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| Originally posted by Adam D |
There's some crazy political science stuff written that talks about how our country, as well as Europe, is moving away from manufacturing and industry to becoming a service economy. I don't know that I entirely agree or disagree with that. I don't know that I really think there's much written behind it as to why that is happening. But I agree, there's growth in service sectors and loss in manufacturing. But by no means is this country ready to be that reliable on others for manufacturing, and I would even say such a move would be disasterous for the entire world.
True, There's definitely a change to a service economy. The last 10 years has made this apparent with a lot of dot-coms introducing virtual inventory and supply-chain management. Hotels.com is a good example of this kind of service economy style corporation, which they are expecting to gross a revenue of 1 billion by the end of their fiscal year. As for being disaterous, I'm not for sure if it would be necessarily negative nor positive, but rather a transition. Change will always be disruptive, but in this scenerio, it is really hard to say. Having our manufacturing base on foreign soil will certainly be interesting for the USA and perhaps a possible bargaining chip for foreign nations to wrestle with American foreign policy, but again, It's not entirely certain as to what the negatives and positives are.
But you're talking about something entirely different. When technology advances and jobs get cut out, generally jobs are created by the advances that generally balance out the loss. But when you're moving jobs away, jobs that are still needed to other countries, that's another effect altogether, because there's no jobs coming back from jobs leaving. The two are not relation, as much Sowell would like to believe. Sending jobs to Tawain does not encourage Toyota to send jobs here.
Not necessarily. 1,000 skilled laborers could be replaced with automation and a handful of engineers. It's not so much technological advances as they are more slight innovations.
To make a broad statement, It's safe to say Henry Ford invented the production line concept, inherited by other companys and creating many jobs for people, however, innovations to the production line process has increased the speed and efficiency of production line processes and reduced the man power involved with the process.
One thing I used to joke around with coworkers about, when I worked for a dot com, was making the statement, "man... there are so many people in the technology field from everywhere else! At this rate we're going to run out of stuff to do... "
When looking at the manufacturing shift to third world countries and our transition to a service economy, it will eventually be relative. Not in the immediate now. But I'm sure a factory in a country with weak labor laws and no unions will have an easier time streamlining their production lines than here at home.
As for the encouragement of companies to set up shop here, you're right. There is no relation. There are other independant motivations behind those needs.