american manufacturing slowly rotting away: how industries die

I wrote in a previous article that, despite record manufacturing output in the United States, it was actually in trouble: when we had a huge trade deficit in manufactured goods, record output does not prove that the industry is healthy. e.
Consume more goods than the products we produce, and fill the gap through asset sales and debt.
But the analysis of this problem only touches on the quantitative level of the industrial downturn that we are doing.
The real industry is not an abstract gathering;
They are a complex ecosystem of suppliers and supply chains, skills and customer relationships, for a long time
Regular investment and return.
Therefore, de-industrialisation is a more complex process than is usually achieved.
It is not just buildings that are laid off and collapsed;
Industry suffers from illness and death in complex ways.
For example, when American producers are driven out of foreign markets by foreign protectionism and foreign export subsidies, the loss is not only immediate profits.
The decline in sales has weakened their economies of scale, pushed up their costs and made them less competitive.
Reduced profits mean less investment in future technology development.
Less access to complex foreign markets means less access to complex foreign technologies and diverse foreign buyers\' needs.
When an industry shrinks, it no longer supports complex skill networks, many of which are outside the industry itself, depending on the industry itself.
These skills usually take years to master, so only in the industry (
And its supporting industries, deep into several layers of the supply chain)
Keep running continuously.
The same is true for professional suppliers.
For example, in the words of James Kynge of the Financial Times: The more Boeing outsource, the faster the machine
The tool company that served it went bankrupt, providing Chinese competitors with the opportunity to buy the technology they needed and better serve companies such as Boeing.
Similarly, the United States has begun to be shut out of industries that are in trouble or dying.
For example, in the words of technology CEO Richard Elkes: just when the loss of VCR destroyed the ability of the United States to participate in the design and manufacture of broadcast video --
Recording equipment, the loss of design and manufacture of consumer electronic cameras in the United States almost guarantees the demise of its professional camera market. . .
As a result, as the United States loses its place in consumer electronics, it also begins to lose its competitive base in the field of commercial electronics.
The loss of these related infrastructure will begin to have a negative impact on other declines
Especially in the automotive industry, they are developing very rapidly. . .
The competitive economy, like an ecosystem, is a whole, far greater than the sum of its parts. (Emphasis added. )
An important example of this is the decline of the past.
The highest level of the semiconductor industry in the United States, compared with the rest of the world, the decline in factory investment can be seen.
In 2009, North America accounted for only 21% of the world\'s investment in semiconductor capital equipment, while China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan accounted for 64%. The U. S.
There is almost no position in the super now.
Expensive machines, one of the most advanced technical equipment available, can \"print\" micro-circuits of computer chips on silicon wafers.
The lack of US status in walkers means that close cooperation between the manufacturers of these machines and the companies that use them is no longer easy in the United States. S.
Traditionally, this collaboration has pushed the chip and stepping industry to a new level of performance.
In 1980, American companies accounted for 90% of the world market, but today it is less than 10%.
Attenuation of related printed circuit boards (PCB)
There are similar stories in the industry.
On this issue, 2008 extract from manufacturing and technology news is worth reading: the situation in the industry is worse than it seems in 2005, hundreds of millions of years ago.
In North America, the bare print circuit industry is very ill.
Many equipment manufacturers have disappeared, or just a shallow shell of their previous.
Many people choose to follow their customers to Asia, where they build machines.
Many suppliers of raw materials have also gone.
Basically the rest of the United States is very fragile manufacturers, with weak capital and difficult to supply [
Original equipment manufacturers]
Prices do not contribute to profits.
Most of the remaining manufacturers should be called \"stores \".
They are owners who operate and use them themselves. They are small.
They barely survived.
They can\'t invest.
Most offer only small batches, fastturn delivery.
There is very little research and development, if any.
They can\'t afford the equipment. They are stale.
The debt burden of big companies is even more serious.
Profits are not reinvested.
Talent is no longer attracted to a dying industry, and the rest of the manufacturers have cut all incentives.
PCB manufacturers need raw materials to produce their products.
There is almost no copper bag lamination industry.
The drill bit comes from the sea.
Imaging materials, specialty chemicals, metal finishing chemistry, film and capital equipment have disappeared in the United States.
If the raw material for the PCB store has to come from overseas then saving it won\'t save anything.
With the massive outflow of PCB manufacturers, so is their supply chain.
Across the United States, other industries are quietly collapsing in a similar way.
Losing the status of key technologies means that no matter what brilliant innovations Americans dream of in small startups --
Big companies in the future
The scale of these innovations will be commercialized more and more abroad.
Britain has also suffered a similar fate by inventing major post-war products such as radar, jetliner and CAT scanners, only to see huge industries based on each industry eventually in the United StatesS.
For example, the United StatesS.
The invention of photovoltaic cells ranked first in the last 1998 of production, but has now dropped to fifth place after Japan, China, Germany and Taiwan.
Of the 10 largest wind turbine manufacturers in the world, only one (
General Electric)is American.
Over time, the industry of the future will inevitably become the industry of the present, so this is a formula for an automatic recession.
For example, nanotechnology may be the first major emerging industry of the century. S.
Not the undisputed world leader.
America\'s increasingly imperfect technology base also makes it vulnerable to attacks from foreign suppliers of \"critical\" or \"critical\" technologies.
Although these technologies are not known and valuable in themselves, other major technologies will not work without them.
China has recently restricted exports of rare agricultural products, for example.
From headphones to electric cars, Earth minerals need to make advanced magnets.
Another form of the problem is that oligopolistic suppliers refuse to sell their best technology to American companies, as long as they provide it to their own corporate partners.
It doesn\'t take much imagination to see how foreign industrial policy translates it into a powerful competitive weapon against American industry.
For example, Japan now supplies more than 70% of nickel in the world.
Metal hydrogen batteries and 60-
70% of lithium worldwideion batteries.
This will give Japan a key advantage in electric vehicles.
The Obama administration has no sense of this, although its head has been cut a hole in the question of why jobs have stalled. (
Tip: It is not stagnant in countries from China to Germany, and it maintains a trade surplus with us in terms of manufactured goods. )
It\'s not too late to reverse these dynamics, but we certainly don\'t have time.
So the sooner we begin to question the sacred myth of free trade, which is largely the cause of this confusion, the better.