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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

(www.molsonhart.com)
842 points putzdown | 1 comments | 15 Apr 25 13:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.243s | source
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vFunct ◴[15 Apr 25 14:05 UTC] No.43692883[source]▶
Our economy was designed to NOT have citizens work at factories. We pay thousands of dollars a year in our public schools to teach each of our citizens calculus, literature, world history, and physics, so that they DON'T have to work at a factory, or perform manual labor like picking strawberries or driving trucks or cleaning toilets.

Why would anyone want to go back to an economy that can be run by a third worlders? What is our competitive advantage then?

Economics works when the people do the things they are most efficient at. If a person in China can make iPhones for cheaper than an American, LET THEM. Our citizens should be designing them instead, because that's what we train our citizens to do.

Trump and the Republicans really do think of our citizens as third worlders performing manual labor like we were oxen.

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1. api ◴[15 Apr 25 14:12 UTC] No.43692975[source]▶
The problem with an exclusively intellectual economy is that it easily loses touch with reality entirely. You end up with generations of people who have no idea how anything works or how to actually make anything or do things in the real world.

Why does it cost us 10X more to build half as much? It's not all wage differences. It's that we don't have a large talent pool of builders. When you make things -- physical things in the real world -- you learn things about the nature of reality that cannot be learned from books or computers.