first of all, there's no point in having all kinds of low-added-value industry in high-income places as long as there are millions of people willing and able to do it all in the same place close to a port.
second, US industry suffers from two major problems. protective tariffs keeping productivity low, and the 'exorbitant privilege' of the USD being reserve currency of the world, which counterintuitively hurts export of every non-finance sector
First of all, yes there is, because it creates a culture of hands-on expertise, and appreciation for how the real world works outside of a spreadsheet.
Second, productivity in the US is fine. The problem is the profits are very unevenly distributed.
You can't run a consumer economy by underpaying your consumers, forcing them into debt, and bankrupting them with - for example - health care costs.
Third, the kindest thing you can say about outsourced manufacturing is that it's strategically unwise. It's good if you want cheap Chinese chips with unknown abilities in your military and civil infrastructure, but not so good if you stop to wonder if perhaps that isn't all that good an idea.
the claim was that the US has lost its industry compared to China. which is ridiculous when looking at the numbers, but understandable if someone is misinformed (because they only know about the rust belt, let's say)
what I'm trying to point out is that having a first-class industrial base, with enough experts, well running supply-chains, and so on, is different from eclipsing China in straight to trash gadget output.
that said, of course, as the article and the comment section clearly shows there are a lot of high profile cases where the trope of bean counters ran the business into the ground has been very unfortunately true.
productivity of the whole economy is fine, but aggregates hide a gigantic mountain of first- and second-order effects that hurt millions directly and indirectly. (as you mention wealth, income, health and other kinds of inequalities are mostly reinforced by a lot of powerful systems. and, just to emphasize this, US social mobility is on par with Spain's, despite the latter known for generous welfare programs, but almost all developed countries have serious tensions between rural-urban groups, generational wealth transfer due to real estate prices spiraling out of control, and so on.)
there are other countries besides China, and there are other sectors besides pew-pew and let's say nuclear power plants, or train safety systems.
the obvious (well, of course not to everyone) problem is that there's no serious effort for economic integration with US allies. the US still has a lot of protectionism dressed up as national security. from the Jones Act shenanigans (oh think of the shipbuilders, oh only one left basically in a zombie state), and the baby formula oopsie (oh think of the horror of Canadian baby formula or European, but no Abbott knows best), and there's some pork for the textile industry too, and so on.
> what I'm trying to point out is that having a first-class industrial base, with enough experts, well running supply-chains, and so on, is different from eclipsing China in straight to trash gadget output.
Absolutely true! But we're nowhere near able to do the latter, so what's the point in caring?
> social mobility
Unrelated, but this is a misnomer. The correct term would be "economic mobility". Social concerns are necessarily orthogonal (i.e. intersectional) to economic ones. I understand that social mobility is the common term but it's extremely disingenuous when it only intersects with social interests through economic interests.
Economic mobility is also strictly less interesting than wealth disparity—being able to move up the social ladder doesn't matter much if there's still self-aggrandizing ghouls controlling most of the economy and the market fails to represent the public.
what are you talking about? the public buys shit from China and uses Amazon, and votes for idiots who then dismantle the rest of the system around them. sure, we can console ourselves that it's not the majority, but hundreds of millions of them are part of the problem.
... if you automate it there's even more things to learn, of course.
this is not a black-and-white thing, outsourcing makes sense in many cases and doesn't in others. the automotive industry does it for quasi-standardized components. (and there's a competitive market, for airplane parts, not so much it seems.)
and on top of all this for things that have inherent safety critical aspects there is no real difference between outsourcing or doing it in-house, there's a need for controls (organizational, quality, independent testing lab with random sampling).
the fucked up process of gutting companies for short-term profits happened just as well for non-outsourced departments too.
as industries mature, companies grow and became organizationally more complex training and advancement itself becomes a challenge. (and many companies just put their heads in the proverbial sand, and hire clueless recruiters - or outsource it - and end up with paper tigers, who have absolutely no idea WTF is going on in the company, but quarterly reports look amazing.)
...
finally, if market forces push for short-term thinking (and simple, wrong, but fancy 'solutions') that's what we'll end up. and if society and politics also has the same mindset it's not surprising that industry will mirror it. (and to overuse the overused cliché gestures wildly )
> there's no point in having all kinds of low-added-value industry in high-income places
The point is economic and social stability. If you don't value that over short-term economic efficiency (i.e. profits), of course, I can understand why you would be resistant to this line of thought.
Also, this betrays your belief that "high income places" have significant-added-value compared to low income places! I don't believe this is true, especially over the long term. This is an illusion formed from wealth-extraction.
first of all, there's no point in having all kinds of low-added-value industry in high-income places as long as there are millions of people willing and able to do it all in the same place close to a port.
second, US industry suffers from two major problems. protective tariffs keeping productivity low, and the 'exorbitant privilege' of the USD being reserve currency of the world, which counterintuitively hurts export of every non-finance sector