Free trade bump
Wow...the article appears to have missed the whole part about unions driving the cost of labor up so that it makes a lot more sense to make your goods in countries where there are no unions.
Welcome to the Global Economy. This is what it's all about - bringing down this great nation. History will once again shake its head and say WHY didn't they see this one coming? Who will bail out the US when it goes down?
Ahhhh. A life of leisure for all Americans!
And we gripe when the Asian producers, particularly in China, copy our technology and designs, and send us cheap knock-off imitations...
Guess where they got the information on how to make those things...duh, we hired them to produce them in the first place. Give a professional burglar your house plans with all your valuable secrets marked plus the key to the front door and walk away, don't complain that your house is cleaned out when you return...
"They are imported now, and the skills required to make them are disappearing in the United States."
BS. Americans can't weld and turn bolts? Freakin' NYT alarmist BS article.
I'm sorry you have trouble making a living. My people are doing great. But then again, we do stuff about it other than complain on FR.
Minor point that is glossed over here - you can make something without having to make it in high volume production which incurs huge startup costs and high risk.
This is a silly argument.
Designing things and making them are two different issues entirely. Furthermore, when designing things, there are perhaps two or three people that actually have the skills to do it in any particular company. It's not like if a refrig is made in brazil that the entire USA can't made a fridge now. There will ALWAYS be people in the USA that will be able to make anything. Their salary will simply rise if there is brain drain.
L
This little device with all the creative accessories and the web based download system coupled with great marketing and imaging has produced phenomenal results for an American Company that manufacturers nothing in the USA.
One can say that this will eventually be copied, but look at Microsoft, one of the world's wealthiest companies with arguably the best distribution on earth cannot come up with a device to compete.
The challenge that Apple has is continuing to innovate.
It can and will be done right here in the good ol USA.
This outsourcing can work with really high volume durable goods or throw away stuff. The problem comes when the cookie cutter MBA's try to shoe horn every industry into the management fad of the day while never even glancing up from the spread sheet.
Wisconsin is full of manufacturers. My little town and its surrounding area has foundrys, finishers, wood/paper mills, furniture and window manufacturers and a hugh HVAC factory. We have a shortage of welders up here.
Already American society is re-organizing to cope with a declining standard of living. Young people are taking longer to leave home, if they ever do. Out of financial necessity, it will become common for multiple generations to live in the same house, reverting to the historical pre-World War II norm.
Increasingly, many will never own a home, spending a lifetime in an apartment or trailer. Squatting and shanty towns will become ubiquitous. Violence will spread, as the new white underclass clashes with Hispanic immigrants. For the first time in our history, children will be worse off than their parents, grandchildren even moreso.
Of course, none of this applies to the elites. The global and historical norm is for a tiny, super-wealthy oligarchy to rule over a massive underclass -- America was the greatest exception in history. Now, America will simply revert to the economic and social conditions that have been normal all over the world, for thousands of years of human history.
IMO.
I think we got the good end of that deal. This alarmist piece from the NYTimes is BS.
Ah, bemoaning the loss of the subway car industry. And the worldwide demand for them is what? Invest scarce capital in an industry that can measure production by hand if they remove their shoes? I wonder what the author would have written when the buggy whip factory left town?
Same crap I heard when Reagan was President.......
I work in R&D for a multinational manufacturer. Our R&D site was inside our most productive plant in the U.S. and we had a great relationship with engineering and production. When they closed the plant and shipped manufacturing to Mexico, quality took a big hit, but we made more money with a 50% yield there than a 98% yield here. The problem came when R&D needed to give engineering support for operations in Mexico. It took me almost 2 years to get something done that would have been a 3 week project because of the pure incompetence of the Mexican facility to follow simple instructions. They do things in a way that's easy for each individual department without regard to the downstream effect on the rest of the operation. For R&D development, they basically did what they wanted and ignored the entire protocol. That meant doing things over and over and over. The article is spot on. No manufacturing here, then R&D gets disconnected from reality.