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Comment by amazingamazing | Hacker News Reader

America’s consumer economy isn’t sustainable anyways. Once China figures out tech and India takes American services, America has nothing. These tariffs are stupid, but it’s either now or later. Better figure it out now, I suppose.

people who think america will indefinitely have tech supremacy are unbelievably delusional. once tech is lost, america has what exactly (it’ll be like the UK - rich, but a shell of its former self)? look at SPY gains since year 2000. almost all of it has been due to tech. trump is one of the dumbest famous people of all time, but this was going to happen one way or another. better it happen sooner.

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> Once China figures out tech and India takes American services, America has nothing.

This is an economically illiterate argument - it ignores the fact that new jobs are created precisely when old ones become redundant. It's like saying that China and India "have nothing" because first-world countries have figured out everything already. It's good for a country when others become better at what they're doing - that's what enables broader supply chains, bigger markets and ultimately a higher variety of products and services.

new jobs are not created precisely when old ones are redundant, lol - that’s wishful thinking. you think every manufacturing job taken from the USA was matched 1-1, the quality of job is very different. losing a manufacturing job and gaining a job at Wendy’s is hardly a good trade.

Those jobs will be gone soon anyway due to automation. They are not coming back now or ever. The US also manufactures a lot right now, second only to China.

The US failed by not using the huge prosperity it gained to put the social programs in place to help those people pushed out of manufacturing.

> it ignores the fact that new jobs are created precisely when old ones become redundant

That did not happen after the electronics revolution changed manufacturing starting in the 1970s. Factories that needed thousands of workers to manufacture a certain car model for large regions started to be run with only a few hundred workers. Same for other manufacturing fields.

The Western countries directed all the resulting excess workforce to sectors like finance, law, tech and services, but with AI and the zero interest economy ending all of those sectors are also coming crashing down.

So no, technological advancement and automation really reduced the workforce need and did not replace it with new jobs.

America is dreaming of moving back into manufacturing rather than doing R&D, creating IP, and reaping most of the value of things created in other places. China, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction: they are much more interested in doing what America was doing and are less interested in manufacturing things (they are willing to send that to poorer countries in Asia). In a decade or two, America and china’s roles in the world are going to be completely swapped.

So the solution is to have people work in factories sewing cheap t-shirts?

I’m picking this out of context - but there’s probably some better steady-state where fast fashion isn’t a thing and your baseline t-shirt costs more and lasts proportionally longer.

Jobs sewing $80 t-shirts are not actually that much better than jobs sewing $10 t-shirts.

tech 2.0 is coming, the question is where. As dysfunctional as SV is, it is at least possible to raise risk capital in the US. Foreign startups still come to the US for capital. Hard to see this changing - the US for its culture wars is very adaptable and can reconfigure everything in a generation

> Foreign startups still come to the US for capital.

Not only that, but foreign capital also flows to the U.S. for higher returns. This is why all the scare-mongering about the trade deficit is yet more economic illiteracy. Every trade deficit is really an investment surplus, and the kind of investment surplus the U.S. is running can be surprisingly beneficial in the longer run.

You might not know this, but Americans aren’t big on “giving up”. Ever.

We’re also not big on defeatism.

Agreed. We have the staying power.

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