The future of manufacturing
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My great-grandfather was a small scale cotton farmer. My in-laws picked cotton by hand, to help put food on the table. My SIL's husband was raised on a 3000 acre farm, where they grew about 1200 acres of cotton. Somewhere around here, there's a picture of seven-year old me on a cotton picker. It's not the King Cotton it once was, but there is still a good bit grown in the South.
We don't grow as much cotton as we used to. We used to grow so much, the Feds instituted cotton allotments, limiting production. Nowadays, the price is low enough that a lot of acreage is planted in other things. Farmers plant what they can make money with and nowadays that's sugar cane if you're not too far north to do so. I live not too far from once was the largest row crop farm in North America, at around 70,000 acres and they don't grow a single cotton plant, but they could if the price was right.
There's a lot of production capacity we simply aren't using.
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Here, read this article about a South Carolina town that used to be a textile hub that then transformed into a car manufacturing hub:
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@Doctor-Phibes said in The future of manufacturing:
I've been around a lot of manufacturing plants over the last 30-odd years and it's very noticable how there are fewer and fewer people and more and more automation. That trend is not going to change.
It’s been that way since the Industrial Revolution
@Mik said in The future of manufacturing:
@Doctor-Phibes said in The future of manufacturing:
I've been around a lot of manufacturing plants over the last 30-odd years and it's very noticable how there are fewer and fewer people and more and more automation. That trend is not going to change.
It’s been that way since the Industrial Revolution
Exactly. Just from teh news of the recent dock workers contract where they were happy that the contract had a limit on the automation on the docks.
@LuFins-Dad said in The future of manufacturing:
If shoe factory moves from Vietnam with 5000 workers to the US with robotics and 20 technicians, that’s still a net growth in the US for manufacturing. The first thing holding it back is the robotics equipment is still massively more expensive than 5000 Vietnamese workers.
Yup. I remember (it was a few years ago) talking to a guy who was a sales guy for Capterpiller(?) (or a company like that) and he was saying how hard it was to sell heavy equipment to India. They could hire 1000 workers at a USD$1/day to move at much dirt as a heavy equipment and at a cheaper price.
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"Do you think America would be better off with more <any sort of> jobs" would probably get an 80% "yes" rate. It's a loaded question, though. If you have to interfere with the market through protectionism in order to create those jobs, I doubt people would find it so obvious that those jobs are a good goal.
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“I would be better off if I worked in a factory.”
• 25% of Americans agree
• 73% disagree
• 2% currently work in a factoryIt's quite noteworthy that 25% of Americans think they will better off working "in a factory" while only 2% of American currently do. I think it shows that there is a significant portion of the population who aspires to "working in factory".
I doubt you'll get as positive a response if you replace "factory" with "farm" or "sanitation" or "inns and hotels" or "restaurants," etc.
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@taiwan_girl said in The future of manufacturing:
The graphic, made by the Financial Times and based on a 2024 survey from the Cato Institute, shows that while 80% of Americans believe the country would be better off with more manufacturing jobs, just 25% believe they would individually be better off working in a factory.
They present it as a contradiction, but it’s not. The fact that 25% of Americans think they would be better off working in manufacturing is actually quite telling, especially when only 2% are actually employed as such.
Now, that doesn’t mean that those 25% SHOULD be working in a factory or would actually be in a better position, but it does disprove the theory posted here that nobody wants to work in a factory.
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@kluurs , I think I’ve seen this person’s videos before … one of those China perma-bull who is always positive on China. Not saying what he says is wrong, just skeptical that the guy may be shilling for China’s interests. That sort of “China good, China better” videos, many with Caucasian Westerners narrating on camera, are fairly common on YouTube (and many are repackaged from TikTok). Not saying they present falsehood (I haven’t invested the time to investigate), just that the way these things show up makes me suspect that there may be state organized propaganda efforts.
