Pylimitics

The regime of the orange baby, and the baby itself, seem to believe (or at least say, which isn’t the same thing for it) that making products — toys, for example — arbitrarily more expensive for US consumers is a good thing. Maybe, the baby spitballs, it will mean that “the jobs” move to the US.

Let’s think about these “jobs” for a moment. The process of creating a new mass-market toy, for example, is something that Mattel or Hasbro do all the time. It involves people (with jobs) in different locations. Here’s an idea about some of those jobs:

• Market research. These jobs are highly skilled, generally requiring a college degree and abilities in statistics, writing, survey research, interpretation of financial data, and more. They’re well compensated “good jobs.” And they’re located, for the most part, in the US.

• Product management. Same as above.

• Product design. Ditto.

• Product engineering. Ditto, except that some of these jobs are located closer to the manufacturing facilities, because some of the product engineering involves making sure the molds work correctly, the production line works, and so on.

• Supply chain engineering. This is making sure you’ve got the raw materials and components in the right place at the right time to manufacture your product. These jobs are also highly skilled, and also largely located in the US.

• Running the machines. These are the jobs “on the factory floor,” and they’re not well compensated, they’re not “good jobs,” and they’re not located in the US.

• Finishing work. This includes things like painting the details on a doll’s face (by hand!) and boxing up the product (in packaging designed in the US but manufactured elsewhere), which might even involve fastening the product to the packaging using wire twist ties. I’m sure you’ve seen those. They’re attached by hand. These are likewise not good jobs, and not in the US.

• Loading the packaged products into containers and delivering the containers to transporters (ships, airplanes, or whatever). Obviously these jobs are located where the factory is, although there are counterparts on the receiving end to unload the products and deliver them to retail outlets. These can be pretty good jobs, as long as they’re unionized.

Let’s say the whole operation gets shut down because the price of the product — again, a toy — gets raised so high that there aren’t enough buyers. The supply chain collapses, and product development and design grind to a halt. You don’t need market research if you’ve got nothing you can sell. So the result is that the good jobs in the US go away. Can we really import all the lousy factory floor jobs here? Maybe eventually, but first all the infrastructure has to be recreated, from the factory to the machines the factory needs. That takes money that a company that’s lost its ability to sell products might not have.

If you’re just starting a manufacturing operation, do you begin with all those old good jobs like design and marketing? Probably not; if you look at the early days of manufacturing of practically anything, from automobiles to toys, at the beginning the focus is on getting the manufacturing operation working, and the supply chain and distribution network. This stuff takes time to create, and by “time” I mean years. Meanwhile, everybody in the US who used to have those good jobs is either out of work or working at a much lower level.

The Project 2025 slogan ought to be “Do you want fries with that?” Because that’s what the future of work in the US might be, for everybody.

Meanwhile, back at the factory, the operation has a pretty good chance of staying in business, because after all, the US market is less than 5%. That’s going by just population; there are around 8 billion people in the world, and 335 million in the US, which is 4.2%. There are plenty more kids around the world who might want toys from the factory, and that might just mean that the good jobs stay open — just not here, because if you’re going to do market research, you probably want to be close to that market. And a toy designed for the US might need to a redesign for somewhere else.