Is The World Deglobalising?
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Concentrating all manufacturing in China leads to power centralization, as is evident, and forms the basis of creation of another hegemony.
The effectiveness of military power goes only so far. There is no realistic scenario where the US and China go to war. So China has great leverage and will continually nibble its way to global dominance.
The US took the manufacturing crown from Britain, France, and Germany (the “made in” label was invented by the British back in the 1880s to try to fend off Germany’s rising manufacturing), Britain having supplanted India and, to Anlässen degree China, through force of arms. Manufacturing was only partially centralized.
The US had lots of land, water transport, raw material, and young labor. This worked for the new steel processes and other mass production. The Europeans were busy with other things.
China had a young workforce, lots of raw material and partially took over some of the legacy industries (e.g, steel), but really picked up new stuff. The USA was busy with other things.
Now China faces a demographic cliff (the workforce is aging) plus major unemployment (of the uneducated) and isnstarting to get busy with other things.
What’s different now is automation, telecom, and automated management. Economies of scale may not apply so much with next gen products from phones to clothes to lawnmowers. If you can get a factory in a box it may be better to sprinkle those around to reduce supply, demand, and transport shocks. These may be more locally configurable.
It seems kind of absurd but I remember when packet switching was wasteful and absurd.
China had at least the following combination of factors in its favor.
- Geopolitical alignment with the current superpower resulting in favorable trade deals across the globe with no need to expend military and diplomatic power to maintain trade.
- A government which actively supported infrastructure investment with a corruption level low enough to actually build infrastructure with the investment.
- A trade policy which encouraged foreign direct investment but required companies to train locals and ultimately leave IP/management decisions locally.
- A strong investment in STEM education, including importing of talent from abroad.
- A stable governing structure.
- A young, low-cost, urbanizing labor force.
There are likely many more factors in China's economic performance. But it would be foolish to believe that China succeeded because of cheap labor, or that manufacturers are going to move shop out of China as soon as labor costs rise. At this point I'd be skeptical that most US manufacturers who outsourced to China could relocate their manufacturing without the technical expertise of the same Chinese manufacturers they outsourced too.
While this gives disproportional power to some states, this also means no state gets all the cards since none has all the industries. China without its partners is nothing. This is a form of mutually assured destruction, which isn't ideal but better than most alternatives.
Who in the world has genuinely condemned the Uighyur atrocities that China continues to this day?
China is wielding a lot of clout using its supply chain hegemony.
The problem with manufacturing is that you cannot spring up factories and upstream vendors in an instant. Costs lot of money and time.
For many industries, looks like China has captured a good part of the value chain. So, costs of setting up a semi conductor fab is compounded because you have to set up not only the fab, but the whole ecosystem of vendors and suppliers required to run the fab, not to mention the logistics to transport raw materials and the finished goods.
China has industrialized itself at the cost of developed nations (unlike industrialization in other nations, which was built from within). It has fast-tracked its way to manufacturing top spot with blatant IP copying, aggressive value chain development.
Parliaments, heads of state, etc have referred to this as "genocide" despite insufficient evidence (the view of US state department lawyers). I don't know what further condemnation you're looking for there.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/29/leaked-papers-...
(edit: *genocide is a significant label, whether China's mistreatment qualifies as that is probably to be determined, but evidence of mistreatment exists)
That's what both my post and the US state department lawyers said. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-...
To your link, evidence, Adrian Zenz, etc, are things I would prefer not to discuss on this site. :)
But China also can't afford to invade Taiwan. That will be a major economic and political disaster. It would bring China back 20 years. Regardless of actually winning the war or not.
How? Globalization allows companies to exploit comparative advantages, such as cheap labor. The increased demand for labor, over time, leads to higher wages, which leads to a number of social and - obviously - economic benefits.
It's certainly not the end all, be all, but better living conditions through economic activity is the primary driver the large decline in extreme poverty that's occurred over the last half-century. Globalization didn't play a role in all of this - export-led economic policies, along with targeted investments in prestigious industries by many countries, also helped. However, this decline in poverty, at this magnitude - absolutely - would not have happened without globalization.
Case in point. In 1990, there were almost one billion people living in extreme poverty in East Asia, South-East Asia, and the Pacific. In 2017, that number fell to 27 million. Source: World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/10/07/global-....
> Concentrating all manufacturing in China leads to power centralization
Employment in the Chinese secondary sector is almost static over the last ten years. GDP from the secondary sector as a percentage of GDP is down significantly. While the size of the secondary sector in absolute numbers, iirc, has gone up, this is due to Chinese manufacturings moving towards higher priced exports.
China will likely continue to be world's largest manufacturer for a long time. However, there is nothing that suggests that global manufacturing continues to centralize there, and there are a - very, very, large - number of signs suggesting that companies are off-shoring away from China to lower cost countries.
> as is evident, and forms the basis of creation of another hegemony.
To quote Game of Thrones, "Power is Power". Russia has an economy that is smaller than Italy's by several hundred billion dollars. Russia also has a blue water navy and nuclear weapons.
> The effectiveness of military power goes only so far.
Agreed.
> There is no realistic scenario where the US and China go to war.
We can agree to disagree here. There is no reasonable scenario, but there are a number of realistic ones.
> So China has great leverage and will continually nibble its way to global dominance.
Let's assume that China's economic and demographic issues are beginning to catch up to them, which is very common for middle income export-led countries with poor demographics. They share borders with two nuclear armed countries and several other highly developed countries. Their largest trading partner is their largest "adversary". Their lines of communication run through other countries, and they are dependent on other countries for their energy needs. China also happens to be a highly heterogeneous country, which has been concealed by a thin-veneer of nationalism.
In short, China much more closely resembles 19th century Germany than it does 20th century Russia or the United States.
This meme about Russia's economy being smaller than Italy's needs to die.
Russia is the 6th economy in the world, Italy is 13th with the difference being about 1.7 trillion dollars. GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) is the proper way to compare economies [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
Except that it really isn't. PPP is a way to forecast long term exchange rate convergence and not make "short run" comparisons. See Taylor, A. M., & Taylor, M. P. (2004). The purchasing power parity debate. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(4), 135-158.
Going to my original point, Russian GDP from manufacturing in 2019 was $219.22 billion. Italy's GDP from manufacturing in 2019 was $298.4 billion. Italy does not have a domestic nuclear weapons program. Russia does. I don't hear about the Italian military in the news. Russia's is mentioned almost every day.
This is a short run comparison. See the article I mentioned earlier. There is little evidence that PPP comparisons, over a short period of time, are meaningful.
PPP is calculated by a basket of goods. There are valid reasons for why the price of, e.g., flour costs X in one country and Y in another country that have little to do with the purchasing power of their respective currencies. This is why there are a disproportionate number of island nations that have high price level ratios - it is expensive to import 'stuff', and this inadvertently increases how much this 'stuff' and what it is eventually processed into costs.
You can't say 'really' and at the same time refer to an article with the word 'debate' in its title. Between World Bank's position and a single article I would take World Bank any time.
Take a look at the drop of the ruble to dollar exchange rate in 2014. Without adjusting for PPP this would mean that everything produced in Russia suddenly lost half of its value, which is absurd.
I thought China shared borders with the following nuclear-armed nations:
Pakistan
India
North Korea
Russia
Good point though, and I stand corrected. It's easy to forget just how large China is.
How many wars have been preceded by everyone believing they can't happen.
Admiration is a different thing from respect.
I might have thought bullies were ridiculous specimens of the human race, and yet, I never dared to cross them.
edit: typo
You were saying? :-)
Just saying... :-)
The worry with someone like Trump getting elected is that he will actively go backwards and thats a problem. Its bad enough that he increases tension within the population. If he actually delivered meaningful progress then I think there would be some argument to have him back. But he actively moves backwards on critical issues that we need to move forward on if we are to compete with China. The worst that typically happens with Democrats is that the country stands still which is not great but thats the low bar we have had for decades now. It is entirely possible that a charismatic outsider can come along and provide some tiny semblance of progress like the Obama years. That is the best case scenario for 2024.
Trump was the first to assert that China represents a danger to US.
Many world leaders, including Trump, started viewing China as a threat to global stability and peace during 2016-2018 or so, in response to domestic power plays and foreign policy and diplomacy changes initiated by Xi.
I think they intend to pressure Taiwan into surrende, by economic and diplomatic means. That will be a very long term goal. But China is good at executing ambitious long term plans and having long term strategies.
Historically, a lot of people in the early 20th century thought that war wouldn't (or couldn't) happen because it would be too unimaginably destructive. The first world war was called the war to end all wars, and despite later usage originally it was not meant ironically.
If both were big and deterred no major war.
If one was overwhelming then they either were the 800 pound gorilla sitting where it wants or the war was short by definition. Even if impactful it is the occupation which would gain focus of history.
If both were limited in military strength they would find there was too much "friction" to do more than shift borders a bit even after handfuls died in skirmishes - they would be unable to hold big gains.
Even in WW2 that was not the case, there were huge swats of land where people were living as if there was nothing going on.
US is already at war with China on the trade. There is full blown cyberspace and intelligence war going right now.
So that you are not running twice a day to a shelter does not indicate there is no war.
I think that in 10 years we can reach that point.
If we take that number literally than you seem to be implying that China is 50 years behind in semiconductors which would pit their feature size in the micron range or about comparable to what Sam Zeloof is doing in his home lab.
https://qz.com/852770/theres-a-limit-to-how-small-we-can-mak...
The situation with photolithography is similar. At some point there was a N-micrometer process where transistor features actually had an N-micrometer size. Now we have 3nm processes where all the feature sizes are 40nm+, but it's called "3nm" because the new FinFET, GAA, etc. transistors produce the same results as what the old transistor tech would if it could be scaled down to legitimate 3nm sizes.
So I have no doubt we'll eventually have "picometer" processes where all of the physical characteristics are still solidly in the nanometer range but they'll use something like 3d transistors to deliver densities comparable to what a hypothetical "0.01pm" process could deliver using flat FinFETs.
Isn't that overstating it? I'm aware of swathes without fighting, but wasn't trade pretty disrupted? Wasn't it pretty apparent in port towns if not elsewhere?
And then the biggest initial change for many people was that they needed to convert their cars to wood fuel.
Single town level can support at very best a rough age of sale technology level and even then almost certainly no bronze.
I will have problem getting most of the goods, probably will have to pay a lot more for basic utilities.
Life might get overall harder, if this competition escalates, even though there might be not a single bullet fired.
We had "cold war" earlier, now it was "crawling war" in a lot of places.
The problem with national security, is its peacetime leverage is only as effective as your actual willingness to fight a war, even if both sides lose.
Ideally, then both players jointly avoid war.
But in the real world and history, surprising dynamics, contradictory local politics, or miscommunication, can all quickly or slowly lead to wars both countries lose.
The alternative, is consolidation in one country with effectively guaranteed national peace.
Which game do you choose, because in the real world, there is no game where both countries agree to never go to war credibly and solve everything with dice matches, or single handed combat between leaders.
Countries that seem to be reliable allies are almost always on the same side in a leverage battle with another entity. Friends become competitors quickly when there is no shared enemy. And old enemies can also suddenly become fast friends, when circumstances change.
I will also be the first time, in a direct war, that the US homeland is directly in danger. If the US invades or bombs mainland China it might be game over, the consequences could be enormous.
Like Joshua said: "The only winning move is not to play".
Since WW2 the US has been at war (oh sorry "military conflict" / "police action") nearly constantly in one form or another.
In all cases they have fought an enemy that was completely inferior.
In Afghanistan, the US used B1 bombers, Drones, Cruise missiles, attack helicopters, an F35, Warthogs and whatever else they used.
Against an enemy that primarily had AK47, some bazookas and various equipment they stole from the allies.
China is inferior to the US in a military sense, but far less so than the other countries they have fought since WW2.
China may be able to take out an aircraft carrier with supersonic missiles (maybe not), may be able to fight the F35 (less so the F22).
The other major problem for the US is that Taiwan is 200km off mainland China. China can bring nearly an unlimited supply chain going.
The US is far away and transporting equipment, soldiers, military hardware etc will be expensive, slow and prone to Chinese submarine attacks.
If China reunites Taiwan by force, it will not take long, and there is is really nothing the world can do, that is sane, except yell, scream, sanctions and so on.
Nobody wants to find out what that war would look like.
We can just assume it'll never happen and fight any war outside the physical battlefield (with economical or cyber wars), while trying to spread to other planets.
The aftermath is like 536 ("the worst year in human history"), but orders of magnitude worse. Radiactive ash covers the sky. The Sun don't shine for years, possibly decades. Temperatures drop to permanent winter, everthing freezes. Food doesn't grow. Animals die. Civilization collapses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
Only geothermally powered, self-sufficient survival bunkers can support a handful of people, and it's a fight against time. The genetic pool is decimated and our biological evolution is basically halted. Hope you printed out the whole of Wikipedia, and can find the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the arctic somehow.
And many were air bursts that are less bad because they don't throw a whole lot of soil into the air. A lot of the multi megatonne ones in particular. They weren't simulating actual attack scenarios with those as they were so overpowered there'd be no point. It was just a big dick measuring contest at that point. I think the Soviets won with their Tsar Bomba and I guess the US wasn't willing to escalate it further.
But yeah I think most of the nuclear winter scenarios were based on massive conflict with those multi megatonne bombs which are no longer in use.
Maybe you're right, we don't have the capacity to blow up the Earth quite yet.
China/US would be the 3rd such example and would likely be similarly limited in scope.
In a China/Taiwan conflict it is likely Taiwan itself that will prevent China from taking over. Wargame scenarios tend to indicate extreme losses on China's side as their invading ships and submarines are sunk and troops on Taiwan's beaches are slaughtered while Chinese coastal cities (where most of the population, wealth and industry are) are pummeled by missiles.
Even if they "win" the outcome will look more like the Soviet invasion of Finland where a Red Army general remarked "we have won just enough land to bury our dead" than a glorious victory.
In such a situation if the US got involved at all it would likely choose to swoop in and mop up after a bruised and battered China retreats, maybe presuming that the CCP has lost moral authority and the leadership could be couped.
The fact that wargamed invasions of Taiwan are so costly for PRC is probably why they resort to saber rattling and economic pressure. It's cheaper.
https://thediplomat.com/2021/05/why-a-taiwan-invasion-would-...
Taiwan is serious about military defense and they are well prepared. They have been for a long time. But China simply has far greater numbers and they are very highly motivated.
This means that you need complete air and sea control before invasion. Thats costly and difficult, if you want the island to be intact afterwards.
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would almost certainly entail a prior reconciliation with extreme, prolonged economic disruption from severe global backlash. China desires to control Taiwan as a matter of territorial integrity (from its perspective), diminishment of U.S. strategic influence, and in general national pride. I wouldn't be surprised if the first inbound missiles targeted TSMC and other important industrial assets--less incentive for the U.S. to come to Taiwan's defense. (Not that I think the U.S's decision to intervene would be predicated on mere industrial ties.)
PRC is obviously massively more powerful but Taiwan can still exact a toll way WAY higher than they'd be prepared to tolerate.
They will not make it more than two days against the Chinese. Taiwanese has pretty bad air defence systems. There's a reason Turkey wanted to buy S-400 and that's because American air defences suck badly.
I don't know what wargames you've been reading but recent western ones finally comport with analysis out of PRC from last few years that a PRC-TW confrontation would be relatively expedient and low cost for PRC, militarily. Current assumption is PRC will secure air dominance within days and enable a lot of relatively uncontested actions in absence of US intervention.
TW barely has enough ordinants to arm their prestige military aquisitions. They certainly don't have enough missiles to damage PRC coastal cities without venturing into warcrime scenarios. It's why currently US is desperately trying to pressure the island into adopting porcupine strategies to bleed PRC in case of invasion. But island isn't biting, the establishment is actively stalling reforms because reinstating civil service and telling population their only hope is to fight like insurgents is politically unworkable.
>invasions of Taiwan are so costly for PRC
The invasion itself isn't and hasn't been for a while. The concern has been dealing with US intervention, i.e. SLOC blockades and potential trade sanctions. Taking TW with relatively little cost is almost forgone at this point. Not to mention PRC has host of other strategies without formal invasion like blockade/quarantine they can do right now without single boot on the ground. There is almost no one except the most deluded actual shills that gets paid by TW (i.e. Ian Easton) who thinks TW can put up much of a fight against PRC anymore.
They can help a lot (and with relative safety) by firing MCBMs from far away, downing Chinese satellites, supplying arms and materiel beforehand and sending subs to sink chinese invading ships but aircraft carriers, fighter jets and long range bombers would all be useless.
Most wargame scenarios indicate a heavy loss of life on all sides (partly coz the US does insist on using easily sinkable aircraft carriers). China might be able to win if it threw everything it had at the invasion but realistically the government would topple if it deliberately tolerated extreme loss of life (60%+ attrition rate for invading soldiers, perhaps?) - especially if it was doing it invading their Chinese "brothers".
If it were as easy as you said it would already have happened.
Submarines are complicated. The Taiwan strait is not very deep and any US subs would have to deal with UUVs in large numbers and sonarphones. It would be a difficult target.
Shooting down satellites is a very risky proposition. If the US attempts that, the Chinese will retaliate. The US has a lot more to gain from satellites than the Chinese do.
Once those satellites are shot down though the US has no accurate ballistic missiles. The ATACMS relies on GPS for good accuracy. There is no GPS-independent seeker for ballistic missiles in US service. It's also a slow and easy to intercept missile.
It's not happening because, as a Chinese General put it, why today and not tomorrow? The more time goes on the cheaper and easier and quicker it will be, so there is no reason to rush it.
Because China is only going to fight in its backyard it doesn't have to fight ship for ship and plane for plane like the Soviets or the Germans. It wants to bring the US to fight it in the worst possible place and then beat it assymetrically using every conceivable advantage.
Since 1945, when nuclear weapons were invented? Zero.
And I think it's only a matter of time before someone crazy enough to use them gets their hands on nukes. Even countries like North Korea have them now. Despite his appearance KYU is not that crazy but maybe this successor is.
Most people believed direct conflict with the USSR by the US cannot happen due to the nuclear weapon risk, and it didn’t. Since the end of WWII, no nuclear powers have been in a war directly with each other.
I agree with you that someone will eventually use nukes in anger, I’m really surprised it hasn’t happened yet, actually.
De-globalisation would be a disaster for developing countries. Being under-developed makes them heavily dependent on developed countries, they can only develop by increasing their engagement and integration with the global economy. Globalisation promotes access to technology and skills, access to markets, access to development capital. Cutting that off globally would be a humanitarian disaster and permanently relegate the developing world to economic backwater status.
Localisation reduces efficiency, that means production requires more labour, more energy and produces less surplus value. It makes local development harder, not easier.
We have seen this play out with recent experiments with protectionism. Tariffs to protect US manufacturing hammered US manufacturing, by cutting off supplies of parts and raw materials. In the longer term retaliatory tariffs would have cut off access to foreign markets for US goods too.
Ultimately, globalisation is about individual liberties. The freedom to travel, to communicate and trade on equitable terms with whoever you choose. Are you really saying that this is a bad thing that must be stopped?
> Concentrating all manufacturing in China leads to power centralization, as is evident, and forms the basis of creation of another hegemony.
Sorry but 2 is an effect of 1, free trade leads to concentration.
* Iceland has plenty of fish, they do the fishing and buy everything else.
* Ukraine has good farmland, they grow all the crops and buy everything else.
* China has cheap labor, they do all the labor intensive manufacturing and buy everything else.
It is national economics 101.
International organizations (like WTO, WIPO [even if we think the copyright is too long, and most of patents are dumb, etc] various UN projects), free trade agreements and such are supposed to keep that "power centralization" in check (eg. with things like ISDS and so on).
But in the end we can't just ignore politics and hope for the best. Yes, maybe, maaaaybe in the graaaaaaaaaaand scheme of things we can. (After all if humanity fuck up so much that we go extinct maybe that's "the best".) But, but, it also doesn't mean that markets and free trade doesn't work. (They work, but they are not miracle tools.)
Unfortunately, almost all historic international organizations (no matter if the UN, EU, NATO or anything else - hell, even the WHO!) operate on a fundamental requirement of trust and the assumption that there are no obstructionist forces and everyone largely plays by the established rules.
This fundamental assumption has been dismantled, starting in the early 90s with the collapse of the USSR... now we have the US and Israel blocking every investigation into war crimes (I do understand the reason though, given anti-Zionist resentments across the world), China not willing anyone to investigate what happened at Tiananmen Square or in the Uyghur concentration camps or with Covid, the Russians protecting the criminal Assad regime, Turkey fighting with Greece, Hungary and Poland blocking anything that could help refugees or hold their regimes accountable for corruption and a boatload of other bullshit.
This goes from the human right council barely condemning genocide, if it is committed by economic ruling partys to WHO recommendations, towing the party line when it comes to them damaging economic interests.
Globalisation creates more inequality.
Every resource is used optimally.
The argument for it is that the end result is more wealth for "everyone" (on average!)
Would you like to be used optimally? As in, extracting the maximum work possible for as little compensation as possible?
There are animal rights groups that won't let you do that to horses.
> The argument for it is that the end result is more wealth for "everyone" (on average!)
Looking at the average and not paying attention to the distribution is a mistake.
Note the quotes around "everyone" and the exclamation mark after average.
Non optimal resource allocation -> less overall wealth.
And free global market is the machine that has optimal resource allocation as optimization goal.
Unless the wealth is well distributed, it makes no difference for the bulk of the population whose bodies are being optimally allocated.
But I am arguing from the standpoint of "global-trade-as-a-machine". And in this case an idealized machine with only one dimension (fish or crops or labor).
Of course if you live in Ukraine and have only one leg and love developing microprocessors, the "global-trade-as-a-machine" will pick that up and let you work on that rather than work as a farmer (one-leggedness and interest/drive as two new dimensions). (Although just as likely it will allow you to move to another country to pursue your interest.)
And of course governments have noticed the inequalities produced by this machine and are doing its best to counter that with more or less enthusiasm.
That's not really how immigration and economic opportunity works. Our one-legged farmer would have to be astonishingly lucky for that to happen.
> And of course governments have noticed the inequalities produced by this machine and are doing its best to counter that with more or less enthusiasm.
It's more like they are taking measures against other governments that gain strategic relevance based on these factors. One way to counter China's advantage with manufacturing cost would be to force China to adopt and enforce better labor laws and increase compensation.
In fact, having a single global standard for compensation and worker rights would be a wonderful thing. As long as it's good and includes progressive taxes on the accumularion of wealth and a mechanism to compensate for undue political power from wealth.
Now just imagine what the rest of the world has to cope with.
Of course this is partially a domestic policy thing, but how we view foreign labor now is not working.
The "stop exploiting poverty" sophistic frankly doesn't map to reality. If the US pulled out of trade in Vietnam they would get worse off instead of better. The issue isn't the result of an action to be stopped which turns the entire notion into dross covered up with guilt tripping.
It is the same "leave the cookies on the table to gather dust while trying to eat far richer imaginary cakes" mental pattern as IP zealots who snub overseas direct sales with things like region locks because they think they could get more selling distribution rights months.
Anyway, more problems come from market concentration and market power abuse by single companies than from international competition (except by the point that international market power abuse makes governments powerless).
You can say that, but...
> But is reshoring the answer to a nation’s manufacturing woes? Not completely. Better than reshoring is the broader concept of resilience — a manufacturing sector that can adjust in real time to supply chain disruptions anywhere while minimizing any loss to customers.
> The pandemic is inducing actions by U.S. manufacturers to enhance the resilience of their supply chains. And the government is not standing idly by.
Relevant excerpts on the topic from [The Emerging American Industrial Policy By Keith B. Belton ](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-emerging-amer...)
It's also crucial to note that the car companies in particular have managed to demonstrate a shocking lack of foresight here: half the problem with the chip shortage was executive panic at gasp maybe having old stock on hand, and completely mispredicting that car sales would go up and not down.
For starters, you need factories i.e. physical buildings. Pick and place machines, machine shops for making precision plastic moulds, the trained personnel to run them and re-shoring all the knowledge for how things work and how to keep them working.
The entire supply chain for electronic components will also have to be re-shored as well. A lot of that depends on a local network effect (why Hong Kong was successful and why Shenzhen is successful).
In Australia we still have small pockets of electronic manufacturing (most of which was decimated by Japanese imports in the 1970s) so we are 50+ years from when things like that were routinely made here and rebuilding that is not going to happen at the stroke of a pen, it's going to require a lot of investment. That is something governments used to do quite well but the neo-liberal political movement not only killed manufacturing in this country, but also makes it impossible to restart it.
It costs me 1/10th of the price to have our circuit board made in China compared to the quotes I had from Australian factories. That is the kind of price difference that would kill my product stone dead.
Maybe the whole field changes with 3d metal printing getting cheaper allowing more experimentation by individuals and reducing the barrier to the field?
I guess once somebody works out how to do it as a desk-side or small factory, high volume situation it might turn things around pretty rapidly on a precision injection mould but there is little incentive to develop such a thing while we still have access to the chinese market, even for complex moulds.
You're right about injection mould design being a dark art, there is so much to be concerned about that just getting something to fall out of the mould cleanly might as well be magic.
Business intelligence meanwhile is more about reverse engineering and observation while not crossing the red line into illegality. Things like deducing the state of thejr competitors by the number of cars in their lots at what time of day - "more cars at odd hours and weekends may hint at a frenzied rush and that they may be running behind schedule".
As someone who works in the reputation management industry, we often monitor major social media platforms for keywords and conduct sentiment analysis on individuals of interest. This is done with the intention of ensuring the correct narratives are understood by the public, and to ascertain potential internal threat actors/whistleblowers before they embark on their mission.
source: friend who did factory liaison for USA companies in Shanghai
Materials cost? Salaries? Cheap CNC machines? Several mechanical engineers on call with long shifts?
The whole world is currently offshoring this work to Chinese firms who already have the experience.
Not to pick on you in particular, I see this sentiment a lot. China is no longer cheap labor, their dominance in manufacturing is due to expertise.
We could skip that step by hiring experts from foreign manufacturers. Pretty sure they would prefer USD over what they are making now (judging by the outflow of capital from Asia to the west).
And there's nothing preventing the addition of a "mentoring" clause where they have to train Americans with these technologies.
Operation paperclip would be a good place to look for an historical precedent.
Life After Globalization (Peter Zeihan) - 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kch4Z1GpNOQ
Contrast that to say law firms and private practices of doctors. While there may be some law offices who warrant their own skyscrapers they don't come close to matching even insurance companies in centralization. Different situations may call for different approaches.
Logistically difficult and custom goods are where 3D printing and automated mills work especially well, and time sensitivity favor local approaches. If you make eyeglasses to order 99.99% of the time, prosthetics or similar then it makes sense.
I know that happened to banking, but the original poster claimed it was for nearly all US businesses. But I can no longer find that discussion nor the relevant laws, and I'm hoping trawling your cite(s) might lead me to them.
Regarding your theory, I think it’s bunk. There has been a consistent trend to centralized big companies throughout American capitalism long before the 80s. Just look at the history of GE. In fact, the growth of index funds actually indicates a shift away from big corps (or at least big corps with disparate business groups) because investors can pick and choose markets better without relying on conglomerates to do that for them.
But it should be obvious that massive urban centers are not due to US laws… because we have 1k+ years of cities before that with good documentation of life and laws in those cities.
[0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
Manufacturing processes are also changing thanks to automation and more general tools, like laser sintering 3D printers, that don't require extension retooling to make a completely different part. This is doubly true if savings from scale get nuked by shipping from wherever your factory is.
there's also diminishing returns. there's an optimal point of factory size.
A few outliers like Huawei make news but not a global trend.
Countries/EU started passing intense laws and regulations that means companies start operating differently in different places. Faang will stay for a while but listen to how many HN commenters skip the EU for GDPR reasons. We may soon see national scope app stores based on recent anti trust cases.
No one even tries to work inn China anymore. Japanese internet is still using Yahoo, and india is on-shoring their own industry fast. Russia practically has their own internet like China.
Big hosting companies are setting up smaller and more frequent data centers in each nation. Just look at the AWS Korea and Indian data centers as a map of what’s to come. Or cloudflare selling “hosted nearby” services. They’re selling shovels for a world where data hosting has national borders and export laws.
No, we do not. For example, Google and Yandex are intensely competing for the Russian search market.
Not entirely. [0]
Here is Yandex’s market share in several countries (Statcounter, July 2019):
Russia: 48.79%
Belarus: 22.38%
Kazakhstan: 21.88%
Tajkistan: 15.12%
Uzbekistan: 11.87%
Turkey: 10.67%
Kyrgyzstan: 9.61%
Turkmenistan: 6.73%
Ukraine: 5.98%
Armenia: 4.20%
Moldova: 3.40%
Georgia: 2.85%
Azerbaijan: 2.06%
YouTube sucks.
The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.
The mythical "cost of embargo" can tell very different story.
If anything globalisation is only accelerating, but changing form. Big industrial agglomerations become more and more independent producing the select set of stuff which they specialize in, and then integrate with other agglomerations across the globe.
I think informational globalisation is on the way up. The internet has made it easy to do knowledge work globally, and the pandemic has normalised it. Broadband is becoming pretty ubiquitous, and projects like Starlink should make it easier to ignore geography when it comes to information, knowledge work, culture and entertainment. I live in India, work for a company in the US, write SaaS apps that are used and paid for globally, watch movies and read books from all over the world, and have working relationships with people I've never met.
Physical globalisation is cutting down, on the other hand. India is trying a major push towards self sufficiency, and from what I can see there's a lot of cottage/home industry coming up for food, localised farming, clothing, mechanicals and infrastructure. The "import everything from China, it's cheap" philosophy is no longer the default option — it's turning into "buy local". I actually think this is a good thing — having industry decentralised is more anti fragile, and probably good for the environment, economies of scale be damned.
So yes and no, depending on which aspect of life you're talking about.
Maybe the value of the materials traded will erode since we will value tech and virtual “materials” higher and higher, but the actual flows of physical materials cannot go back to where they were 50 years ago, unless a global war erupts and the global standard of living and population goes to hell.
Back in late 19th century Britain managed to pull off a globalization through empire building, advancements of technology as well as global trading. The two world wars and the cold war put globalization on hold for seventy years, but then US picked it up and started the second trend, which gradually see setback after the financial crisis.
What are you going to do with the UK? Count it in? Count it out? or have a big, artificial jump in the charts at the time of Brexit?
If your objective is to write an history book about early 2000s and you want to put a chart then you'd count it in and have a big drop with a footnote
But I would say count it out, since else the UK statistic would be 0 for some time :D. So it's "historical GDP of the current EU"
The elephant in the room is cars and the power generation. Cars will become increasingly electrical for sure but in colder climates, I don't see how the electric cars are yet able to solve that issue . This is due to the fact that electric cars are simply not as good as in warmer climates(https://www.insidehook.com/article/vehicles/can-electric-car...). Power generation is probably going to have a major revolution quite possible but unfortunately, many people are still against nuclear power and wind/solar will require massive investments that I only see developed countries being capable of doing so.
I can't say we will be able to remove fossil fuels from our lives so quickly considering our whole society has been extremely dependent on it. Especially not so soon.
Source?
You did say disappear. I agree transportation will have the most amount of progress but where it is warmer all year round.
I work in a company that makes stuff for robots and if that manufacturing comes back from China, no matter where it then goes to, the market for robots is going to go up massively.
Because there is no way you can produce most of the stuff we make in China cost effectively without massive number of robots.
of course a big problem is that the created economic productivity is not distributed in an equitable way, it tends to be captured by the elites (let's say Jack Ma, but of course the political elite is even more powerful and rich in many aspects). automation tends to amplify this effect. (capital vs labor)
If some countries/regions decide to not do business with China then that will have a twofold effect. First China loses business, which means unemployment, internal tensions, and likely fallback to producing less valuable things, which means that there will be even less economic surplus to spend on those "luxuries". And second, that region now needs to find different trade partners, which is a disruption in trade, supply chains, which has a cost. (Which could be spent on a lot of other things, eg. education, infrastructure.)
Of course this is hard, because it's a coordination problem. Were the participants able to find a good solution magically then it'd be great, but usually their own short/medium term interests override the long term ones.
Talking about those I just fixed my Play installation by "uninstalling" in settings, which really reinstalls the original one and re-updates.
This is the second time my Android phone nukes itself (by popping up "App is crashing, closing it" over and over again) without any interaction from me, because of some hidden update; last time it was Chrome, and the fix is always to reinstall the offending app which not a single help page in the whole internet describes!
I'm building my own phone: http://radiomesh.org
So we better deglobalize before it is too late and reduce the influence of dictatorships like China, Russia and Saudi-Arabia on our free world.
In fact a growth of wealth in these countries even makes the situation worse, because wealth stabilizes a regime. Instead first a country must democratize and only afterwards it should be allowed to profit from global trade.
This is awful, but it's not something that ever have been significantly better in any of these countries.
there are valid critiques of the (neoliberal) concept of "just open up the markets and rich merchants will usher in proper democracy", but those need a bit more sophistication than "guys globalization totally failed thanks for coming to my TED talk".
democracy itself needs thousands of conditions to flourish. there are no silver bullets for organizing societies.
This type of pseudo-globalization is a recipe for inequality, and thus instability.. regardless of how many ideologically motivated “economists” gave their blessing to this idiotic idea.
I have been avoiding stuff that comes from China for many years it makes feel happy you know that i am not funding the biggest global mafia
Basically in the article he outlines what the economists didn't get right and then pointed out that globalization caused virtually all income inequality. That the damage done has basically enabled the existence of people like Trump or movements like Brexit.
The irony is that Krugman still doesn't see the forest through the trees. Not to mention big changes like many countries agreeing upon a minimum corporate tax rate. Which gives huge advantage to anyone who doesn't play ball. Though this is now less to do with economy anymore.
This is bipartisan. Trump started the war with China, and Biden pressed the gas pedal. Tons of countries are clearly declaring their intentions and allies. You can clearly see where this goes, there is no alternatives. However, it's not going to be China as the victor. Sure they have all the factories and largest standing army of any country. They'll not be pulling any trigger and be accepting their depression; see Greece for what is about to happen to China. Followed by a peasant revolt.
typo at: Vietam