how competitive will american made cpu's be? will american consumers just end up paying n * more for same product that the rest of the world gets from taiwan?
I don’t think the mix of engineers we’ve been producing is right for this. We need a whole generation of folks at a higher hardware:software ratio. Check back in a decade to see if we’ve seriously started.
America could import it if the current administration wasn’t so hell bent on repelling global talent through inflicting great cost and uncertainty upon the talent
Even this forum can’t decide whether skilled personnel are a boon because they positively contribute to the local economy, or a negative because they undermine employment prospects for locals.
I don't know about this forum, but mainstream economics (and quite a few of the more niche approaches, too) is pretty much all in favour of open immigration for all skill levels.
I don't think you can say that. They are neither for or against, they make (or try to make) predictions what happens in either case. Who benefits and who loses is not the same in those cases, it's not linear. If you wan to be "for" or "against" you have to take a side. Doesn't mean they don't have opinions too, but two economists that each favor different outcomes may still agree on the methods of their field.
There really is a big difference betwwwn needing to import engineers to create high end chips and WITCH companies using h1B to get cheap contractors to do enterprise dev or any software development except something really specialized
I worked at a US college that had a big semiconductor engineering and manufacturing engineering program. They were about 20-30% international, but the program wasn’t huge.
Frankly, it’s shitty work. Software is where it’s at. Hardware people get paid peanuts and work really hard. When you’re a master of a particular technology, you get discarded when the next thing comes along. Ask the people at Intel or IBM. The best jobs are the execs and the tradesmen.
And attract them away from what? What are these skilled people doing? Does a photolithography skill set enable you to moonlight at some other gig such that they're here and keeping their skills fresh and we're just not noticing?
Software. Talk to anybody in the hardware space, and compare their experience to software.
Hell, the only two people I see in this thread that claim hardware experience are saying that it's a better career move to switch to software.
Software is easier, pays better, and has far better employers. Until hardware companies realize the situation they've created, they will lose their workforce to greener pastures.
Software has also benefitted from a massive tax subsidy relative to hardware, as the latter requires a massive capital investment. Hardware requires expensive real estate, and benefits from saving the spending, whereas software can exist on debt and small footprints.
Seems like everyone forgets that the USA literally invented all these things. In fact some of the Americans who invented these technologies and processes are probably still alive, if not a bit older and retired. Photolithographic semiconductor fabrication was invented in the United States. Americans invented the transistor. Americans invented the integrated circuit.
I’m pretty sure the USA would do fine in the semiconductor industry in a short while if it was economical (i.e it stops being profitable to undermine American workers with cheap overseas labor).
I was a fab tool owner. My last paycheck in a semiconductor position was in the mid-200s. I went into software and make double that in the same metro. Same level of responsibility. I don’t even work in machine learning.
To take your photolithography example though, I know someone who went litho tool owner -> camera team at Apple -> Meta reality labs. FAANGs want semiconductor process engineers just so they can spend all day yelling at underpaid Asian vendor semiconductor process engineers who are doing the actual work.
A lot of highly skilled people are perfectly happy to stay at their job earing 60% of what they "could" be making because they have other priorities that don't involve increasing shareholder value.
No one will be until US gives couple nukes to Taiwan so that they no longer need the killswitch for the entire global semiconductor supply chain merely as the substitute. TSMC is going to just keep undercutting everyone else till then.
They can compensate for that by lowering living standards and simultaneously raising expectations in the country.
Everyone was competitive against TSMC until just 10 or 20 years ago. Then they all lost to TSMC one by one. Even IBM was competitive in price against others back in 2000s.
Have you seen how much of a premium Americans are already paying for chips in the face of constrained supply?
Gamers are still buying them and so is everyone else
Given that this is the same curiosity and question since pre-pandemic and now we have many examples of a premium, I think its not a real worry as long as the chips perform
I keep seeing this in every industry. "We can't give up America because they buy so much"
"China needs the American market because they can't make up the numbers for the rest of the world combined in the short term"
Can people here help answer where the heck does everyone have the money to buy all this stuff? Especially post COVID with all the layoffs? The US is only 5% of the world population. Europe isn't that poor and many chunks of Asia have a lot of wealth now. Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!
I'm American and I applied to a software dev role at a European tech company some years ago. The job looked interesting and I thought it would be a fun adventure living abroad. I was shocked how low their salary range was. Even if I got their best offer for that position it would have been less than half what I was currently making. I figured it would be pointless to even to try to negotiate so I just left it alone.
The most frustrating thing is how successful populist politicians have been at convincing voters that the US is actually going to shit and needs radical change. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when said politicians start chipping away at the underpinnings of our prosperity. Wake up America, you actually have it pretty good.
The US is very rich, but Europe is not poor. Europe is richer than basically anywhere on the planet _except_ the US. Like even compared to Canada or Japan, Europe is (generally) as rich or richer. Poland just overtook Japan in GDP per capita! Both the UK and France are richer than the oil-rich UAE.
I mean on an absolute basis the average European enjoys a very comfortable quality of life and often a better work life balance then most in the USA.
That said in the context of this thread on why countries seem to bend over backwards for the "privilege" to sell to the USA it's because everyone is shockingly poor by comparison.
The US is about 40-60% richer than Europe and the US probably has half the world's disposable income plus a voracious appetite for conspicuous consumption.
Some of that consumption is stupid from a sustainability perspective. For example:
Car dependency means that:
- both the initial cost of transportation
- and the ongoing cost are higher
- while the quality of life and health outcomes are worse
than for decent active transportation.
However no one can deny that the money is there in the US.
There are many cases of "money for the sake of money" in the US (healthcare and ultra processed foods being other examples), but again, the US is good at making money. Large, educated workforce on top of a humongous chunk of prime global real estate.
Its pretty impressive and brings you into macroeconomics and monetary policy
Its a long answer but there are many winners in every financial environment in America, while the short answer is that nobody knows how they have money en masse to buy stuff
and the whole system is based on incentivizing them to move that money around the economy, as opposed to collect and save it in a bank account
And we are only talking about 'the' layoffs here because a bunch of tech people got laid off. It wasn't anything special for the overall economy. Some industry or other is always laying people off, and others are hiring.
Most countries are surplus countries and to maintain that competiveness they do alot of things that ultimately weaken their consumption to go into investment instead. They also a buy alot of US treasuries, giving USA alot of credit.
Because of this, the US dollar is the reserve currency and quite strong, which combined with strong credit means that Americans are quite incentived to spend. Another point is that this dynamic concentrates jobs in high paying roles like Finance, leading to a "winner takes all" economy. Which is relevant because 50% of consumption is done by the top 10% of the population.
Well, the question is more like why everyone sell a phone for equivalent of lunch money in US. No one makes a phone at local equivalents of $45, nevertheless it happens and seem to drive some Americans crazy.
It's wild but true. History provides a partial explanation. In 1960 the US was 40% of the world economy while only being 5% of the world population. It's still about 25% of the world economy today.
The thing is that WW2 decimated most of the advanced economies outside of the US, and for decades afterwards many of them simply weren't managed for growth (i.e. the Soviet bloc). So the US had a huge head start and never stopped running. To this day you still don't really see many other countries being as fixated on juicing consumer spending as the US is. The big play of the last few decades has been all these emerging economies getting good at exports and making a lot of money that way, which has cut into the US' lead, but once they have the money they tend to be less aggressive about getting it circulating internally - it accrues to a fairly small number of people and/or they just sit on a lot of it.
part of the problem is that to get yourself to export competitiveness, you have to essentially underpay workers through restrictions on capital and credit; and once you have done so, these export businesses become so central to the economy and to economic identity that it is politically tricky to reorient the economy.
Add on moralizing about how people should be making and not spending and you've got yourself a recipe for an export-oriented slowdown, since at some point the world won't be wealthy enough to keep raising your economy through only exports. We saw this in Japan, South Korea, and more recently Germany and China.
Why would they not be competitive?. Intel makes state of the art cpus in the us and they are competitive on price. It's weird that we seem to forget Intel when this issue comes up.