This excerpt mentions a trend I'd rather not see come to fruition:
"...the sort of policies proposed by the Dysons of the world amount to the beginning of a levelling-down of Western standards to developing-world levels, when the opposite should be occurring."<p>I would hope that the leaders of our country don't feel the need to lessen our standards on working conditions in the name of economic recovery. I think that would be backward progress.<p>Another excerpt caught my attention:
"After all, it was the financial-services and property sectors that collapsed; industry-driven economies such as Germany and Singapore experienced record-breaking export booms and avoided the crisis."<p>With that in mind it would seem then that our current troubles are due to many of our economy's eggs being in one basket, so-to-speak.<p>It doesn't seem such an attractive idea to make a U-turn back toward making manufacturing our strong point- it seems to me we have a better chance building on what seems to be a strong foundation in technology, to make that our strong point, and then re-invest in manufacturing only to a degree enough to have a safe amount of diversification in our economy. I've read lately somewhere about a trend in 'high-tech' manufacturing, which seems like the kind of industry that would maintain high(er) growth levels.
After using a Dyson vacuum cleaner (DC08 Animal) for some years, I now think I've fallen for marketing, the cleaner isn't a very good one and I'd never buy one again from Dyson.
Dyson is a lot of marketing, not so much product. I like the hand dryers though.
> Dyson played a large part in the election of Mr. Cameron's government: He wrote a report, “Innovative Britain,” calling for tax and education systems designed to move people into design and manufacturing; it was a major subject of the 2010 election, and almost all of its recommendations have been implemented.<p>Too large to summarize. The report, in whole, might be worth skimming.<p>> Both Professor Holman and David Phillips, Emeritus Professor at Imperial College believe that without the stimulation produced by making elements combust and fizz, pupils won’t continue science beyond GCSEs. “All the evidence points to practical work being the thing that pupils like to do,” Prof Holman said. “This isn’t about how do you get more Grade Cs in GCSEs, it’s about how you inspire more young people.”<p>"Ingenious Britain"<p><a href="http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/assets/UK/downloads/IngeniousBritain.PDF" rel="nofollow">http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/asse...</a>
The one thing no one ever talks about when they speak of manufacturering coming back is the pollution that comes with it. We didn't just out source manufacturering we also out sourced the pollution. How will we deal with that?
It's the chicken and the egg with these guys: we can't get factories because all the components are made elsewhere, and we can't get the components because we have no factories...<p>You can't use trade barriers anymore because if you block someone then you're getting blocked too. At the same time you can't let companies choose between local or abroad else those going to dirt-poor countries will have an unfair competitive edge that may bankrupt the ones that stayed, something that already happened 20 years ago.<p>You know what's the biggest industrial innovation right now? Toyota's new model factory: it's designed to be moved at any time to anywhere in the world, cheap and fast. It has a lower degree of automation than most car factories, why? Because Toyota realized it was easier and cheaper to hire people than to use robots which are still very expensive and need to be reinstalled and reprogrammed each time you move them.<p>That's the future of manufacturing: if X place is cheaper than our current location then we're moving everything there.
> But Mr. Dyson describes it as only one symptom of a larger problem: a Western world, especially the former branches of the British Empire such as Britain and Canada, that has lost its will to invent and make things.<p>Excuse me? Apple's pushing the limit of display technology by using layered pixels. Google has invented and is maintaining an index on the sum of the world's knowledge. Facebook and Twitter have invented contraptions that make information dispersal nearly frictionless. And this guy says the Western world has <i>lost its will to invent and make things</i>?
The west definitely needs to get back to manufacturing. You get rich making things, and poor buying them.<p>Robots will, in the next few decades, wipe out all the labor benefit that China has. Their huge population base value will shift to being a huge liability.<p>Bring 5 million manufacturing jobs back to America through 100 million robots (that never riot, demand wage increases, unionize, go on vacation, can work 24/7, and get better constantly), and the cheap labor advantage that China has completely disappears. The only question is who will dominate robotic manufacturing, not whether it'll happen.<p><a href="http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/</a>
"In fact, Mr. Dyson, Britain's most famous manufacturer, doesn't actually manufacture anything in Britain. He hasn't done so for 10 years, since he was refused local permission to expand his Wiltshire factory"<p>That's it right there. He wasn't allowed to expand his factory. Presumably it was on land he already owned, right? It was an existing factory. He had to get <i>permission</i> to grow the economy by expanding, and that <i>permission</i> was denied.<p>That's the core of it.<p>So long as you need government permission to do anything, and that permission comes from someone who has no incentive to give it, and plenty of incentives to deny it (e.g.: covering their butt) this trend will continue.<p>The british (and US) culture is "you have to get permission before you do anything", and that's a form of regulation that is really harmful to growth. That gives a lot of power to people who can be petty... but it also creates a lot of make work jobs that are politically very valuable (because , you see, donate to the right campaigns and your permission comes very easy. Donate to the wrong person and you have trouble doing anything.)<p>The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished.<p>Its not like the permit based system is doing any review (that's the excuse but they rarely are funded well enough to really do this).<p>I remember a friend who lived in central california who wanted to build a house. He was in an earthquake area and as a geologist he mapped out the fault lines and knew the relationship to his property of the nearest fault and thus the specific danger. He had a house designed that would withstand an earthquake on that fault and wanted to build it. He wasn't allowed to do that-- because his design was not the off the shelf slab house design. Liquifation makes slab houses very poor in an earthquake, but that is what the kid in the permit office was able to approve. He was literally forced to build a house that was unsafe to live in, because he couldn't get permits to build a safe one. They had no interest in doing an engineering review (that costs money) or in seeing the work of the engineers he'd hired. It was total joke. His alternative was simply to sell the land and move to another state.... instead he built his house (it was his dream house after all) only on a foundation that he knows will not survive the earthquake.