>The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy.
Except that we don't have monopoly on that. Assembled in China, designed in California worked for a while because of the inertia of the previous times when the whole pyramid was located in the US. For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.
Guess what - we moved the bottom layers of the industrial pyramid and we are acting surprised that the top layers are also organically happening there. We are probably somewhat ahead, but if we get wiped out of existence tomorrow the progress in China won't slow down.
> For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.
What am saying is that this is not happening because shit got assembled in China but because of internal issues in the West. Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better; and I think this is where I (and most?) people disagree here.
This is the fundamental thing you get wrong. The whole industrial knowledge thing was build because we were building stuff internally. When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing. For free.
We live at a physical world - so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper is extremely important for continuous dominance.
The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.
> When you are outsourcing assembly you are actually sending quite a lot of the knowledge and know how that went into the high value act of designing a thing.
I don't think so. Employees on the chain line are not going to become literate and engineers just because you are outsourcing the menial stuff.
> so being able to produce physical stuff both better, more, and cheaper
That is knowledge work.
> The only area china is really behind seems to be commercial airlines engines. That is the only thing we never really outsourced.
It didn't stop Brazil from creating a rather very good aerospace company.
I am afraid we cannot reconcile the difference in our thinking.
> Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better;
How so? Why would bringing back domestic manufacturing be worse for a country than outsourcing all of it to another country that is actively working to replace the few parts of the process your country's still involved in?
Of the top of my head: pollution, jobs that negatively affect your countryman and then require expensive healthcare, side effects (noise, truck traffic) that negatively affect knowledge workers, low pay.
I can't also think of any reason why bringing these jobs is a net positive. Like I get it, China is adversarial but there are 2-3 billion more people you can outsource this work to who are unlikely to get adversarial.
Except that we don't have monopoly on that. Assembled in China, designed in California worked for a while because of the inertia of the previous times when the whole pyramid was located in the US. For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.
Guess what - we moved the bottom layers of the industrial pyramid and we are acting surprised that the top layers are also organically happening there. We are probably somewhat ahead, but if we get wiped out of existence tomorrow the progress in China won't slow down.