Why America needs Scale before Moon-shots
"The advanced capabilities are offshore. We push the buttons." - Industrial Policy #11
A few years ago, I visited a U.S. injection molding facility and asked a simple question: “Can you make these parts?” They said yes. Then I asked if we could also make the molds there — the high-precision tooling that enables the molding process. Their answer: “Oh no, we don’t make molds here. We send the CAD files to China. They make the molds and send them back.”
When I told them I wanted to keep the work, and the intellectual property, in the U.S., they just said, “Good luck.”
That moment snapped everything into focus. We’re no longer the nation that builds the machines. We’ve become the operators of someone else’s machines. Once, America exported intelligence and capability — the “hard stuff,” like tool-and-die making — and let others do the routine labor. Now the reverse is true: the advanced capabilities are offshore. We push the buttons.
— Jeremy Fielding1
This story comes from a video by engineer Jeremy Fielding, where he describes the moment he realized just how hollowed out America’s tooling capacity had become.
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, once put it bluntly. Asked why Apple builds in China, he replied:
“The products we make require really advanced tooling. The precision... is state-of-the-art. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure you could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”
We’ve lost something foundational. But can we measure what exactly?
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A Framework for Rebuilding
A new paper by Keith Belton and Joseph Zenick offers one way to do just that. Their approach uses economic complexity theory (ECT) to guide industrial policy with data rather than guesswork. They focus on three key metrics:
Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) – Are we globally competitive at producing this good?
Revealed Comparative Dependence (RCD) – Are we overly reliant on imports for this good?
Relatedness – How closely connected is this good to what we already know how to make?