I know it's absolutely not the point of your post and you don't mean 15 years as a literal prediction but I thought about it anyway and damn, 15 years is pretty optimistic. Think about how long it took China to become a manufacturing giant. It would take the US even longer to get back to that. The US would have to do what China did, with additional challenges such as:
- overcoming environmental regulations
- a more disjointed government that changes hands every 4 or 8 years
- competition from, well, China
- US dollar making exports very challenging because of strength relative to yuan
etc
it would take, honestly, more like 30-50 years and/or a true forcing function like a world war (heaven forbid)
I think you’ve, intentionally or not, hit on a critical point that most like to ignore while passively accepting that “China is simply where things are manufactured”. As if that wasn’t the case until about the time the median HN reader was born.
Some will attribute it to the proximity of factories to one another, collaboration between those in adjacent industries, culture, government intentionality, a general lack of enforcement on IP as long as it favors China… but the truth is if China along with every alternative adopted Western environmental and labor laws tomorrow, by mid-2026 there would be factories open in every town and city in the USA and Canada.
The West loves to play holier than thou while paying others to put their negatives on their books. Canada implementing carbon pricing and phasing out coal domestically while simply shipping it to Asia instead is the perfect example. Or banning single use plastic because we were shipping it to countries that claimed they were recycling it and instead dumping it into rivers.
There is no reason why we can’t produce things, aside from the fact that it’s unpalatable and often illegal to have to deal with the realities of manufacturing like toxic effluents and aerosols.
It’s why we tend to stick to manufacturing things that only involve assembling, processing, and welding materials after the bulk of the nastiness has been done overseas.
At this point, adopting Western labor laws actually helps China. China is facing increasingly severe challenges caused by the distribution of wealth. Changing labor laws does not fix them all, but it likely helps.
> Canada implementing carbon pricing and phasing out coal domestically while simply shipping it to Asia instead
Canada's carbon pricing is to incentivize buying stuff that has less carbon emissions. there's nothing particularly holier-than-thou about it, its just there to get the infrastructure to swap.
Yes I’ve heard that speech from Freeland a dozen times too. And yet she just announced if she’s elected leader of the LPC she’s going to do away with it.
And while waiting 15 years for that to become possible, just move that US based R&D to countries not ran by idiots.
I blame myself for not immigrating earlier. I had a chance to move overseas for a least a year and I didn't.