by Sixstrings » Sat 28 Nov 2009, 15:44:20
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kristjan', 'W')hich reminds me - I've bought quite a few books from the States (from visits to the US and from Amazon) and I have noticed an interesting thing - they were all printed in the United States. Seems like the printing industry the only industry that hasn't been shipped to China. Funny, really.
Well, the wood pulp needed to make paper comes from the United States. And books are printed by machines anyway, it's not really labor intensive. So you see, it wouldn't make any sense to ship American wood to China just to have machines there print the books and ship the books back here. You can just have machines print them up here and save the cost of transport.
Now, manufacturing which can't be cheaply automated and therefore benefits from slave-wage human laobr, is of course done in China. When it comes to human labor, we'll ship a caesar salad or a snuggy around the world if it means we only have to pay folks ten cents an hour.

Ironically, the day when all manufacturing approaches 100% automation is when we might start to get our manufacturing back. The rub though is it will no longer employ many people, be they Chinese or American.