I started going off topic in another post and decided it is better to start a new post for the discussion on the topic of US reindustrialization.
Below are a couple links to my replies that are pertinent.
To summarize my main points:
We are at or near full employment for those who are able and willing to work, and we have tens of millions of immigrants working. We cannot fill current job openings for well-paying jobs across the nation. Just as China provides a large portion of what we need to live, immigrants perform a large portion of the work in the US.
If China stops supplying parts for missiles, drugs, and many everyday needs, we will face shortages. Similarly, without immigrants, we wouldn’t have enough homes to live in or buildings to work in. Many food items wouldn’t be produced, and infrastructure wouldn’t be maintained. There’s no need for a report or study—just look around you.
This issue extends beyond blue-collar jobs. There aren’t enough native technical graduates. Visit any university with an engineering program, and you’ll find they can place every graduate, yet they struggle to fill their master’s or doctorate programs with native Americans because there aren’t enough of them.
One of the problems with DEI initiatives is that when there is more demand than qualified candidates, everyone is competing for a limited pool, resulting in the hiring of poor talent. Negative talent can cost ten times their salary. There simply isn’t enough technical talent available in the US native population.
I think @Gavin is correct in saying we need to be very careful about our relationship with China, or we may find ourselves in a very bad situation. For the same reasons, we must think carefully about immigration, or we might end up in an equally difficult position.
For those who want to limit immigration or remove immigrants, how do you envision addressing the resulting labor/talent shortage? Or maybe you think there will not be shortages?
Why don’t you have a problem if they go to small towns? What difference does it make where they live? Is that NIMY?
More importantly, I am looking for people to answer my question. If we don’t have immigrants, where are we going to the essentials of a civilized world that we can’t get from China?
We need an all hands-on-deck effort to boost (primarily white) childbirth in this country. We need to value motherhood again. But that’s not going to happen. As I said in the previous thread, we’re toast.
Yes. We need to get right back to the basics of a sustainable society – in the true meaning of sustainability. We also need to value parenting again – fathers as well as mothers. Even if we could flick a switch and do that today, it would still take a generation or more before the benefits showed up. It is a long road back for Western civilization.
While I wholeheartedly agree that we are toast, I do occasionally find myself having optimistic thoughts. Feminism was basically driven by women who don’t want children, and it was acceptable to men who like a plentiful supply of responsibility-free casual sex. But there are subsets of women who want children, and of men who value fatherhood. Thanks to old Darwin, the females who don’t want children are expelling themselves from the gene pool. In a few generations, we may have a smaller population … but a population that does value motherhood and parenthood.
Of course, that smaller population will still face the huge challenge of re-industrializing their society. Practically, they will need to find ways to make nice with the Russians and the Chinese to invest in the West. Losing has a price.
I couldn’t agree more…this will go down in history as one of the biggest and most profoundly devastating (evil?) medical experiment in all of human history.
I have also thought along these lines. However, societal pressure is a significant force. Those who argue that genetics are dominant must explain how women could be convinced to resist their biological drive. We now see a similar trend with the rising identification of LGBT individuals, which highlights the impact of societal pressure.
As Charlie Munger professed, be very careful about what you pound into your head when you are young.
No. As a reference. I would consider roofing to be an 8 on a scale of one to 10 and a desk job a 1. These are 3 or maybe 4 on that scale.
I meant difficult compared to not having to work. Hardly any job in a manufacturing facility is physically demanding. Most things are automated or semi-automated. A person at an entry level will basically put materials or sub components into a machine and maybe pack out the output of the machine. These are all light weight movements. Lifting more than 40 lbs is not allowed. The talented workers will be able to quickly identify problems with the incoming materials or problems with the machine.
There are jobs that are very repetitive. The employees that do these jobs are mostly women. When I watch them work, it reminds me of my mom knitting. She would be carrying on a conversation and be knitting away for hours. Like watching some of these video game streamers play a game while reading chat and talking.
Thinking about it caused me to recall my first job as an engineer. I was responsible for harnesses that were made for the telcomm industry. These ladies wired these harnesses just like my mom knitted. They all sat around a table talking while they wired up the harnesses. It wasn’t obvious that they even looked to insure they had the right color wire to be connected. The connections were so close together that I didn’t have the finger dexterity to be able to do the job.
I think I remember that because they told me that in Thailand (they were from Thailand) a man could have as many wives as he could afford to support. A 22 year old single male that is making more money than he ever thought possible, thinks that sounds wonderful.
Maybe my niece is lying to me but given that’s not characteristic of an LDS faithful that is about as “based”* as a young woman can be who graduated last year from BYU with a CS emphasis in AI:
She reports that NONE of her BYU friends that graduated with her have been able to find employment** in the computer industry and they have all been searching.
* so based that her dream is to work from home as a programmer so she can raise children rather than being one of the sterile workers the West insists on turning young women into.
** and, yes, she has been willing to work as an intern.
Every technical field has times when the graduates cannot get jobs. It was common that Chemical Engineering would fluctuate with large oil company hiring/firing.
I will be commenting on the tremendous bloat in corporations and I think Twitter is a perfect example. Layoff 80 percent of the people and nothing catastrophic happens.
This technical field was hit by layoffs across big tech and the reduction of the bubble in venture funding slowing down.
You mentioned nothing about these layoffs in your OP. Why not?
Reindustrialization is heavily dependent on automation which is, in turn, heavily dependent on embedded control systems even if not machine learning.
You’ll have a hard time convincing me that machine learning is not directly applicable to embedded control systems for manufacturing – since this is directly in my field of expertise having managed software development of automated ordnance inspection systems at SAIC AND having developed the first hardware convolution-based neural image segmentation system using the same DataCube hardware.
My niece not only excelled in programming embedded control systems for robotics in college, she LOVES it and is a big fan of BattleBots. Likes “C” more than python.
Immigration – like H-1b’s? Are there huge H-1b layoffs heading back to India? I’m sure there are anecdotes but my experience circa 2000 is that when the bubble burst they were the LAST demographic to lose jobs.
These arguments are tiresome after more than a half century of contempt for more than a supermajority of the will of the American people regarding immigration rates. Businessmen aren’t qualified to run a country. They’re mesopredators who have overgrazed the genepool and are now complaining that there isn’t enough prey to consume anymore.
Time for the apex predators to step in and eat them.
I will answer my own question about why we do not have enough labor/talent.
Government Size: In the 1950s, government employees made up around 15% of the civilian workforce. Today, this figure is around 23%. This difference accounts for 8 million people who could be working in the private sector but are instead employed by the government. Each government employee requires additional labor from the private sector to ensure compliance and support. For instance, as the EPA grows, businesses need to allocate more hours to ensure compliance with environmental regulations, adding potentially another million jobs.
Corporate Bloat, Lack of Competition, and Destruction of Small Business: Elon Musk fired 80% of the employees at Twitter, and it didn’t seem to impact its operation significantly. This issue isn’t limited to Twitter. Big tech companies, which often feel like monopolies, have extraordinary profit margins. Despite minimal new inventions, companies like Google should face competition. However, due to network effects and the purchase of potential competitors, these companies can afford to hire a large number of employees who may not be essential. In the finance sector, despite fewer banks and more passive investing, universities continue to produce a large amount of finance graduates (I think it is still the number one area for MBAs). Large financial institutions, which can afford to bloat, also receive government backstops when they face issues. This situation results in a significant amount of talent being wasted on unproductive tasks. In 1950, small businesses accounted for approximately 58% of domestic output, but by 2023, this had dropped to around 44%, indicating massive consolidation and reduced competition.
Labor Force Participation: The labor force participation rate has dropped from 67% in the late 1990s to 62% today. This decline represents about 13.3 million people. While the rate consistently increased from the early 70s to the late 90s due to more women joining the workforce, it peaked in the late 1990s. The male civilian labor force participation rate has declined the most over the past few decades, standing at 68.1% in 2023, down from around 85-90% in the 1960s and 1970s. From Braves AI search:
According to the data, the male civilian labor force participation rate in the United States has been trending downward over the past few decades. As of 2023, the rate stands at 68.1%, down from its peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Here are some key points: * The rate has declined steadily since the late 1990s, with a few minor fluctuations. * In the 1960s and 1970s, the rate was around 85-90%, indicating a much higher participation rate among men.
You can read the article for proposed explanations.
I haven’t read the full article I posted. I just wanted to show the number.
Here is a quote from that article I would like to comment on:
Workers may lack the skills needed to shift from one sector to another. In addition, the Brookings report noted that male workers who formerly worked in manufacturing may not want jobs in these growing sectors because pay is lower and the occupations are often female-dominated. Safety nets, such as disability or other nonemployment income, could also inhibit labor supply.
Safety nets could inhibit supply?! May not want jobs? How are these people living?
Total: It seems within the napkin calculation there are 20 million people that are not working or have make work jobs from the government. It is likely there are 40 to 50 million people that are available for productive work if zombie corporations and corporate bloat is eliminated (hopefully through competition).
tax workers, pay the growing political class, hire social workers, provide handouts to unemployed to sit at home, eat junk food, and watch TV, experience lower birth rates, generational dependency on welfare, increase taxes to medicate mental health and obesity, experience lower growth, increase borrowing, higher payments of interest, need higher taxes…
entrepreneurs hire unemployed at market rates, the now-employed get training, their salaries increase, positive example for their families, low taxes, low public sector employment, economic growth with inexpensive abundant labor, higher birth rates among the skilled employees…
