As it turns out, the U.S. is actually a very capable manufacturer and able to deliver projects on time and within budget but media reporting focuses on all kinds of irrelevant operational friction present in all firms and the handful of projects that don’t become successful, and in this specific case, tsmc playing the government for money.
As it turns out, nothing turned out. The factory isn't running or producing anything yet. Also, you have confused yield rate, which is dependent on the normal transfer of technology, with production capacity. You can make 1 batch per day with 90% yield, but they can make 3 batches a day with 90% yield; it is not the same production capacity or efficient use of the facility.
US workers have the highest number of working hours out of almost anywhere in the OECD, including famed manufacturer, Germany
So I guess you can stay on top of the the OECD midgets. That was assumed from the very start.
Productivity is output per hour and in typical American fashion, technological advancements and innovation mean that the U.S. can produce substantially more per unit labor hour than anyone else.
That's something you need to prove, not an underlying assumption. You starting an argument with this is like an average Joe asking why he can't get a date despite being the richest and most hung person in the world LOL Judging by everything we see in construction and science, the US moves like a smudge of molasses in a cold Chinese stream.
Improvements at the intensive margin of work hours are fools gold (with all kinds of other deleterious effects elsewhere); extensive margin improvements are far more desirable
That's why China's rise bringing people out of poverty and into the cities has led to unrivaled results in development.
Having an attractive business investment for FDI is a strength since FDI is wonderful - it provides competition, scale effects, jobs, and technology and knowledge transfers from other countries
Yes, but correctly using FDI to catalyze domestic innovation, innovation that happens at the pace of a giant rather than of small critters, is the most important. Something we see in China and absent in the US.
TSMC is manufacturing in Arizona and paying taxes to the State of Arizona and the U.S. Treasury with workers resident in the United States. It absolutely is America’s productivity
More like taking subsidies. With 50% cost overrun compared to chips manufactured in Taiwan, what is their purpose? How do they generate sales except through government aid?
Well now it’s built in the U.S. Problem solved.
Not at all. By that logic, having foreign car companies build in China should have solved China's auto problem, but actually, it didn't until China innovated our own world-beating EV cars. Having others build tech or even transfer tech to you is only a solution to the near-sighted; to those with future plans, is but a tool that may allow you to find the true solution. China used this tool properly to spur domestic innovation, which is the only lasting solution. America can take TSMC's technology, actually, China has it as well since Dr. Liang came to SMIC, but it cannot use it as a tool to move forward, rather relying on TSMC to keep feeding it. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and feed him a lifetime. America and China are large animals engaged in a fight. America depends on rodents and sparrows like Taiwan to keep feeding it; it will become comparably malnourished while China learned to hunt and brings in large prey to dine on (uses its own power, a superpower's strength to innovate) and thus grows ever larger.
I’m explaining a scenario in which it is unnecessary for American workers to do 12hr days and still be competitive vis-a-bis tsmc
That's how the chips made in Arizona are 50% more expensive than their overseas counterparts? LOL That's "competitive?"
Indeed. The U.S. is generally on the technological frontier, not always. And plus, economic growth is not a zero-sum game. Trade & investment are mutually beneficial and win-win. Saying an economy is not real because it attracts FDI is ridiculous. What’s more - remaining open to FDI helps keep the U.S. on the technological frontier through multiple channels - capital deepening, competition, scale effects, driving inefficient firms out of the market place, and of course, technology transfers. And regardless, national origin discrimination and xenophobia are bad - it doesn’t matter where a technology comes from, so long as said technology is being used to fund tax revenues for the U.S. treasury and contribute to TFP growth in the United States
The U.S. is a far more competitive and desirable location to do the FDI than China
All depends on your relationship with FDI. China is its master, using it to jumpstart the muscles of a giant, then oftentimes running those foreign firms out once they are no longer useful. America is its slave, addicted to it and in need of it, constant updates of it, powered by the innovative abilities of mice, to sustain America's edge. Something that is only good enough to be China's means has become America's end. The American strategy would work in a world where there was not a Chinese collossus in competition with innate abilities that dwarf the trickle-feeds that America can get, but the sun has set on that world.
