What is Manufacturing?

I knew that.

This sort of this further blurs the already blurry lines defining Made In America, or Buy American, or...

Every year many of the manufacturers I trade with amend their product offering, many items previously marked as "Made in USA" are now marked "Assembled in USA, using Foreign and Domestic Materials".

I gather from the tone of the blog that Milo is displeased with this prospect. I agree. But money talks, and this proposed change is coming from somewhere...

Why can't USA get manufactured items more from countries where they have favourable

trade balance in stead of China with whom it has negative trade balance? It should have

policies to manuafacture more in the country with incentives. If all countries in world

make 50% of products they consume in house, the world will be different.

Good and Valid points from Guest1947. Though all manufacturing can't be outsourced to countries where BOP is in your favour, depending on the strength of a particular country, you can choose items that can be developed to create a win win situation.

What are ISO-9000 "diplomas" are they a manufactured product? I wish I had the idea to use a printer to print diplomas that I charge big bucks to audit, re-audit, all for a signed piece of paper with some Norwegian writing on them saying that company X is ISO-900X certified.

A competent dictionary would define it as "making stuff."

--Ed. C

Wait till you see the follow up, guys. Milo

Wait so if you have a factory full of robots where the humans only take out the completed parts and fill the robots with raw material is it still manufacturing as it is not done by hand?

GDP: produced within country; GNP: produced by county's citizens (see

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/gdp-vs-gnp/)

Currently, Apple's FoxConn operation counts towards the US GNP and China's GDP.

"There is a move afoot to count the foreign production of Factoryless Goods Producers (FGP's) as " U.S. Manufacturing."

Are you saying there are folks who want to add Apple's Chinese manufacturing to the US GDP? Isn't that double bookkeeping with China and US both claiming the manufacturing?

YES.YES.

Milo

Just out of curiosity, I visited the National Labor Board site to see if I could come up with a number for how many actual producers of goods there were in the US. Statisitcs can be found here.

Essentially, we find that 409,590 people are employed in the Farming, Fishing and Forestry industries; 4,956,770 people are employed in "Construction and Extraction (including mining, oil production, etc.); and 8,365,980 people are employed in "Production". That gives us 13,732,340 "Generators of Wealth" in a total US population of 311,591,917 people. In other words, each producer must create enough wealth to support more than 22 additional people.

Some additional information from this data base: there is roughly one manager employed for every two producers; there are nearly two Office/Administrative people employed for every producer...

It would be interesting to see similar statistics for China, Germany, Greece and a few other countries for comparison...

Startling revelations... One person creating wealth and 22 persons piling on to share. This one person's capability to produce has increased many fold due to automation, yet computerization has not reduced the piling on category. In fact statistics in your post indicates the number of such people keeps growing . It is true and applicable to all countries with slight variations.