Comment by DrewADesign
3 hours ago
The American manufacturing industry is scrambling to transfer some of the industrial trade and process knowledge from the retiring remnants of pre-offshoring industrial America into the two generations of people that didn’t have apprenticeships, pensions, (often) union membership with good benefits, etc. Trade schools were very expensive for industrial trade skills that were seen as dead-end careers compared to white collar jobs or non-manufacturing trades, and almost none of the companies saw any reason to spend all that money training people into expensive skilled professionals when they had all the professionals they could possibly need for decades after the industry largely collapsed, here. Keeping the workforce viable was always someone else’s problem— the individuals, the governments, larger companies— until it was suddenly everyone’s problem. They spend decades myopically chasing quarterly results before they realized they were running towards a cliff.
Unless your company had for some reason enough margin to just spend a lot more money than the competition to train and retain workers that you largely didn't need for a decade you were forced by the market to cut that corner. Market capitalism is inherently unsuited for long-term thinking. Even if everybody saw the cliff a decade ago, they all had to run towards it or be outcompeted by those who did. See also all other problems that can be externalized, e.g. pollution.
Tackling long-term problems and externalities must be done by someone outside the market.
“The market” doesn’t stop business owners from slightly overpaying for labor or training people for the future or providing pensions. It’s the business owners who are choosing to do this. Say a business could make 8% margin by cutting corners and applying only short term thinking, but the same business could make 6% by not doing these things. The choice is up to the business owner. Nobody is forcing them to maximize short term profits. They’re not going to simply vanish just because they aren’t profiting as much as someone else.
The problem is that most business owners and shareholders are cut from the same cloth and only care about maximizing short term profits.
> “The market” doesn’t stop business owners from slightly overpaying for labor or training people for the future or providing pensions. It’s the business owners who are choosing to do this.
Well, laws and regulations forbid the obvious contracts that would help you fix these things.
> Market capitalism is inherently unsuited for long-term thinking.
How so? See how eg Amazon's shareholders were famously patient with them. Similar for Tesla, and lots of other companies. Including both public and private.