How could you have the US as an economic powerhouse?

How could you have the US to be an economic powerhouse in which automation and human labour work side by side (somehow) to create high quality manufactured goods around the world instead of China? I'm putting this before 1900 to expand proposed PODs.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
How could you have the US to be an economic powerhouse in which automation and human labour work side by side (somehow) to create high quality manufactured goods around the world instead of China? I'm putting this before 1900 to expand proposed PODs.
Er... are you aware that in WW2 the US had production pretty much equalling that of the rest of the world put together?
 
The problem is wages. We require a certain level of wage to live on in the society that we live in. Add to that workers' rights, won through hard struggle over the centuries, and the Western worker is at a disadvantage against the poorly-paid virtually indentured servitude of workers in China, Bangladesh etc,

Logically how to prevent this?

1) Tariffs
2) Policy of refusing to trade with slavers
3) Denying technology to emerging nations
4) retain colonisation

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 

Redhand

Banned
The problem is wages. We require a certain level of wage to live on in the society that we live in. Add to that workers' rights, won through hard struggle over the centuries, and the Western worker is at a disadvantage against the poorly-paid virtually indentured servitude of workers in China, Bangladesh etc,

Logically how to prevent this?

1) Tariffs
2) Policy of refusing to trade with slavers
3) Denying technology to emerging nations
4) retain colonisation

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

It basically is impossible by this point then. All of those ideas are going to face determined bipartisan resistance. Technology is the only thing that keeps the west from economic irrelevance and for any of this to come about I think you would need a massive weakening of the labor movement to the point of irrelevance during industrialization yet enough changes to be made to keep life expectancy over 50.
 
How could you have the US to be an economic powerhouse in which automation and human labour work side by side (somehow) to create high quality manufactured goods around the world instead of China? I'm putting this before 1900 to expand proposed PODs.

Is this a DBWI? The United States is an economic powerhouse in which automation and human labour work side by side to create high quality manufactured goods around the world. It's the world's second-largest manufacturer. Up until about 10 years ago, it had been the world's largest manufacturer for more than a century.
 
Is this a DBWI? The United States is an economic powerhouse in which automation and human labour work side by side to create high quality manufactured goods around the world. It's the world's second-largest manufacturer. Up until about 10 years ago, it had been the world's largest manufacturer for more than a century.

Hmm, I should have said, how the US can attain its manufacturing capabilities equal to that of post-WW2 (in which the US produces about a larger percentage) today.
 
Hmm, I should have said, how the US can attain its manufacturing capabilities equal to that of post-WW2 (in which the US produces about a larger percentage) today.

Oh, ok. That makes more sense. The thing is, the US percentage of global manufacturing in the 1940s was kind of a fluke. Every other major industrial power in the world had been bankrupted or destroyed by 1945. To keep the US in that position, you need to cripple everyone else. Have the USSR collapse, China stay Maoist, India balkanize, and Japan become a Third World country instead of a modern economy.
 
Oh, ok. That makes more sense. The thing is, the US percentage of global manufacturing in the 1940s was kind of a fluke. Every other major industrial power in the world had been bankrupted or destroyed by 1945. To keep the US in that position, you need to cripple everyone else. Have the USSR collapse, China stay Maoist, India balkanize, and Japan become a Third World country instead of a modern economy.

How could you go about making Japan poor? They basically would have been babysat by the US until it reached some point of self-sufficiency. Does Downfall completely wreck the country for decades to come?
 
Oh, ok. That makes more sense. The thing is, the US percentage of global manufacturing in the 1940s was kind of a fluke. Every other major industrial power in the world had been bankrupted or destroyed by 1945. To keep the US in that position, you need to cripple everyone else. Have the USSR collapse, China stay Maoist, India balkanize, and Japan become a Third World country instead of a modern economy.

Well even before that, the US was far ahead. So cripple the European Union, discourage globalization and free trade. Everyone turns to autarky, but America's economy gives it a commanding presence. The world is much poorer than OTL, and so is America, but it's relatively richer.
 
How could you go about making Japan poor? They basically would have been babysat by the US until it reached some point of self-sufficiency. Does Downfall completely wreck the country for decades to come?

There are plenty of ways to do it (all of them awful). Downfall is an easy one. Or the US could go the "starve them out" plan: mine the harbors, bomb the farmland, and keep up a blockade, crippling Japan demographically. Another option is a sort of Japanese Morgenthau plan, where the islands are deliberately deindustrialized.
 
There are plenty of ways to do it (all of them awful). Downfall is an easy one. Or the US could go the "starve them out" plan: mine the harbors, bomb the farmland, and keep up a blockade, crippling Japan demographically. Another option is a sort of Japanese Morgenthau plan, where the islands are deliberately deindustrialized.

The problem is that the US needs Japan against the Soviet Union. How can the Soviet Union collapse and how can the US Marshall Plan to Europe for aid never happen?
 
Hmm, I should have said, how the US can attain its manufacturing capabilities equal to that of post-WW2 (in which the US produces about a larger percentage) today.

That might be literally impossible. The United States in 1945 had something like 50%+ of the world's industrial manufacturing capacity and about 48% percent or higher in terms of GDP. That's just unsustainable (as much as I love America, of course).
 
That might be literally impossible. The United States in 1945 had something like 50%+ of the world's industrial manufacturing capacity and about 48% percent or higher in terms of GDP. That's just unsustainable (as much as I love America, of course).

Which is pretty much why I set the POD limit before 1900 since post-1900 would be nearly implausible (unless WW1 and WW2 gone really bad for Eurasia).
 
The problem is that the US needs Japan against the Soviet Union. How can the Soviet Union collapse and how can the US Marshall Plan to Europe for aid never happen?

How about a scenario where the Nazis defeat the USSR? Then the Western Allies sweep in and defeat Nazi Germany. No USSR=no need to build up Japan or Germany.
 
Which is pretty much why I set the POD limit before 1900 since post-1900 would be nearly implausible (unless WW1 and WW2 gone really bad for Eurasia).

Yikes. Well, you might have to entirely switch up history where the USA* exists but the industrial revolution really takes off in America, and absolutist Europe lags behind for a very long time. Something with that start might do the trick, though it would be tough to bring that to 2014.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
A nuclear war in which the US's antimissile capability limits damage to about half the industry, USSR is smashed early, the UK, China and France go down in the first exchange, and then some crazed psychopath nukes every other industrial centre on the planet?
That might well do it, but it's the same way that the last man standing is the strongest man in the room...
 
weaker , pluralised Trade Unions ...

the US Union system is what most would call a 'closed shop' and is ed facto and de jure illegal in much of the (rest of the) Developed World .

part of the reason that the Japanese chose the UK as their EU base of operations in the 1980s was the way in which the excesses of the Trade unions had been checked by Mrs T following Uncle Arthur's ( dubiously legal) Escapades i nthe early 1980s
 
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