Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Who Makes the World's Stuff?


Who makes the world's stuff these days? Not the United States, certainly. We don't make much of anything here in the U.S. anymore. All of our manufacturing jobs have been off-shored and outsourced and shipped overseas to China and Taiwan and other points east, where wages are low, unions are scarce, environmental protection is an afterthought, and billions of people stand in line to do work once done in the U.S. for a fraction of what we used to charge.

The United States, having served as the global manufacturing leader for most of the last 100 years, has let that all slip away and has become a weak, reactive slave to consumerism. . . choosing to buy what we need instead of making it ourselves.

Isn't that right? I mean, that's what we've been led to believe, isn't it?

Wrong. As the the Financial Times pointed out in June of 2010, "The U.S. remained the world's biggest manufacturing nation by output last year."

Not China. Not Taiwan. The United States, thank you very much. We make the world's stuff. Still. For now.

But as that same article points out, the U.S. is poised to relinquish that crown to China in 2011 unless something dramatic happens.

Will that happen? Probably. Powers greater than me will decide that one way or the other. I'm just pleased that we're there, right at the top, vying for the lead. It's like finding out that you're almost as good at something today as you were back in high school. Maybe we're not as far gone as we've been led to believe we are.

And maybe there's hope. There are still things the U.S. does better than anyone else on the planet, I believe.

2 comments:

Steven Hoober said...

Totally anecdotal, but just talking about this the other day with folks at work. Go out during the day in any big city. Look at the trucks. A HUGE percentage of them (and trucks are a lot of the traffic) are carrying machine tools or similar production equipment.

If that's what's moving from one place to the other, we wondered, what the hell is the /installed/ manufacturing capacity of our town alone? Staggering, apparently.

I didn't know the figures before, but am not totally surprised. And I'll /bet/ China is passing us (increasing efficiency, productivity) more than we are falling behind.

John Bossert said...

Yeah, China's also passing us because they have ten times the workforce working for one tenth the wages. It's insurmountable, and shouldn't even be viewed as a defeat for the US, honestly.