The computers and software we celebrate make the one-man machine shop of today orders of magnitude more productive than it was even 20 years ago. To the point where every time someone pops up on a manufacturing forum asking if he can start a business with a few manually operated machines, he's immediately told not to waste his time. A couple of guys cranking handles on even the best manual machinery is no match for even a low-end CNC machining center.
My SW dev. desk is directly above the manufacturing floor of the company I work for. No, we don't make cheap, shiny consumer products, but as I look at the complexity of the machines that my software controls, I find it hard to believe anyone who says we've lost manufacturing strength.
I did look. I didn't find, and it's not my job to prove somebody else's assertions.
Since you've seen it all over the web, I'm sure you'll be able to find it for me quickly, though. In particular I'm looking for time series data showing value added via manufacturing for the last 50 years or so, plus similar data on consumption of manufactured goods. Ideally in actual dollars of the day. Or if it's inflation-corrected, then it will be documented well enough that I can subtract that effect.
> I find it hard to believe anyone who says we've lost manufacturing strength.
I recommend starting with the blog "Evolving Excellence", written by a manufacturer and a manufacturing consultant. They're pretty clear on it.
If you do a GIS for "US manufacturing output" you'll see what the GP is talking about. Worker productivity has shot up over time, as has output. In return, far fewer workers are needed.
I see this as a simple truth: We have arrived at a time where we have far fewer jobs than workers, and this won't be getting better any time soon. Either we decide to become a country of wildly disparate classes being the norm (think the favelas of larger Brazilian cities), or we need to find a way to spread the wealth, as our current economic model isn't doing it.
And I don't necessarily think some socialist fantasy will save us; I don't know the answer. I just know what we have isn't getting people who want to work, paid. Maybe eliminating the minimum wage will encourage employment. Maybe we do need to bite the socialism bullet, and instead of Social Security, give everyone a guaranteed minimum income with a negative income tax. Maybe we just need to make the legal work week 32 hours. (Or more strictly enforce 40.)
I'm not claiming to have an answer. But the jobs are leaving, both our nation, and existence due to increased productivity and increased automation. Wealth is concentrating, and becoming idle. This is bad for us all.
Maybe we do need to bite the socialism bullet, and instead of Social Security, give everyone a guaranteed minimum income with a negative income tax.
I'm a small-l libertarian and I support that in principle, because it's no more socialist than what we have today. We've already decided that we aren't going to let people starve, or die due to lack of basic health care. So given that, it's more efficient to just give everybody enough money for survival than to have hundreds of government agencies trying to fulfill specific needs, or to impose protectionist policies for the purpose of keeping inefficient jobs. That would also get rid of the perverse incentives that the working poor often face, where it's possible to get a raise and end up worse off because your benefits go to zero.
The computers and software we celebrate make the one-man machine shop of today orders of magnitude more productive than it was even 20 years ago. To the point where every time someone pops up on a manufacturing forum asking if he can start a business with a few manually operated machines, he's immediately told not to waste his time. A couple of guys cranking handles on even the best manual machinery is no match for even a low-end CNC machining center.
My SW dev. desk is directly above the manufacturing floor of the company I work for. No, we don't make cheap, shiny consumer products, but as I look at the complexity of the machines that my software controls, I find it hard to believe anyone who says we've lost manufacturing strength.