Report Card for Donald Trump

[Warren Dew]

(01-12-2017, 09:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Quote:Ah yes, as long as the pain doesn't hurt you, it's fine.

The pain of polyester dress shirts?  Polos?  The horrors.

For people with sensitive skin and glasses, yes.

Quote:

Quote:Regaining manufacturing by going forward, such as through automation, makes sense; it may even be a reasonable source of knowledge worker jobs, such as the engineering jobs that the Japanese and Germans have.  Going backwards to try to regain low end assembly jobs is foolish and likely counterproductive in most cases, as it certainly would be in this case.

I don't seem to remember ever advocating the re-establishment of sweatshops in America employing no technology.  I think factories should be as automated as makes sense to the people running them, I simply would prefer if those factories are here.

You contradict yourself.  Some industries, such as certain types of clothing manufacture, are dependent on sweatshop style labor, because there's no technology capable of substituting for the labor.  If you want those factories here, you're advocating reestablishment of sweatshops in America.

Quote:You talk about knowledge worker jobs related to the manufacturing industry.  There have been a number of studies done on the impact of outsourcing on product innovation, how that trades off with efforts to cut costs, and the experiences of the Asian Tigers in particular leveraging their command of the manufacturing process to outcompete more established technology leaders in the US not only on price but eventually value as well.  It's just not as simple as saying that you're going to keep the "innovative" parts and outsource all the boring stuff.  Product innovation and process improvement comes not only from the engineers and designers in their offices, but from the people on the line, too, and especially from the interaction between the two.  An interaction that becomes more difficult when the two groups of people are on opposite sides of the world and speak different languages.

I am not advocating that we try and be the America of the 1950s again, just that it would be worthwhile going forward to borrow some best practices from people like the Germans and the Japanese.

I agree that separating process management from process execution is questionable, and for industries where the intellectual input is primarily in process management rather than product design, the entire firm is often better located in on geographic area.  That doesn't mean the entire value chain has to be in one geographic area; the fact that gold is mined in Russia and South Africa doesn't mean that electronics manufacture, which involves gold plated contacts, has to all be located in Russia and South  Africa.

The best practices from the Germans and Japanese include focusing on highly automatable parts of the manufacturing industry where much of the work is knowledge worker work rather than repetitive assembly work.  They are okay with importing dress shirts while they are exporting automobiles.  If we are going to have the manufacturing success that they do, we're going to have to be okay with that too.