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Pundits will debate the wellsprings of Donald Trump's election triumph for years. Right now, cultural explanations are in the lead. Multiple researchers and journalists are stressing the role of "racial resentments" and xenophobia as the deepest sources of Trump's appeal. And such explanations cannot be dismissed.
But the decades-long decline of U.S. manufacturing employment and the highly automated nature of the sector's recent revitalization should also be high on the list of explanations. The former is an unmistakable source of the working class rage that helped get Trump elected. The latter is the main reason Trump won't be able to "make America great again" by bringing back production jobs.
The Rust Belt epicenter of the Trump electoral map says a lot about its emotional origins, but so do the facts of employment and productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries. The collapse of labor-intensive commodity manufacturing in recent decades and the expansion in this decade of super-productive advanced manufacturing have left millions of working-class white people feeling abandoned, irrelevant, and angry.
To see this, one has only to look at the stark trend lines of the production data, which show a massive 30-year decline of employment beginning in 1980. That trend led to the liquidation of more than a third of U.S. manufacturing positions. Employment in the sector plunged from 18.9 million jobs to 12.2 million.
[...] In fact, the total inflation-adjusted output of the U.S. manufacturing sector is now higher than it has ever been. That's true even as the sector's employment is growing only slowly, and remains near the lowest it's been. These diverging lines—which reflect the sector's improved productivity—highlight a huge problem with Trump's promises to help workers by reshoring millions of manufacturing jobs. America is already producing a lot. And in any event, the return of more manufacturing won't bring back many jobs because the labor is increasingly being done by robots.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday November 21 2016, @12:20PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @01:32PM
Robots are useful, yes, but they can't and don't do everything. Nobody's saying it will take us back to when the steel mill workers numbered in the millions but it will create jobs if it works.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @03:22PM
> but it will create jobs if it works.
Not necessarily. Money supply is not infinite. Money spent inefficiently on some jobs is money that can't be spent efficiently on other jobs. Net employment may easily go down as a result of misallocated spending.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:26PM
It doesn't need to be. If you profit from making things is what matters. Poor business decisions are outside the scope of this particular study.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @05:11PM
Such logic, much wow
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 21 2016, @06:41PM
Money supply is not infinite.
Money supply is near irrelevant. There appears to be a slight negative correlation between unemployment rate and inflation, but that's about it.
Money spent inefficiently on some jobs is money that can't be spent efficiently on other jobs.
How do you spend money "inefficiently"? Kite checks? What it sounds like you're saying is that the product purchased, employment of people in the furtherance of certain tasks is inefficient. That isn't a property of the money used. This would be better described as employing people inefficiently. And t would be a problem even if no money were involved, say you were using some weird barter or gift economy system (both which are often associated with the act of employment, let us note!).
My point behind this is that spending money is a poor description of the complicated economic transaction of employment, particularly because it focuses on a rather unimportant part of that transaction. And going from that to money supply veers into near complete irrelevance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @07:47PM
> My point behind this is that
Your point is that you are just smart enough to be willfully obtuse, but not smart enough to realize that we can see through it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 21 2016, @09:20PM
Nuh huh, you wrong
Look, I realize you think you're saying something relevant. But this is the essence of charlatans, kooks, and anyone who couldn't argue their way out of a wet paper bag.
Going back to the post I criticized, the phrase "money supply" shouldn't even be there. I explained why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:31AM
> Look, I realize you think you're saying something relevant.
Hello, mcfly? Are you looking in a mirror when you write that? Of course I didn't say anything relevant, I just flamed your ass for a reductively meaningless criticism.
Seriously, is this some sort of "I'm rubber and you're glue" defense?
you are a damn child
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:07AM
a reductively meaningless criticism
And I explained why it wasn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @10:15PM
Not necessarily. Money supply is not infinite.
Yes it is, you total ignoramous! Where did you study economics? Trump University?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday November 21 2016, @04:13PM
I forget if I've explained this here yet. I run a small prototyping shop as part of a small medical device company. It's just one five axis CNC, my assistant, and me. We've recently expanded our duties to include some production, and I've been researching options for increased throughput. There are two ways I could quadruple production, both at about the same cost. I could buy three more of the same low-end machine, and hire more people to work them; this is the old fashioned way. The problem with that is that people tend to be unreliable; they're hard to train, they make mistakes, they break things, they go on vacation and sometimes just don't show up. The other option is to buy one high end machine with a built in pallet pool and high tool capacity. My one, already trained and proven assistant and I could set it up without more help, and it could run just about 24/7/365. More production, fewer mistakes, no additional workers. Plus, once the machine is paid for I'd still have it, whereas if you stop paying people they go away.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:22PM
That's a valid point for SMBs. But only for SMBs. Once you hit a certain scale, it's cheaper to hire a full time maintenance crew than call in someone when necessary.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday November 21 2016, @07:13PM
That seems tangential. You have to be pretty darned big before it pays to have your own machine repair team, and even then they're only doing the same work that would have been jobbed out. My point is that in the old days your staff would increase close to linearly with your production; that is no longer true. Let's say I did get the high end machine I was talking about and quadrupled my production. If then I wanted to quadruple again, I could buy three more of those machines, and maybe get another programmer and another assistant. That would be four people doing sixteen times the production. At that point it might be with it to get a CNC stock saw and a Fanuc robot arm or two.
Yes there would be some jobs in making and maintaining everything, but far fewer man hours than if I had sixteen mills with sixteen operators. Much less overhead and floor space too.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:39PM
Which is a fair point. Any jobs you farm out locally can't get counted against employment though because you are paying someone's way in the world. You're also paying the way of everyone involved in creating the machines you buy. It doesn't work out the same as if you'd relied on human labor entirely but it's more US wages paid by your existence than if your business had moved overseas.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @03:12AM
You're assuming he doesn't buy the machines from overseas.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 23 2016, @12:33PM
Yep, that's one of the assumptions. There are many necessary for protectionism to fly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 24 2016, @06:19PM
Even if he does, it reduces his contribution back to the U.S. economy but it doesn't completely negate it. It's also one less thing a sometimes hostile foreign power can hold overt our heads later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:25AM
You could even double one of the dudes up as a 'maintenance' guy. When the machines go sideways you just take him off the job to fix it. Then when fixed he continues where he was. He was standing around anyway more than likely.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DECbot on Monday November 21 2016, @04:15PM
Robots are useful, yes, but they can't and don't do everything.
Precisely! Take welding robots for example. Sure they can go faster and have more repeatablity. However, they are very inflexible for doing anything beyond the assigned task. When given a bin of bad parts, a manual welder will attempt two or three parts with a bad fit-up before inspecting the bin and complaining to the production manager that stamping has a problem. A robot will happily make terrible welds all day at twice the production rate of the manual welder and never complain of the bad fit-up. Thereby wasting an entire day's worth of production and generate perhaps thousands of dollars of scrap.
American manufacturing should absolutely add robots where it makes sense, and use people where it makes sense. In my example, there normally is an operator that would be responsible for loading and unloading parts from that section of the production line that could identify bad robotic welds. This is the common difference between American operators and operators and foreign manufacturing facilities, the Americans tend to care about quality at the lowest levels and will raise awareness to problems. In third world and developing world manufacturing plants, that level of ownership is not as prevalent and the operator cares little more than the robot.
So, yes, robots will take many of skilled laborers positions, but they cannot do everything. 20 years ago, 100 manufacturing jobs went to $NOT_USA, and if they come back now, there will be 80 robots and 30 laborers. However, the point is even 30 jobs added back to the US is better for the US than 0 jobs getting added. The more of these positions that return to the US, the more opportunities there are available for people without MBAs or Harvard degrees. This is a win for anyone with just a high school diploma or a technical degree.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday November 21 2016, @04:47PM
When given a bin of bad parts, a manual welder will attempt two or three parts with a bad fit-up before inspecting the bin and complaining to the production manager that stamping has a problem. A robot will happily make terrible welds all day at twice the production rate of the manual welder and never complain of the bad fit-up.
You have discovered a bug in the robot's programming: "evaluate fit-up" is missing. Add it. But I admit that I'm unfamiliar with welding. Is this something that's impractical to measure automatically?
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday November 21 2016, @05:55PM
Impractical as it is expensive and time consuming (hurts cycle time). Also, it tends not to work well on shiny surfaces, like aluminum and stainless steel--you know, the stuff you happen to be welding. The biggest this is the human welder can change their path automatically to accommodate bad or less than consistent fit-up. Robotic algorithms to measure and calculate a path based on measuring a joint's fit-up are still iffy. More so on any parts that require traveling around a curve. Also, if the gap between the parts vary by more than a millimeter, you may need to adjust your power, wire feed speed, or travel speed to accommodate. Stuff that experienced welders do really well on the fly but are still impossible for robots to do.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:48PM
You think the companies using robots are not doing quality control?
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday November 21 2016, @06:14PM
Except for aerospace, aggressive quality control may put in QC checks for the quality of the welds every 25 parts. Otherwise, it is just a simple 'is there a weld here check'--and these checks are still done by a person. Additionally, production continues making bad welds while the operator discusses the bad welds to QC.
Anyway, my argument was never that these checks weren't done, but rather that the (1) the quality of the quality control checks vary by workforce possibly allowing large volumes of bad parts to be produced and (2) both the QC supervisor and the operator making the checks are jobs that could be in the US if the manufacturing returned. Sure, there will be less welding and machinist positions than previously, but there will be additional operator, production supervisor, engineering, technician, procurement, and HR type jobs if the manufacturing returned to the US. From my discussions with engineers working with foreign plants, they are installing robots in those places because the workforce doesn't have any competent welders and they are looking for big data solutions for weld monitoring because can't trust the quality control measures in place.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 21 2016, @07:24PM
When you say "robots are useful ... but they can't do everything" you are technically correct, but misunderstanding things terrible. You need to date your facts. Robots today have certain limits that constrain their usefulness. Robots next year will have fewer limits, and the year after that fewer still. To get a feel for what this means look at the robots from 10 years ago. (In the first sentence I engaged in a bit of rhetoric, as the improvements are not smooth, but stepwise, and often there will be several years without much improvement.)
The thing to notice is that unless you are working with an extremely modern factory, or actually engaged in the development of robots, your image of them will be several years, if not several decades, old. A new factory will use state of the art, or even bleeding edge, robots. This will entail startup costs of debugging, but the factory will be in use for a long time, so you need to plan ahead. And jobs are designed to work with the particular robots installed. This allows maximal efficiency of the robots, and puts the places where they are inflexible at minimal disadvantage. But those places keep changing. A factory build next year won't have the same jobs as one built last year. Which minimizes the advantage of experience when moving between factories. Etc.
I don't expect the big loss of jobs to come within the next two years, but I do expect it in less than four years. This will be largely from truck drivers and those who service them. And it won't happen all at once, but it will snowball rapidly as the insurance companies decide that automated trucks deserve a lower cost for insurance. (Or, possibly, more and more companies decide to self-insure for vehicular damage.)
Naturally a lot of this depends on political decisions, but I don't really see this administration as acting in a way that businesses would object to.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:44PM
I'm really not. You're neglecting the fact that large companies will run a specific site into the ground before they shut its doors. There are factories and industrial operations operating now from sites over a hundred years old. Granted they've been updated some but they're nothing near as automated as a site would be if built today with automation first in mind. There's also the fact that buying extremely expensive machines is a very risky investment unless you're absolutely certain you will be able to make your money back on them before they become obsolete. Both of these factors keep automation growth in check.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.