Report Card for Donald Trump

[SomeGuy]

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

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

Quote:The truth is, what would happen is that people would substitute less comfortable poly/cotton blends for cotton, since those shirts last ten times as long.  And since they last ten times as long, there would be a lot less consumption, so virtually no jobs would be created in making them.  Demand for cotton would plummet too, hurting that industry as well.

Is that the truf?  De honest truf?  That our present set of arrangements, which have scarcely been free of political distortions and other contingent factors throughout the value chain, are in fact the only ones we can ever have, and that any effort to change them will only make things worse?  And this truth was revealed to you, how?
At exactly what price point (in terms of pure cotton shirts) does the durability and other qualities of polyester blend shirts (which makes them last literally 10 times as long) outweigh the comfort and any other positive qualities of said shirts?  Do you have a study on it?

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 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.

Quote:Thanks for the answer, but that doesn't sound like a policy change to me, and isn't really consistent with the apparent discontinuity in slope in 2000 or so.

Did a bit of looking, and at least somebody begs to differ.