Comment by crote
1 day ago
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week.
In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Western labor is never going to compete with Asian labor, so it's no use even trying. If we want to have any chance of matching what China is already doing (let alone beating it), we're going to have to invest an absolute fortune in automation and streamlining: reduce the number of unique products, reduce the part count, reduce the number of vendors, reduce the distance to vendors, and automate everything you can reasonably automate.
Make it capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive and we might be able to keep up.
> In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate.
Not really, American manufacturing is already automated. Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased[0] while output has increased (or stayed steady) in manufacturing since the early 2000's [1]. There is only one reasonable explanation for this -> automation.
While it is true that the Chinese are indeed automated their manufacturing, it still doesn't negate the fact that companies like Foxconn still have 200k employees in China.
IMHO the real reason you'll never see manufacturing come back to the USA is because you can't convince people who are already in less manually intensive labor conditions to go back to more manually intensive labor conditions. Said differently, it's easier to get someone who's family has spent decades doing back breaking work in a rice paddy to work in a factory for slightly better pay than it is to do the reverse.
[0] - https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling...
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOMA
I took a tour of the BMW Spartanburg factory a few days ago. It is highly automated with most work done by industrial robots. There are a few human workers manually pulling parts out of bins to feed the robots but nothing like the way that assembly lines used to operate.
https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en.html
Wow - super automated and they still employ 11,000 people?
The goal of automation is not necessarily reduce personnel, it could be increased reliability, reduced risk to life, reducing waste from scraps, faster lead time, etc
Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea. I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.
I watched some videos 10GTek published. Rather “boring” stuff of a life in the day of various employees.
But I was shocked by how efficient and modernised their factory was, including really rigorous quality control, advanced testing setups, dedicated jigs everywhere just for the testing… and then one video was of an office worker who spent her day making sure everything runs smoothly, juggling customers, orders for parts from vendors, and getting ahold of the right people when something was going wrong.
Incidentally none of my 10GTek stuff has ever failed.
From the American point of view there's something to be said for doing a job where the money is. Like you'll make more in finance or as an AI engineer than making stuff in a factory.
I London where I live you can't really afford to buy a house or things like that if you got a job manufacturing anything that's globally competitive which is why manufacturing is basically gone here and people get jobs in finance and the like. We used to have a factory in the London outskirts but it got knocked down and replaced with apartments long ago.
I don't know if it's addicted to easy money so much as the people earning easy money push up the cost of living and force others to do similar to afford to live in the same area.
Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items.
Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with scale orders.
There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at a video like this and count how many humans there are to make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20 speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to go away as an option.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
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It really just depends. There might short/small runs which are easily automated, and there might be a large scale production which are not and need hand assembly. The very same product might see both during production – fully automated robots and hand assembly etc.
> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production.
The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive automated sites at huge expense, but there aren’t the skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the AMR companies don’t want to talk to you, and there isn’t really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will wipe out the benefit, and we don’t have the skills within most small production companies to get a small robot arm/AMR working without external integrators - but a one-AMR deployment might be a more common scenario in China).
I was thinking the issue might be its much better for factories to automate sections of production over time.
It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned.
Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.
They're automating the production of many items not just cars
https://archive.ph/DuZGe
>The overall number of robots added in China last year was 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US and just 2,500 in the UK.
I know, that’s not what I was saying :)
Or you could have trade borders.
Not that I would doubt the guy who let Mike Tyson hit him in the head or anything, but don’t we have decades of research showing the negative effects of those?
This hinges on the assumption that economists are correctly accounting for value, which seems unlikely. For example, what's the value of being able to repair your jets in a conflict, because the supply chain is local, and doesn't start in an enemy's factory? Comparative advantage tells us we should trade for things that our economy doesn't do well, but if your rival makes bullets better than you do, you're probably still going to make your own. But how do you value that? Security is an intangible asset that can quickly become pathological, as we see in other areas (too much is never enough, just think of the children).
Industries don't exist in isolation, so these effects propagate. If you can't make cars, you probably won't make good tanks. When we assess the value of a local car industry, how do we account for the "use it or lose it" nature of retaining knowledge built up by industry? Part of learning and skilling up is actually doing the thing you're learning about. It's no surprise that the country the West has skilled up in the pursuit of greater profits is now it's chief rival.
And of course, all of this is before we ask questions like what metric is used to determine the benefit. Efficiency in particular is rife with competing definitions that fit various niche use cases, and for which the underlying assumptions may not be obvious. E.g. thermodynamic efficiency is often calculated using the lower heating value of a fuel, the reasons for which are good, but typically left unstated. A layman comparing thermodynamic efficiencies where differing methods are used might draw an erroneous conclusion if they don't understand that there can be differences.
Sure, decades of research by think-tanks hell-bent on pumping the assets of their sponsors at any cost to others.
"Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis is a good counterpoint.
I have never had anybody make this reference before!
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Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking.
I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car.
When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
>I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia.
>People in backwards places like rural...
That's not actually true. You want to visit rural Asia and compare.
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>When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
Would the rest of the world even care anymore? Everyone from Canada to New Zealand is now making plans for long term disconnection from the US. They will not let the next Trump boss them around like they have been this past year. The reputation is torched and so if the US launches another populist movement that leads nowhere and collapses the country as a result why should the other 95% of the planet care?
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> I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia.
Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu?
Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.
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