A contributing factor in all of this is that US manufacturers have spent the better part of the last 30 years turning their engineering departments into glorified parts replacers. A complaint I have heard from nearly every electrical/electronics engineer that I’ve known is that “We don’t design things anymore. Now we just spend most of our time trying to find replacements for chips that we can no longer get.”
From what I can tell, from my very limited perspective, there has been a significant lack of investment in engineering capabilities and a resulting lack of innovation for a long time. As usual, short term thinking is expensive in the long run. We’re only just beginning to find out how expensive.
Replaceable parts was the greatest industrial innovation in the history of the world. It’s the single most important reason that millions of people can afford refrigeration, stoves, lightbulbs, TVs, cell phones, cars, and everything else in the modern world. Without replaceable parts these things would only be luxuries for kings and queens.
The problem of engineering departments being “glorified parts replacers” is a social problem: elite overproduction. Society simply does not need millions of engineers (or lawyers or historians or urban planners for that matter)!
I’ve tried explaining to people that I think the best way to fight globalization is a well educated population. Then the theory is, we’d be able to make more domestic advancements that other countries would have to try and keep up with.
Why fight globalization? It’s inefficient to make everything domestically, and as long as your supply chain is sufficiently diversified (including some domestic production), it’s not an issue.
Keep the good jobs domestic, outsource the bad ones.
A contributing factor in all of this is that US manufacturers have spent the better part of the last 30 years turning their engineering departments into glorified parts replacers. A complaint I have heard from nearly every electrical/electronics engineer that I’ve known is that “We don’t design things anymore. Now we just spend most of our time trying to find replacements for chips that we can no longer get.”
From what I can tell, from my very limited perspective, there has been a significant lack of investment in engineering capabilities and a resulting lack of innovation for a long time. As usual, short term thinking is expensive in the long run. We’re only just beginning to find out how expensive.
Replaceable parts was the greatest industrial innovation in the history of the world. It’s the single most important reason that millions of people can afford refrigeration, stoves, lightbulbs, TVs, cell phones, cars, and everything else in the modern world. Without replaceable parts these things would only be luxuries for kings and queens.
The problem of engineering departments being “glorified parts replacers” is a social problem: elite overproduction. Society simply does not need millions of engineers (or lawyers or historians or urban planners for that matter)!
I’ve tried explaining to people that I think the best way to fight globalization is a well educated population. Then the theory is, we’d be able to make more domestic advancements that other countries would have to try and keep up with.
Why fight globalization? It’s inefficient to make everything domestically, and as long as your supply chain is sufficiently diversified (including some domestic production), it’s not an issue.
Keep the good jobs domestic, outsource the bad ones.