to death. Comments that would come out of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk's mouth any day of the week are regularly downvoted to hell here.
It's not a matter of 'liberal' vs whatever anymore, it's a matter of expertise and basic ethics versus corruption riding upon anti-intellectualism, cloaked in naked bigotry. Say what you will about the prevailing value system among HN commenters, this place isn't that bad.
My observation over the last 10-15 years here has been this is partially true. But what's more true is the Overton window has shifted. To use your example, the things that would come out of their mouths, especially Elon, has taken a decidedly right wing turn over time. So keep in mind you're also seeing people who have largely stayed the same discussing a culture that largely has not.
Stop playing the victim. When you have time to hang out on HN you're obviously part of the privileged class. The area is hugely profiting from "stolen" EU jobs, which according to Trumpistan logic is something that is not good. I don't see any uprising of all the "folks in the Southern US" against the lawlessness of your government. And if you're called out for it the victim reflex sets in.
The subsides were during Clinton and Bush 2. BMW and Mercedes were here long before Biden and Obama. It makes good sense to manufacture your product in the area it is sold - that's the real reason for their mfg base establishment.
Not only the direct jobs, but also the other support ones - automation, suppliers, maintenance, facilities work, etc.
Absolutely, especially with larger/heavier items like cars... I'm frankly somewhat surprised there aren't more assembly plants across the US just to reduce the shipping costs of the final product. Even with a more globalized supply chain of the component parts.
I'm talking of the Biden-era IRA here. BMW had to invest 1.7 billions in 2022 to manufacture most of its EV directly from there as you can compete in the US market without the IRA subsidies and the conditions severely limit even which parts you can import.
That's a significant shift moving from final assembly to forcing most of the supply chain to be relocated.
What countries, beyond the US, are you speaking to? I mean, I'm interested in what countries you're talking about that don't leverage tariffs and other restrictions to favor domestic industries in those countries.
There is EU / Schengen which immensely boosted local economies. We had TTIP but unfortunately it was killed by opposing forces, and there is still MERCOSUR. However, Germany with it's brilliantly corrupt leadership, changed that strategy to "trade facilitates change" ("wandel durch handel") and went all in to removing trade barriers w/ russia and china because the idea was to convince them if we trade they won't try to kill us. Obviously this approach failed.
Strategically, it does not make sense for democratic countries to have higher trade barriers with each other than with autocrat states. But over time the hybrid warfare by autocrat states leveraged social media to convice people to vote against their own interest e.g. brexit.
Tax revenue. The nation is tens of trillions in debt with a multi-trillion per year deficit. Tariffs are proportional to spending, and encourage domestic production and security.
There have been several favorable trade deals as well as several announcements for new production facilities in the US... this may cost more than imports, but there's something to be said for domestic security in terms of access, especially in the likes of a global pandemic or war.
I'm not suggesting it's a perfect solution, or situation, only in that it isn't exactly an idea completely without merit and just blindly applied at random.
You're description matches a well planned and communicated slow increase of tariffs targeting specific products or industries so companies have time to adjust (newsflash, US was already doing this). Trump used blanket tariffs as a hammer to extort other countries, but its not like we want to buy your shitty cars anyway. Most of these facilities already existed or were planned. hint: most foreign brands were building their cars in US already.
If the economy is doing so well because of these tariffs why are they hiding numbers?
Its not even the first time US tried tariffs like these, it didn't go well then but Trump talks about like it was a golden age.
I think that humanity hasn't changed as much as maybe you give it credit for as a whole and that most human behaviors are somewhat consistent. I do think that taxes on actions as part of trade is better than taxes on income. I also think that taxes that are somewhat protectionist are better than "free trade" against nations that don't have similar quality of life, laws regarding labor, or free trade themselves.
The portions regarding trade are borne out by the VAT systems in place throughout EU and UK. The fact that tariffs exist in pretty much every nation of the world bears out their utility. The reason that most people are even arguing against it is that its being championed by Trump, who is admittedly a bombastic personality.
My opinions on tariffs long predates Trump. I have similar opinions against property taxes against individual ownership as well. I don't think that you should be at risk of losing personal property for the simple fact that you survived another year.
I said "extended" not "opened". That's indeed intentional. Please don't use a strawman to avoid addressing the point I'm actually making.
Michelin invested significantly in the site recently and BMW added a ton of EV manufacturing capacities, we are talking of a 1.7 billions dollars investment.
All of this is linked to subsidies they got through the IRA on top of local South Carolina subsidies. They had to do these investments to remain competitive in the US market as the subsidies are tied to local manufacturing and the conditions significantly limit what parts they can import. It was a direct attack on European manufacturing masquerading as green investments.
Downvoted for a factual comment, I see the usual denial on the basis of party lines is still as strong as ever in the US. Here is a bunch of sources for the few who might be interested:
A line cook makes no more burgers per hour, a hairdresser delivers no more or better haircuts, and a daycare worker watches no more children concurrently than they could have 25 years ago. Meanwhile the Magnificent 7 have emerged. Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?
The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours, or they have special skills that you need and lack. “No such thing as unskilled labor,” ok, but you are definitely get sorting on how useful people’s skills are and how difficult they are to substitute or replicate.
> How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?
I’d like to see this worked out for real.
On the one hand, sure, a hairdresser cuts the same amount of hair as they did 25 years ago, and a fancy tech worker produces enormously more output than 25 or 50 years ago.
On the other hand, why does it follow that that tech worker should have an amount of take-home pay equal to vastly more haircuts per month than a comparable worker 25 or 50 years ago? A modern programmer does not actually need more haircuts, or more food, or more lattes, or more housing, or more doctor visits than a comparable worker any other time in the last 50 years.
So maybe something is actually wrong with the profitability of modern non-labor-intensive companies and the tax system such that their owners and employees are wildly overpaid compared to lower-productivity workers.
I’m thinking more of paying people on the margin or of some kind on tax system that compensates for inequality a bit.
Not fully worked out, but consider: suppose there are 100 people in the population, and a bunch of them are ambivalent between tech work and jobs like hairdressing. If tech work paid 10% more than hairdressing, some would do tech work and some would cut hair. If tech work paid 200%, then maybe there would be too many applicants and the employers would reduce wages. (I’ve occasionally contemplated that perhaps one reason that the big Silicon Valley employers pay so much is kind of anticompetitive: they can afford it, so they might as well, because it makes it more expensive to compete with them.)
Or alternatively, imagine if taxes were structured so that owning more than one house were highly discouraged (with appropriate provisions to make owning properties to rent them out make sense, which is something that a lot of legislators get wrong), and if permitting to build houses were not absurdly restrictive, then many different jobs with very different salaries would could still result in having enough income to afford to live in approximately one house. Some might afford two (!), and some might afford one that is much fancier than someone else’s, but if the pressure that makes someone like a hairdresser need to compete against a highly paid tech worker to pay for a similar house went away, the situation could be much improved.
(California, like many places, has strictly too few residential units in the places that people want to live, so just adjusting prices won’t help much.)
> The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours
And if everyone else's time has become more valuable then too has the time that is being saved by buying services.
If my time as a programmer is worth significantly more now than it was 25 years ago, then the time I save by buying services is worth more.
There's a reason that someone making $1mil/year is going to be willing to pay more for the exact same haircut that someone making $70k/year also gets. The time being saved is worth more to them.
You're only looking at half of the equation here. Following your logic, if my time is worth $100/hr, I should be willing to pay $99/hr for a haircut. But reality is that a haircut isn't just worth some utility value based on time saved, it's worth the lowest amount where suppliers' willingness to provide it at a given quality and buyers' willingness to pay meet.
So while the $99/hr haircut might technically save me money/time, suppliers of haircuts are generally willing to give the same haircut for $30/hr. If one supplier tried to pin their prices to the growth of their customers' income, they would go out of business. That is because the value of the suppliers time isn't increasing at the same rate.
I'm mostly bald... I got tired of paying as much as I did for haircuts and now mostly just use a pair of clippers on myself, since my goal is to take off all of it. I've paid for more beard trims the past few years than haircuts, though I mostly do that myself too.
Note, I usually use clippers on myself about once a week. Sometimes I'll use a shaver to get a closer shave, but generally doesn't matter as I don't care if there's a little growth, which is noticeable unless I literally shave daily anyway... which I'm too lazy to do, and definitely not able to pay someone else to do.
> Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?
Supply and demand? If the population of hairdressers was small, so they could charge more and more, then their wages could keep up as a percentage. And that would be possible if for example so many people moved into high productivity work that only a small percentage remained in low automation work. But if you have a constant influx of new hairdressers or a constant influx of people willing to do low automation work, that doesn’t happen.
But the relative value of those same labor (hairdresser, daycare worker) changes. If my labor as a tech worker was $50 / hour I'm willing to pay $30 / hour for a haircut. But now if I make $100 / hour I'm willing to pay $60 for the same haircut. And in both situations I still need a haircut and the hairdresser is still the place to go to get one.
Which is fine right? If both wages just keeps up with inflation, the gap will increase by the same amount as well. In fact in this particular case I wouldn't even expect the hairdresser's wage to increase the same amount proportionally, which is also fine. Not all wages should increase at the same rate.
The line cook is relatively as valuable as they were in the past, they're just being out leveraged by people asserting a self-centered entitlement mentality.
Manufacturing in particular... it's very easy for folks to say we should bring those jobs back to the US but people are often shocked when confronted with the prices of items manufactured in the US. I don't say that to dismiss the thought but it would be a lot more difficult for folks to swallow than they think it would be.
I've worked a wide array of blue collar jobs and manufacturing I always found some of the worst, even worse than stuff like general labor building houses or working on fishing trawlers in the Bering sea because at least that stuff wasn't nearly as rote.
You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over. Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up -- you think that sounds easy but wait until you're up all night taking care of a screaming infant and then have to come in so your family doesn't starve, then you make a simple mistake and now part of your body is gone. Often a overnight shift. I would find myself waking up at 2,3 am moving my arms but completely unconscious. Sometimes I would catch myself before I stick my hand into something that would break it apart. One place I was working, about half the people were missing fingers.
I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right. Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets and instead do the awful work making them is beyond me unless you are so desperate it's your only option.
> Why we would trade away our comparative advantage in things like designing widgets
As China has shown over the past 20 years, that advantage erodes quickly if you stop making widgets altogether. It's very easy for widget makers to move up the value chain into widget design. And once they do, you're cooked, there's nowhere to hide.
Not to mention, widget design can't absorb as much labor supply as widget production. And many people can't do widget design, still need a living, and would be perfectly competent widget makers. So...you gotta solve for that if you focus only on widget design.
Out of all the many industries out there, I don't understand why we keep glorifying and romanticizing manufacturing and trying to "bring it back." I've also worked a few of these jobs and you're right: THEY SUCK. Depending on what you are manufacturing, it can be boring, stressful, stinky, physically taxing, or dangerous. And most of them, even the highly skilled ones, don't pay well. For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.
Because there are 300M people in the US and not all of them can have your cushy SSE role. See all the homeless people - it's because we're selling them out.
Maybe not literally all but certainly most. We hardly have any farmers or factory workers compared to what we had at one point. They've mostly moved onto cushy office jobs.
Most is 12%? This is the problem with HN. You're all so bubbled it's ridiculous to think sometimes a HN'er will say something like "If I were President."
You're using officer/administrator role for your number. The number of people who work in an office or sitting at a desk is much higher. I see numbers ranging from 40-60% for that.
that's a very incomplete view though. How many of those would take up the newly created manufacturing jobs? How many of those can be trained to do other, better jobs? There are reason to bring some manufacturing jobs back for national security interests etc, but from a labor and economics perspective, it seems a better investment is first to try to invest in people such that more of the current labor pool can be engaged in "better" jobs first.
> For the sake of our own society, we should be getting rid of these jobs, not adding them.
So let me get this strait. You think these dangerous, monotonous jobs are bad for "our own society" so the best thing for "our own society" is to export these dangerous jobs to another society "own own society" doesn't give a shit about. Wonderful.
I can't believe how ignorant and callous people can openly be.
You can't seriously believe those other societies are taking manufacturing jobs because they are worse than what they already have. People in the 3rd world are less fortunate; they're not dumb -- they want the same as us: better lives for themselves and their family. If they're working in a factory and not the alternatives it's because they passed something else along the way that was an even shittier option than that.
Short of going back to a society of married families with a single income, there isn't really a solution to keeping everyone working and making an income though. Without jobs, we revert from a modern society to a third world nation.
There are some people who like the rote work. You and I may not but some of the people I talk to like that they can basically "turn their thinking off" and get paid.
>Do one thing wrong, your finger gets chopped up
This should not be possible in the US. OSHA is still in existence(you could argue that the future state is unknown)
https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...
>1910.212(a)(1)
>Types of guarding. One or more methods of machine guarding shall be provided to protect the operator and other employees in the machine area from hazards such as those created by point of operation, ingoing nip points, rotating parts, flying chips and sparks. Examples of guarding methods are - barrier guards, two-hand tripping devices, electronic safety devices, etc.
> a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
When the safety on a machine fails, the machine should stop. If it does not, then the safety was not installed correctly.
Where was this? Because that's not true in the US, land of the personal injury attorney. My brother used to be a machine salesperson. He got a call from a law firm couple years after his company sold a machine asking about a particular one that was sold (not even by him) because their client lost a body part. Those payouts often end up in the millions.
It looks like a company was using uninformed and "scared" employee population to commit labor violations. Also using the same tactic that I alluded to in one of my other comments: Production workers are hired from a staffing agency and dispatched to the job site, that way the company HR doesn't know(and can't legally ask about work eligibility).
It looks like that plant in particular has serious issues. Someone else died after the 16 year old, bringing the number of deaths in recent years to 3.
This one in particular seems to know what it is doing: Googling "Mar-Jac Poultry" does not bring up any of the issues, nor are they listed in the Wiki page.
I've worked some in metal fabrication and supported some light industry. if you think anyone in a normal business in the US that hires less than 50 hourly people has even read the OSHA regs, you're completely unconnected with the reality
we really do call those stamping machines 'finger eaters'
I work in manufacturing and stamping machines scare the shit out of me, usually because of the forces involved but I did work on some that were not guarded. That was not in the US however.
My first job with a stamping machine was in a company with about 30 production workers. This was early 2000s in the southern US, all the workers were from Latin America and I think that most of them were not here legally(I say this because the company used temp agencies to employ the workers and at one point later they wanted to bring one of them on in a management role so they had me(also a temp) ask if the person wanted too switch the the higher paying but also requiring them to submit legal documents role).
Even under those circumstances, I never saw the company do something that skirted OSHA regs. Their stamping machine was a POS that was annoying as hell to use, mostly because the light curtain and other safetys kept tripping but it was never bypassed.
Or more likely, the safety measures were bypassed because they were a PITA. You can put all of safety measures you want on equipment, but humans have this insane mindset of faster = better. Yes, that includes top to bottom of companies.
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills
We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.
This is part of the Labor vs Capital stuff I mentioned in my post. We're not likely to have strong unions again in the near future, so any jobs we bring are likely going to be dangerous in addition to carrying low pay.
OTOH if we posit strong Labor, the good news is we have a lot of jobs now that we can turn into Good Jobs. We could, for example, make it so that any large employer pay their employees enough such that nobody who works for them full time (including contractors) is eligible for income-based government assistance at the state or federal level. We could choose to expand those rules to any organization over a certain size. There's a lot we can do to turn Bad Jobs into Better Jobs without boiling the ocean and moving industry supply chains.
Because in a lot of people's minds having ~1/1000 of your coworkers killed for every decade you work at the factory still sucks less than taking orders from some algorithm crafted in a downtown office by someone who wants to exploit you at best and hates you and your way of life at worst.
In the factory you get both. With essentially zero chance to change the algorithm. When my father worked in the factory he found a way to manufacture the product faster and cheaper and just as safely, and rearranged the factory to do so. He was punished by management for altering the algorithm and also ostracized by fellow workers because they perceived it as reducing the demand for jobs.
Yup, that does sure sound like a silent-generation or boomer era story.
I'm sure pockets of that stuff are left but pretty much all of "those sorts" of "we don't pay you to think" workplaces either transitioned or went tits up over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as the Japanese management made its way to the US (though one could argue it's come back over the past 10-15yr).
Now, of course if you are doing something that's as unskilled as unskilled gets or in a particularly perverse workplace you'll encounter those conditions, but they are absolutely not the norm. The business schools these days teach various flavors of "it's cheaper to run a workplace people feel doesn't suck".
This stuff goes through phases to some extent. The 1920s and 30s were adversarial. The 1940s-60s were more cooperative. The 1960s-80s were not great. 90s and 00s were quite collaborative. Now we've kind of got another wave of "management knows best" and adversarial thinking that's waning.
That's the American dream story- always starts with dad getting yelled at for making things better and faster - the next sentence in the founding documents: So he went his own way and now we have NicoCloth Inc. which in the years since has become a global corporation.
Pretty sure they regulated that out of existence in the past several decades. Now best you can hope for is to be bought out by the competitor of the company you left sometime before the 50 employee mark.
(only partly joking, and that part is way smaller than I want it to be)
Doing rote work is better than no work and living off the government.
People in those rote jobs enjoy the camaraderie, the beers after work and putting their kids through school. Something an unemployed person has more difficulty doing.
Even the great USSR had huge amounts of rote work. People found a way to live life.
Sure, let's adopt the Soviet model of "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay" because what could go wrong there!
You're basically asking every consumer to pay more for goods so someone can feel better about themselves personally (at the cost of someone who they don't share a country with). I'm not sure if you've met many people, but it's not a very compelling argument, nor a morally superior one due to the global impact.
It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.)
I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
> It’s going to cost the consumer one way or another. Either taxes, (cities still need to take in taxes, so if they lose taxpayers, their option is to levy more taxes), quality of life (more homeless, less municipal money for maintenance due to social costs, etc.)
It's actually not, because people aren't required to live near people who consume more in social services than they contribute in taxes. Areas like you describe exist, but basically contain the people who are unable or unwilling to leave an economically depressed area. Most people just leave.
> I’d prefer things to cost more than to have cheap crap but at the cost of social/employment issues. I don’t need new fashion every year. I don’t need new appliances every few years. I can do with less consumerism in exchange for my neighbor being able to have a job, boring as it may be. At least he’s not calculating the cost of suicide and wondering if he’ll be around for the kids 18th birthday.
I don't disagree entirely, but most people do based on behavior.
It's not a simple problem at all, including what is fair to consumers and the businesses themselves which have to compete with other companies that don't have artificially inflated expenses.
> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over.
Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. I ran the press, milling machines, lathes and saws. No one in that shop was missing body parts. Sure, its monotonous at times but that can be said about many jobs. A well ran shop should not put you in harms way.
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with other people being subject to the same conditions.
> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over.
Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. No one in that shop lost a finger.
> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.
I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with people outside of your country So the laborers in other countries where safety is ignored aren't people?
Theoretically wages should rise due to the increased demand in labor.
In practice, not sure. But it's not like the prices dropped drastically when mfg. was outsourced, the companies pocketed a most of the savings as profit.
Prices absolutely _did_ drop dramatically for many, many things that are manufactured overseas. Goods from from clothes to electronics are vastly cheaper.
For clothing, for the most part is an Indian woman that is moving the cloth on a sewing machine still. We have not LLM'd making clothes yet. Nike and a few other companies are working on 3d printing shoes, but it's not comparable to hand made yet.
For the most part, the price of a shirt made in India vs USA is the cost of labor. The Indian woman will work for $3 per hour which is a decent wage for that area (don't fact check me, it's just a guess here). She can probably make 5 shirts an hour.
A woman in the United States will make $16 per hour and still make just 5 shirts (or less - more rules in the US about breaks, and probably streaming Netflix too)
Now the company that sells the shirt at Walmart for $10 will have a profit margin of probably $5 per shirt from the Indian labor, and $1 from the US labor.
Technically after the industry is built out more we may be able to squeeze more shirts per hour if we start doing technical innovations (for example we make a machine that pre-sews 5 of the seams because of innovation. This is something that won't happen if the center of gravity is in India, but may happen in the US. (Actually today that may happen in India as tech is taking on its own thing there now).
If we cut costs and automate the way China has automated - some factories run without any lighting at all because it's all robots running in the dark - then there aren't going to be a lot of jobs created by on-shoring. And the only way to create a product on-shore that approaches the pricing of the Chinese equivalent is to heavily automate.
"Lights out" has been the big automation meme since before China joined the WTO. Everyone has gotten better over time but it's still "high school sex bragging rules": a few people are doing it but not nearly as many as brag about doing it.
Clothes are nowhere near as heavily automatable as people like to believe they are, is the problem. Unlike many other goods, nearly every article of clothing produced today is still produced with human hands. This does not mesh well with the fact that the modern public has been trained not to value apparel; people expect to casually buy items of clothing for less than they'd spend on a single meal.
It's not like the cost of clothes would be that much more if produced domestically though... the difference is the margins would be lower, a domestic employee would have a job and the domestic economy as a whole would be stronger as a result. Not to mention, the lower margin also means the wealth gap would be more narrow and there would be less incentive to stoke the flames of class warfare.
Why do people assume that clothes (and other goods, mind you) produced in the US are a mere hypothetical? There are plenty of brands that do so, and your general public overwhelmingly ignores them (and, as you have just demonstrated, don't even know they exist) precisely because they are way more expensive than consumers have been conditioned to believe that clothes should cost.
For instance, actual MiUSA jeans from companies like 3sixteen and Raleigh Denim retail for ~$200+, which is a far cry from the $30 to $50 that most people think jeans "should cost" (and that companies like American Eagle, who have long since outsourced their manufacturing, are happy to provide). Sure, it's not as if MiUSA jeans HAVE to be a few hundred dollars (I believe there are some Gustin's jeans you can pick up for $120 or so), and there are offshored jeans like Levi's which are already overpriced. But you'd have to be very naive to think that there would not be a massive and quite frankly unbearable sticker shock for the vast majority of people if you were to somehow force all domestic clothing demand to be met through domestic production. You could maybe sell it with some very effective austerity propaganda, but good luck with that.
Where did I say there are no clothes produced in the US? That said, I do think there's room to compete of most US clothes were produced domestically and that the pricing could come well below the existing US brands.
There's also brands made in China for cheap with Euro brand labels attached that sell for several hundred. Cost is not the same as price.
Pretending to not understand how game theory works is a choice -- more of a choice than customers have.
Companies are also constrained to do labor arbitrage once the rules allow it, but they were the ones who lobbied the rules into place and they were the ones to profit from the rules, so they have far more culpability here.
It would be a virtuous cycle, though, right? If we had the right incentives for keeping manufacturing here, then sure, prices would be somewhat higher [0], but so would income for the very people who would be buying.
[0] But how much higher, really? On a mass production line, what is the actual contribution of wages to the cost to produce?
Assuming the local versus offshore good is a perfect substitute, that means that the value has not changed.
Paying more for the local good means your money is worth less, as it buys less value.
Your question on the production line doesn't account for all of the precursors also being local, plus the local energy rates, local taxes, local rents, and so on. Everything tends to be more expensive, otherwise the cost of managing offshore production wouldn't be worth the effort.
Total isolation only works when there's still room to grow by way of some underutilized resource- cheap labor, land, or something extractable from the environment like wood or minerals.
From purely a price perspective, sure. But there are other advantages to maintaining production capacity within our own country.
Plus, doesn't offshoring effectively push the whole world towards a common cost-of-living/income ratio? Great if you're labor in a struggling country, bad if you are labor in the richest country in the world.
That's why I do blame corporations for outsourcing. The companies outsource every time they select for more profit for their owners and not for sharing among the workers.
And if corporate officers don't select for more profit then their stock goes down, shareholders become unhappy, officers could lose their jobs and the corporation could even fail b/c they have competitors and their competitors will likely select for more profit.
I'm not aware of that many times where I've had a choice. I could get a nice, expensive dress shirt made in the US but for general clothing it's extremely difficult to buy domestic.
Frankly, a lot of the corporations are still to blame because they're the ones actively concentrating wealth at the top. If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made in the US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.
But you wouldn't. You, and everybody else, would see several shirts that looked basically the same and not pick the expensive one without giving it any more thought. If you think I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
Even expensive brands are usually made overseas. I looked at a couple of random pieces of expensive Patagonia outerwear in my closet. One was made in Vietnam. The other in Bangladesh.
Sure, you can get custom/semi-custom dress clothing made in the US. Probably other things (at an eye-watering premium). Which may be OK if you buy very little clothing. But mostly forget about going into a store and picking things off the rack.
Right, because there is virtually no difference in quality so companies go with the lower labor costs (as does basically everyone else on earth who is looking to have a task completed).
IIRC the last company that manufactured men's dress shirts in the US closed not too long ago. They really were dedicated to making stuff here. The economics just simply did not support it. Which is another way of saying people would not pay the necessary price premium.
The expertise to do that isn't here anymore on a scale to satisfy the majority of the market.
However that is likely exactly what happened when it was finally pretty much killed of in the 90s. At some point clothes were made largely domestically. Some manufacturers started offshoring while others didn't. At that point consumers had a choice, the choice they made was to drive the onshore industries out of business or offshore.
There might be some argument people have more surplus wealth now though, and they'd rather en masse buy those domestic products than healthcare, healthy food for their children, education, housing, and the other stuff that absorbs all the income we can muster. Of course I think there is always a market for people with money for luxury goods, some of them buy USA because it is USA.
This is true, but let's not pretend that "healthcare, healthy food for their children, education, housing" is what's absorbing all the money. Average car payment is around 700 bucks a month now.
~75% of cars are bought used and according to Experian only 33.5% of those are financed. When adding 80% new cars financed you're already under 50%. Then consider already paid off vehicles.
I recently came to a tangential realization (obviously I'm not the first to notice) regarding "cheap Chinese knockoffs":
The US company outsources the manufacturing to China because "they have to" (I don't necessarily agree with that), Chinese company keeps the assembly line running a few extra hours and resells the units back in the US under a slightly different name.
This equation is so comical to me:
The greed-driven US company screams that it's "fake", yet they didn't do anything illegal by outsourcing, just put Americans out of jobs. But if they don't build in China, a competitor will.
The Chinese company is driven by the same "profit over everything" motive and doesn't infringe on the US companys trade mark, but competes with the US company with essentially an identical product minus the R&D costs.
US company cries foul, "they're stealing our trade secrets!" Creates FUD about China but has no legal standing to do anything about it. Reeks of the same "immoral but completely legal" argument the former/would-be employees make
That's what tariffs are for. These are macroeconomic decisions, not decisions that should flow down to individuals, to be thought of as their responsibility and their moral failing.
Individuals shouldn't be expected to choose to buy American. It's a cost with an at best extremely distant (in time and space) benefit for an individual, and a non-existent benefit unless everyone does it. Instead, when goods are produced by foreign slavers and polluters, they should either be barred from import (if they're morally impossible to support) or taxed arbitrarily in order to optimize the local market, for which discriminatory taxes are not a factor.
But all if this is bad faith reasoning in general. What is produced is shit clothing, with shit treatment of the workers producing it, and intentionally outmoded by planned fashion cycles. If it were quality clothing being imported, labor costs would be a much smaller part of the costs, and therefore of the potential lost margins if owners failed to maximize the exploitation of labor. Tariffs wouldn't even effect quality imported clothing. What they would do is kill the shit imported clothing market, and allow us to redevelop a shit domestic clothing market if the minimum wage were low (i.e. sweatshops), or if we raise the local minimum wage, force a quality local clothing market.
> I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
The belief that macroeconomic problems should be solved by spontaneous generation is a form of religious capitalism. The fact that it doesn't ever happen is pointed to as the evidence that we are always at an eternal maxima. It's a practiced, self-serving denial that our economy is always actively managed by a very few people.
You seem to think I'm trying to make some moral point but nothing I said has the slightest thing to do with morality. It is simple fact of incentives and human behavior.
It isn't. I'm saying that people select for cost because corporations are actively engaged in pooling resources for the rich. If they didn't people wouldn't need to select for cost as much as they do.
When do you intentionally overpay for goods or services?
Are you haggling with your mechanic, landlord/mortgage lender, or grocery store to pay them more money than they're asking for, or do you purposely seek out suppliers that do not provide the offering with the best value?
>I'm saying that people select for cost because corporations are actively engaged in pooling resources for the rich.
People select for cost when resources are finite. This is going to be the case until we reach a post-scarcity economy, rich people or not. It's not like under communism everyone was driving around in lambos on gold paved streets.
Clothing is one of the hardest things to automate production of. We have had the "women at a sewing machine" since about 1850. Bring that 1850 women to 2026 with the latest computerized sewing machine and she would be equally productive as she was back then in an hour, and even after working that machine for a decade would not be much faster than she was. We can do a few fancy stitches today that she would have had to do by hand with the machine - but mostly we do them less know even though the machines are faster.
Nonsense, it's just cheaper to pay someone without any rights 50c/h then to automate it
If that industry was still in the area, they'd be automating the shit outta it. It's just not worth it right now considering there are always literal wage slaves in some place they can ship in for their sweatshops
Also, even locally produced premium clothing uses materials sourced from literal slave labour. There is no consumer decision anywhere, because the immorally sourced materials are just too cheap... And if you're willing to pay a premium for your morals, someone in the middle will just take it and fulfill the order with the cheap stuff.
They have been trying. Clothing is hard to automate. It needs to stretch and flex which is a problem for machines. We need many different sizes which makes things harder
The first is that much of it is optional. Stuff like fast food. People can do without it much easier than doing without a washing machine.
The second is, for many services, such as child care and elderly care, most adults are terrible at assessing quality. This creates a race to the bottom much like you see in manufacturing, making the jobs low wage. Because humans are humans you can't really point to a specific consequence of this either.
Market forces are what cause different jobs to pay different amounts. Welders don't get paid high wages out of charity or respect, they get it because welders with sufficient skills are rare, so if you don't pay up you won't get your welding done.
If service jobs can be differentiated (e.g. by training and licensing) then scarcity can be created.
For best results buy a political or ten and then enjoy the profit of having government violence chase away much of the "maybe not just as good but good enough for a lot of the demand that's out there" competition that doesn't have your training or license or belong to your professional group or whatever.
And the best part is the public pays for the privilege of having supply be constrained because the state forces that constrain it are not paid by those who benefit but by the taxpayer.
Manufacturing jobs were only "good jobs" in comparison to the alternatives available at the time. The other options in the US have gotten better in the last 50 years. As much as people hate on service industry jobs, they're much less physically dangerous than working in a mid-20th century manufacturing plant.
> What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning?
They wouldn't all come back, many of them would be automated to keep costs down. Fortunately, this would also be good for us since automated systems require engineers to design them and technicians to maintain them.
>> We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity.
I read an article years ago talking about a man that worked as a janitor for a US public school. He was just getting by on whatever that job paid. Someone (school board, business person, IDK) said if he wanted to make more money he should get more education himself, or learn some new skills so he'd be worth more and could get a "better" job. And hey, I'm all for some amount of meritocracy and all that but... If he did improve himself and get a better job the school would presumably find someone else to be the janitor for similar pay. The bottom line is that they expect an able-bodied adult to work a job that most people look down on for barely a living wage. At some point it's not about him needing to upskill it's about expectations about who gets paid how much, and America expects a lot of people to "make a living" at just above poverty wages.
I'm not sure how you change that, to some extent employers can't pay more because it's become structural and they don't actually have the money to pay those jobs more. So I have to agree with parent poster:
>> There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country.
_DeadFred_ says: "Fox News host Brian Kilmeade saying that homeless people should receive "involuntary lethal injections"
Yeah, that kind of thought crossed my mind when a homeless guy, unhappy that I wouldn't let him sponge my car's windshield, grabbed my lhs rear view mirror with both hands and broke it (the mirror no longer responds to its dashboard control). But the moment quickly passed, leaving me only with a new item for my to-fix list.
FWIW we still worship cowboys. They differ greatly from today's urban homeless.
And you know this how? Personal experience, research, multiple interviews, analysis of census data, etc.?
And BTW, Perhaps you could enlighten us as to why cowboys are, as you state,
_DeadFred_ >"homeless dudes who happened to chase after cattle."?
Maybe a research URL or perhaps an brief explanation of how you lived with "cowboys" for X years and also lived with the "urban homeless" for Y years or such?
If you upskill enough people, companies will need to start paying more for those services. And once they need it, they will find the money.
There is a reason unemployment numbers are always within the same small band. There's always money to employ around the same ratio of the population. And when people get richer, that ratio gets slightly smaller, not larger.
This really doesn't work because there is not enough demand for people to upskill. Even during boom periods like 1999, there were still janitors. Janitors did not suddenly earn more money because white-collar hiring was exploding.
You can look around the world, janitors consistently earn more in countries with a stronger middle class.
What you are calling "boom periods" are not composed of lots of people upskilling and moving into a higher earning partition of the middle class (or leaving poverty). I have no idea why you expected then to behave like something they are not.
I think that "good jobs" is a red herring for manufacturing jobs. The important question is whether they have positive externalities. According to one argument (which I'm reconstructing), working one manufacturing job improves dexterity and spatial reasoning, as well as motivating workers to learn basic math and science. These (may) continue to provide benefits to the economy after the worker leaves the position, hence being unpriced. How we manage this at a policy level is not obvious.
(OTOH, there is also an argument that manufacturing has an important negative externality — pollution)
Note that the "Labor vs Capital" distinction mostly means "workers vs retirees". The reason more money goes to capital these days is not necessarily that each retiree is getting more but that in an aging population, there's more retirees so it takes more resources diverted from workers to support this larger non working population. This problem can be solved with more babies 20 years ago or more immigration of workers now to share the burden (unless AI makes everything weird).
I undestand what you are saying but retirees are not what people mean when they talk about Capital. They are talking about executives, fund managers, billionaires, and so on. People who actually control much of our society. Yes many of the funds are managing the retirements of working people but that does not necessarily need to be the case, nor do those retirees have any active ownership of the companies those funds invest in.
Right but the majority of people holding significant amounts of capital is retirees or people saving for retirement. There is a small minority of people wealthy for other reasons. It doesn't really make sense to strongly associate these people to "capital" since they are a small minority of capital holders.
Do you have a link? What I've seen in most discussions is obscuring of the fact that the majority of "capital" is directly or indirectly retirees or people saving for retirement. Those in the top 5% wealthiest often need to survive on that wealth for decades so it's not as if they have per year spending power that is that high. You too will be at your top percentile wealthiest of your life when you are nearing retirement.
Honestly? Your favorite LLM will be able to build you a syllabus better tailored to fit your current level of understanding. But in short, Capital is the people making decisions about how money is expressed through the economy.
But to make concrete what I am saying. Take a VC fund like Lightspeed that manages tens of billions of dollars. They do this on behalf of LPs, of which the largest are typically large pools of long-term capital like university endowments and pension funds.
Lightspeed, for example, has received ~$400m in investments from CalPERS (retirement program for some California public employees) alone. That represents tens of thousands of employees and former employees. Even if the notional value of one of their retirements is (say) $2m, that person is still Labor. Capital is represented by the people at CalPERS who decide where to allocate money, and by the Lightspeed GPs who decide which startups to fund. A former county attorney who has money in CalPERS has essentially no say over how her retirement funds are invested (if she's on a pension); that decision is down to a relative handful of people she will likely never meet.
A quick way to know the difference: top 5% wealthy people can buy the house next door and make it ugly, being a small nuisance. Capital can crash the entire economy with bad bets or get laws changed/ignored at their behest (we are watching this right now with X's CSAM generation on demand).
I think with the advancement of manufacturing techniques the future is in small run manufacturing. Manufacturing won’t return with a few companies employing thousands of people. My thinking is that manufacturing will return with thousands of companies employing around 10 people. The future will be more customized solving detailed problems with unique specification.
> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
There kind of is - it's the same reason B2B SaaS tend to make more money than B2C - it's easy (easier) to sell someone something if they can make money from it.
If I can pay you Y to rivet some sheet metal together and sell the finished product for Y * 10, that's a much better outcome for me (economically) than paying someone to take care of my elderly parents. In fact, maybe I'm not mean, maybe _I_ don't make enough money to afford to pay someone to take care of my elderly parents.
Economic rules are all subject to externalities like the effects of taxes, regulations, etc. I mean there is no rule in the sense that some of the jobs that are poverty wage in the US are not poverty wage in other countries due to the impact of regulation.
It's a policy choice to allow Walmart pay full-time employees so little that taxpayers have to subsidize their food. We are free to make different choices.
Riveting ends in a real item that can often be used to produce further economic value. Elder care is not analogous to this, and the economic value is only what the elder can pay for it.
"We" have not "decided" anything other than collectively making decisions about what we are willing to pay for a given service. That ultimately is what sets wages. The only reason software development pays so well is because the market will bear it, and the market isn't some cabal of fat cats in top hats, monocles, and tails (or hoodies and Patagonia for that matter). It's the collective decisions of 330 million people.
The largest reason software development costs a lot is that a cabal of people had been desperately trying to lock out smaller companies from having access to software engineering resources at such a cheap rate and eventually get taken out.
I get that from another perspective your answer is also correct, but the reality is the large pay is really so that EA's blockbuster video game sells and a small upstart of 45 software people that want to make their own amazing game does not beat them. Those 45 people will take the paycheck rather than collectively start a game company now.
What happens next no one is sure, but I can tell you, that if the amount of cheap software surfaces because 1 man army companies take out TeamViewer, Photoshop, Jira, etc... because of LLMs - then those wages will drop, and drop fast and it has nothing to do with the 330 million people "having a say".
There are also hundreds/thousands of elections annually through which we collectively set policy directions. Contrary to belief, politicians are responsive to voters over long periods of time. So over time, the policies that are continually ratified do reflect our collective choices.
And for at least the last several decades, yes we have collectively decided through our policy directions that there are classes of jobs whose holders are not deserving of material prosperity.
Because nobody actually wants to talk about the core of the problem or how to address it. They see different, seemingly unrelated problems depending on what their priorities are. The democrats are also not on the side of actually solving the problem.
It’s almost entirely a leverage problem. Insofar as we rely on the labor marketplace as the primary “prosperity” distribution mechanism for the majority of people the power balance between labor and capital will determine the average person’s level of prosperity. The following increase the leverage of labor: collective action, high competition between firms, near-zero (actual) unemployment rate, strong labor laws. The following increase leverage of capital: monopoly, monopsony, cartel action, high unemployment rate, weak labor laws.
Obviously the cost of converting wealth into tangible “prosperity” is an additional factor, so inflation of the cost of goods and services will factor in.
So if we wish to promote broad prosperity over ultra concentrated wealth we need to address the above factors: enforce anti-trust, break up firms as needed, promote labor protections and organizing, make taxes more progressive than regressive, make stock buybacks illegal again. The hyper mobility, political ties (with low national loyalty) of the capital class make this difficult but not impossible.
We will probably have to de-emphasize some sticky cultural memes around individual merit and everyone “deserving their fate” to accomplish the above. A surge of empathetic humanism would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a bonus.
If we were more invested in each other’s well being, especially if we had more capacity to put that care into action, wouldn’t that improve the support network surrounding those suffering from chronic mental health conditions?
Have you ever dealt with an alcoholic when he's drunk or a schizophrenic when he's acting out?
You use the word "suffering" as if they had no part in their own condition. I'm reminded of Duke, the skinhead in "Repo Man" who, as he dies, says "I blame society!":
> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
There's something to be said that the labor movement was destroyed by eliminating the need for the labor. Bringing the labor back would see the labor movement return.
Not really sure how you come to the conclusion that I was under the notion that nobody is working. Union membership has been in decline for decades. Labor jobs have been leaving the country for decades. Bring back the labor jobs that the unions represent and the union membership will go back up as well. The labor jobs that still remain are what's left of the union membership.
> Bring back the labor jobs that the unions represent
Please research which are the largest unions in the US. I'm curious why union representation would work for labor jobs, but not for the millions of jobs* represented by unions now.
* These are all "labor jobs," because otherwise you're not talking about a job
Most people referring to "labor jobs" are manual labor and not some laborious butt in a chair behind a keyboard banging code all day. While there are unions for the tech industry, the entertainment industry, and other non-labor industries, labor is pretty well understood in its meaning even if you don't understand it.
You're missing a giant class of workers. Janitors, retail employees, warehouse employees, home health workers, physical therapists, etc. And jobs in retail, food prep, hospitality (certainly the folks who clean hotel rooms would be surprised to find out they are not engaged in "labor jobs".)
Might be an interesting exercise to consider why you consider those jobs as not being "labor jobs."
> What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning
Your entire political statement aside manufacturing was always a good job. I’m not sure if you realize what kind of skilled labor went into manufacturing:
1. Machining
2. Tool and Die
3. Welding
4. Etc
Hell when I was working in construction I was making 20 dollars an hour at 18. That’s good money, and at the time if I would’ve stuck to it I would’ve been able to afford a decent life. My stint as a machinist while backbreaking at times was a good highly rewarding job.
Now, to address your political point. Yes, jobs should pay a living wage. Unfortunately even with such “wage suppression” America is still one of the most expensive countries to live in. We subsidize global food, drugs, etc. I can only agree with your point if we simultaneously become an export economy, and reduce or remove all global subsidy. But the party who supports raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less fortunate countries. You cannot have both.
"The United States provides over 40% of the world's humanitarian aid, and spends around 1% of its budget on foreign aid, including military aid. Surveys suggest that Americans believe 20% of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, and that 59% of Americans believe the government spends too much on foreign aid"
Your unwillingness to read the primary sources linked in the Wikipedia article because they show how you're flat out wrong indicates that your entire thought process can be disregarded at no cost.
Do you have a primary source showing that "the party who supports raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less fortunate countries"?
- your suggestion that we become an export economy, here on a forum where many people are working on products that will be purchased by the world but not counted as exports (examples of non-exporters who collect money from around the globe: Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, AWS)
- the idea that the way to prosperity is for Americans to move back into lower-productivity jobs. (Here I ask you to look up the revenue per employee of Costco and JP Morgan and on the other hand good manufacturers like Steelcase and Lockheed Martin and Eaton. What do you think happens if we move the workforce from higher-productivity jobs to lower-productivity jobs?)
- your confusion of an economic point with a political point
I think you should read up on comparative advantage and the roy model of labor. Forced onshoring is likely to hurt US productivity and large wage gaps arise because of self-selection driven by correlations in productivity across jobs.
Service jobs are hard to export, it's just moving money around inside your country. Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.
That is a fundamental distinction, yes. But the notion that exporting brings wealth to a country is… kinda not really the case anymore.
If that wealth is ending up in very few people’s hands, and if said people are wealthy enough that they keep their money offshore (which is the case a lot of the time), what is the big difference in making something you can export?
This makes next to no sense. Service jobs aren't "just moving money around inside your country" for the same reason that exporting goods isn't "just moving money around inside your planet".
Services sell time and skills directly, instead of in the form of a tangible good. That's it.
Unless elderly care is too expensive and people have their parents live with them.
In the late 90's when we talked about the transition to the Service Economy, jobs such as call center were touted as the way forward for the recently unemployed textile workers. Until we found we could move those to the Caribbean, Philippines and India.
I remember a number of people talking about how they could make decent money bar-tending and waiting tables. Until the economy slowed down and people stopped eating out.
Service is job that you pay someone else to do because you don't want to do it, which is great until you have less income. Then it becomes a budget line item that can be cut.
> Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.
Where's the distinction between "moving money around inside your country" and "goods that can be exported for incoming cash"? If you go to mcdonalds to buy a burger instead of making it yourself, is that also "moving money around inside your country"? What about paying some carpenter to make a chair rather than making it yourself? Should we just cancel all jobs that can't plausibly produce stuff that can exported?
It wasn't about the labour part and whether that is exportable in the off-shoring sense.
It's about the product being exportable (in the sense of being able to sell it for money outside of your country) vs. just having people within your own economy doing "left pocket <-> right pocket".
And even with that, you can sell a waiter's service to other countries. You just have to first make them come - it's called tourism and comes with a whole lot of other jobs / supply chain(s) as well. Some of which can themselves be off-shored!
Jobs aren’t good or not because they government declares it so by fiat, there’s substantive differences between different kinds of jobs. “Service jobs” are bad because they typically require little skill, just a human body physically present in the U.S.
In contrast, many people will never be good riveters. They lack the strength, coordination, and stamina to do the job. Similarly, many people cannot be plumbers or electricians. Those are jobs that require intelligence and skill.
Reading this, one would make certain incorrect assumptions about pay in service jobs based on imperfect knowledge of skills required. One might assume service jobs in general do not require any skills at all beyond the capability to slightly warm a room.
The famous counterpoint is obviously "teacher" with its starting salary in the $20 range, but that's too easy so I will start with phlebotomist (starting under $15/hr). And I'll toss in chef (~$22/hr-$25/hr in my city) as an alternate to suggest that even in service industries skill matters (because there is a range here).
I bet many people would find that job a lot more appealing than risking your life doing shopping gigs under time pressure, without even getting health insurance.
How exactly is doing instacart runs "risking your life" without using a definition for that term that involves any task where you're required to leave your house?
> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
This is a widely believed narrative, but not necessarily true. The competing narrative that better living and working conditions arise from better technology and cheaper energy is just as supported by the data. Perhaps even more so because it also explains the post-1971 decline.
This seems like a non sequitur to me. What does (general) better living and working conditions arising from better technology and cheaper energy have to do with which jobs are considered "good" and "bad"?
How does the explanation without labor power dynamics explain the post-1971 decline? Electricity is cheaper inflation adjusted than it was then, and technology has certainly progressed since 1971.
I think even more important than the difference in taxation is the difference in freedom of movement. There are heavy restrictions on labor moving between countries, capital has no restrictions at all (except kinda in China) and can move instantly to wherever it is most useful, i.e. wherever has the most human rights violations and lowest wages. We need to eliminate this asymmetry: either get rid of all restrictions on freedom of personal movement and selling ones labor, or lock down the flow of capital with serious capital controls.
It'd be a very interesting thought experiment to completely redefine the economic and fiscal plan of the US.
It'd be interesting if we greatly reduced personal income taxes in the majority of cases. Removed corporate income tax (the idea being corporate income tax hurts all equity owners, whereas we specifically want to target the very wealthy), and then implemented a progressive wealth tax that kicks in starting at 7.5M or something (maybe something like 1.5% from 7.5M-15M, 2.0% from 15M-50M, and then 3% from 50M+, this could be done more smoothly if desired). We'd need to penalize capital flight with something (something like a 40% exit tax or something). The IRS would have to be greatly empowered to support this, net worth declarations would all be declared by the tax filer, and if audited and found to be incorrect, the IRS will purchase the asset at 70% of its declared value (or some other better mechanism can be thought of to ensure that NW is declared accurately). We'd also simplify the tax code in all other cases, removing all forms of credit/deductions/etc on income. This will free up IRS audit resources to focus on declared net worth fraud. Remove all forms of non-sin tariffs entirely.
Get rid of entitlements taxes and spend and replace it with a negative income tax that is calculated to provide a very base level of existence that never disincentives work.
Then remove government backed student loans, but make them treated the same as other loans (ie. students can declare bankruptcy). Kids should also get a 5k per annum payment that's held in trust by the government that's invested into the US total market that gets linearly released to them from the age of 18-30.
I also propose that we remove all consumption taxes that aren't a sin tax. Ie. keep taxes on alcohol, gas, etc. Implement a very high luxury goods tax.
Then completely change the medical system to be more similar to Singapore with mandatory copays of something like $20-50 (to prevent abuse), but also provide universal coverage with the government setting prices with pharma/providers.
Dissolve the ability of states to collect taxes and provide federal funding per head. Standardize/centralize all stuff like the DMV. Ie. have a single federal agency to de-duplicate work.
I don't think this stuff is viable at all (would require dramatic tweaks), but it'd be a very interesting thought experiment to see how something that tries to encourage business friendliness, the strength of the income earning population, and incentives capital effiency (over tax effiency) and investment does.
I really think that the fundamental market forces of capitalism are very powerful, we just need to change the incentives structure so that the benefits aren't captured strictly by the ultra wealthy.
>Removed corporate income tax (the idea being corporate income tax hurts all equity owners, whereas we specifically want to target the very wealthy),
I'd back this whole plan to a hilt but want to highlight this section.
I'm on board with eliminating corporate taxes under 1 condition: the company, its executives, and its board - are fully 100% banned from participating in politics in ANY way besides each individual citizen voting in normal elections.
Lobbying? Banned. PAC contributions? Banned. Campaign contributions? Banned. Hiring former government workers as "government liaisons" or "government relations" consultants? Banned.
If a corporation wishes to not pay taxes to the government, it has ZERO business involving itself with politics.
To some extent, the pay rate for a lot of jobs comes down the available candidate pool for those jobs. The easier/simpler a job is for anyone to step into, the more likely it is to have a lower pay associated with it. As an addition, regarding service jobs, a lot of the times, you get what you put in... at this point, most customer service interactions I've generally seen have been poor at best.
Craftsmanship, pride in work, and just caring about doing a good job just aren't concerns a lot of the workforce has at this point. That's not to excuse efforts to offset employee pay into a forced tipping culture. Neither does it excuse efforts to use foreign labor as a lower paid under-class either... I think jobs for foreign workers should have pay floors that force them to be more expensive than domestic labor. If there really isn't a supply, or they really are that skilled, then pay up.
Part of the problem is the idea of fiscal duty has been tunnel visioned into what the next quarter looks like over anything resembling longer term health of a company and the communities they operate in. Not to mention VC corporations swallowing industry sectors and "extractive value" to the point those sectors collapse altogether.
Govt has largely sold out to corporate interests over the people's best interests and they are emphatically NOT the same... govt policy should be to encourage or even require competition in practice. Shared essential infrastructure should require dual/multi-sourcing with a healthy portion required to be domestically supplied as well.
I truly believe that it's in everyone's best interests to refocus beyond the next quarter, and I don't mean woke lip service... just actually considering organizational and community concerns. If we/they don't do it, communism will only grow and take over.
What’s your point? Say everything you just said again, but with software engineering and Indians, instead of manufacturing and the Chinese, or textiles and Vietnam and Pakistan.
There’s no reason American cars need to exist either, they basically all perform worse dollar-for-dollar, feature-for-feature, than foreign cars.
In fact, let’s offshore everything. There’s no reason not to use Filipinos for McDonald’s and In-n-Out drive-thru speakers.
Let’s all adopt Chinese tang ping. Lay down and die. Treat every effort of labor as replaceable and void of respect.
If China and India wanted to wage effortless war with the US all it would have to do is stop exporting goods and labor to us.
Please read my comment again. This time, consider that our laws and regulations are not laws of physics or axioms of mathematics and are therefore able to be changed. The comment will make more sense in that light.
For example -- suppose one could snap one's fingers and "bring back" millions of manufacturing jobs. What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning? Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed.
Similarly, if we want widespread prosperity, there is no reason service jobs should not be "good jobs." There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery.
We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. If we re-shore jobs, what would make anyone think we would treat those jobs differently?