The manufacturing/services divide itself is a bit silly without careful attention, and I think is incredibly overplayed because "manufacturing" aligns with a bunch of other political/economic geography stuff.

This is true everywhere, not just in computing where it's most obvious. Even agriculture in a lot of ways.

By the time you apply all that careful attention, any sort of meaningful macro work becomes impossible. You're just doing a whole ton of little sector-by-sector analyses.

And it gets worse if you start looking at the labor economics instead of just measuring output. It used to be that manufacturing-related services and the physical work of manufacturing were relatively coupled. The people working in the manufacturing plants more-or-less knew how all the equipment worked. That's not really at all the case anymore.

I believe that was the point of the "share-of-real-GDP" adjustments. Because "prices of manufactured goods have gone up more slowly than those of other goods and services (think health care), Baily and Bosworth reasoned that manufacturing's shrinking share of nominal GDP understates its continuing impact on the economy."

Apparently there is a decent way, at least in principle, to compare mainframes to iPhones; that is, to compare their contributions to improved productivity independent of nominal prices. But it breaks down over longer time scales unless you can plugin real numbers for changes in relative value-add across entire industries, which in this case isn't possible because the trick was used to adjust industries in the aggregate by assuming a constant ratio of value-add.

Jobs, the economy... there is more to life, and more to maintaining a hegemony.

NB: there's also a strategic geopolitical advantage to out-sourcing manufacturing. The US would be a weaker nation if we had to commit a bunch of human capital to textiles.

But to answer your actual question:

> Jobs, the economy... there is more to life, and more to maintaining a hegemony.

You could say the same about freedom. Most people would prefer a good-paying job over global hegemony, and care about the latter only in service to the former.

note: I agree there's a strategic national security/economic/sov. interest in domestic chip manufacturing, hegemony or not. But the general analysis that we should make ourselves poorer in order to be world hegemon is, to most Americans, I suspect a bit backward.

It's not hegemony for the sake of hegemony, but hegemony for the benefits of hegemony, which in our recent history have included technological and economic supremacy, both tightly correlated to one another.

I think globalism can be a good thing, and I hardly oppose the notion of outsourcing some economic activities. However, the original point was regarding ceding our production capabilities for a short term and potentially insignificant improvement in the performance of a single company.

> The US would be a weaker nation if we had to commit a bunch of human capital to textiles.

There is something to be said for balance, taste, and sensibility. Like, it would be cool if we were able to manufacture essential medical PPE during a pandemic. Them be textiles, my friend.

If we are unprepared for a crisis that can gut our economy because we were prioritizing the economy over preparedness... I'm sorry, but that is stupid and short sighted.

Jobs are important. The economy is important. But it's as if all nuance is lost on the GDP-measuring mouth breathers. You want a strong economy? Maintain the hegemony. Be a global leader in many diverse categories.

The post you're relying to literally says the same thing...

> medical PPE be textiles, my friend.

1. No. "Textiles" is a term of art, and it doesn't include N95 masks or 3 ply surgical masks. Full stop. Might include some basic cloth masks that are equivalent to a ripped-off tshirt sleeve with some elastic bands. But we never had anything approaching a shortage of t-shirts to rip up for cloth face coverings... what we're missing is the stuff with melt-blown layers and/or filters.

2. We do make N95 masks and could have surged production... shortages of the most needed types of masks in the US were due to an utter failure of political leadership, not a lack of manufacturing capacity. E.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-d...

3. The same is true for 3-ply surgical masks. Repurposing a huge number of t-shirt factories would've taken ages and $$$. The difficult part is the melt-blown layer, which is more like N95 or surgical gowns than t-shirts. Not even clear having an existing t-shirt factory would even speed things up much, since, obviously, the barrier isn't "stitching a couple pieces of cloth together". But even if it did, what are the odds on that happening if we couldn't even give a green light on flipping the switch on existing N95 lines in May? Again, leadership problem, not manufacturing capacity problem.

4. All of that aside, this is the sort of thing you solve with strategic stockpiles and planning, not "make everything ourselves and hope to god some of the other lines can be repurposed ASAP" and especially not "constantly maintain manufacturing capacity and raw resource supply chains for every conceivable long-tail event". No. You figure out for each long tail event how long it takes to ramp up production, and then you stockpile for that amount of time.

The rest of the post is sort of _exactly_ demonstrative of the point I was making in my original post about macro analyses being limited and needing to go sector by sector. So I'm really not quite sure what we're arguing about here.

While I probably agree with the broader idea, I can't help but think that at root, sentiments such as these are the root cause of our industrialization and significant but hand-waved human costs here that have been incurred.