This book
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...
tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process adopted by countries that had their obsolete furnaces blown up. The rest of US industry, such as our car industry, were dragged down by this because they were using expensive and inferior materials. I think this book had a huge impact in terms of convincing policymakers everywhere that tariffs are bad.
Funny the Mellon family went on to further political mischief
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife#Oppositi...
You can't onshore manufacturing and have a dollar reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs?
This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes, great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry, dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.
I really wonder what you're comparing with.
Try some quality surgical steel from Sweden, Japan or Germany and you'll come away impressed. China is still not quite there but they are improving rapidly, Korea is already there and poised to improve further.
Metal buyers all over the globe are turning away from the US because of the effects of the silly tariffs but they were not going there because the quality, but because of the price.
The US could easily catch up if they wanted to but the domestic market just isn't large enough.
And as for actual metallurgy knowledge I think russia still has an edge, they always were good when it came down to materials science, though they're sacrificing all of that now for very little gain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs
There are people making top quality steel in the US today by modern methods but it wasn't like the new replaced the old, the old mostly disappeared and we got a little bit of the new.
US pipeline for metallurgical R&D broken (by financial/cultural incentives)
This guy studied metallurgy in Carleton U, Canada, switched to CS, founded YC, emotionalized the decision
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600555
Who knows, he might have become John Carmack's John Carmack, building rockets better than Carmack or Elon
What you describe seems like very cheap Chinese imports fraudulently imitating something else.
I don’t find this to be true
The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment.
Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.
And there are many others that might've been a positive investment from a strictly financial perspective, but not from a moral one: see Banana Republics and all those times the CIA backed military juntas.
Be careful. The data does not confirm that narrative. You mentioned the 1950s, which is a poignant example of reality conflicting with sponsored narrative. Pre WOII, the wealthy class orbiting the monopolists, and by extension their installed politicians, had no other ideas than to keep lowering taxes for the rich on and on, even if it only deepened the endless economic crisis. Many of them had fallen in the trap of believing their own narratives, something we know as the Cult of Wealth.
Meanwhile, average Americans lived on food stamps. Politically deadlocked in quasi-religious ideas of "bad governments versus wise business men", America kept falling deeper. Meanwhile, with just 175,000 serving on active duty, the U.S. Army was the 18th biggest in the world[1], poorly equipped, poorly trained. Right wing isolationism had brought the country in a precarious position. Then two things happened. Roosevelt and WOII.
In a unique moment, the state took matters in their own hands. The sheer excellence in planning, efficiency, speed and execution of the state baffled the republicans, putting the oligarchic model of the economy to shame. The economy grew tremendously as well, something the oligarchy could not pull of. It is not well-known that WOII depended largely on state-operated industries, because the former class quickly understood how much the state's performance threatened their narratives. So they invested in disinformation campaigns, claiming the efforts and achievements of the government as their own.
1. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/06/how-world...
I assume you are talking about WW2 and at first thought it was a typo.
The post-war era, under Truman and Eisenhower administrations, reaped the benefits of the US being the wealthiest and most intact winner of WWII. At that time, the highest income tax rate bracket was 91%, but the effective rate was below 50%.
The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence.
If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software, we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the 1950s look like table stakes.
I think it's extremely early to try and call who the principal winner will be especially with all the global shifts happening.
There is no early mover advantage in AI in the same way that there was in all the other industries. That's the one thing that AI proponents in general seem not to have clued in to.
What will happen is that it eventually drags everything down because it takes the value out of the bulk of the service and knowledge economies. So you'll get places that are 'ahead' in the disruption. But the bottom will fall out of the revenue streams, which is one of the reasons these companies are all completely panicked and are wrecking the products that they had to stuff AI in there in every way possible hoping that one of them will take.
Model training is only an edge in a world where free models do not exist, once those are 'good enough' good luck with your AI and your rapidly outdated hardware.
The typical investors horizon is short, but not that short.