They'd think it because otherwise the prices would be too high and it would be difficult to sell the goods. If iphones go to $3000, the market for iphones will get much thinner.

That doesn't explain the ratio. If a highly efficient and automated China is employing (say) 1e6 people to supply US demand, it's implausible that anyone (including the US) would be able to spot a way to fire 90% of the factory workers when rebuilding the production line at same capacity anywhere else (including the US).

Of course, I simplify. But despite the wage difference, China's no longer the place you go to substitute expensive machines for cheap humans.

The wage difference between the USA and China also means that for any given product, there's a minimum tariff below which it still makes more sense to import and pay the tariff rather than to pay local workers. To paint a very broad brushstroke, if I naïvely compare GDP/capita, that's about 558% — from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... I get US 90,105 and China 13,688; then 90,105/13,688 = 6.58…, less 1 because tariff of 0% means the importer pays 100% of the money to the exporter.

To be clear I was suggesting that the number of jobs gained in the USA would not be 1-1 with the number of jobs currently in a given hypothetical factory. I.e. the Chinese factory loses 100 jobs, a corresponding American factory is unlikely in my view to gain 100 jobs, and instead the number may be much lower.

I guess it's possible if China is that good at efficient manufacturing that the number of jobs in the United States would increase relative to the job loss of the same factory in China, but I wouldn't view that as a bad thing. Higher employment and more wage pressure for regular workers, and companies will have to invest in better technology and processes to alleviate that wage pressure.

Oh so we would gain more jobs then? So we'll take a highly automated factory in China, shut it down since it won't be selling products to the US, build that factory here even though it might be a little less automated, and then we'll have the same number of jobs and maybe more than the Chinese factory had? Sign me up! That sounds awesome.

If there is a goal for more factories in the US, and it's certainly not clear at all that this is a policy goal of the current US executive branch, there's not a clear route to achieving that goal.

If the factory gets staffed at all, it will be competing in a labor pool in the US that only has 4.2% unemployment. The high employment rates, and inability to find workers during Biden's presidency, led employers to revolt against Biden.

The question is whether those automated factory jobs will be better than other jobs for the workers, whether they will be created in places with the appropriate worker pool (education, unemployment high enough etc.).

There's also the question of whether there's anybody willing to build some new high-cost automated factory when the same capital could be deployed to another purpose that likely has a far higher capital return rate. There's almost zero protection that the impetus for having the expensive highly-automated factory--namely the tariffs--will exist past for most of the life of the factory. Or in fact if they will even be in place by the time that the factory is constructed and ready to go, which will take a minimum of 3-4 years.

All the stars have to align perfectly for some sort of new jobs to appear and then it's not clear that they will be better than existing jobs. And if it does happen, we all suffer from several years of being poorer in the mean time.

All great points and great questions - today however they're not really available for consideration because those jobs remain in China.

I mentioned in another post, but I think having a 4.2% unemployment rate and putting even more pressure on that rate is a good thing, particularly for workers who will see wages rise, and technology as new automation techniques will be created to also alleviate that same pressure.

The status quo today is, well, we have none of that and those factories sit in China and we continue to buy things and ship them over - not really great for the environment either.

> And if it does happen, we all suffer from several years of being poorer in the mean time.

Yes, that's kind of how America operates - quarter by quarter. We focus on the short-term and worry about Temu products* doubling in price, but fail to see the long-term implications - economic outflows, loss of manufacturing capacity and know-how, etc.

* Yes, I know China manufactures more than these specific products and "we can't", which is all the more reason we need to figure out how to do it, even if it costs more money to do so. Absolute efficiency and the cheapest possible price for a good/product are not ends in themselves, but outcomes to economic policy decisions we make.