A few comments on manufacturing

I had an unplanned tooth extraction yesterday, so my schedule this week is a little scrambled. I will be brief today, I want to pass on a few notes related to my post this week about our need to focus on manufacturing.

Noah Smith is a better writer than I am and wrote a good letter about how America is losing the physical technologies of the future. It is well argued, as he points out that we are falling behind in key electrical technologies, and some of this is self-inflicted as we have gotten caught up in the politics around climate change.

He also points out how critical this is for national security, a view I completely agree with:

As Paul Kennedy wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the power of nations has historically hinged on their ability to master the key technologies of the day, whether that was gunpowder and sailing ships, modern taxation and bureaucracy, or mass manufacturing.

Ben Thompson is also a great thinker and writer, and he covers some of the issues around manufacturing competitiveness in his recent post. He and others agree that the manufacturing challenge is daunting, but as one of his sources says:

But it’s better to have tried, rather than shrink into irrelevance.

In a private email, one of my most intelligent friends made the point that the manufacturing gap between the US and China is so great it may take 40 years to address it. But really, what choice do we have? Sure, we should focus on the most important industries, but there is really no other choice.