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After reading Apple in China - The Capture of the World's Greatest Company I’m extraordinarily skeptical of the US’ ability to compete with low wage, lower workers rights countries and bring back a meaningful amount of Apple’s manufacturing business.
Some leading edge chips? Sure, extremely automated. iPhone assembly in Peoria instead of at Foxconn in China or India? Ain’t no way.
But, hey, maybe Foxconn Wisconsin really was the long game after all?
Foxconn Wisconsin has mostly been converted to Microsoft “token factories” that employ far fewer people, than the originally envisioned 13,000 in the Foxconn “8th Wonder of the World”.
Microsoft intends to expand in a place where it's been welcomed, months after backing down on a rezoning attempt in an adjacent village when residents objected.
www.cnbc.com
But if you want to see new real physical manufacturing factories, you have to look 10 miles further south in Kenosha, where they make something as valuable as chips by volume.
Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company Thursday announced a $3 billion expansion at its recently acquired manufacturing facility in Kenosha County.
I assume you are talking about Japan's re-emerge after WWII.
Japan and Germany did not deindustrialize after the war，the allied force put restrictions on their military development，but no restrictions on their industrial capability. Some large conglomerates split into smaller companies，but that did not much impact on Japanese or German industrial capability.
De-industrialization has happened primarily as a function of the labor cost delta yes? It would make sense that re-industrialization has never happened, as generally the cost of labor in a given country only goes up.
If your need for labor becomes minimal due to automation, it seems likely that the costs associated with manufacturing outside the country (shipping, tariffs, intangibles such as not being collocated with manufacturing, etc.) will eventually outweigh labor and create an opposite force to re-industrialize.
Question of definitions - did the US ever deindustrialize ? We’ve been at our max real dollar industrial output ever since about the Great Recession. And that doesn’t include software which is counted under services.
There could be a Big Cycle, 80 years. It involves debt overload and collapse, followed by reindustrialization. Debt collapse hasn't happened in recent history.
We'll know the cycle is over when governments retrench, give up military ambitions, etc. Losing a war is a good way to have a debt collapse. Japan and Germany are illustrations of how losing can conclude a cycle and results in a rebound, counterintuitively.
But the point that reindustrializing without first losing a chunk of your standard of living, probably doesn't work, is a valid point.
Yeah, high-tech stuff might come back, but mass iPhone assembly in the US? Pretty unlikely. Foxconn Wisconsin feels more like a political show than a serious reshoring plan.
