America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

Jonathan Blow's "Preventing the collapse of civilization" [1] makes a similar point. It is easy to assume that, if we can build EUV machines and space telescopes, then processing stainless steel and manufacturing PCBs is baby stuff, and is just waiting for the proper incentives to spring up again. Unfortunately that is not the case -- reality has a surprising amount of detail [2] and even medium-level technology takes know-how and skilled workers to execute properly. Both can be recovered and scaled back up if the will is there. And time -- ten or twenty years of persistent and intelligent effort should be plenty to MAGA :)

1. https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk

2. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

But the important question is - is it worth it? Should we be doing something more valuable instead?

I've seen this brought up with board games that are now primarily made in China, because injection molding is cheaper there especially for small quantities. The US could make the board game minis, but everyone who is capable of it in the US is producing high value high quality aerospace, industrial, medical parts. It's a waste of their time to produce small runs of toy parts.

This seems like the kind of thing where 3d printing is probably good enough quality wise.

Of course, the 3d printers themselves are probably being made in China.