I've been thinking about this comment. I've got some pretty severe Pareto pareidolia lately for whatever reason, but I guess the whole point of the Pareto Principle is it's more common than we think, right? Let's call that last 20% expertise and that first 80% competence. I've long argued that most anyone can pick up the competence to do 80% of any job. Dealing with the last 20% that really makes up the job? that takes expertise. The Chinese are competent manufacturers. They are competent researchers. They have successfully leveraged a command economy to produce astounding quantities of "good enough" consumer goods, machine tools, electronics, follow-on patents and other markers of empire. But they're devoid of luxury goods. They are bereft of original ideas. Their entire techological culture is imitative - Alibaba is a cutthroat eBay. TikTok is a cutthroat Vine. Huawei is a cutthroat Samsung. But through the wonders of globalization, they can sell "good enough" for 30 cents on the dollar what indigenous "good enough" costs and if you're just reading Amazon reviews (the majority of which are written by Chinese bots) there's no reason to spend the 2.6x in order to buy "great." I've got a "good enough" water welder. I spent half its price on the "great" Italian handpiece, though. I had a "good enough" melting furnace. It broke after three uses and I bought the "great" one. I have to hunt for these things because with what I'm pursuing, "good enough" isn't good enough. The spindle for my mill will cost me between $4k and $18k if I need to rebuild it. It's Swiss and 30 years old. I could buy a Chinese one that theoretically specs out the same for $1600... but my experience has been that the Chinese just straight up lie about their specs. If you grew up with Chinese shit, pretty much everything you've ever seen is a solid b minus from a quality standpoint. So it gets to the point where nearly no one can afford to sell even the 90% stuff. We're all watching TV shows with the subtitles on because that last 20% was my job, man. I'm an expert in a competent economy.
I like to think of it as competency being bucket with a small hole. Some folks have a big bucket some small but all of them need experience to fill the bucket. In the US maybe we have larger buckets but it doesn’t matter because we’re not filling them fast enough or have enough of them. The Chinese are filling millions of buckets to the point of overflowing while the US has a thousand half full ones. Chinese products in the us tend to be garbage because that’s just how incentives line up. There is no brand, the amazon ratings have no transparency or consistency so high quality goods don’t stand out except in niche areas. The market incentive is just too cheat the ratings and put out the cheapest product possible. That could probably change quickly if Amazon wasn’t so damn evil. Many American brands are like that now too, they sold their brand name to some private eq firm gutted their core product to shave off a few cents., they fired their core engineers and moved production to a state that still allows federal minimum wage pay and prohibits unions. That might be ok if it shifted experienced workers but usally the workers don’t stick around for very long and the company goes bankrupt or goes overseas at that point. Point being that knowledge is simply being lost. Now your set spindle as an American buyer you got no chance of buying a real one but if you were in China and you knew how to work the right channels you might be able to get one that’s closer to spec, one where the corners weren’t cut as badly and the product is better, but if you need a 30k precision tool China isn’t the place to get one. The supply chain just isn’t controlled enough for top of the line products in most places.
See, and here I'll have to disagree. I spent two days at IMTS - biggest machining trade show in the world. There was no shortage of Chinese manufacturers attempting to sell anything and everything... but they were all garbage. Build quality was poor, interfaces were nonsensical, they were Potempkin Villages of manufacturing. Buddy of mine has a Chinese machine; it's a patent-infringing Fanuc Robodrill that he paid about 1/8th as much as you'd pay for a Fanuc Robodrill. Which is fine for him, he's making Harley parts. But Bulgari uses Fanuc Robodrills to make watch cases and I guarantee you, this machine will never cut that precisely even after my buddy has sunk $10k in a new control system for it. And the problem is that expectations have been lowered to match the output. We put up with shittier stuff than we used to because the delta between the good stuff and the shitty stuff is such that the 20 cents on a dollar ripoff is good enough. Which I wouldn't mind except I need the good stuff and there's no market in making it anymore. I've taken apart three or four Chinese watches. Their manufacturing ability far outstrips mine. But their yields are shit, man. Stuff that absolutely would rip ass if they had any quality control will barely tick because they don't. It's yield curve engineering - you make 100 things, the top 5 are export grade, the 25 below that are domestic, the 25 below that are sold out the back for night market ripoffs and the 40 that are left are junk. It's how the Swiss did it before Florentine Ariosto Jones taught them manufacturing; it's how a biomedical company I worked for 20 years ago did it because their 20-person handwork assembly line couldn't get above a 17% yield in a 100% test environment. I think that culturally, the Chinese will never make it to expertise because they don't value it. But I also think that so long as we're competing with the Chinese, our experts will starve.