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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: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday November 21 2016, @02:24PM
More than likely, China was never really in a position to make good steel. Like you said, you need a good staff of metallurgists, possibly chemists, engineers, some decent people in quality control, and a facilities staff to keep the machines running. The rest of the people are just peons. The US and others had plenty of time, over 100 years to build a steel ecosystem. China had to learn to make steel the hard way. Their ludicrous speed like growth of their manufacturing market saw demand skyrocket. Chinese steel makers could barely keep up with demand. Remember the scrap steel boom of about 8-10 years ago when it was fetching $200-$250 a ton at scrap yards instead of the usual $40-$50?. It was all going to China. Hundreds of thousands of tons, if not millions. I'm sure Chinese steel makers at some point said "fuck it if it holds together after forming, it passes." Besides, in the beginning of China's export boom, quality was absolute trash. People didn't mind so much as long as they could buy something that normally costs $100 for $10-20. I mean, if people are willing to buy a $20 cordless drill which breaks after a few uses and just buy a new one, then why improve?
So in the end it was a lack of knowledge which hampered production which in turn lowered quality BUT it turns out it was just good enough to meet demand. So there was/is no real reason to improve quality as people are still buying.