How the West Was Lost
notochina.org
notochina.org
China (and, indeed, the rest of Asia) set standards lower. Economic activity is permissible if it makes life better for someone. Damage is acceptable.
The economy acted exactly how a neutral observer might expect it to and is rerouting all the manufacturing activity into Asia. This is the outcome where everyone gets what they want - and although a lot of people complain loudly, nobody in the West is willing to put up with the conditions needed to change the situation. All the stuff China is doing to get ahead is illegal in the West (eg, the pollution, letting IP restrictions go without much fuss).
Reactionaries are trying to legalise the economy away with about as much success as all the other attempts of the law to overrule the economy. The only thing that can stop the Chinese economy is China - if they don't handicap themselves then 1.4 billion will have the worlds most impressive economy and it won't be close. The military implications of a competent China are scary for the Anglosphere, but avoiding their goods isn't going to change the situation.
You are claiming that the West did not have lower standards in the past which is not true, even the West went though the lower standard phase. You cannot just jump to higher standards from the start.
America needs to dog food it. Don’t like it? Don’t consume so much wood and export your catastrophe.
As for American Indians, as far as I know, they practically can’t do anything productive on their lands without an Act of Congress, it’s a crime.
Small- and medium-time loggers are hardly paying rent though. I don’t know where the money is going. I’ve worked in supply and demand. It’s all crooked. Millers are thieves, as are others, etc.
Of course, China is strong in many ways, but we would be remiss not to note China's weakness.
Chinese citizens were certainly not really happy with the environment; air pollution is probably one of the few issues that have really galvanized the population and resulted in protests in China's political climate. There's certainly been efforts made on that front, not least because in a country with severe water and land shortages polluting what they have doesn't make sense. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/23/china/china-air-pollution-mic...
This will go down as a strategic blunder of historic proportions. It may still be recoverable, but it is getting late...
I don't see how the West is lost, even after the author claims that if there's a war against China, "You’d need to walk around naked because you have no shirt, pants, socks, or underwear". Global-yet-Western Companies that outsourced manufacturing to China like Nike and Apple seem to be doing very well.
Furthermore, why is the fact that Chinese companies can compete after 30 years (while following the CCP rules) a bad thing? Did globalization go wrong because this wasn't supposed to happen? Was China supposed supposed to just be the world's cheap manufacturing for eternity? If so, a better title for this article would be "How China Was Not Lost".
After the collapse of the USSR western companies and governments saw shiny ($) ($) in their eyes and could not help themselves. They thought giving up some intellectual property rights was worth getting a leg up on their other western competition because they thought they’d be able to fend off completion local to China as they presumed it would adopt western ideas (law, intl conventions, governance, etc.) despite history indicating otherwise.
I agree that this is hyperbole and a bad example.
I'm not sure how long the author thinks such a war would last, or the aggregate US stockpile of textiles, or the source of cotton inputs into Chinese textile manufacturing, and so on...
Both I'm going to go out on a massive limb here and assume that even a decade-long cold war with China wouldn't result in a single American walking around naked who would have otherwise been clothed.
There are geopolitically significant manufacturing sectors where the west has ceded important ground in the last couple decades. Daily-use textiles isn't one of them.
> The death spiral begins for the global brands who are forced to give up the low end of the market and focus on the high end, resulting in loss of both economies of scale and profit margins for the global companies.
Except that profit margins are much fatter at the high end of the market, and successfully positioning yourself as a luxury mass-market good is a license to print money. (Exhibit A: Apple.)
These kinds of material had lower profit margins, so the big companies gave up that share of the market. The big companies profit margins got even better, the smaller mills were making money, everything looks better to the investors.
Then the cheaper mills get better and can now do medium-grade work. That's still less profitable than the biggest work, so once again the big companies withdraw from that market when they can't compete on price and their profit margins get even better.
You can see where this is going. There's nothing stopping the upstart that you're ceding some of your markets to from entering into your market and taking it over, and at that point you have no moat and no differentiation, while those companies have a full range of other products to fall back on and earn revenue.
We’re already seeing this play out with really compelling non-Apple devices.
However, it’s worth noting that Apple isn’t a great/perfect example for the phenomenon because it has the confluence of both software and hardware plus ecosystem lockin.
https://www.ft.com/content/2b843e4c-c745-11df-aeb1-00144feab...
Wind Turbine Tech Theft
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626683457/judge-orders-chines...
And many more
Someday, not too far away, Foxconn will no longer need Apple.
Anyone remember RCA? The Radio Corporation of America? "The most trusted name in television?". Owned the NBC network. Made Spectra computers. Today it's just a front company that licenses out the brand.
Anyone remember Western Electric? Made most of the telephone switching equipment in the US. They eventually became Nortel, which went bankrupt around 2011.
That could happen to Apple.
Do you want CRT manufacturing back in the USA? No? Me neither.
That's what's happened with PCBs and phone displays and enclosures. Sure, they're important. But they don't make much money. In fact most of the price of an iPhone ends up going not to the component manufacturers and assembly houses in Guangdong but to this weird looking building in Cupertino California that doesn't make anything at all.
And yeah, it's true: that could happen to Apple! But it will happen to Apple when Apple's products have become valueless commodities, and we'll all be talking about something else (Tesla Home Robots, I dunno) that has captured the global attention as the new growth fad.
In the classic example for Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, England is better at producing wool and Portugal is better at producing Wine, therefore each should focus on what it does best and gain efficiencies through trade.
But then the industrial revolution happened and England had a far easier time automating weaving than Portugal could grow grape vines. Path dependence is important for technological innovation and this can not be protected with IP law alone.
It's not about the product as much as it is about the production engineering.
The US used to be a comparatively[1] low wage labor environment, though. We used to lead in making cheap goods because making goods in the US was cheap. It's not anymore.
That's not a value judgement. Maybe it should be. Maybe we should relax minimum wage legislation, increase immigration quotas to expand the labor pool and make up the human condition shortfall with sturdier safety net programs from the government (call it "progressive libertarianism"). That would be interesting to discuss.
But it's not the country we live in. If you want PCB stuffing to be economical in the US as it exists today, you need to figure out how to stuff PCBs economically with people paid $10-15 an hour. (And in such a way that people paid $2/hour couldn't just use the same trick.) That's a technology problem, not a social science one.
[1] It's complicated by the development of cheap global trade. The reason the third world didn't get involved into global trade like this until the 90's wasn't that it didn't have lower wages, but that the cost of transporting the goods was so high that it would eat up the advantage. And this is why heavy industry like auto manufacturing still exists in the high-wage west, because cheap labor doesn't make a car cheaper to ship.
Why should it take that long? AFAICS it'll happen the instant enough people realise what they're paying a premium for is fifty percent empty image and fifty percent lock-in and limitations. Just admit it: Having your online identity owned by Apple or by Google is a difference without a distinction. And paying twice as much for a device made by exploited suicidal workers in a Chinese factory as for another functionally pretty much identical device made by exploited suicidal workers in a Chinese factory is just stupid.
(That comes off as snarky, but I don’t mean it that way. Don’t use Google DNS)
It does seem that archive.is blocked Cloudflare DNS at some point in the past [1]. But that seems to have been resolved.
[0] https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-minds...
In my experience the phrase more or less means functionally sufficient, which is not exactly the same as say ‘not as good.’
Sometimes you want the best thing you can buy, other times you just want one that does the job. Of course, that is a different distinction than being pragmatic vs. cutting corners.
I guess ‘chabuduo’ sometimes sits in the gray area between the two.
There are crappy Chinese knockoffs on Amazon now but there's no indication I've seen that everyone in the country is happy with just staying there.
Source: me, a US brand owner who has worry about product liability...
None of the stuff I buy is counterfeit, although plenty probably have designs copied from other products. Sometimes I’ve wondered whether I should buy that tool or pack of LED light bulbs from the local hardware store instead, but either way I’m buying products made in China and sold by a big American corporation.
I don’t know where this wormhole goes, although there has been some good discussion here covering multiple aspects and viewpoints.
Well, much of that so called intellectual property progressed out of tax funded research. The so called west use to mass produce RND which made a rather epic combo. It was the neoliberal agenda that didn't care about slow long term progress that killed it just like local manufacturing.
> the West exploited us in the 19th century
"the west" should probably not be the title of the entity but damn, China was completely and utterly obliterated. This of course much like Asian leaders from the region did to other countries and among their own long long before.
One cant make an omelet that size without breaking many many eggs.
Walking alone in a forest behavior is very different than having a companion, replace the companion and it is again very different. Now if you add more and more people it increasingly matters less who they are but as the numbers go up the weirdness grows until you get things no single human would ever do. Groups of people are not a person. Free form self organization will quickly look very sensible but without people at the top entitled to say NO to stuff it may also turn into utter chaos over night. All ever so slightly refined qualities people might have are lost in the chaos theory and you get uniform instinctive behavior.
I want pepper, the next guy wants rice in the giant omelet. Some are lactose intolerant so the end result wont even have cheese in it.
Imagine that! No cheese!
The US is around 4% of the world's population.
If I had to choose, I would prioritise the welfare of Chinese people, who are 18% of the world or the welfare of Africans, who are 17% of the world or the welfare of Indians, who are 20% of the world.
Our loyalty should be to humans, not to the delusional political configuration of the moment.
Otherwise we might as well go back to loyalty to traditional ancient Greek city-states.
China peaked about two years ago. Today sharp left policy shifts are signaling a quick erosion of their economic integrity, which will turn out to have been very brief between the prosperity brought on by what's mentioned in the article and the coming collapse due to a lack of fundamentals built into the society.
You can't make this shit up.
It wasn’t true (in the sense of a sustainable rate), but it makes for good appearances and propaganda.
It should be noted that one of the surviving Liberty ships today, the SS John W Brown, was the third Liberty ship launch of its day... at Baltimore alone, not counting the other shipyards also producing Liberty ships. Which should give you an idea of the sheer scale of Liberty ship production (it's the largest ship class ever built).
I do agree that the decades of steady 10+% growth are over, largely thanks to demographics/aging, but a Japan-style stagnation seems more likely than an outright collapse, unless Xi does some really catastrophic miscalculation that triggers WW3.