Why manufacturing?

This came up as a tangent to an Erik Lund history-of-technology post; why worry about manufacturing?  Why is rearranging dirt more important to the economy than rearranging schedules?

(Anybody who thinks rearranging schedules is easy needs to try it with several competing sets of interests and priorities; for difficulty, the schedules might be more fundamentally so.)

Right now, we're in the early stages of the end of the world, in at least the sense that fall of the Western Roman Empire was the end of the world.

One of the things that means is that while capital creates long supply chains to maximize returns on investment, instability shortens your supply chains.  There's three ways this is certain to happen in the next five, and the next twenty, years.  ("Short term", if I don't watch what I'm saying.)

1. We're going off oil.  We're going off fossil carbon generally.  This is going to be a combination of solar PV being flat out less expensive, dawning horror at just how bad the climate swing is going to be (see if you can get housing sale data for Florida by age and education...), and the collapse of American hegemony ("the Oil Empire maintains the stable oil markets necessary to the deployment of all that capital" and "the Oil Empire manages to keep people from effectively opposing technologies like fracking" both apply).  Does this shift the basis of naval power?  That happened in the 1950 with nuclear submarines.  It may force notice; it is very likely going to break the commercial arrangements which came in with DREADNOUGHT's continuation of the Anglo thalassocracy.
2. Food security is going away.  Direct habitability is going away for at least places with large populations.  (Second order, "I can get food there", is a different and more general question.) This is going to do in economic predictability; the supply chains don't notice the people suffering, but do notice the lack of spending, the loss of productivity, and the shift in economic focus from what people want to what people need.  Also the inoperable ports and rail links.
3. We're at the front edge of an age of miracles so far as capability goes; there's clinical trials of effective anti-aging treatments reported, there's meta-materials, someone will eventually figure out how to get bulk graphene.  Normally innovation is irrelevant because incumbents can keep it from getting enough capital to threaten their markets.  The historical counter examples are all either extremely prolonged (see "clocks, Europe, 1400-1800") or side effects of three enormous wars.  (Napoleonic, Great War, Hitler's/Great Patriotic/Great Pacific; incumbents willing to be less rich in preference to maybe losing in a war of annihilation.)

ALL of these things will shorten the possible supply chains.  Not because anyone wants there to be shorter supply chains and a less capable economy, particularly, but because the predictability necessary to the present arrangement isn't going to hold.  (Has stopped holding, and isn't likely to come back.  Even if everybody with significant political power does the optimal thing for the next century over the whole planet, it's not likely to come back.)

So the answer for "why is manufacturing important?" is "shorter supply chains are less capable but more resilient; to be reasonably sure you'll have all the critical stuff, you need the ability to make it locally, for someone value of locally, and remember that value of locally is significantly political".

One awkward part is that VLSI is really difficult and takes enormous supply chains.  Communications isn't a luxury, and one thing that's likely to be interesting about the next twenty years is the difficulty of keeping the incumbent communications infrastructure working as the necessary supply chain length gets unmaintainable.  Here's hoping some equivalent to direct electron lithography gets established as a viable alternative Real Soon Now.

Another awkward part is no one knows what's going on, supply-chain wise; heat pumps and window glass and autoclaves and refrigeration and tractors aren't optional as functions, and doing it with electricity and aluminium and glass instead of coal and iron and brass is obviously entirely possible but making sure all the parts of the supply chain are functioning and close enough hasn't been addressed.  It ought to be, and it ought to be with some urgency.

(I am, tangentially, all for trade and for long-distance trade; we're desperately going to need it to be a bunch of local economies rather than one global one, though, because we're not going to be able to keep a global-supply-chains one running consistently this coming century.)

So -- gotta be able to make knives and abrasives and paint and bandages and soup pots and dust masks and shoes and socks (keep thinking about just how much stuff is on the real list; artificial light should come to mind) in a couple local places by a diversity of means, or there's no resilience of supply, and we need the resiliency of supply because there's going to be no meaningful agricultural or climatic predictability for at least the next hundred years.

My American cousins...

Somewhere in the machinery of your government, there's someone who was carefully chosen for being not especially empathetic, never having made any mistakes at anything their whole life, and for not considering themselves especially important.  (You can't reliably put duty and country ahead of your own personal feelings if you've especially much got personal feelings.)

They're also not that old and still in the time of life when you can be extremely fit.  It won't help with the empathy and it certainly won't help with having developed the kind of robust personal wisdom that'll help in a terrible crisis.

The best thing you can do for that person is to get Congress to take away their job, because right now their job is to follow the President around, carrying and guarding a set of nuclear launch codes.  There's a real risk the current President is going to order an unprovoked nuclear attack -- the aggressive war y'all hanged people for at Nuremberg but worse -- and at that point, that person's true duty, the thing required of them if they're to go on not having made any mistakes at anything their whole life, is to out-draw the Secret Service and shoot the President dead.

That's an unreasonable amount of heroism to ask, and y'all are the Sovereign People.  Get ahold of whatever representatives and senators you can, and tell them to  Pull The Football.

Category error.

The US and gun control is a category error.

The problem isn't gun control.  Gun control is how you codify a social consensus about what firearms are appropriate.  (Which is about half of why Canada has a political issue about it; there isn't such a social consensus.  The other half is American media leakage.)

People will sometimes cite the US firearms ownership stats as evidence of a particular tendency to violence.  I think that's a misinterpretation; it's a highly price-sensitive, high volume market.  That's people using up limited disposable income for social signaling purposes, not any structurally different in social group-formation terms from having to have this year's shoes.

It's an ethnogenesis based on fear-banishing rituals.  It's got entirely divorced from facts -- one of the major costs of the Cold War was a set of facts with which people could not by-and-large deal at all, and this has been the wedge of a whole lot of refusing to admit facts -- and it's got a whole lot of fear amplification driving it for profit.  (Advertising -- just plain bad, because it's about making you more insecure, and the more insecure you are, the worse your decisions will be.)  This is why tactical is a fashion category, and why there's a thriving trade in teaching people house clearing tactics in case they get burgled.

It's also why gun control -- guaranteed to increase fear in this belief system -- won't work.  It'll become (more of an; look at what got produced in response to the Clinton assault weapons ban) an act of piety to evade any such laws.

Fixes?

Real tough, because corporates have been granted civil rights which they ought not to have.  There isn't a simple mechanism whereby you can legally break the "I can make lots of money by terrifying people" business model.  There's the whole vast "the 2nd Amendment's modern political existence supports white supremacy and only white supremacy" problem.  (Try to imagine a future in which the NRA holds picnic-and-range-day events for inner city disadvantaged youth and has a Black American gunsmithing scholarship program where the top tier awardees go to MIT in mech eng on a full ride scholarship.  Then try to imagine how to get there from here.)

I'm not clever enough to figure out how you get around the fear; I can think of some things that would do it -- lots of good jobs doing ecological restoration and infrastructure replacement, any time anyone has a functioning government -- but not how to get there.  It's just that trying for gun control fits the whole (carefully designed) apocalyptic narrative of helplessness and fear, and won't do anything good.