All METARs are aware of the strategic importance of semiconductor chips and how the Covid-related supply chain bottlenecks from Asia impacted important U.S. industries, like automobile manufacturing.
Chips are a truly strategic product, but about 92 percent of the world’s most advanced chips are made in Taiwan. The rest come from South Korea. If China decides to flex its muscles by blockading chips the way Russia is holding Europe hostage with energy…well, you finish the sentence.
**Money Alone Won’t Buy U.S. Tech Superiority** **by Farah Stockman, The New York Times, July 25, 2022**
**...**
**One of the biggest obstacles to making more chips in the United States is the lack of experienced workers. Part of the problem is structural. Facebook and Google pay astronomically higher salaries than the chip manufacturing industry....**
**Part of the reason for this skills gap is that people in the United States who already work in the semiconductor industry tend to have experience in chip design, not manufacturing. For years, many U.S. companies ordered chips from contract manufacturers overseas, like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, instead of embarking on the extremely expensive process of producing, testing and packaging chips themselves. ...** [end quote]
Part of the problem is a lack of engineers. But an even bigger problem is the lack of highly skilled and perfectionistic production people to work, hands-on, in manufacturing an exquisitely sensitive product in a clean-room environment.
The article mentions changes to our immigration system to attract highly skilled immigrant labor. The U.S. labor force may be large enough but many production-level people aren’t capable of the level of work required. And the fabs, which take years to develop and cost billions of dollars, will have to attract production workers – but they aren’t willing to pay to attract the caliber of worker in the American work force.
With the Western world dependent upon chips from Taiwan, and South Korea to a smaller extent, put that basic monopoly upon the world stage as a defense strategy.
Threaten to blow up the key chip factories unless the rest of the world defends Taiwan against China in case of an invasion. We’ve got about as much stake in their continued existence as a free world supplier as they do.
And let China face that in their decisions. A united Western world response to threats - for their own self interests.
Should delay China until at least the Western world feels more secure in alternate supplies.
And that’s going to take a long time - as you point out.
But an even bigger problem is the lack of highly skilled and perfectionistic production people to work, hands-on, in manufacturing an exquisitely sensitive product in a clean-room environment.
That has been true for decades. Fabs rely on relatively lower pay for extremely high tech skills. Which is why new fabs were mostly built outside the US.
You pay one way or you pay another way. Either way, you (the customer) pay.
By now it seems clear that we have a shortage of workers. For decades we have known of declining birthrates (from the '60s). Now we have the last of the baby boomers retiring. Remember the massive post war baby boom when large families were still popular.
The solution has to be immigration. We need Congress to get its act together and figure out how to let in more with suitable job skills. They have delayed far too long. And for the dumbest of reasons.
My state is one of the states correcting the birth rate. It will take 22 years for those workers to show up though.
CT gives out $250 for each child per month up to 3 children.
The reasons are myriad. The women in their late thirties have tough financial choices to make if they want to have a child. This money changes the calculus for some of them. The group of women that wait that long are often highly educated and will see to well educated children.
The poorer, lower middle class and possibly middle class women who get this money can feed and/or educated their children better with the money. The feed part counts a lot.
The idea is also with well fed children to reduce the crime rates further out. A child gaining a high school education is less likely to be committing crimes.
The idea that an educated woman in her late thirties must be white is not true. African American women for some time now have had the highest enrollment rates in college of any major group. Older educated women of all creeds having children make for a better educated workforce.
The alternatives are more expensive and far less productive. Incarceration of a fraction of the babies born today as they get into their adult years is far more expensive.
The other forward thinking part of the Connecticut program, the women and men can be married.
Handing out welfare to unmarried women should their partner make money in a marriage that would disqualify them from help is one of the dumbest ideas going.
People of modest means who have a child quite naturally when supported even when their incomes begin to rise will get off welfare programs sooner. Women who can not declare boyfriends when getting help end up unmarried without the man and with the children. That is a recipe for social disaster.
to attract production workers – but they aren’t willing to pay to attract the caliber of worker in the American work force.
If they build in day-care centers while they are building their fab plants, they’ll have a much easier time attracting “perfectionistic production people to work, hands-on, in manufacturing an exquisitely sensitive product in a clean-room environment.”
What we really need to do is to learn to live sustainably with lower populations. Human overpopulation underlies so many of the problems we face. Yes, I know what the economists think, but they aren’t looking out the windows of their ivory towers.