There Is No Shortage of Reasons for the Broken Supply Chain

I think you’re partly wrong on chip factories. While most new plants have been opened in Asia in the past few years, there are major plants under construction in the US by both Intel and TSMC [0]. Additionally, the US still has a large number of fabrication plants [1]. And US-based semiconductor companies handled around 48% of the global market share in 2019 [2].

So I think it’s not true to say that US had completely lost its edge with semiconductors, nor that the US moved all its manufacturing capacity to Asia. The US has been and is still competing to be one of the largest players in the semiconductor industry, even if it might not be first place anymore.

And I think it’s fair to question whether the US needs to be in absolute first place. Asian countries have significantly more population and therefore need for semiconductors compared to the US, so it makes sense that eventually, manufacturing capacity would be more relative to local population levels.

- 0: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/semiconductor-fabs-dot..., https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Intel-b...

- 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

- 2: https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20...

That sounds right to me. The press has tried to push all sorts of narratives, but buried in the previous Bloomberg article on the ports we learn that 30% of truck appointments go unfilled. The WSJ article yesterday quoted Long Beach port guy saying only 60% of their truck appointments are being utilized.

Dockworkers being poorly paid is definitely not true. It's been a while since I lived in Long Beach, but these were among the most desirable jobs you can get. Any time the union announced it was hiring, they needed to do a lottery to even get the opportunity to apply. Whatever the reason it is that not enough people have this job, it isn't that they don't want it or that it doesn't pay enough.

Trucking pays pretty well, too, but comes with a different set of challenges. You have to be willing to live on the road, sleeping at truck stops or in your own cabin, never seeing your family if you even have one, sitting for 8-12 hours a day and destroying your spine orthopedically. It takes a special kind of person to want that job no matter how well it pays.

Multiple companies are building chip fabs in the south west right now.

Dock workers here in Long Beach are well paid. (100K+/year is not uncommon)

Chip making is technologically difficult, even if you can buy all the same machines TSMC uses. It is evident from previous failures that a nation can't just say "we need on-shore chip capacity" and pay to get it. in the US, Intel fell behind TSMC and GF can't catch up. The situation is more dire most other places.

Container shipments are up like 20% from pre covid levels. It isn’t that there is a shortage so much as people haven’t adapted to the increased demand for goods.

I don‘t think salary of the workers is the problem here. It is more about regulatory/union obstacles that prevent ports from competing and being automized

Well they are not wrong. Lumber price was sky high. Change the time scale to 10 years and that peak was still unprecedentedly high. Inflation was and is still high. The mainstream media are reporting the truth, as far as I can tell.

Hard to say if that would actually be effective. I can imagine there would be some improvement if you had assigned some drivers from the national guard's motor pool. But it could also be the case that throwing more people at the problem actually makes things worse, almost like in the Mythical Man Month. I imagine there is probably a ton of skill and "lay of the land" around trucking at a specific port and that kind of experience needs time to cultivate.

I don't actually know, just speculating.

Army? So, instead of paying more for labor to clear that market, the port operators get free labor?

Aren't they operating 24-7 now? I think the problem is there are too many backed up boats and not enough ports.

The National Guard Transportation Corps does have units qualified to load and unload container ships that can be called up in the event of a true emergency, but I doubt this qualifies. They still have regular full-time jobs. The active duty military can't be used for something like this unless we're actually at war.

Of course, me saying I "doubt" this qualifies is a personal opinion. As far as I know, it's pretty much up to the governor of each state to decide what counts as an emergency worthy of activating the Guard. I don't think it's ever been done as a response to somewhat higher than average inflation rates, though. It's usually natural disasters and long-running riots that the police can't control.

If people were starving on the streets due to a shortage of food then yes, states could activate the national guard for help.

However getting your new iPhone a couple of days late doesn't constitute such an emergency.

Who's going to pay for that? Have government subsidise the ports by providing them with free labour? Has capitalism failed so immediately that there's no other way to get workers?

They can maybe use the National Guard? They've used them to administer vaccines and drive school busses in some states.

Self-sufficiency is another term for poverty.

We have centuries of observations confirming this.

How local do you want to go?

Fundamentally, the theory of trade is that there are comparative advantages in different areas. At the time the theory was introduced, the early 19th century, by David Ricardo, much of that advantage was in agricultural products. Goods such as timber, cotton, wool, grain, tobacco, sugar, hemp, silk, and spices were either much more readily grown in certain areas, or were highly specific to specific climates. We see much of this today still.

Extractive commodities also are very specific as to location, with tin, copper, gold, and silver particularly notable in ancient times. In the industrial era, this is dominated by fuels: coal, petroleum, and natural gas most especially, as these are both 1) highly concentrated energy sources and 2) very unevenly distributed geographically. Strategic minerals --- non-fuel resources which are vital to advanced manufacturing but are not widely distributed, are another concern, and was first recognised by the US during World War I (see the "Harbord List").

Another set of inequalities emerges though in the sense of regulations and power-balance between specific economic sectors, most especially capital and labour, though also of environmental regulations. One view of China is that it's been exporting not only hugely disadvantaged cheap labur, but a tolerance for accepting tremendous long-lasting economic damage without pricing that into the cost of its goods and services.

There's an argument that manufacturing, if all extermalities and labour differences are priced in, should not be a geographically differentiated service, in general. Specific sectors of expertise might emerge (a discussion on its own), and there's the question of being able to motivate or redirect a massive workforce on short order (again, a strength of China's, though one India or Indonesia might also be able to match, eventually Nigeria as well if its population continues to rise).

That would leave us with some locally-provisioned goods and services, and some imports. Overall the world might look more like the late 19h century through mid 20th, where local advantages in natural production account for some global trade, but most food and finished-goods production is relatively local.

Well for starters you'd be eating nothing but canned vegetables and jerked meat for most of the winter if you live far enough north to regularly get snow.

Do you mean everyone has a small plot of land and grows food to feed their own families?