debut: 11/13/02
37,541 runs
The culture of skilled labor, seeded by the medieval guilds and fully developed by the Industrial Revolution, was what made the West unstoppable for over two centuries. The RoW, while being colonized, enslaved, and generally ruthlessly screwed, at first didn't realize what the white man's advantage was; they erroneously thought it was the clever wheeling-dealing or having a more modern military.
Japan was the first to catch on; the Meiji statesmen at first tried to emulate the Western political system, with a parliament and everything, and financial institutions, because that's what the Western propaganda said were the roots of their success. But eventually they realized it was industry, and started to modernize their own. It took them several generations, not to build the factories, but to develop a proper working class, with the right ethics: the culture of skilled laborers. But the Japanese eventually got it right, and even exceeded the standards of the West, which was already floundering under the weight of its parasites all that time.
South Korea was next; then eventually China, which has just arrived. Iran and then India are not quite there yet, but getting very close. I know some really good engineers, they order a lot of modules and parts from subsuppliers around the world. Twenty years ago Chinese products had a well deserved reputation of being cheap and shoddy. Ten years ago, the bad rep was still there, but the products were mostly solid, if not stellar. Now they make parts and equipment better than the Germans, not to even mention the US; quite on par with Japanese products. Twenty years; a full generation.
But the whole process, from the start, took more; two or three generations; same as in Japan. First to build up the infrastructure, and teaching cadres for technical education. Then to turn out the first, raw cohort of industrial workers, while at the same time developing the know-how, mostly by copying others and learning by painful trial-and-error. Finally, to build the attitudes and the culture of skilled labor, which is what made the difference between the "Chinese crap" of twenty-years ago, and their cutting-edge tech of today.
The United States, and the rest of the West including Germany, meanwhile destroyed their culture of skilled labor, for profit. The destruction is complete; just as we mistrusted Chinese products recently, now we are coming to realize that German industrial products are shoddy, and not to be trusted. And Germany is the best of the lot, they still retain some old-timers who know what they are doing. American companies fired the lot of them, demolished the facilities, and salted the ground.
All manufacturing in the West is just coasting now; producing minor variations of products that were designed by previous generation's designers, on legacy production lines that have been running for decades. That is why they were so utterly unable to accelerate ammunition production. The old production lines, at Rheinmetall and elsewhere, are still limping along, but establishing new ones is not feasible---no one knows how to build them, or get them running properly. Other industries are in the same bind, churning out the same-old widgets---as financialists disdainfully refer to industrial products---using trivially upgraded legacy designs and production lines. The only real innovation comes from abroad, mostly in the form of faster chip designs.
That is why Trump's ambition of reviving American industry with nothing but financial leverage is a pipe dream. There is no know-how anymore, no cadre of industrial workers, and the culture of skilled labor that made the West has been canceled and erased. By most estimates it would take one generation to start churning out crude, failure-prone lemons, and yet another generation to bring industry to world standards. Not the kind of timeframe Mr. Deal-artist is used to be working in.
A case in point is the ongoing attempt to transplant chip manufacturing from Taiwan to the US. The factories have largely been built, at exorbitant expense, and only because Taiwanese engineers were on hand to supervise the construction. But there are no engineers and no tech-aware managers in the US to run these factories, so Taiwanese cadres were transplanted---essentially by making them an offer they couldn't refuse---to manage these factories. But the production is still no-go, because in all the third of a billion of Americans, there is not enough skilled workers capable of working in these production lines, despite the promise of exorbitant pay. Now they are at the stage of importing slaves---er, I meant coerced-volunteer production line workers---also from Taiwan, to work in these "American" chip factories. Money is being poured in by the bucketful, but I will wager a guess: once they get the production running, the chips coming out will be so substandard, that nobody will be buying them. For years.
And that is the absolute best the US can do, with all the government and finance leverage you can get, and workforce imported wholesale. In less strategic fields the situation will be much worse. And it will be made much worse yet by the impending reverse brain drain: all the foreigners doing science and STEM education in the US, all the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Persians, and Germans whose foreign names figure on most engineering textbooks and on most STEM research papers, will soon pack up and go home, because they were here only for the living conditions---and living conditions in the US are going to hell in a basket.
There are practically no top-level American-born STEM researchers left, and the few adequate exceptions have been recruited to work on classified military projects, where foreigners are barred. And we can judge their level of know-how by observing how these projects are spectacularly failing, from the F-35 boondoggle to the hypersonics development clusterfuck, to the pratfall of Boeing orbital vehicles.
