Tag Archives: manufacturing

July 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: In case we still don’t have enough feedback loops to worry about, loss of Antarctic ice could also trigger volcanoes under Antarctica.

Most hopeful story: The Great Lakes states, provinces, and cities may be the best climate havens North America has to offer.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Policies to increase housing supply in the most economically dynamic cities can theoretically accelerate economic growth, since housing supply is not expanding fast enough and is therefore holding economic growth back. A lot of discussion has been focused around zoning, which is a local matter. But I offered some additional suggestions: investment in better transportation and communication infrastructure to reduce the friction of working across distances between homes and offices, effectively enlarging housing markets. And serious investments in construction productivity, which has been flat in the U.S. for decades. Ideas include more factory-based modular components. The U.S. has tried and failed at this before, but of course China is now leading the way. AI should also be pretty good at construction scheduling and logistics. The U.S. is somewhat successfully partnering with Korean ship-building expertise, at least on a small scale.

Mount Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, aka Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings (Guillaume Piolle)

what’s new in shipbuilding?

We hear that the United States is woefully behind China and other Asian countries, and maybe even Europe, in ship-building. So is it labor cost, labor skill, outdated technology, or some combination that is causing this? Here are a few things being tried at the Philadelphia shipyard, which has recently partnered with a South Korean firm:

The facility builds one and a half ships a year; Hanwha plans to outfit it with “smart yard technology” to speed up manufacturing so it can churn out as many as 10 ships annually and raise sales tenfold, to over $4 billion a year by 2035.

Hanwha’s subsidiary Hanwha Ocean is among the largest shipbuilders in South Korea. Its yard in the country’s southwest produces 40 ships a year…

At the shipyard, Hanwha is bringing in technology from its Korean facilities, including computer-aided design, welding robots and virtual-reality training models. Under a model it calls “cobots,” robots work alongside workers like computer-aided manufacturing and design coordinator Kyle Pernell, with human workers in charge of operating, repairing and programming the robots.

This article is positive, but I remember seeing another article saying that this facility is having trouble finding U.S. workers who are, well, trainable and willing to do this work.

American Made: The New Manufacturing Landscape

NPR has this series called American Made. It has a variety of interesting articles/interviews but there is a common theme. We are making and selling a lot of stuff, and it has a lot of economic value to be captured. But manufacturing is now a tech industry. It is more capital- and technology-intensive all the time, and less labor-intensive. So favoring manufacturing over other industries is not going to be a path to full employment and sharing the wealth with low- and medium-skilled workers like in the U.S. of the 50s and 60s, or the Asia of the 80s and 90s and 00s. By default the value is going to be captured by a small elite who own the capital or have the skills to create and operate the technology, unless we think of something better.

Also related to this topic, be sure to check out this Dilbert.