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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>They are dumping e-waste on us, and we pay for it. A fantastic trade trick.

To be fair, western corporations were the ones who made the big move of offshoring all goods manufacturing to China in the first place and turn them into e-waste in a constant race to the bottom of lower and lower costs and higher and higher margins along with insane executive pay for their genius move. Hardly China's fault. Hate the game, not the player, and this game was made by the west, and China has just gotten really good at playing it.

The best way to fight this is to bring back manufacturing (it's already cheaper to build certain stuff in some EU countries than in China) along with products that last longer and are more easily repaired. Western consumers would just have to stomach higher cost of goods, and western corporations would have to stomach lower margins, but it's definitely doable if desired, but it won't happen.

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Lowering costs and increasing margins is the game of the business everywhere, east or west. It is largely the policies of Chinese government that made manufacturing in China especially lucrative, even considering the bad business culture.

>Lowering costs and increasing margins is the game of the business everywhere

Sure, but there is no free lunch. You're getting cheaper stuff but for that you're sacrificing your local industry and the environment by offshoring the environmental damage to places with less environmental protection laws. There is no free lunch. The right way to lower cost is by pursuing automation, not by offshoring the environmental damage and using sweatshop workers in areas with human rights violations.

If you avoid the cost, you benefit from an externality and have a free lunch for a limited time (or, lunch someone else paid for)

Thinking about local industry and environment is a government's job I would say. Government sets the rules, and businesses optimise profits under these rules.

I would say Western governments did a poor jobs protecting their countries from unfair competition from China, but also the practices are indeed unfair, I can't agree Chinese government is not to blame.

>sweatshop workers in areas with human rights violations

Such as USA with $11B of goods manufactured by forced labour in prison camps?

(Note: this is not whataboutism, it’s pointing out hypocrisy.)

The service company I used to work for got acquired by a much larger US based company. So the CEO flew in to to do some presentations, answer questions, etc. One thing that stuck in my head was when he was talking about price based competition: there are people flying in private jets around the globe negotiating a single penny off a dollar and that won't stop any time soon.

You are wrong in pointing your finger to the business: we the buyers are to blame! We don't buy "good", we don't buy "local", we don't buy "our farmers are fairly compensated", we don't buy "ecological": we only buy "cheap".

We lost our manufacturing jobs because we insisted on pretending Western wage but Chinese prices:

1- We discovered ourselves rich when we found out that a median Western wage could buy us much more stuff if spent half a planet away, but we never took the time to appreciate the consequences of such huge capital flows (hint: our wages made us rich up to the moment the wages were no more).

2- We stopped accepting polluted air in our cities, but did not tolerate the higher prices of those factories that installed filters. Net result: industries either outsourced or collapsed.

There is no bringing back manufacturing without ensuring that a Western and a non-Western blue collar enjoy the same quality of life.

That would be an acceptable answer if we were all wealthy within the same country, but we both know it's not the case. People buy cheap because they can't afford to buy expensive. Putting in 60 dollars in a USB hub is some privileged behavior. Many people just need those prices to be low, because they don't make much, because rent takes away most of what they have, etc. As to why they're not paid much, I'll let you circle back to said companies that keep increasing their margin with cheap chinese products, without ever redistributing that wealth.

> People buy cheap because they can't afford to buy expensive.

Not really: people bought cheap because they couldn't afford to buy expensive, and then they lost their job, and now they can't even afford cheap. When we started exploiting poor people from far away, in a moment we found out that our wages could give us a much better life than their wages, but we never wondered why, and we never got upset that they couldn't afford the same quality of life like ours (while doing exactly the same job).

The illusion was very sweet while it lasted, then outsourcing came and the illusion vanished, and we passed from being rich with a blue collar wage to not having any wage.

Not being able to buy expensive does not imply buying cheap: buying fewer things is still an option. We bought cheap because we were greedy, because we hated breathing pollution and we wanted strong unions in our factories, but we could not care less about the same issues for the "others". And we just kept illuding ourselves that we could keep up with a better life for the same job, just because.

We, the Western buyers, were greedy. And idiots. We swapped our jobs for cheap smartphones.

> Putting in 60 dollars in a USB hub is some privileged behavior.

If we want to take manufacturing back to the West, just having a USB hub must be considered a privilege.

Low-wage jobs will come back to the West when we will change our definition of a decent life to include what a low wage can provide, and not expect that each kid plays with several-hundred-dollar electronic toys.

>You are wrong in pointing your finger to the business: we the buyers are to blame!

That's a faulty logic. History has proven you can't just leave the responsibility to the profit-at-all-cost free market to run things and then blame the individual consumers for the consequences. Otherwise we'd still be buying polluting gas guzzlers while LA and other cities would still be smog filled hell holes.

Was it the fault of consumers that decided to only buy polluting cars 50 years ago? Or was it that consumers just had no say in what manufacturers were making and were stuck with an offer of only polluting cars?

The solution was, you guessed it, government regulation from the EPA and EU to fix this and forced all auto-makers and industry to be less polluting and it was a great collective success that improved the air quality in our cities.

Same with e-waste and wasteful consumerism. All this can, and should be government regulated for the sake of our environment. The reason it's not yet regulated, is because unlike with car emissions, the environmental damage has been offshored from the west to developing nations on the other side of the planet.

Consumers are voters. Ever tried to push a political program based on import taxes in order to protect the local economy? Ever tried to convince your factory comrades that Chinese people have the right to clean air and strong unions, just as we do? Ever tried to convince people to pay more for the same object, just because it was made locally?

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