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169 comments on The Freezing Point of Industrial Society
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it seems to me that over the last 15-20 years the us has de-industrialized
any thoughts
The US has offshored much of its industrial capacity, but Americans still enjoy industrialized commutes, industrialized entertainment, and work in industrialized agriculture. Despite the high level of imports, the United States still has a high level of manufacturing capacity per GDP. So no, I don't think it's fair to call the US a deindustrialized country.
The US has exported the part of industry that makes actual machines, clothing, chemicals, steel and some other products to a virtual empire. These industrial colonies get all the disadvantages of the resulting pollution and can be attacked by the Pentagon at will, but the US has no responsibility for their well-being. So they are a plausibly-deniable extension of our country.
What remains of actual US manufacturing is trucks, food (since it's become too unnatural to be called anything but a manufacture), refining (though we've begun to import a lot of gasoline), and houses. I'm not thrilled.
You forgot to mention the biggest part of remaining US industry: weapons.
There's a difference between letting your manufacturing sector go kaput, and "deindustrialising" in the sense that this article means it. I meant an industrial lifestyle - as I said, having lots of roads, computers, pharmaceuticals, mobile phones, cheap t-shirts, and so on. You could have all that and have zero actual production in your own country. I mean, Monaco, Vatican City, Abu Dubai, these are all "industrialised societies" but they produce nothing materially.
To answer whether it's "an industrialised society" or not, simply ask yourself, "if I took away all the fossil fuels today, would it make any difference." For somewhere like Albania, the answer is "not much." For the US or Australia, "hell, yes!" So the first is a manual economy, the other two are industrialised economies. Places like China, where in the east the answer is "yes", in the west, "no", they're mixed.
[double post]