From Newsgroup: sci.electronics.design
On 9/01/2026 7:56 am, john larkin wrote:
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2026/01/08/trump-boom-u-s-productivity-surges-as-businesses-shift-from-cheap-labor-to-investment/
Interesting what happens when the deluge of cheap labor and cheap
imports are throttled down.
This looks promising for a new generation of factory automation.
There's a lot of old stuff out there.
Off-shoring always had a bigger influence than immigration. Trump's
erratic foreign policy and his tariffs have encouraged manufacturers to
invest in making their domestic manufacturing more productive, rather
than investing in factories overseas.
But it's not so much innovation as more playing catch-up with European
and Chinese manufacturers - nobody in America has had to develop
anything innovative. They can just buy it or copy it. American is now
dong what Japan did a century or so ago, and China has been doing more recently.
It reminds me of an episode in British politics, when Margaret Thatcher deplored the low productivity of British workers when compared with
their German counterparts. A British economist compared productivity per worker while controlling for capital investment per worker, and on that
basis the British workers came out ahead. British industrialists would
only invest in extra equipment when it paid off at higher rate than
their German counterparts found adequate.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
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