This looks promising for a new generation of factory automation. There's a lot of old stuff out there.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Off-shoring always had a bigger influence than immigration. Trump's erratic foreign policy and his tariffs have encouraged manufacturers to invest in making their domestic manufacturing more productive, rather than investing in factories overseas.
But it's not so much innovation as more playing catch-up with European and Chinese manufacturers - nobody in America has had to develop anything innovative. They can just buy it or copy it. American is now dong what Japan did a century or so ago, and China has been doing more recently.
It reminds me of an episode in British politics, when Margaret Thatcher deplored the low productivity of British workers when compared with their German counterparts. A British economist compared productivity per worker while controlling for capital investment per worker, and on that basis the British workers came out ahead. British industrialists would only invest in extra equipment when it paid off at higher rate than their German counterparts found adequate.
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