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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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Notes -
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.
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