Comments

1
There has been a fair bit of talk over an American manufacturing renaissance. Wages in China are rising as is the political cost of making things there. American wages have been stagnant and there are growing tax subsidies and other breaks for doing things here. Plus you have rising transportation costs and a growing fear that China might not be as stable as it lets on.
2
Charles, for all your trashing of rural lifestyles, now you're picking on Detroit? Have you even been there? Ask Kelly O. It's cold there, but it's not dying. That town roars. We hum.
3
We're winning the race to the bottom.
4
What @2 said. Detroit hasn't been more alive in my lifetime. (I'll be there again next week.)

Also, on top of wages narrowing, fuel goes up; at some point it becomes cheaper to pay people here than to manufacture cheap shit halfway around the world and then pay to ship it here. Now we just need to figure out what to do with landfills full of barely-a-year-old cellphones...
5
I've been predicting this for a while. Wages are only part of the equation: there's a language and culture gap, a 10-12 hour time zone gap, and then the ungodly hassle of shipping your products by boat(!) and getting them through US customs: the point at which it's more than worth paying a relative wage premium on the actual labor is probably much closer than you'd think. Just read the

Foxconn's factories in Brazil were pretty clearly their test run for internationalizing their operations: Mexico and the US are likely next, and not necessarily in that order.

The obvious model here is Toyota and Honda, who quite happily assemble cars in Mississippi and Ohio respectively.
6
oops: "...just read the updates on any moderately popular kickstarter project that's trying to assemble stuff in China. It's an education for everyone involved."
7
Thanks for comparing L.A. to Detroit. Like it doesn't suck enough here already ...

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