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Only if wages collapse enough to justify ramping up industry while also still having the competitive advantage of being where the money buying products is. If wages have fallen that much, it may not be the case that just the American elite can prop up many industries to justify reinvestment. Also, practically, this is all long term thinking. Right now the US is still #2 globally in manufacturing, and we only got dwarfed by the immense growth of China. We are still significantly ahead of #3 Japan, who is ahead of #4 Germany, etc. All the way down to a few percentage points of global supply chain, which all these doomsday scenario third world nations are apparently competing in. There absolutely has been a shift as the US outsourced demand for goods to China, but it hasn't precipitated elsewhere at nearly the same pace, because very few countries have what has effectively been China's governance for the past 30 years - since Mao, it has been mostly a corptocracy, ruled by an insiders club of the wealthy and elite. That alone isn't special without the general attitude the Chinese have that their culture promotes, that has enabled them to rapidly educate and modernize and create great industrial capacity effectively overnight. It was a special case. And the US still has more absolute manufacturing right now than it did 30 years ago back in its "glory days". The difference is that market saturating volume can be produced from the labors of dozens rather than thousands of people. Many industries are relocating back to the US now, not because of slipping wages but because the technology to automate got cheap enough to justify the opportunity cost. A lot of hyperbole surrounds accusations of a doomed US in the face of third world production capacity. Per-capita Chinese production capacity is still behind a lot of the nations this article grouped with the US, when really they are all still producing a lot of goods - they just aren't being made by many humans, much the same way food production in the US pushes historic highs despite employing fewer people as a percentage of population than any point in the countries history. |