Opinion
From Navdeep Singh
What is modern manufacturing?
(1) It requires fixed capital investment and much of that machinery must come from China-Germany-Japan-South Korea. In order to build modern manufacturing, the US will need to increase its import of these capital goods.
(2) The supply chains for intermediate goods will need to be radically altered. Most of these intermediate goods do not come from the US. To build local supply chains for these intermediate goods will be time consuming and expensive, taking years, decades.
(3) Modern manufacturing requires stable energy at low cost, as well as stable 5G infrastructure to drive robotics and AI. (4) The new type of manufacturing requires workers that are more skilled and educated, with higher literacy standards.
All of this will be very expensive, require meticulous planning, state intervention and state planning.
In point of fact, US manufacturing has stabilized for the last 15 years in terms of numbers of workers and output. The Hallowing out was a long-term process after the end of the post war boom, around 1973.
After that, more machines replaced workers and a lot of Low skilled, labor manufacturing was outsourced. This is long before China enter the picture.
Remember, China only was admitted to the WTO in 2001. The more important factor was that money capital started investing in fictitious financialization schemes, giving rise to the large scale casino economy.
As for actual US manufacturing today, a lot of it is highly expensive stuff that is not competitive on the world market but find sales locally like cars. Canada is actually the biggest importer of US cars.
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