https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/11/09/why-american-manufacturing-is-increasingly-inefficient
The unfortunate reversal of a long-standing trend
Why American manufacturing is becoming less efficient::undefined
Spoilers!
industrial productivity growth has slowed across the rich world, even if not by as much as in America (see chart 2). The extra bit of American underperformance is trickier to explain. Economists throw out a boatload of hypotheses. America is known to have laxer antitrust enforcement than its peers; perhaps scrutiny was especially needed in the manufacturing sector. Maybe American manufacturing was more advanced when robots arrived on the scene, so had less to gain. Some have even argued that because America’s software and internet sectors have been so lucrative, talent has been diverted away from older industries.
Some have even argued that because America’s software and internet sectors have been so lucrative, talent has been diverted away from older industries.
It's not just that software and internet has been so lucrative, it's also that there are fringe benefits of being a white collar software worker versus a blue collar factory worker. The biggest is absolutely that the blue collar work will fucking ruin your body over time. All my blue collar friends have a plethora of health problems related to doing manual labor their whole lives. Injuries that will never really heal and leave them in chronic pain until they die. None of my white collar working friends in the software sector have any health problems similar to that which were triggered by their job. A few of them have some serious health issues, but nothing caused by the work they did.
Millennials and Gen Z are some of the most educated generations in history, and we're surprised they've recognized this and made the choice to not suffer physically in their old age?
It’s also easier to be a software developer now than 10 years ago. Modern languages do a lot more of the work for you.
Well, the barrier to entry is lower anyway.
Software also seems to be more complex than it was 10 years ago
Yeah software is definitely more complex. But modern languages are easier and have more syntactic sugar. And being a junior dev is mostly boiler plating or copy and pasting. A lot of devs don’t even get into the real complicated stuff. I’m a mediocre dev with no degree and I’m constantly surprised at the terminology people who’ve been doing for years don’t understand.
I'd wager it's a combo of all of those things, plus we've just lost the innovations that come with running that of wider sector since so many things are done in other countries now. Manufacturing jobs in the US are also considered blue collar, and blue collar is not looked at as an enviable job.
we’ve just lost the innovations that come with running that of wider sector
I'd argue that is not the case at all since manufacturing innovation is a commodity sold to the global market. See manufacturing trade shows. The tech is available, the skilled labor doesn't exist in plentiful numbers to exploit such tech readily.