The website is a user-friendly proxy for youtube - if it has trouble loading the video, there's a link to the youtube page (or just edit the url).
You may have read things like Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA, but what about a hand tool with no electronics, just a few materials, large tolerances, and a simple assembly process? The same problem of manufacturing engineering being exported for greater integration with manufacturing labor applies to that, too - according to this, American "tool and die" capabilities for small-scale manufacturing are gutted. (I suspect the this video overstates the problem, because the biggest obstacle came when the non-manufacturing engineer with a small budget wanted to contract out a specific need - molds for plastic injection molding, which the molder would have sourced from the PRC - and two other engineers lent their expertise for two different ways of manufacturing plastic injection molds, and he found a mold-maker, after he needed to change the material of a part, but it's still a big deal that there aren't more American vendors advertising these capabilities.) And the video didn't even touch the materials supply chain...
(The completed grill scrubber was priced at $75 and the initial batch sold out within hours, in case you were wondering.)
If you haven't read things like that Forbes series, you might not fully appreciate that it's very easy to have a false perception of what the manufacturing capabilities of other countries are, due to selection bias in exports; there's often a wide variety in the quality of goods produced in a given country and only a narrow range of quality that's economical for you to import. One famous example is the brand images of German cars in America, which only imports expensive German cars. Less famously, there's been a secular trend of American imports of Japanese musical instruments going from the bottom to the top of the Japanese (followed by other Asian countries') production ranges and many American musicians assume each decade's imports were a representative sample. But, since manufacturing labels reflect final assembly, increasingly complicated supply chains are mostly invisible to the consumer. It'd be interesting to know what this partnership would have done differently, if they had expanded their searches to Mexican and Canadian suppliers as an acceptable alternative to American suppliers (as a larger-scale business intent on "friend/near-shoring" would), but the value of purism vs general applicability is a "six of one, half a dozen of the other" type thing.
As someone who's pro-industrial policy and also anti-CCP, I think think the supply chain problem is one of those issues with a lot of misplaced attention, wherein globalization gets projected onto various political narratives, to the detriment of analyzing capability.
(Hopefully that's enough of a conversation-starter, without crossing into CW!)
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This video really sold me on protectionism. There's tons of value in having someone somewhere who can make what you need.
Protectionism, by what means and to what end? "Protectionism" usually connotes zero-sum (or negative-sum) trade policy and a goal of maintaining employment in specific jobs (which may become obsolete), while "industrial policy" could be any intervention aimed at increasing a desired capability/capacity (e.g., STEM scholarships and incentives for skilled-labor apprenticeships or lowering import barriers for certain industrial inputs).
Protectionism, by the means of tariffs to the end of preserving the jobs of tooling makers in the United States against unfair Chinese competition. Of course if other domestic firms think they have an edge, that competition is still there.
This wouldn't protect obsolete jobs from destruction, because of those obsolete jobs would die out both domestically and in China.
And the history of American ship and automotive industries?
Shipbuilding was made obsolete by railroads and trucks because it only protected domestic shipping from foreign competition, not specific modes from each other.
Last I checked the US automotive industry is perfectly healthy. I'm don't see any consensus that US made cars are inferior to foreign ones, and in my experience they're perfectly fine.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships
The US shipbuilding industry was only strong in the mid-1800s. Since the rise of iron and steel ships, massive government spending was able to buy military ships, but protectionism and subsidies failed to maintain a competitive shipbuilding industry.
Ford and GM only make good cars because of international competition, and Chrysler has never made good cars, at all (Chrysler fans won't be mad about me saying this, because they like that Chryslers are bad). The only long-lived US motorcycle manufacturer is Harley-Davidson and it not only needed tariffs to survive, it's also bad.
More options
Context Copy link
I think you could not be more wrong. While I did not find any neutral specific numbers, my gut feeling is that shipping a container by railway is several times more expensive than by container ship.
If you look at a map of Eurasia, you will find that the shortest single-transportation mode from Shenzhen to Amsterdam is over land. Yet China does not ship to Europe by rail, but uses container ships, which need to travel a lot further. Some of it will be geostrategic considerations (you do not need to rely on foreign states for transit, and if the EU instates tariffs, then it is a lot easier to redirect your ships than building a railway to Mexico), but most of it comes down to costs.
A container ship can load upwards of 5k (TEU) containers, and the only part which will see substantial wear and tear are the propulsion system. If you have an ocean somewhere, you are all set. Sure, you will pay a hefty premium to go through the Suez canal -- from naive considerations it should be priced slightly below what it would cost you to go around the horn of Africa, but all the rest of the way (excluding the harbors) is basically provided for free by Earth, and international treaties prevent states through which you pass from making you pay taxes for the most part.
By contrast, a freight train might typically have 150 cars. If we assume four (20-foot, TEU) containers per car, that is six hundred containers. Both the engine and every axle of every car will experience wear. Unlike waterways, railway tracks do not occur naturally on Earth, but need to be painstakingly constructed. To make matters worse, land is not always very suited for building railroads. Mountains in particular make building railroads much more expensive. The tracks will certainly also experience wear, and whoever owns them will bill you for the privilege of using them. There is plenty of international water, but almost no international land, so your train will have to reach an understanding with the states you pass through, which will likely involve you paying money (taxes, union wages, etc) and might also come with regulations which prohibit you from running your diesel engine on the cheapest fuel it can take.
Rail is surprisingly more efficient than many forms of shipping (e.g. barges).
Thanks for the link. Given that the ships in that graph were rather small, I tried to calculate the force per ton for a TI-class supertanker. To my surprise, it turns out that the number I get out (F/m=P/v/m=37MW/(30.6km/h * 441kT)=10N/T) is rather similar to the barge.
From physics, I would have assumed that the friction of a ship has roughly two components, one which is proportional to the cross-section of the underwater parts of the hull (and to the velocity squared) and one which is proportional to the area of the underwater hull (and to the velocity). Notably, both of these are decidedly sublinear to the displaced water volume, so going from a 1kT barge to a 441kT supertanker should really lower friction.
Now, it could be that the 37MW are the absolute maximum rating of the engine, and that in normal operations it used only a fraction of that power at top speed, or that the conversion of the engine power into a forward force is inefficient for some reason, but I do not have a great explanation.
I notice I am confused.
The other curious thing about that table is that once your railroad track has an incline, the story becomes much different. For example, with an incline of 1%, you will tithe 100N/T to gravity, regardless of your velocity.
But we can also invert that. An incline of 0.1% (one meter per kilometer) imposes a force of 10N/T from gravity. Per the plot, a 60ton railroad car on such an incline (which would not even be noticeable to the naked eye) would (once we push it a bit to overcome static friction) accelerate until it reaches a velocity of 150km/h. Now, if you try to tell me that 40 foot container filled with water falling door forward out of a plane would reach a terminal velocity of 150km/h, I would already find that unlikely.
I would like to roll a will save to disbelieve, please.
Don't container ships usually travel much, much faster than barges?
More options
Context Copy link
I think I read somewhere that surface ships actually experience drag proportional to the cube of speed, due to the bow wave.
More options
Context Copy link
The physics of shipbuilding is incredibly counterintuitive. This is because we have bad intuition about the physics of fluids in general, and the physics at the intersection of the fluids air/water compounds this.
One super counter-intuitive concept is the Froude number, which is a dimensionless quantity that determines (roughly speaking) how fast a ship can go at max efficiency, but doesn't depend on any of the quantities you mention. The formula is:
Fr = V/√(g×L)
Where:
There are dozens of other constants like this that ship designers measure/use, and none of them are intuitive.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your statement is not supported by your link. The article says:
The graph in the article says that barges still are more efficient than trains below around 10 km/h (6 mi/h).
In Railroads and American Economic Growth, an economist estimated that, if 12-mi/h (19-km/h) railroads had never been invented and instead the Midwest had been connected to oceanic trade with an extensive 7-mi/h (11-km/h) canal network during the late 19th century, the cost of the resulting increased inventory requirements would have been essentially negligible. Most freight transportation does not need to be fast.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This argument applies to international shipping, but not to us domestic shippingnwhich has been made obsolete by rail and road. I guess to be more specific, my argument was obviously that US shipbuilding for the domestic us market was made obsolete by trucks and railroads.
Applies to international shipping but not to us domestic shipping covered by the jones act.
Railroad has reached every single US population center since before modern sea shipping existed.
And many of those population centers are landlocked, not accessible by ship, only by river barge if at all.
If you look at situations where people have gotten caught doing cabotage, you'll see that it happens only in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Unfortunately those markets are too small to sustain an actual shipbuilding industry which requires significant economy of scale.
I will grant you that shipping within the continental US is mostly not done using waterways. Part of it are historical reasons. The transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869, while the Panama canal, was only finished in 1914. Before that, oceanic coast-to-coast shipping had to run around South America, which is a big detour.
Now, if someone needs to ship a lot of bulk cargo (like coal) from New York City to Miami or even Los Angeles, I would guess that in theory (asides from the Jones act) it might still be cheaper to use ships. However, NYC is not known for its coal mines, so any coal which ends up there was likely transported there from the hinterlands by railroad. If you already have your cargo neatly loaded onto railway cars, reloading it on a ship (and then potentially unloading it back onto railroads on the other side) is likely not worth it just to take advantage of the lower shipping costs per kilometer for boats, if your distance is only a few thousand kilometers. And as you point out, there are effects of scale -- if half of your cargo goes to landlocked destinations, then investing in railways seems like a better idea.
I guess the polar opposite of the US in that regard is Japan, which famously consists of multiple islands. If half of your cargo goes from one island to another, it makes sense to focus on ports and use railroads for passengers and getting the goods from the ports to the landlocked locations only.
The three big shipbuilding nations, in order, are China, South Korea, and Japan. Of these, Japan will likely use transport ships a lot domestically, and I can imagine China doing likewise to connect coastal cities separated by thousands of kilometers.
But looking at South Korea, a 600 km x 200 km peninsula, I do not see them doing a lot of domestic transportation over the ocean when the US with its many thousands of kilometers of coastlines does not. To be honest, I am also not convinced that the ships which ferry containers between Hokkaido and Honshu are the same ships as the ones which ferry containers between Shenzhen and Atlanta. Larger ships certainly offer better fuel efficiency, but might also require deeper harbors and might be more expensive to load and unload. So naively, I would expect that the perfect ship size to carry containers half around the world will not be perfect ship size to carry containers for a few 100 km.
In short, I do not see why you would require a thriving local market for transport ships to build ships for transporting goods over the ocean. Sure, it might help to start small and then scale up, but the only strict requirement is access to a sea which is sufficiently connected to the world's oceans.
That's exactly the point. Intercontinental shipping and domestic shipping can essentially be thought of as two separate markets with very little intersection.
The Jones act was a misguided attempt to protect US domestic sea shipping from international competition. It did stop foreign carriers from moving US domestic shipping by boat, but didn't stop railroads and road from eating the market. As a result, Alaska, Hawaii, etc. are screwed as nobody wants to build a new shipyard just to build the one or two ships needed to serve those routes. In my imo the Jones act should be repealed in order to help out our islands, but if it were repealed, I doubt that sea shipping would pick up much market share on the continental US.
International sea shipping is a totally different beast. In a sense, nearly all international shipping is cabotage, as goods shipped between two countries are almost always shipped by a carrier from a third country. This is in sharp contrast to air travel, where air carriers are almost universally required to serve their home country on every route. The result for sea shipping is that there's a winner-take-all single market for shipping and shipbuilding. Countries with heavy subsidies and favorable regulatory environments are the winner here.
If the United States revoked cabotage and enforced a system similar to that of air travel, it would certainly encourage diversification of the shipping industry, including potentially US shipyards able to make halfway decent cargo ships. But something like this would be such a shock that it's likely impossible.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The EU moves more freight by coastal ship than by rail. American coastal shipping was rendered obsolete by the Jones Act, not by improvements in land transport tech.
If by "cars", you mean "cars" and not pick-up trucks, then the only reason why US-made cars are still a thing is because foreign companies opened up non-union factories in places a long way from Detroit. That is not the outcome classic protectionism would have been looking for.
The pick-up truck market is an example of classic protectionism working, admittedly. There are lots of union jobs making pickup trucks for sale into a protected domestic market. There is an ongoing argument among non-American car nerds about whether they are unexportable because they are crap products produced for a protected domestic market, or if they are unexportable because they target a market segment (people who drive clean pickups to the office) that does not exist outside the US.
I don’t think that’s true. The Act doesn’t put any restrictions on US shipping, only foreign shipping, and US shipping was strong for about a half century after it passed. The decline in US shipping instead seems linked to the decline in US industry post-war. Unless you’re taking that decline as a given and talking about the death of small American ports that can’t be serviced by foreign shipping?
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships
The US shipbuilding industry was only strong in the mid-1800s. Since the rise of iron and steel ships, massive government spending was able to buy military ships, but protectionism and subsidies failed to maintain a competitive shipbuilding industry.
More options
Context Copy link
Of course the Jones Act regulates US shipping - the whole point is that it prohibits US shipping using imported ships.
But when it was written, the US made its own ships, on colossal scale. Getting US ships was no issue. It’s only after US shipbuilding declined that any of this became a problem. That’s why I’d lay the blame more at the feet of deindustrialization.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It puts restrictions on shipping as a class of economic activity in moving things around vs other classes of economic activity in moving things around. This means the ancillary things around shipping that would make it more efficient and cheaper over time don't happen because the market for them just isn't there, leading to shipping as a whole (US and foreign) losing out to other means of transport.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In most other countries, large personal cars are heavily discouraged through taxation, both of the cars and the fuel. If fuel is $8/gallon and the car tax is based on weight and engine displacement, a Ram is not a practical commuter car, for reasons of economy alone.
But I do see people driving gray-import Rams around. People are willing to pay easily double the American price, for a car that they know beforehand won't fit in any parking garage or even down the road in some places. (They get converted to run on LPG to save on fuel costs.) And they do drive their clean pickups to the office. I bet if it weren't for the regulations there'd be much more of them around.
Anti-Americanism is highly concentrated in the environmentalist left and liberal professional class.
Below them, a lot of things associated with America are loved, from Disney to conspicuous consumption to Las Vegas and Hollywood to the Wild West and Cowboys and Indians and ‘take me home, country roads’ and In-n-Out burger and fanboats in the Everglades and Twin Peaks and Twilight and police procedurals with those old Ford crown victorias and oversized portions and endless suburbs where even a cop can buy a 6 bedroom McMansion with three cars in the drive and cheerleaders and jocks and frats and (American) football (yes, all these things blend into some kind of generic Americana).
That’s why it’s not uncommon to see relatively affluent right-ish leaning German or British or Scandinavian working class or small business types spend huge amounts of money importing and fueling pick up trucks, Mustangs, Chargers etc. Often they will go on vacation to ‘Americana’ places they associate with American movies, music and culture like Vegas, Miami, LA or even Nashville despite very high American salaries and hotel prices making vacations in the US more expensive than almost anywhere else in the world for Europeans.
These are extreme outliers and really rare for the simple reason that US style pickup trucks solve the problem of hauling stuff or people around in a very poor way. They’re expensive, huge & heavy (a major problem when trying to drive or park them) and don’t protect the cargo. People who need to haul large amounts of cargo buy either a van or a trailer. People who need to regularly carry people and regular goods buy a station wagon.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The crossover and truck craze is largely driven by cafe distortion. Just because us carmakers don't want to build sedans doesn't mean they can't compete - they build crossovers just as well as forign companies do.
Why not? The presses are still here and they place orders in the domestic supply chain for parts. Those factories aren't fully vertically integrated, neither do they import all of their inputs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Protectionism is often the disease. Rather than erroneous regulation enabling complacency, the solution is becoming more competitive. That means simplifying the regulatory environment, improving logistics and encouraging similar businesses in the same area.
China is known to engage in dumping, so you can't survive just by being competitive.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link