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Comment by Flatcircle | Hacker News Reader

After the first couple questions he really dropped a lot of wisdom.

For instance, the story about the US's fear of the Japanese owning the flat screen tech in the 90's.

and...

"Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%."

"We've lived in a cultural and intellectual space just as much as we've lived in a physical space for thousands of years."

much like the internet itself, you gotta read through lots of hay to find those golden needles.

The comments from folks about how bad the interview was, probably stopped reading after the first couple of paragraphs and missed the meat of the interview.

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> "Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%."

What sort of evidence does he cite for those numbers?

The denominator in a percentage matters. Once you take out housing, food, fuel, insurance, education, etc. -- how much of our remaining expenditures are goods (mostly) made in China?

While less than 3% of my household expenditures are electronic goods, the vast majority of those goods are made in China -- this despite a concerted effort to buy domestic products.

From the article: “Total foreign imports are only about 11% of American consumption, and Chinese imports are 3%. Most of any national economy, including ours, is domestic; you can't import a haircut, a house, or a hospital visit. So global trade is probably overblown as an issue generally. Which isn't good news; it's just to say that, as usual, most of our problems are our own.”

You seem to have forgotten the core expenditures of a household: Shelter, Food, Personal Care and Entertainment.

Very little in there is coming from China. Certainly not food and most likely basic goods like stationery, toys, electronics, furniture and clothes. Seems reasonable to think that chinese goods fit the 3% figure based on the expenditure in those categories.

This means that raising housing costs, interest rates and debt, taxes, and medical costs reduce his figure for foreign imports as a percentage of spending. That increasing the amount spent on those things is “good news” regarding trade deficits.

Unless he is using these numbers to suggest we need to prioritize driving down land prices and rentier practices etc more than worrying about trade imbalance. But this certainly does not seem like his intent.

At any rate, the numbers 11% and 3% are as fictional as the Taylor Lorenz quote but the amount of skepticism differs greatly. This hints more of ideology based beliefs than fact based.

I’d be willing to bet that every single household in the US has products more than 3% made in China.

Sounds like you need to read the article.

Sound alike you need some critical thinking. Roughly speaking, what percentage of your household products are manufactured in China?

Percentage of household products manufactured in china is irrelevant, he's talking about spending (excluding investments)

so music, movies, television, video games, internet, cellphones plans, healthcare, schooling, food, gas, sporting events are all included in this equation. So importing Chinese goods isn't that much money when factoring the entire US consumption. That's a novel idea, that I never thought about before reading that article.

Still - the point remains: what % of the consumer goods in every single american home is made in china.

you're talking about something completely different, which is fine, but doesn't at all refute what Andreessen is saying

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