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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that almost no one buys products based on the stability of the supply chain, so irresponsibly-global supply chains will beat out responsibly-global ones on price.

The problem is our tools to addressing this are either (a) some sort of tariff arrangement, which will almost certainly be political footballs far more than they will address any real problem, or (b) some regulatory/compliance arrangement, where regulated industries will have to sift through billions of dollars of compliance paperwork annually describing their supply chains, and which may be subject to the scare-of-the-month and international political football. Neither is ideal.

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There is a third option. Apply the same regulations to the manufacture of all products sold in your country. You want to manufacture in China and sell in the US, that's fine -- but you have to do it in accordance with US environmental rules.

That does two things. One, no more cost advantage to global manufacturing in whatever place has the least respect for the environment, which lets others compete better and removes the race to the bottom. Two, there are lots of different and potentially conflicting rules everywhere, so then you get more specialization as there is an advantage to smaller companies that only comply with the rules for the markets where they're selling.

There's a fourth option: close down all U.S. trade ports for a month once a year. No paperwork or other administrative headaches. "Just" a dry run once a year.

I think the power grid is tested like that once in a while after the 2003 blackout - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Lon...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04287-5

Chaos monkey, but for supply chain. I actually like it...it would make our systems more robust.

That'll just mean stockpiling before the month it gets closed.

Not if it's unknown _which_ month. Then you'll have to keep a stockpile year round, which is precisely the objective of grandparent.

I've been advocating this strategy for years having direct experience in a highly regulated manufacturing sector business. I like to put it this way: The US has the responsibility to protect the world from the (externalities of competing in the) largest consumer market to ever exist. We currently do a pretty good job at protecting ourselves from that market, not just with environmental laws as you mention, but with safety and worker's compensation laws as well, but it is frankly a travesty to think that our current strategy is "good" by any definition but an entirely economic one, and as we are seeing now with this pandemic, even that is dubious. There is still an enormous toll on the environment and on our shared humanity when we allow business to off-shore their dirty practices, not to mention the loss of domestic security. Climate change and the Holocene extinction show that the externalities of business are everyone's problem, and we should start acting like it.

How does one enforce this effectively? Are companies required to self-regulate (chuckle), or does this require massive supply chain transparency?

This is already partially done with Automobiles, for example. Comply with local pollution and safety standards or a lucrative market is closed to your exports.

I think you mean that for example, the US pollution standard needs to be fulfilled by Volkswagen if they like to export VW cars to the USA.

However the OP meant more than that: that the VW workers, employed for example in Mexico, who assemble cars for US export would get the same worker rights as they would get in the USA.

And the same would hold for pollution at the factory and so on.

That would make things cost a lot more money.

The reality is much of our economy is built off the backs of essentially slave labor. And we're all guilty of benefiting from it.

In the short time, I agree with you. However, this also reduces the incentive to produce in a foreign country. Hence, this would even move many jobs back to the country where the consumers live. This in turn keeps the consumers' money in their country. Hence, their total wealth increases, largely already because the outflow of money is reduced. With more money available at the hands of the consumers, things don't need to be much more expensive than now.

> The problem is that almost no one buys products based on the stability of the supply chain, so irresponsibly-global supply chains will beat out responsibly-global ones on price.

We should qualify the term "irresponsible" here:

1) If we somehow avoid events like covid19 for an entire decade (for example), in retrospect the self-imposed inefficiencies could be called "irresponsible". I think the real issue is that there are costs associated with guessing wrong in either direction regarding when these events will occur.

2) Just a guess, but I would think having interdependent supply chains reduces the chances that those countries will go to war. Giving up that benefit could also be seen as irresponsible.

Britain didn’t seem convinced by 2) for the EU probably because it was spared the worst of the war (invasion)

Hm, what about some kind of "chaos monkey" where a random number generator decides which countries will be embargoed and for how long? (Half-joking.)

Wow, the idea of a real-world chaos monkey is genius.

Robotic or biological?

Perhaps COVID-19 is a chaos-monkey?

This is genius. Better to have an artificial failure inducing system that have rare but catastrophic natural failures.

This really should be implemented!

We used to have this; it was called piracy.

lol, very true! Put in that perspective, maybe it's a better idea to contain have international cooperation -- like we did for piracy -- to compat the problems that cause a country to be shut down, rather than assume international trade will always be a crapshoot.

Events like this should weed out firms with irresponsible supply chains, unless we’re forced to bail them out.

Extended period without events will weed out firms with responsible supply chains and thus the other type of firms are very likely to be the majority - the majority of the population will depend on them. So Governments will always be forced to bail them out.

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