[Paperweight]

Highly-automated, "clean" manufacturing is all well and good for billion-dollar highly-capitalized, politically-sheltered megafactories, but what about the other 90% of manufacturers?

Manufacturing is a dirty, dangerous, manual business. I think the small guys will tell you that environmental regulations killed manufacturing in the west, not labour costs. We've been living in lala land with it all offshore, out of sight. If US/EU-level environmental regulations got applied and enforced globally, we'd be sent back to the stone age. Not to mention the litigation risks, intellectual property risks, trade union cartels, needing to hire an electrician to change a lightbulb, etc. (All added up, it's hopelessly calcified, but whatever...)

Don't get me wrong - I really care about the environment - but most regs here are just to look good, not actually about stuff that matters. And pushing it into the third world, where they don't protect the environment at all, is counterproductive.

[jdietrich]

>Manufacturing is a dirty, dangerous, manual business.

It can be, but it can also be clean, safe and highly automated. Fly-by-night operators that run dirty and dangerous shops are not the basis of a sustainable manufacturing economy. China is just damned good at manufacturing. They have everything that is needed - skills, capital, logistics - at an immense scale. They don't offer a cheap but inferior substitute for western manufacturing. They offer speed, flexibility and scalability that western countries could only dream of.

Xi Jinping has a degree in chemical engineering. His predecessor Hu Jintao has a degree in hydraulic engineering. His predecessor Jiang Zemin has a degree in electrical engineering. That is the fundamental reason why China is a manufacturing superpower - for thirty years, the government has been run by people who actually know how to make stuff.

[Dahoon]

Unlike most other nations. I wish more people knew this and the impact it has. maybe we wouldn't see Trump win again then (as we will).

[jacobush]

And now the US is run by people who know how to bully and hustle.

[piva00]

Tell that to Germany, stricter environmental regulations and a very healthy, highly developed manufacturing sector. They might not have all of their supply chain made locally but Germany makes the machines that makes machines so if needed they could ramp up their internal manufacturing quite quickly, doesn't seem to be the case for the US.

[wolfgke]

Many Germans say that the fact that manufacturing it still rather strong in Germany is only a carryover from the decaying momentum of a much more glorious past (Wirtschaftswunder (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wirtschaftswunder...).

[Seanambers]

Well Germany has been so fortunate as to be a member of a currency union, where they are the leading industrial base, thus giving them a artificial low currency as an advantage as well. This helps manufacturing quit a bit.

[bluGill]

The US is a currency union and has been for longer. Most people forget that state originally meant the same thing as country

[jacobush]

I agree on your first point, but not the etymology. Germany has a long federal history. The word "state" has been a little ambiguous for a long time.

[dotancohen]

State was defined by political borders, country by geographical borders. For much of human history states were countries. The blurring of the meaning of these words I believe started around the 18th century as transportation, and thus the ability to rule further away, progressed.

I agree that in today's colloquial usage there is little distinction between the two.

[imtringued]

That's completely insignificant compared to having the dollar as the global currency in the oil trade. Countries that sell oil for dollar can only spend those dollars on American products. It's as if the USA produced all the oil in the world and sold it for profit. Meanwhile Germany's unfair advantage is that it's prices on products are slightly lower than they should be.

[AdrianB1]

It is actually the other way around: this keeps the US dollar artificially high, hitting on exports, and it is completely not true that these countries can only spend dollars on American products: they can spend on anything they want, the dollar is just a currency, you can use it to buy products from Russia, China or Nigeria.

[mensetmanusman]

Economists recognize Germany’s unique position that is overheating their manufacturing center. If the DM still existed, it would be ~50% more valuable than the Euro.