I'm currently reading a fascinating series of essays that I will post soon when I'm done reading them. They argue that the US subscribed to the model of comparative advantages and consequently...
I'm currently reading a fascinating series of essays that I will post soon when I'm done reading them. They argue that the US subscribed to the model of comparative advantages and consequently deindustrialized — sort of, manufacturing output is higher than ever on paper, but it employs fewer people than ever, lots of know-how has been lost, and manufacturing no longer draws the best and brightest because opportunities are dim and our culture looks down on it.
Instead in our current cultural-economic paradigm, we channel and waste so many of our best and brightest into/on consumer internet tech, finance, and law — highly profitable but not very productive fields. Compliance is one of the biggest 'industries' in the US. Earning substantive knowledge of the material world by working in and impacting it is looked down upon.
I suspect the rot in our decadent society is underestimated, and that our actual wealth is not as great as it seems on paper. We are indeed ineffective turning that money into things and services we need.
Our educational outcomes are quite disappointing despite us being one of the highest spenders on education per pupil. And as Skybrian highlighted, despite how much money we pour into infrastructure projects, the outcomes are disappointing. Waste abounds.
I suspect that things only look good to the middle classes and up for now because we've been coasting off what our forefathers built.
A lot has been lost, but it seems somewhat pessimistic to say that manufacturing is doing well only on paper. Looks like US steel production stayed in about the same range since 1980 or so,...
A lot has been lost, but it seems somewhat pessimistic to say that manufacturing is doing well only on paper. Looks like US steel production stayed in about the same range since 1980 or so, recessions aside. (Above 80% recycled now.)
Noah Smith's article is mostly about construction. There are other things you can buy where nobody will stop you if you have the money.
Now I'm wondering if US auto manufacturing has gone down. Looks like it's down a lot if you just look at cars, so you need to look at trucks, too. (Also, the country of origin has lots of wiggle room due to part imports.)
Maybe there are other ways to look at manufacturing in concrete terms? I'm somewhat skeptical of using prices alone as a measure of value since they can behave in weird ways, but it's also true that if you can use less materials and energy to achieve the same goals, that's more efficient.
For decades, I’ve heard progressives, including my friends and relatives, bemoan America’s unwillingness to spend money on things like transit and green energy. But now America is spending all the money, and things still aren’t getting built, because of the country’s broken system of permitting, land use, and development.
This is such an important point that it bears repeating. Money is not physical stuff. Just because you earmark $5 billion for a subway or $2 billion for a solar farm in some Excel spreadsheet somewhere doesn’t mean a physical train or power plant has actually been created. If permitting holds up the process for years, then you still haven’t built a damn thing. And if eventually construction does begin, but the cost balloons to absurd levels, that means that a pitifully inadequate amount of actual physical transit, or housing, or solar will be created, despite that huge flood of dollar signs in your spreadsheet.
For decades now, Americans have told ourselves that we’re the richest nation on Earth, and that as long as we had the political will to write big checks, we could do anything we wanted. But that was never really true, was it? The inflation that followed the pandemic should have been a wake-up call — we had all this excess cash, and we started spending it on physical goods, and mostly what happened was just that the price of the physical goods went up. And so R.I.P. to all that cash. From meaningless numbers on a spreadsheet you came, and to meaningless numbers on a spreadsheet you shall return.
What matters is not how big America’s spreadsheet numbers are, but how much physical stuff we get. And yet as a society we’ve decided to award people with stasis instead of stuff. In many dysfunctional societies, the government’s guarantee of economic inclusion comes in the form of a specific physical good — usually, cheap fuel. In the United States, the in-kind subsidy we provide our people is the option to keep their world from changing.
I'm currently reading a fascinating series of essays that I will post soon when I'm done reading them. They argue that the US subscribed to the model of comparative advantages and consequently deindustrialized — sort of, manufacturing output is higher than ever on paper, but it employs fewer people than ever, lots of know-how has been lost, and manufacturing no longer draws the best and brightest because opportunities are dim and our culture looks down on it.
Instead in our current cultural-economic paradigm, we channel and waste so many of our best and brightest into/on consumer internet tech, finance, and law — highly profitable but not very productive fields. Compliance is one of the biggest 'industries' in the US. Earning substantive knowledge of the material world by working in and impacting it is looked down upon.
I suspect the rot in our decadent society is underestimated, and that our actual wealth is not as great as it seems on paper. We are indeed ineffective turning that money into things and services we need.
Our educational outcomes are quite disappointing despite us being one of the highest spenders on education per pupil. And as Skybrian highlighted, despite how much money we pour into infrastructure projects, the outcomes are disappointing. Waste abounds.
I suspect that things only look good to the middle classes and up for now because we've been coasting off what our forefathers built.
A lot has been lost, but it seems somewhat pessimistic to say that manufacturing is doing well only on paper. Looks like US steel production stayed in about the same range since 1980 or so, recessions aside. (Above 80% recycled now.)
Noah Smith's article is mostly about construction. There are other things you can buy where nobody will stop you if you have the money.
Now I'm wondering if US auto manufacturing has gone down. Looks like it's down a lot if you just look at cars, so you need to look at trucks, too. (Also, the country of origin has lots of wiggle room due to part imports.)
Maybe there are other ways to look at manufacturing in concrete terms? I'm somewhat skeptical of using prices alone as a measure of value since they can behave in weird ways, but it's also true that if you can use less materials and energy to achieve the same goals, that's more efficient.
From the blog post: