alt Hacker News> I’m always reminded of the poll where 80% of Americans say that the country would benefit from a bigger manufacturing base but only 25% are interested in actually working in manufacturing.
This is a silly statistic that manipulative people drag out to imply the answer that they want. If you asked people who work in factories right at this second, 75% of them would say that they didn't want to work in a factory. If you ask people who work any job, and ask if they would rather not be working, 75% would say yes.
It kind of goes with the weird idea that illegal immigrants actually love to clean toilets and work in fields for slave wages.
> when I ask “so you’d prefer to work in a factory?”
...to your upper-middle class friends who make six figures.
If you have more factory jobs the workforce has to come from either immigrants or the cushy white collar or service jobs that Americans mostly work today right? Because our unemployment rate isn’t low enough that we can just take people who aren’t working and get them working in factories.
Japan has had to heavily import workers to keep its factories and service jobs staffed, and the Japanese hate immigration more than MAGA does. The other solution is automation, which is how China plans to deal with its demographic cliff, I guess we could import factory robots from China.