America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it
Here are the key points the article suggests (it spends quite a long time explaining how we got here):<p>1) Improve the [government sponsored] Manufacturing Institutes<p>2) [federally] Back R&amp;D for manufacturing technologies<p>3) Provide scale-up financing [by the government]<p>4) Use government procurement power to promote new manufacturing technologies<p>5) Direct production support [to sectors deemed critical]<p>6) Provide both “top-down” [gov picks a tech and supports development of it] and “bottom-up” [broad incentives like IRA] support<p>7) Build a manufacturing focus into existing industrial policy programs<p>8) Map and fill gaps in supply chains<p>9) Fix workforce education [by refocusing on legitimate vocational tracks]<p>10) Put someone in charge [of coordinating agencies, budgets, and efforts]<p>This is all effectively trying to copy large segments of the China playbook, but in my opinion it misses some rather important points. Namely, protectionism and implicit incentives. On the first point, you can&#x27;t really compete with China when it is actively hostile to foreign companies and de facto encourages outright theft of knowledge and expertise in exchange for access to its market. As long as we have a significant portion of people yelling about &quot;trade wars don&#x27;t solve anything&quot; any time someone proposes leveling the playing field, competition is a nonstarter.<p>On the second point, the elephant in the room is that smart people in the US can make 2-3X as much in software or finance as they can in manufacturing, so what do you think they&#x27;re going to pick? Which company is private investment going to fund - the SaaS co. with 40% margins and rapid growth or the manufacturing co. scraping 10% margins and 5% CAGR? It&#x27;s hard to see where the skilled labor and private investment side of the equation is supposed to come from when the incentives are so mismatched - you almost have to find a way to decrease incentives in the currently lucrative pools first.