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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!)
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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.
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?
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.
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