Why is so little produced in the USA?
In a large part because attention to get somebody to read a funding proposal is nearly inaccessible to most engineers, businessmen, etc, compared to even 1995-2005.
There was a huge subsidy in the past, when we lived in a writing-comes-first culture. When social media did not exist.
In the past you wrote a dozen letters. Sent that **** off.
You would get nearly a dozen polite and detailed human responses. Half way there.
You can call and follow up, try to convince. You would probably get an hour of a decision-maker's time. Didn't really matter much who you are, which is important, because attention is the one resource that doesn't grow much. Most people by definition, regardless of merit, importance, even wealth, cannot acquire attention. It's something that's basically free, courtesy of a very written-text-first western culture, or else totally unobtainable.
Anyway, within about 20-40 such written pitches, you would get very likely get funded or hired and the project would go into motion, if what you proposed wasn't complete ********.
This is no longer true, because attention is now the main currency. It wasn't.
Today nobody will read anything coming from most people, let alone reply, so most manufacturing projects are dead simply because you have to get attention first. The mundane manufacturing economy can't function like that. It's profitable. It's important. But it has one fundamental flaw: it's mundane.
The owner of that "random huge industrial complex" you pass on the side of the highway is wealthy, but he is probably almost completely unknown and unable to become known in a global media environment where everyone is trying to get attention. His company makes faucets. Faucets don't lead to attention, meaning very few ways to expand into production of anything else.
By the way, the faucets are selling because they went into production long ago and became known before attention cost much.
The attention economy hits twice. Most projects, in part precisely because of the growing marketing budget needed for success, are so expensive that very few people can fund the project just by working and saving to get started. Marketing costs are like prime real estate. You can't really make a lot more time.
Today you need to already have a lot of attention to get attention. Lack of attention is the gatekeeper on everything else.
Meanwhile all serious projects rely on subcontracting, division of labor, and it should be noticed that having a bunch of successful manufacturing firms around is often what is needed to make possible successful projects for other manufacturing firms.
If you can't easily hire at competitive prices the subcontractors needed, because there are too few, the cost of any project that did get the go ahead somehow is probably too expensive and it gets canceled once that is realized.
The whole economy goes down a spiral except that parts that control attention or focus on entertainment. Real growth rate keeps going down.
One basic abstraction of video games, why most people miraculously do super duper well in roleplaying games, is because questgivers talk with all players as much as players want. So the only criterion for success is skill. Today the main hurdle is getting the "questgivers" to give anybody a "quest". Result is that nothing gets done and when it becomes obvious that, as the saying goes, "you can be fighter but not get a fight", investment in human capital goes down.
Pretty soon so few people can actually produce anything that it's a market of lemons and even saying yes to a proposal that did get attention is too risky. That's the end of the real economy.
By the way, none of this was new and the marketing guys in the 70s, 80s, 90s already predicted it all. It's one of the reasons they predicted platforms will be giant monopolies and the only ones making serious money.
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): Games, D&D, SW/Game Dev & other nerdy stuff.