Ask HN: How do you deal with the end of globalization? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you deal with the end of globalization?

27 pointsdev_082 comments

With China and Russia trying to isolate themselves from the world....Cold War 2.0 is coming

I believe the era of growth is over. What are your preparation for low growth era?

This only really matters if you live in China or Russia. Everyone else will do just fine or better as manufacturing in China plateaus or declines and Russia’s sphere of influence recedes to its own border.

The US will continue to grow modestly but steadily with decent governance, lots of resources, and a growing population.

I keep wondering who'll work in all the factory jobs. How much will the jobs pay and how much will the rest of the people need to be able to make in order to afford Made in America things.

Would appreciate insight into this.

We need legislative changes to make that lifestyle sustainable, because at the current rate it will become less and less so.

In the long long term, probably will only end with legislation, revolt, or dystopian outcomes.

It's just simply way too expensive to make things in America.

We can build all the $B factories we want in the rust belt but shareholders will move it to places like Mexico at the first sign of profit.

I'm seeing a real flow of software jobs to mexico too in the coming decades.

Is it expensive, or is it that dollar is just too valuable to people out there?

If they don't provide you with labor, (e.g. because they want it for themselves or they do not want to pollute their land) what will you do, raid them?

yes that's one way of looking at globalization, advanced economies export expensive and stable currencies to less advanced parts of the world in exchange for labor.

That's the early 20s century model perfected by the Brits.

Obviously it didn't last long but at least it made sense.

I personally think we're gonna see a huge boom in 3D printing for manufacturing. People overlook this technology, but it's been chugging along with steady improvement for decades. It has not yet been effective or cheap enough to compete with Chinese manufacturing, but if China indeed isolates itself from the world, then that may be the spark required to ignite a major integration of 3D printing in the West.

We've been hearing for a decade now that the robots are coming to take all our jobs.

I guess it's time for them to actually turn up to work.

Unfortunately, for people living in China, such as me, the only reasonable ways, under Xi's reign, are either to start a rebellion or to go abroad. Actually, the term "Run-ology"(润学), which basically means the study of running away, has been quite popular in China for some time. My current plan is to find a new job in a western country, hopefully.

I used to think that my country was just an authoritarianism state and things would get better, but now I know that it's simply dictatorship. I feel so sorry about what's going on in the land I love so much.

I heard people are stopped from moving overseas

Is it risky for you to be writing this?

Posting things like this will get him in the jail. (Just kidding.

Posting English content on a US based platform is safe for me. I'm glad that I didn't skip all the English classes when I was a kid. :P

However, I WAS asked to report to the police station once for cursing Xi himself in Chinese on Weibo. A lot of words have been banned or censored, such as Winnie the Pooh, just because someone jokes that Xi looks like it. It's indeed very oppressive and scary for anyone who is even only slightly curious about politics in China. Looks like Cultural Revolution 2.0 is about to be generally available.

Be careful, and use Tor if possible. Best of luck, friend. I’m sorry you and your country are going through this.

> Cold War 2.0 is coming

This would be a blessing. I think we can trace most of our problems back to the end of the cold war. If we have some common thing to fight against we stop fighting each other (see Watchmen- ironically though it was about ending the cold war but a level down it works)

More realistic is a 1984 style "continuous but meaningless war" that lets the various parties pursue their ideological aims without fear of revolt from inside. Though I have no idea how to prepare for this

"I think we can trace most of our problems back to the end of the cold war. If we have some common thing to fight against we stop fighting each other...."

That never happened during the Cold War from what I've read, and from what I observed starting in the early 1970s it steadily got worse.

Note that the 1970s was a time of detente in the Cold War, so it supports the OPs point. As we started to forget about the Russians, we started to fight each other. The 80s is often held up as a time of renewed national unity, and it corresponds with heightened Cold War fears.

On the other hand, the 60s saw race riots and massive demonstrations against the Vietnam war. Plus the McCarthyism in the 40s and 50s.

On a more positive note, hell yea here comes another space race!

> This would be a blessing. I think we can trace most of our problems back to the end of the cold war. If we have some common thing to fight against we stop fighting each other

Except for that whole Jim Crow thing in the south…

This was hundreds of years ago. My still living parent grew up during segregation.

It never worked in the war against drugs and war against terror.

It's highly unlikely that we will enter a sustained period of low growth. It is too advantageous for all parties to continue interconnecting economies. Any country that chooses to isolate themselves from the rest of the world will find that it is much more difficult to be self sufficient than they imagined.

Its more like US trying to isolate itself from Russia and China (for seemingly different reasons), don't you think?

It is as if US wants to rollback globalisation, because they feel it is starting to disadvantage them.

But for many companies Apple for example, a globalised world is better, in both ways in terms of efficient supply chains and getting access to markets.

International trade is a magic bullet in economics.

Since this is HN, here is a book recommendation:

The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization by Peter Zeihan

I’m going to add the usual disclaimers here about everything that comes with listening to a guy who has been predicting doom for a decade. He is very entertaining though and he has some unique insights and some unusual data comparisons - it’s fun to read.

To be fair, he did predict events in Ukraine a few weeks before they happened [1]. That counts for as much credibility as one can have with a title of “geopolitical strategist”

[1] Jump to 7:45 https://youtu.be/UA-jOLF2T4c

Around February 2022, I consumed every piece of Zeihan-related content I could find online. He is very entertaining but I had to give up on him because he plays a bit fast and loose with facts and makes pretty wild predictions.

As an example, early in the Russia-Ukraine war, he claimed that Russia wanted to secure one of the geographical gateways into the country and could be expected to invade Poland and Romania circa this coming winter. He said that these gateways have been historically important for Russia's defense for hundreds of years and that they want to defend them before their population becomes too old to bear enough soldiers to take them.

This is exemplary of both the good/bad with Zeihan:

- He is entertaining and has unusual takes, as you said.

- He tends to have an essentialist worldview: Russia is obsessed with its own topography so it invaded Ukraine, China is isolationist so Xi doesn't care about what goes on in other countries, etc.

- He is a bit of a state department shill (probably necessary for his career, he seems to make a good amount from speaking gigs for these people).

- He fixates on age demographics and draws many (probably too many) conclusions from them. Big props to him for introducing me to the population pyramid though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid

- He stopped making this claim around ~summer and I'm sure will never reckon with the fact that he sincerely said he thought Russia would invade a NATO country within a year in early-mid 2022, on multiple podcasts.

I have heard him spout too much nonsense for me to listen to consistently at this point but I still check in on him just to hear what he has to say regarding major world events (like the NS1/2 pipeline bombings).

Biden was warning about a Ukraine invasion a few weeks before it happened too. So Biden is equally a geopolitical guru.

That is not what's happening at all. China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa, and lots of other countries are currently building an alternative to western economy. These countries are where majority of the world population lives.

Absolutely.

China has a very public long standing policy of engaing in global economic colonialism via its "one belt | one road | silk road 2" strategy.

China having less(?) to do with the USofA in no way translates to China withdrawing from the world - rumour has it there are many other countries other than the US.

The US is the largest and wealthiest economy in the world. I don't think China will be able to simply swap out the US for Kazakhstan and these other 1B1R countries and throw in the towel. In fact, I just recently read that China is overhauling the entire program due to various failures: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-belt-road-debt-1166396163...

> The US is the largest and wealthiest economy in the world.

For now, imagine what a Trump second term might achieve, particularly given the real life example of Truss in the UK:

> The past six weeks have been not so much a cautionary tale as much as a textbook example of what happens when political ideologues are let off the leash, allowed to shut out anyone with opposing views and given the keys to the kingdom

( Rob Harris, Sydney Morning Herald )

Your linked WSJ article indicates that China's plans are coming to roost sooner rather than later:

> ... have left countries struggling to repay their debts to China.

as this is pretty much the point of economic colonialism, just as the British once ended up with Hong Kong as an outpost for a century so too will China end up with a ring of outposts spanning the globe for a century forward, ideal for those distributed ground stations for its space programs coupled with duty free ports for trade.

The belt and road 'strategy', in practice, meant Chinese companies using Chinese workers to build random bits of infrastructure (roads, ports, railways) in less-developed countries, after Chinese state agencies lent the money for them to those countries.

The things built are mostly not well used (and unsuited to the local country, being designed to serve Chinese-licensed mines or similar), and the loans are looking fairly shaky. There's antipathy in the victim countries because the promised jobs for the locals never eventuated, or worse, they were hired and then sacked in short order. One commentator said something along the lines of "rather than 5-dimensional chess it looks more like financial naïveté, and a soft power disaster."

Definitely. And trade agreements will/do favor this alignment more than before

Still, the majority of educated labor flow is moving towards the US and China/Russia make it comparatively incredibly hard for immigrants to move btwn these locations. Moving between China and India would be difficult, whereas all of these countries generally can largely rely on English being their common language esp India and S Africa, where English is one of the national languages.

I think limited ability to share labor/culture/etc will limit this alternative western economy and the US has not abdicated its position yet`

If you're the best of the best in machine learning in China or India and are looking to make a move, or write a book...it'll likely be to the US and in English rather than to Brazil and in Portuguese.

>Still, the majority of educated labor flow is moving towards the US and China/Russia make it comparatively incredibly hard for immigrants to move btwn these locations.

That's false as well

First, China is already outpacing US in both quality and quantity of research https://physicsworld.com/a/china-overtakes-the-us-in-terms-o...

China is also outpacing US in number of STEM graduates now, many of top STEM universities in the world are now in China

https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-is-fast-outpac...

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone given that China has a strong education system that's free and a population of 1.4 billion people.

Furthermore, there is already a huge brain drain happening from US to China thanks to xenophobic policies US has been enacting lately

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3196372/reve...

China alone is a comparable population to US and Europe. Russia also has a strong education system inherited from USSR, and has some of the top tech talent. For example, companies like Yandex and VK managed to outcompete US companies like Google and Fb in Russia. This hasn't happened anywhere else in the world.

From your comments:

- no debate on population and the ability to grow STEM graduates at a faster clip

- no debate on the general availability of education

- many folks debate whether there is enough innovation or space to execute on research that isn't in line with whatever the political stance is at the moment. This is a long debate and anyone with a proper understanding of US history can find many instances where the US government has also shut down innovation. That being said, foundational efforts that we all rely on daily have come from DARPA, NSA, CIA and other government funding sources and made it into global consumer goods

This is from the physicsworld.com article you posted: "They found that 1.67% of papers with Chinese authors were in the top 1% most-cited articles in 2019 compared with 1.62% of papers with US authors." This is not what one would call "outpacing".

To your other points re: Yandex and VK. I assume you know the below, but lets discuss:

Russia has fully blocked its competitors and built in-country players as has China. Not quite the same as growing invasively the way FB, Insta, Whatsapp, Paypal etc have from an external position. The government has advantaged their own players, which is fine but not the same. This I can say from reading and from first-hand experience having worked on growing Paypal in Russia and other emerging markets.

As I recall, Russia did allow Google and Fb to operate while Yandex and VK were ramping up.

I guess there are two questions:

1. Will we have hyperinflation at some point?

2. Will we have all-out war?

Everything else can be answered by the standard "don't spend more than you make, invest in a broad-market index, keep your reserves available".

But if you have those things covered, you may want to consider thinking about what you could do to mitigate 1 and/or 2. You don't have to go bunker-prepper, but you can do things that could help in those cases (and even in boring emergencies like hurricanes) - for example, change your eating habits to always have 2 weeks-6 months of food on stock, rotating through it, things like that.

Doubt any side is uncomfortable or desperate enough for war. The comfortable don’t fight. They do, however, demo their weight.

There’s at least one or two month blockade somewhere in our future where trade halts between the super powers, where we all glimpse into the economic center of the earth that we know certainly exists. Economic morbid curiosity.

Then we’ll all sit back and go “woah what a world, economic death does exist, US is a big deal, so is China, so are all these other countries, let’s diplomatically settle this, we’ve had our exploratory mushroom trip in the desert, as all people need to, you know, find themselves”.

But no war, we’re all far too weird for that now at this point.

Wait, I just realized I rhymed. We did the same nonsense with the nukes during the Cold War. There’s something magical about human natures curiosity for “we just wanted to see what it would be like, but we would never …”.

Sounds a lot like what was said before a world war; things can get ugly way faster than we're used to - and it may not even be a war directly involving the US or any particular country.

Russia and Ukraine has already caused massive secondary effects throughout the world, and that's a "relatively" minor conflict.

China and Russia are yesterdays growth stories (China is still at 5%). Look for growth in other places like Brazil which is poised to grow in the next 20 years.

India

Climate change would like to have a word with you

Climate change will have a word with everyone. Investment in infrastructure and climate management might help in a stitch...

While India is building the infrastructure to not starve and drown they will not have sufficient exploitable labor to "grow" as translated into building and manning sweatshops and factories.

> Look for growth in other places like Brazil which is poised to grow in the next 20 years.

Poised... how? This graph from a recent economist article doesn't inspire much confidence: https://www.economist.com/img/b/400/436/90/media-assets/imag...

China has strategically made bets for the last decade and is a major MAJOR investor in many of these 'other places'

Globalisation is all about transportation means being cheap and efficient.

That will end with our understanding that it breaks the natural rules. (Or the depletion of cheap oil, whichever comes first)

What you call the end of globalisation is the end of U.S dominance. [which is definitely NOT what I experience in Europe, on a day-to-day basis].

I would try to avoid such binary narratives. I don't think globalization and growth are done, but they will almost certainly be very different going forward. In the case of the US, I think it's fair to say it will be a very long time before we have the level of globalized supply chains that we had at the end of 2019.

I read this article earlier today which I thought provided some pretty insightful answers to this question:

https://themarket.ch/interview/russell-napier-the-world-will...

Bad information is often worse than no information which is why it's better to save your energy/time/resources to deal with circumstances as they unfold instead of trying to prepare for the unknown.

Risk assessments and decision rules like Minimax exist. (Saving up energy/time/resources is a specific possible action of many and might or might not be the optimal action)

Why did the west even go to China in the first place? Cheaper labor.

China can’t go do what the West does by meta colonizing (economically colonizing) South America, India, Africa and South East Asia because their people need the low wage jobs too.

The West will just go elsewhere. If China and Russia don’t want the business, someone else will. And when suddenly those other someones become the growth story, China/Russia will adapt and reprice (as in, they will stop the shenanigans).

This will sort itself out. Amoral industries will find the geopolitical jockeying by the growth economy leaders as a liability.

How much do you actually know about manufacturing in China? China is not where comps it’s go for “cheap labor”. Companies aren’t building clothing factories in China.

Clothing factories is how it started. They weren’t exactly talking a whole lot of shit as we kept investing in that trade partnership up until they got to this advanced point.

So, if this is the end of the line, we simply have to start again from zero in other economies. Start with the Nike sneakers all over again in some other part of the world, and don’t ever let it get so far where they also make your technology.

It's been happening for the last seven or eight years in Bangladesh.

Now, knowing something about populations of countries, you might ask yourself, why there? Why not Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, or Nigeria? They all are bigger than Bangladesh, and all appear to have better trade links and geography (ports, location, and such).

Finding out the answers can deepen your understanding of the world.

You guys are port country, direct access to a lot of water and centrally located between trade channels (dead smack in the middle of China and India and other places in the south east). That’s my best guess. Might be a little harder (longer) to ship stuff to and from Pakistan.

It’s completely different this time. 10 years ago, no one was manufacturing the 300 million+ high precision electronic devices with hundreds of parts that Apple alone is manufacturing. The supply chain is more intertwined and Apple alone has billions invested in tooling. Not to mention China itself has a population of 1 billion+. China is also a stable government.

You need to have an exit strategy. What will happen to you if you lose your jobs and the only alternative is a minimum wage paying job? This is what most youngsters haven't had a life experience of. When you first get money you spend it freely on materialist things but it's all dependent on how quickly you learn that governments want you to be a slave to the work grind. If you have an ability to think and make decisions for yourself then you are a big problem for governments.

Exit strategy to where? There is no viable exit when the world is crumbling around you. Not even actual farmers might be safe.

We have a lot of actual physical labor to do, regardless of how much it is paid for. It can be paid for well or it can ruin you. What our societies did is devalue important physical labor, when it's more necessary then ever before.

We need to fix rivers, build exosystems - with a shovel and rake, oftentimes - and build these wind farms and solar panels, meaning restarting old manufacturing in a new clean ways. All while at the same time food and water still gets delivered and cleaned, garbage is properly disposed of, or better yet, reused.

None of which current revision of capitalism promotes.

Technological advancement still means growth, even if it looks different from the growth of the last 30 or so years.

Also, wouldn't be a bad time for defence-related startups...

I guess it depends on how you look at it... For me this is like a river with a big rock in the way... The water will find it's way around with other means...

Considering this era of growth meant Americans became fatter, dumber, and went from 1 person working households to 2 people working multiple jobs who still require state-sponsored benefits households - the end of globalism sounds pretty great.

The future is more human-oriented instead of pursuing profit at the cost of everything else. It will be based on resilience instead of JIT, sustainability instead of extraction. Growth will be slow to zero, but things won't crash so often or so hard either.

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/05/02/u-s-trade-representat...

No. First you must produce compelling evidence that globalization is ending before you can should ask how to deal with such. I don't see the evidence, to many countries have on going interconnected relationships.

Before we address something like this, you would need to show evidence that it is happening, such as: Imports and exports are halting for a majority of the countries. Termination of diplomacy and communication between countries.

To assist in this, you might consult some definitions of globalism.

These are always the most cartoonish viewpoints.

How dare you have an opinion! This is the internet! SapporoChris is going to require journal published studies, probably several, before granting you the unbelievable kindness of acknowledging your question.

Having been a member of HN for 7 years, you should be well aware that we deal in facts and data here, and such things require evidence. If you want to spend your time with those who pull fiction out of thin air and present it as gospel, I would suggest you check out Reddit. It might be more your speed.

> Having been a member of HN for 7 years, you should be well aware that we deal in facts and data here,

Could you start with the "facts and data" of where it is specified that there is requirement for "facts and data"?

Having been a member here for 7 years, I can assure you that most posts do not contain "facts and data" and there is no requirement or implication of a requirement to post with "facts and data". In fact, a vast majority of everything written here is completely subjective and unsubstantiated.

See. I'm not going to prove that with any facts or data at all. I'm just going to assert it.

Ironically, you have a variation on breaking one of the actual written post guidelines in this very post:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

China and Russia are part of BRICS[1]. That's not isolation. That's half the world's people. And that's the coalition that will soon be the world economy.

> Cold War 2.0 is coming

I don't think the US can "win" that Cold War, so maybe it shouldn't pick the fight this time.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brics.asp

BRICS is not a coalition, it is just a label for emerging economies that aren't 100% onboard with the US system. China and India aren't in a coalition, in fact their relationship has some rough spots.

> I believe the era of growth is over. What are your preparation for low growth era?

I doubt it. It's a shame to see China isolating itself, but at the end of the day the manufacturing could just be moved somewhere else like India or Vietnam. Economically speaking, isolation is never the way forward, and China will likely fall further behind. Any sort of aggression on their part will only ensure that this happens

If anything, the extreme differences between China/Russia and the US will just bring the US (and the Anglosphere) closer together. I'm convinced the west has reached a stage of post war society where it's understood that it's better to grow up rather than out

What will be interesting to see is how Putin handles the current situation, considering they're losing ground and poorly prepared

Ofc I'm speculating here, and my position is highly US-centric

Green technologies and the de-centrification of energy sources is going to countermand the trend. The work will still grow.

"With China and Russia trying to isolate themselves from the world....Cold War 2.0 is coming"

You've been brainwashed

..help ourselves please

Putin, Xi, Modi, Biden/Trump are getting older. Generational shift is coming and it is a phase transition. Where it settles, in which attractor basin is the Quintilian dollar question. :) I vote for the ECO revolution.

Xi will last as long as MaoZedong

Brexit too.

same as it ever was

I wish it was just a cold war. It has turned into a real fucking disaster. Despot Putin does not seem to be backing off, and perhaps will destroy all of Ukraine's vital infrastructure no matter the cost. If Ukrainians still stand still, he will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons.

"Putin will not hesitate to nuke his neighboring country"

I frequently wish people could read their words but with my reactions to them

'...neighboring upwind country..."

China and Russia isolating themselves? You’ve heard of BRICS right?

Here is how your BRICS were doing up until 2017.[1]

India and China: OK at that point (before Modi and Xi had really started micromanaging, and before Covid hit trade).

Brazil, Russia, and South Africa: get a participation certificate and commiserations.

The acronym "BRICS" was a western invention in the early 2000s, shorthand for a list of good places to invest. Nothing more.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Annual-GDP-Growth-of-BRI...

A lot has happened since 2017.

Brasil,

Russia,

India,

China,

South Africa.

Tell me, besides Russia who managed to align with both China and India in some way and is their intermediary (no kidding, Russian diplomacy was top tier before they attacked), which of this country do you think will align with each other against the US?

China managed in five years to be hated more than UK and France in Africa (Russia however is very well viewed there, again their diplomacy and PR). Brazil managed to create a pretty good sphere of influence but Bolsonaro by himself massacred that (his recording about abusing underage venezuelan refugees do not help, but the trend was downward before).

If i based myself solely on demographic and the concept of demographic dividends, i would be worried for most Brics. Luckily, I've read a bit about hidden migration and i now understand where the wives and sisters of Gulf countries and Singapore 'workers' are send (doing a different kind of 'work'), so i think China will do just fine. Probably the others will too once they fix their political troubles.

I wouldn’t be worried for most BRICS. Their coalition is growing because the world sees the hypocrisy of the west. And even the legacy western media is reluctantly capitulating to that fact.

https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-90-percent-world-isnt-follow...

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