One especially difficult aspect when you’re doing work related to addressing a long-term problem is that such work typically necessitates the sort of specialization that creates information silos.When that happens, the individuals working on solving a given long-term problem will find it persistently challenging to explain the problem’s significance to the 99 percent or so of people who aren’t concerned with it on a daily basis.For those working in the tiny niche within the manufacturing sector that is the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, the discourse surrounding reshoring is a perfect example of this phenomenon.
I would imagine that, at this point, it’s far rarer to find individuals working in the AM industry who haven’t heard of reshoring, than it is to find those who have — a dynamic that is no doubt reversed outside of the manufacturing sector.Along these lines, it’s quite helpful when you stumble across moments that remind you of the broad disconnect.To that point, I was compelled to discuss this topic by stumbling across an article about a question Bill Maher recently asked on his HBO show, Real Time: “Why do we want to bring back manufacturing?” At this juncture in my life, I only notice what voices like Maher say when they show up in my news algorithm.
I find the overlap between politics and entertainment that they wade in to be too repulsive to inflict upon my actual ears and eyes: politics is fake, and entertainment is fake, and the intersection is surely amongst the fakest things of all.Nevertheless, I can still appreciate from a distance the importance of what commentators like Maher do, and of that ilk, he’s one of the more tolerable ones.He makes his fair share of fair points, and this was one of them.
Because it’s not so obvious — unless you’re concerned with the topic on a daily basis — why “we” do want to bring manufacturing back to the US, or even that “we” do want to do that.However much it may seem to people in the AM industry, among others, like this nail has already been hit on the head, the nail apparently remains unhammered.For what it’s worth, one of the guest panelists on the episode, columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon from The Free Press, gave an acceptable response to Maher’s question: “Manufacturing is still being done.
It’s just being done in other countries,” she said.“[The purpose of the tariffs is] to make American workers more competitive in the global market.Why are we accepting that there should be a race to the bottom? …[China is] still manufacturing our PPE, our pharmaceuticals, our cars.
They’re making all that stuff.…[It’s] really important that we have a stake in the manufacturing of the things that we need as a nation, so that when China decides that it wants to go to war against us, we’re not relying on them for steel and aluminum in order to fight them.” Maher conceded, “Ok, at least that’s an answer.” While I don’t really care for that particular line of thinking, Maher is right — at least it’s an answer.There are many other, far better reasons why people should want the global economy’s manufacturing activity to be geographically diversified, but at least the (in my opinion, silly) idea that China is going to “go to war” against the US (as if the several major conflicts that are already in progress across the planet aren’t already a war between the US and China) is a starting point for conversation.
Image courtesy of ASTRO America The funny — and by funny, I mean sad — thing about the whole conversation is that none of this rationale for “bringing manufacturing back” to the US that is being attributed to Trump, is, per se, a rationale that can be credited to Trump.Everything that Maher and his panelists discussed regarding reshoring was already happening under Biden, which does much to highlight how abysmal the Democrats are at messaging.Trump is merely accelerating and amplifying the process by doing what he does best, which is to loudly make mischief, and paralyze with fear the other, more genteel member-nations of the Western world.
But again, the fact that the conversation apparently still had to be had illustrates the extent to which the framing of the issue heretofore hasn’t worked.For the AM industry, this presents a real opportunity to take the lead in reframing the narrative, a task which I believe will be essential if reshoring is to have any chance at achieving any long-term impact aside from enriching the interest groups who are pushing for reshoring.In order to succeed at a (multi-)generational project like reimagining and reshaping what was once history’s most awe-inspiring industrial base, the manufacturing sector is going to have reach demographics far outside its normal wheelhouse.
I’m sick of having conversations, and I’m sure you are, too.But it turns out that, concerning reshoring, much of what we’ve all been doing up to now hasn’t really been conversing: otherwise, we’d have made enough progress to where it would no longer be such a mystery as to why it’s a desirable thing to bring manufacturing back to the US.The good news is that, when the problem is finally being discussed in such a mainstream forum as HBO’s weekly political salon, we finally have confirmation that it is worth having the conversation with people outside the manufacturing bubble.
And those are precisely the people who will have to be reached in order for the issue to transcend the bubble, and take hold in the world at-large.Featured image courtesy of Knowledge at Wharton Subscribe to Our Email Newsletter Stay up-to-date on all the latest news from the 3D printing industry and receive information and offers from third party vendors.Print Services Upload your 3D Models and get them printed quickly and efficiently.
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