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> Globalization in its recent form has been all about exploiting labor cost differences.

What is the alternative? Richer countries voluntarily transferring wealth to poorer countries? Richer countries hoarding wealth because it is not politically popular to transfer wealth to poorer countries?

Can also replace countries with tribes of any size delineated by any given arbitrary characteristic(s).

Richer countries being self sufficient. Poorer countries being self sufficient.

So your solution is to ban trade, right? No more coconut unless you plant coconut trees in your suboptimal environment (i.e in Norway).

I can't wait for that small and poor country to manufacture its own modern chips (perhaps in 100-200 years) so that it can enjoy the technology available today(i.e cheap smartphones, TVs etc). I thought HN is smarter than that. The future is multi planetary not self sufficiency.

> The future is multi planetary not self sufficiency

Even if there were a network of planets. They'd need to be self sufficient in key areas (food, air, water, shelter) as the time and energy needed to trade is likely too much for robust exchanges.

It may become self sufficient(whatever that means) but there is little incentive to do so due the waste of resources/inefficiencies.

If you have valuable goods/services you can offset the transport costs and exchange them for food or whatever you need.

The same rules apply at the individual level. How many engineers are self sufficient? How many cities are self sufficient? Is it really worth it to build all kind of redudant systems (i.e people building bunkers for their families and learning survival skills) ? I think we already know the answer.

Self sufficiency is what keeps you from starving when trade has a down turn. The US is a net food exporter so even if the tech industry implodes, the US still has food for its home market, and can raise trade barriers to keep it at home.

On the other hand countries that must import food, suffer greatly when there’s any economic shock. Basic food stocks can double or tripe in price due to inflation affecting imports most strongly. And the country is trapped: it must export in order to get money to buy food, however demand is already down. Add to that that many counties run on credit, so failing an import/export balance leads to additional debt, increased inflation, and a vicious spiral to economic ruin.

Where did I say we should ban trade? I would just like life to continue as normal if something like a war or global pandemic breaks out. The US is moving in an amazing direction with the TSMC fab.

What exactly self sufficiency means if not less trade and less capital efficiency?

Whoever abandons the globalisation will find itself poorer. That was my whole point. And yeah, TSMC is a global/foreign company so that praised investment is part of the globalisation. The moment U.S becomes protectionist against Taiwan you can say good bye to TSMC. TSMC in the U.S does not represent the death of globalisation. I would say on the contrary. U.S provided good incentives for TMSC and other GLOBAL players to manufacture in the U.S. When the incentives move somewhere else so the capital/factories(i.e see the exodus from China).

No matter how you spin it globalisation is here to stay regardless of what one big player does(i.e U.S or China).

Less trade does not mean banning trade. The US doesn't need to become protectionist against Taiwan, China could establish a blockade in the South China Sea.

> ban trade

Yes those are the only two options, totally unrestricted free trade*, or a total ban on trade. There's no middle ground, no spectrum.

*Except for what restrictions "free trade" agreements place on national legislation, of course. Can't have rogue countries reducing copyright length or the scope of patentable subject matter.

So you think a less free trade will reduce copyright length? I imagine in a protectionist and nationalist world the small, poor country will always get the short stick of the bargain. That or invasion.

"Good fences make good neighbors."

But you're conflating nationalism with imperialism, as is so common these days.

And somehow you think that in the current system where multinational corporations sneak anti-consumer legislation into trade deals, poor countries don't get the short stick. Why? Who do you think benefits when poor countries are made to agree to onerous patent and copyright protections, and forced open internal markets, that prevents them from growing or protecting local industries?

> So you think a less free trade will reduce copyright length?

Copyright length is literally written into trade agreements and other international treaties, yet you are incredulous?

This would lead to massive lifestyle differences between rich and poor countries, which would continue to expand the wage gap between rich and poor countries, which would continue to incentivize sending low skill jobs to poor countries. Globalization is inevitable unless countries are able to ban trade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autarky

Does not exactly sound like a desirable state

Yeah, I think those are exactly the alternatives: Either the wealth keeps getting transferred[0], or it doesn't.

But if it keeps getting transferred, how can that last forever? Over time, the gaps between countries shrink in that system. So "labor cost exploitation" puts itself out of a job.

[0] globalization is corporations more than "countries" voluntarily transferring wealth, sure, but... I don't think you can argue it hasn't increased wealth in those countries

> What is the alternative?

If cheap labour is no longer possible/desirable, then near fully autonomous factories driven by next-gen AI and robotics becomes significantly more viable.

Globalization was sold to the emerging countries and the developed nations were perfectly ok with it as long as the west was winning. Now that emerging countries are extremely more efficient and competitive suddenly globalization has become a dirty word. Well it is time for west to understand that countries used to trade before globalization and will continue to trade after globalization. They will all do so in their own terms.

This is a straw-man argument. Emerging economies get money and jobs out of the globalization arrangement. That's more than enough to sell emerging economies on the idea. Globalization needed to be sold to western economies. Why, after all, should the western economies sacrifice money and jobs? Western economies, they were told, would benefit due to more efficient economic operations, or so the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy went.

Now globalization is unpopular in the west because the west realized neo-liberalism is bullshit, for lack of a better term.

Western economies benefited immensely from neo-liberalism. The problem is that by nature, the most significant gains went to the rich. The rest of the population got some cheaper gadgets to play with and a lot of bullshit service jobs.

> Globalization in its recent form has been all about exploiting labor cost differences.

? That is globalization. It's arbitrage through nations borders. Arbitrage is not limited to financial instruments but can be extended to Labor, Weather and Culture.

> * the most advanced countries have seen how quickly that edge can be lost if you outsource to this extent, which could lead to more proprietariness and a desire to enlarge gaps in absolute lifestyle instead of short-term cost-minimization; especially if armed conflict stays hotter than it was in the 90s

Sure, in a truly globalized world, every country will be arbitraged to equality. That's a feature not a bug.

> * on the other hand, if closing labor cost and standard of living gaps continue in the future, globalization makes less sense because paying the logistics penalties and shipping costs in a world with more-or-less equivalent labor costs everywhere becomes stupid - sooner or later you run out of cheaper places to outsource too.

This assumes all geographies have the same advantages. I'm pretty sure it's more profitable to produce bananas in African jungle; and also impossible to pump oil out of Japan. Globalization re-enforces local advantage. On equilibrium, only your local advantage will prevail as everything else will get arbed to death.

> Outside of raw materials, what do you need from halfway across the globe that none of the millions of people within a few hundred miles couldn't figure out how to do or copy?

Tropical fruits, Highly advanced computer chips, iPhone made by factories all around the world and assembled nearby, Internet services, Medical equipment, the list will goes on. Now if you are saying who will roast your coffee, cut your hair and wash your car; yeah it'll be a few miles around.

Also: Shipping material halfway through the world is stupidly cheap.

> Globalization in its recent form has been all about exploiting labor cost differences.

I disagree. The U.S. which has relatively high labor costs, has nevertheless been a leading recipient of foreign direct investment.

Specialization is a far stronger driver. Labor cost differentials narrow over time but specialization can be compounding.

Your last paragraph is important. This explains why highly specialised goods continue to be produced in wealthy countries, such as US, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Korea, and Japan.

The better choice would be to onshore/keep key and strategic industries and skills in-country and other non-critical aspects of the economy can seek some labor arbitrage, but not so much to eviscerate the local workforce and economy that you end up with people in despair and then have to come up with ideas like UBI to shore up their purchasing power deficit. A bell-curve distribution means some people are only capable of low to mid-skill labor and you have to have a plan (other than physically export your low-skill labor --which is not a thing countries can do anyway)