What is the future of manufacturing?

For an individual, it's actually a very profitable idea. For an economy as a whole, it's a stupid suggestion.

Ed Huntress

international

trans-shipment

Sorry about that last empty message, bg. My trigger finger got jumpy.

Let's hear specifics, bg. Otherwise, it's all meaningless mush.

Engaging in trade with a low-wage country while prescribing "innovation" for your countrymen is self-serving, bg. You admonish the people who have lost their jobs to low-wage imports to do something that you acknowledge you can't imagine how to do yourself.

It's all a scapegoat argument for some dynamics that require a more thorough examination than the one you've given to it. Your posture is not far from one of blind faith.

But don't take this personally. I get serious about it because it's a serious issue. We're awash in fuzzy, qualitative arguments about what the problem is and what should be done about it, by people who won't take the time to investigate the accuracy of what they say. We need an antidote for that.

-- Ed Huntress (remove "3" from email address for email reply)

Thanks for catching that. Per capita means per person. I meant per worker.

Ed Huntress

--I'm still waiting for details on HP's "Bunny burner" project; i.e. home stereolith using a modified laser printer. That would be the Great Leap Forward in terms of being able to get stuff made at home rather than manufactured and delivered to stores, etc...

Probably working off the books at wall-mart.

Jim

================================================== please reply to: JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com ==================================================

Before I left Honeywell 18 months ago, I suggested that my boss (I reported in to the Indian software organization) needed to start hiring MBAs from the Indian Institute of Management (literally right across the street) so that the company could start exporting the product management jobs. The amount of money to be saved would be staggering, and actually made a lot of sense given that the engineering would be done there anyway.

It's happening.

Pete

What do you mean by "constant dollar household costs"? I'm not familiar with that stat. Are you talking about household *expenditures*? If so, how does that relate to "costs"?

Or are you talking about inflation?

I'll address the rest of this when I understand what you mean here. Meantime, if you want a mainstream explanation of the '70s inflation (which sounds like what you're talking about), you can find one at:

This thread got kind of long, but it was interesting. I teach welding and machining at a vocational school near Roanoke, VA and train high school kids for jobs, many of which should be found in manufacturing. True, our manufacturing base has eroded to the point where I have to educate kids in what a machine shop is! When I was a kid (10-12 years old) I had never seen a machine shop, but just by listening to my dad talk while he tinkered I knew what they did. Today, at least among the kids I work with, there is no family memory of someone being a machinist or industrial mechanic. They sure do know what MTV is though, and can play the hell out of a video game! Are we looking at this thing backwards? Have the jobs followed the labor? I struggle to get kids interested in this field, particularly the best and brightest who would make good engineers. The angle I take with most of the kids now is that they need to learn everything they can, be competent in as many technologies as they can, have good people skills, and learn to be professional. That is the best job security. While they won't spend 30 years working on the same line and retire with a fat pension, they should be able to live comfortably and not be chronically unemployed. And there will always be room for the man in this country that can repair anything, as well as be a craftsman with an artistic flair. Just my dos centavos. Bruce

"Bruce Hunt" wrote

And there will always

Very well said.

Mark

Think of it this way: If we all paid each other to shine the other's shoes, which would raise the GDP, would it be good for the economy?

Importing and distributing are services that serve us best when they are a very small proportion of the economy -- just enough to get the job done. It's the goods and their transportation to their destination that add value.

Ed Huntress

Greetings and Salutations...

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 08:03:42 -0400, "Bruce Hunt" wrote:

Yea, it is an interesting point to debate, and, can be chewed over for quite a while. This is a good point you bring up here. IMHO, it is kind of mixed. First off, starting, early 50s (and perhaps perhaps, as early as the late 40s), there was an increasing change in attitude in American society. Through much of our history, college was a goal for a fairly small section of society, and, it was pretty much accepted that this was the case. For much of society, High School WAS their "higher education", and, for many folks, only a year or two of that, as they moved out into the "real" world and started working. However, sometime in that period, after WW2, the paradigm changed to the attitude, which persists today, that EVERYONE needed to go to college and get a degree. In the 60s and 70s, when I was in elementary and high school, while there was still some attention paid to the vocational arts, the whole emphesis of the system was to prepare each of us to go to college and "get the sheepskin". The problem here was that there was an implied attitude that the only "good" job, the only job that was respected, was one that required a college degree - typically a management/white collar job. Jobs that involved getting one's hands dirty were implicitly or explicitly denegrated. The attitude was that folks that did work with their hands were not as bright as other folks, and, that "we" were better than that. So...for several decades now, we have had an erosion of knowledge and skills required to actually DO the hands-on manufacturing necessary for an industrial base, and, an increasing prejudice against folks that DID that sort of thing. That narrowing base of people that were capable of and interested in manufacturing meant that there were fewer folks available for work. The laws of supply and demand kicked in, and wages went up (of course, the Unions had some influence in this too). Added to this mix is the fact that transportation became cheaper and easier with the advent of increasingly large cargo ships. These things all came together to "suddenly" make it both feasible and economical to manufacture an item many thousands of miles from its market, transport it, and still be able to sell it at an economic price. When THIS kicked in, the manufacturing nations (China, Tiawan, Korea, India, etc) also started implementing national policies which fostered this sort of trade, making it even cheaper and easier for them to take over the manufacturing jobs in the USA. Yet another factor is the evolution of focus in today's business world. Today, the attitude seems to be "make as much money as possible for us and for the shareholders and who cares what the product is". While the purpose of business has ALWAYS been to make money, it seems to me that 30 years ago, there was a pride of product in that process. The atttitude seemed to be more that of "Let's make a great product, that folks will be REALLY attracted to, and make a ton of money off it". Combining that with the fact that today's world is a lot tougher for business, what with the increased costs, smaller margins and almost cancer-like growth of government bureaucracy, regulations and laws, really forces the American businessman to outsource as much of the work as possible. Paying an American worker $15 or more an hour to sew pants might destroy a business, whereas paying someone in a Third World nation $5/day to produce the same thing means that they show great profits. Speaking of cancer, another factor in this whole bag of worms is the attitude that the only way a company can be considered "good" is if it shows a growth of return in every Quarter. If a company returns the same dividend for two or three quarters in a row, it is looked upon with suspicion, and, the stock's value may fall. It has been my observation that the only thing that grows continually is cancer...and we KNOW how good that is for an organism. The bottom line is that as long as Americans follow the path where continual, growing returns on investments; always searching for the lowest price; and folks that work with their hands are looked upon with scorn are the rules of the game, our jobs will continue to vanish overseas. At some point, I expect that things will collapse, simply because if all the revenue sources are gone, we will not have the bucks to buy those imports from overseas, and, our country will appear weak enough to be easy pickings for one of the other countries in the world. That will be a time of serious chaos for America...and one that I am not sure can be avoided. Regards Dave Mundt

Isn't that how many beers you can buy per hour worked in any given job?

:)

Steve Rayner.

And lo, it came about, that on Fri, 08 Aug 2003 13:45:54 -0400 in rec.crafts.metalworking , Gary R Coffman was inspired to utter:

Some of the low skill grunt jobs are just plain disappearing. The strong back kind of jobs, like longshoreman, went away with containerization, etc. Even the burger flippers are working in a computerized environment: push the key with the picture, the machine does the rest: add up the order, send it to the kitchen, compute change. That is one reason Mcdonalds is going to the kiosk. Why pay several some ones to do what the customer will do?

My Dad pointed out to me years ago, that you could formerly put the village idiot to work on the mindless tasks, like sweeping, cleaning and the like, but even then you wouldn't exactly turn him loose with a team. Now a days, we've got ride of the horses, the mindless tasks have been automated, and the village idiots are left wondering why they can't get a job.

And we haven't even addressed the issue of regulations barring entry into the market place. You can't start a cleaning service without being licensed, bonded, and certified. And the idea of raising chickens in your back yard "for fun and profit" just isn't going to happen in most municipalities.

The good old days, they were different. Some ways better, some ways worse. (The two oldest cliches in the book are "The Good Old Days were better." and "After all, these are Modern TImes.")

tschus pyotr

Gack! CPI already INCLUDES the cost of housing (which is roughly 40% of the CPI) and big ticket appliances. Why are you adding them again??

The CPI rise over the period 1964 to 1980 was 166%, not 312%. And, if you want to make a meaningful comparison between household income and household expenses, you have to use the CURRENT dollar values for income, not the constant dollar values. If you calculate it right the two come into close agreement, as they should.

CPI includes ALL inflation. It IS mostly inflation. CPI is in current dollars, not constant dollars. A CPI in constant dollars would be meaningless. In fact, CPI is the DEFLATOR used to normalize other costs for inflation.

Gary, your figures are cocked-up from start to finish. If you're claiming that an increase in workers drove up costs, look at the total percentage of working-age adults, the total of men and women, who were actually working over that period of '64 - '80. It rose from roughly 54% to 58%. How does that support an increase in the cost of maintaining a household?

Also, if you look at the increases in the percentage of adults who are working over that period, and track it against inflation, you'll see that the people entering the workforce LAGGED inflation. The two-worker families were catching up to inflation, not driving it.

The percentage of adults in the workforce now is around 60%. We've reached a stage at which a high percentage of those middle-class households now require two workers, as I said at the beginning of this thread. But there's no evidence that they've driven up prices. The inflated prices were the leading factor, and the hefty inflation rates from the mid-'70s on were clearly driven by fuel prices rising for peculiar reasons, not by excessive demand.

Why are you introducing "money supply," BTW?

-- Ed Huntress (remove "3" from email address for email reply)

Along with the thoughts of Gary -

I'm generally pro Women working - but they brought us all another stat - productivity level - it dropped and was forced upward by government and by industry. One reason, a large group moved into the workplace, largely unskilled or newly skilled. I think this larger head count with what ever the other measure outputs gave us all trouble.

I tend to expect like trouble due to the massive influx into the country from many countries world wide.

Martin

To be somewhat fair one would have to point out this has always been true to some degree. During the 20s the black boxes were radios - and most folks had little idea what was inside. Then the boxes became TVs, and again only a small percentage of the population understood the principles.

I think you are certainly correct though that now most of the average US citizen's day is occupied with manipulating machines that are completely obscure to the operator, as far as the real internal workings go.

The difference is, in the 30s there might have been one or two items that fit that catagory, and they were strictly amusement or pleasure devices. Now nearly eveyone simply cannot do their job when the worm shuts down their computer network or the power goes off. No gas for the car? No way to get around. The technology basically has a full turn around the workers and is starting to squeeze. This is how constrictors work.

Jim

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I have no idea what the effect of women workers is on productivity, Martin, nor do I know where you would get that information. Do you have facts and figures to back it up?

Here's a point you have to keep in mind when you're looking at productivity figures: Unless you're talking about extreme effects that are related to very low wages, as in China, the education level, skill level, and work habits of labor have practically nothing to do with a country's productivity. It's almost exclusively a function of the way capital is employed and how business organizes its use of labor.

As for government, its effects on productivity are indirect, by way of labor laws, financial regulations, and so on. In modern societies with advanced economies, government's effect on productivity tends to be much less important than the effect of capital investment.

Ed Huntress

Booming voice, "JIM, cleanup in aisle four!". :)