Just to play devil's advocate, who cares about machine tools? They're so noisy & messy. What's so good about them?
Doug ----------
They are an index of the depth and breath of industrial development and capability, since they fabricate the base of manufacturing. That is why Taiwan was near the top and the US was just above France at the bottom of the list that Dennis posted.
If you have no machine tool industry, then you can't make the industrial and manufacturing facilities and equipment required for production. If you have to buy those tools, then you can't sustain your own industrial capacity since these are very expensive, usually custom, product specific and amount to an investment that never pays for itself directly. How do you show a profit on a row of customized CNC machines? And it gets worse. If you have no MT industry, then your not going to innovate or experiment with production systems because you have to design, engineer, and order everything in advance--and the reciprocal relationship between tooling and manufacture is lost. So all that amounts to high risk and low profit, hence the accelerated downward spiral of US de-industrialization. Bye-bye high skill, high paying jobs, bye-bye healthy middle/working class, hello drugs and fat, hello rust belt, hello prison-industrial-complex.
And it just keeps on going downhill. With no MT industry then you lose the engineering skill base. How many high schools have drafting (or CAD) and machine shops any more? Who brings home a jack screw they turned to show Mom? Nobody. How many students are graduating in mechanical engineering relative to EE or CS?
So who cares? Evidently nobody.
Chuck Grimes