industrial productivity growth has slowed across the rich world, even if not by as much as in America (see chart 2). The extra bit of American underperformance is trickier to explain. Economists throw out a boatload of hypotheses. America is known to have laxer antitrust enforcement than its peers; perhaps scrutiny was especially needed in the manufacturing sector. Maybe American manufacturing was more advanced when robots arrived on the scene, so had less to gain. Some have even argued that because America’s software and internet sectors have been so lucrative, talent has been diverted away from older industries.
Yeah software is definitely more complex. But modern languages are easier and have more syntactic sugar. And being a junior dev is mostly boiler plating or copy and pasting. A lot of devs don’t even get into the real complicated stuff. I’m a mediocre dev with no degree and I’m constantly surprised at the terminology people who’ve been doing for years don’t understand.
we’ve just lost the innovations that come with running that of wider sector
I’d argue that is not the case at all since manufacturing innovation is a commodity sold to the global market. See manufacturing trade shows. The tech is available, the skilled labor doesn’t exist in plentiful numbers to exploit such tech readily.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231110232943/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/11/09/why-american-manufacturing-is-increasingly-inefficient
Spoilers!
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It’s also easier to be a software developer now than 10 years ago. Modern languages do a lot more of the work for you.
Well, the barrier to entry is lower anyway.
Software also seems to be more complex than it was 10 years ago
Yeah software is definitely more complex. But modern languages are easier and have more syntactic sugar. And being a junior dev is mostly boiler plating or copy and pasting. A lot of devs don’t even get into the real complicated stuff. I’m a mediocre dev with no degree and I’m constantly surprised at the terminology people who’ve been doing for years don’t understand.
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I’d argue that is not the case at all since manufacturing innovation is a commodity sold to the global market. See manufacturing trade shows. The tech is available, the skilled labor doesn’t exist in plentiful numbers to exploit such tech readily.