Also, a major pet peeve of mine for over a decade now has been the lack of granularity in classifying "high tech" jobs.
Most studies use BLS codes, but those are extremely dated - they still treat a typist like a skilled worker and a machinist as a semi- or low-skilled worker.
In reality, aside from macro-level production stats and private sector signals such as dealflow, we have no idea about the rate of production in the US.
From personal experience, I doubt any "make in America" policy would lead to more jobs - most low and medium level assembly roles have been automation friendly for decades now (even in India you can buy and install a programmable soldering robot for roughly the same amount as a year's salary for an employee).
Most discourse is divorced from reality, I blame this on the lack of engineers in the policy space - most of us with those backgrounds would rather remain in the private sector, because an LA or think tank staffer salary ain't making rent in DC.
If you do not know the difference between AC or DC or what solder flux is, let alone further intricacies, you have no position making industrial policy or grand strategy for American manufacturing or engineering (this is a shot fired at you so called "Software Engineers" as well - Leetcode doesn't mean you understand how Infiniband works). But this principal also works in reverse w/ regards to policy matters imo.
> I doubt any "make in America" policy would lead to more jobs
This seems guaranteed to be false because at a minimum you’d have construction workers building manufacturing facilities. But I don’t think you meant it literally, which leads to my next point which is that even if moving a factory making X widget from (insert country here) resulted in a single job at the expense of any number of jobs in (insert country), I would deem that trade off to generally be worth it. Now as we add in prices and cost and all those things it means there’s a social cost to moving those jobs back, but often times the “jobs” angle is that moving production here or even to other western countries won’t create that many jobs, but even if it’s 1 it’s 1 more than before. I think it’s better and more important to think of the whole package of trade-offs instead of caring about number of jobs.
I agree and for reference I am a proponent of Trump-style tariffs convinced with Biden-style industrial policy.
I think rebuilding domestic capacity is critical, but we should not oversell the amount of jobs that can potentially be created.
Light manufacturing will never return to America - it's already begun leaving China and half of India by 2019, and left Mexico in the 2000s.
"Manufacturing" is a very broad and overloaded term, and the type of manufacturing matters, and the kind of high value manufacturing needed for the US is both highly automatable AND high skilled.
Also, a major pet peeve of mine for over a decade now has been the lack of granularity in classifying "high tech" jobs.
Most studies use BLS codes, but those are extremely dated - they still treat a typist like a skilled worker and a machinist as a semi- or low-skilled worker.
In reality, aside from macro-level production stats and private sector signals such as dealflow, we have no idea about the rate of production in the US.
From personal experience, I doubt any "make in America" policy would lead to more jobs - most low and medium level assembly roles have been automation friendly for decades now (even in India you can buy and install a programmable soldering robot for roughly the same amount as a year's salary for an employee).
Most discourse is divorced from reality, I blame this on the lack of engineers in the policy space - most of us with those backgrounds would rather remain in the private sector, because an LA or think tank staffer salary ain't making rent in DC.
If you do not know the difference between AC or DC or what solder flux is, let alone further intricacies, you have no position making industrial policy or grand strategy for American manufacturing or engineering (this is a shot fired at you so called "Software Engineers" as well - Leetcode doesn't mean you understand how Infiniband works). But this principal also works in reverse w/ regards to policy matters imo.