Europe is the same. People don't know and don't care, and there's a relationship between these things. Not caring means there's no incentive to learn, which in turn results in a lack of awareness of relevant knowledge related to manufacturing in a broad sense. This appears to coincide with the rise to prominence of the service economy, which involves fewer and fewer people being trained in manufacturing-related fields and fewer manufacturing firms being active (esp. proportionally to the economy at large). It's also apparent in media; manufacturing does not feature at all in mainstream media of course, and the handful of journalists who do report occasionally about the manufacturing industry or related topics, are generally lacking in technical knowledge/background, resulting in an inability to grasp what developemts may or may not be relevant and how to make sense of the evidence they might stumble across by accident.
Sorry to sound all jaded, but I'm afraid that Western society overall has degenerated to a state of only caring whether something is featured on TikTok and whether we can afford to purchase it, without exhibiting the slightest interest in, or awareness of how or where something is made. Manufacturing is regarded as the grimy, shady enterprise dominated by greedy CEO's that one would do well to avoid at all costs because surely, making stuff is boring, polluting, irresponsible and overall undesirable and it's best left to parts of the world we don't have to see or care about. Owing stuff, on the other hand, is fantastic and more stuff = better, so let's all run to the store and get a bunch of new flat-screen TV's, because we don't have one in the upstairs bathroom or the storage shed out back yet.
