How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?
twitter.com
twitter.com
We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is that a world where “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” still makes sense? What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?
What seems most likely to me in the future is that the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now. Dominating finance and services won’t mean anything when both the IP and the physical products are being produced somewhere else.
Also, the UK hasn't dominated finance for a century and has never been dominant in services, so it doesn't seem like an apt comparison.
Not where it matters. China has a much larger under-employed population base than the US has. They still have a few hundred million peasant farmers whose children can and are getting educated and moving to the city. Their pool of labour is growing while the US's is stagnant.
Not that it needs to grow -- over the last decade or so China's factory employment has been relatively constant while output has surged dramatically. Their factories are rapidly automating.
The race between manual labor and machine labor is heating up anew. We don't yet have humanoid robots but they're on the design table, so it may be time to fasten your seat belt.
Right ... so about that, here's Morgan Stanley's report on humanoid robots from a couple months ago:
Investors will notice that 73% of the companies confirmed to be involved in humanoids and 77% of integrators are based out of Asia (56%/45% out of China, respectively). A common refrain we hear from investors is the lack of Western firms to add to their humanoid portfolio outside of TSLA and NVDA. In our view, this is important information in and of itself as it represents the reality of the current humanoid ecosystem which we expect may need to change materially over time (see the West's current experience with EVs which has significant supply chain overlap with humanoids). Our research suggests China continues to show the most impressive progress in humanoid robotics where startups are benefitting from established supply chains, local adoption opportunities, and strong degrees of national government support.
https://advisor.morganstanley.com/john.howard/documents/fiel...
And those children will be burdened with caring for their elderly parents, often alone, continuing to keep internal consumption low. They are automating and moving up the supply chain, but have a long, long way to go as a nation.
The moment oil producing gulf states decide to stop buying USD bonds, they will receive "democracy".
The whole intent to fight Iran is not only to protect Israel, but also to choke off China's major oil supplier. If Iran folds into US control, it will be easier to choke China in terms of energy supplies
China's per capita purchasing power will increase rapidly if RMB becomes the world's preferred reserve currency.
Trump seems to be doing everything to speed up the former and as a result is also speeding up the latter.
I think so too prior to the Trump tarrifs. Now their influence abroad is picking up steam again, with former WW2 enemies now becoming trade allies. I think this has reinvigorated their opportunity.
I suspect they will squander the opportunity the US unforced error has provided, but we'll see.
China will surpass USA from a GDP Point of view in 2035.
China surpassed Germany as industry machines export in 2018.
Don't be so sure, this has become much less clear. For example, in this article: "The Centre for Economics and Business Research, which in 2020 predicted that China would overtake the U.S. by 2028, revised the crossover point two years later, to 2036. This month, the British consultancy said it will not happen in the next 15 years."
https://www.newsweek.com/2025/01/31/china-us-compete-biggest...
I'm in germany and i'm pissed. I will not go on holiday in USA and thinking proactivly how to boycot USA.
And i'm not even a company. A company wants stability, predictability and not chaos every 4 years. And this president is in office for only a few month.
Whatever strategy companys currently try to do is either sitting it out or starting to adjust. The adjustments might not just go back when USA is more stable again.
https://bigdatachina.csis.org/measurement-muddle-chinas-gdp-...
They have been projected to pass the USA in GDP for a long time now. We'll see if it happens. Their demographic trends are not favorable, but the US seems to be testing out how many self-sustained wounds its economy can survive.
Word for that, hubris
This can not be overstated. China is on the verge of the largest population collapse in human history.
By 2080 China's population will drop by 600 million. If that trend continues, by 2150 China's population will drop to 280 million.
Other asian countries such as South Korea and Japan are on a similar trajectory.
US, Canada, Europe are demographically cooked too, but they (partially) solve this problem with immigration, that is not an option for China and the rest of Asia.
"London Beats New York as the World’s Leading Financial Center in the Latest Ranking"
in 2015 before the glory that is Brexit.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-28/london-be...
The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference.
The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing. Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. It's not actually where we want to be. While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored. Or bogged down in extra export red tape thanks to Brexit.
To improve reality, we have to start from reality, not whatever vision of the past propaganda "news" channels are blathering about.
Ha ha ha. I was this naive once. This just isn't our reality. You would have to have a functioning education system AND a population with adequate emotional regulation. Do we even have the pieces anymore?
This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you).
Thanks for this interesting fact.
But most of that revenue goes to JKR, whereas most of the fishing revenue may end up in "working class" people's pockets.
I am sure JKR has to pay taxes still, which goes back to the government.
Does JKR personally own the copyrights, or have they been sub-licensed to a corporation in (e.g.) Ireland?
Velocity is one of those critically important concepts that often gets left out of these discussions because it's hard to understand if you haven't formally studied economics because it's all about second order effects. But it's a big part of understanding why, historically speaking, maximizing corporate profits doesn't seem to correlate all that well with overall prosperity trends.
And the more of that that happens, the better for the economy overall. The less of that that happens - implying more of it ends up in JKR's proverbial dragon hoard, not doing much good beyond being an impressive pile of wealth for the dragon to sleep on top of - the less good for the economy overall.
When rich people get large amounts of money they don’t hoard it like they did in Roman times.
That money either goes into the stock market or to a bank. If it’s in the stock market that money is being used in investments that further economic growth. The portion of the leftover money that’s in the bank is then lent out by the bank to others in the forms of loans and so on for purchasing houses, starting business and so on.
The idea that the pile of wealth is simply hoarded to be slept on is out of date and not representative of modern economics.
Also, as for JK Rowling specifically, she had donated a significant amount of her wealth to charity.
Am I missing something about modern economics?
I look at my tiny townhouse that my Dad could built in 6 weekends with his buddies and zillow needing seven digits to display the price and very well thinking “what a fucking real estate bubble we live in currently.”
there is a clear point at which one might start thinking about real estate as investment (and it sure looks bubbly). if you bought a house as an investments some decades ago it is not much of an investment and basically a loss inflation-adjusted, no?
yes you have.
The home took someone money to build, the land cost money to buy (from the previous owners) - thru the long chain of title ownership that would stem from the conquerors of this land (who ultimately took the land from either natives, or whoever that previously owned it by force).
The previous owners who now got paid by you will use this money for other investments. It is not slept on. Your house is also providing utility (of being a shelter).
You just stopped thinking about the money as soon as it left your bank when you buy the house, and thus you feel that the value of the house is merely being "slept on", when in actual fact, this transaction that is your house is a small cog in a very large system.
The nominal gdp is my father's time was lower and yet he could buy a house and support a family of four on a single salary as an immigrant in his early 20s.
> The idea that the pile of wealth is simply hoarded to be slept on is out of date
I don't see what you're arguing against. If they did that, what would the problem be?
In other words, they're effectively rent-seeking dollars. The whole hope of investment is that you get more money without doing any labor yourself.
And if you invest and they're lost? Well, now it's not even rent-seeking. It's just burning money.
This isn't to say that there's no benefit from that money being available. The issue is that the real value that investment creates isn't really the money going back to the investor. It's the value of the labor and products generated by whatever the money fronted costs for. The actual value is still generated by the labor. The investor does help start the ball rolling, but is still a leech.
Once we get to shareholders, things don't really improve. Shareholders are also only interested in dividends. They want dividends at the cost of the company. At the cost of the product. At the cost of the customer. There's no responsibility to society or to the customer in the face of a shareholder.
Shareholders are like employees that don't do any work but still want a paycheck. "Oh, but they're owners," is kind of a poor excuse when these owners do no work. Stock is like buying a box of Crackerjack and letting your brother take the whistle and sticker.
> Also, as for JK Rowling specifically, she had donated a significant amount of her wealth to charity.
Which she does because donations offset the taxes she owes. She's no Dolly Parton.
The labour _needed_ the money. In other words, the labour doesn't want to take on capital risk (aka, the output turning worthless, or something like that).
Investors aren't leeching, they are taking risks - risks that the labourers dont want to take (otherwise, they would've been the one fronting the cost, rather than expecting to get paid for labour!).
The old idea of capital being leeches only happens when your capital comes from lords who granted you ownership (of the land).
How would that work? You can only write off the amount you actually donate. Paying 100% to save 40% (or whatever your tax rate is) seems very counterproductive if the goal is to actually save money.
Personally, I'm always dubious of the rich and famous genuinely finding unmet cases for charitable organisations. Especially when they've made a fortune outsourcing being morally dubious to others - she can save children because others are paying her to be allowed to sell low quality merchandise almost certainly made in exploitative conditions.
She's not alone, there's many more e.g. Messi donating lots to children's cause through his own charitable organisation after gladly being a global ambassador for unhealthy snacks targeted at children.
That's a long way from advertising unhealthy snacks.
Lego isn't made in dubious conditions, so for toys she's already above average.
Warhammer requires designers, moulding experts, warehouse staff and so on.
Games Workshop is a public company, in case you want to look up their accounts for the comparison.
The Harry Potter World theme park in London has over two million visitors annually. That tourism must be more economically significant than fishing for cod.
What an amazing argument to tax the rich!
And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.
This decade: "We're not the ones trying to steal your fishing jobs!"
Next decade: "It's not our fault there aren't fish!"
In broad terms, this is related to the error the USA made. Manufacturing in China was a very profitable deal for the USA. A lot of companies view labour first and foremost as expense, wealth as as the goal, and power in wealth— so it's not surprising as a whole the industry opted to "contract out" labour across the globe.
A lot of power lays in labour though. Money doesn't produce, invent, move, feed, etc— money is only good if someone will take it at the amounts you have it to do that specific labour you need for you.
China is moving up the value chain also, they are being forced to by their demographics, and they are investing heavily in the change ATM (just like they started investing heavily in green energy 10 years ago) so I don't think they will make the same mistake as the Americans are making right now.
No it isn't, productivity has to increase, that's why we constantly get rid of jobs that do not provide much value. People want more money, and the only way we get there is with more productivity (doing jobs that make more money).
> If and when China becomes twice as big an economy as the US, much of our “edge” in marketing, finance, and services isn’t going to mean squat.
China gets to 2X our GDP by doing what we basically did in the 90s, so you are definitely right! They will have their own marketing, financing and services. The only difference is that they won't need to outsource manufacturing to China (well, they are outsourcing it a bit now, but also investing tons in automation).
> E.g. how much “GDP” will evaporate overnight when American universities no longer have the cachet that comes along with being the best universities in America?
I don't know what you are ranting about, but I get the feeling that if I did know what you were saying here I would probably agree with you.
Our measures of “value” are wrong.
> I don't know what you are ranting about
My point is that a lot of what we think of as “higher value” activities are actually derivative of and downstream of our industrial supremacy. As China takes up that mantle, the higher value activities will go along with it. E.g., how long do we expect the US to do the cutting edge nuclear power and weapons research when China is the one building all the nuclear power plants?
I mean look at the path dependency that led to Silicon Valley. Why did the software revolution happen in the same place we were building the microchips?
> Why did the software revolution happen in the same place we were building the microchips?
Hardware people becoming software people was extremely common back then, and still is today (EEs can make more coding than using their degree directly). Now we have the opposite problem (we don't have enough hardware people because software sucked all the oxygen out of the room) and China has less of it (although increasingly...they are repeating history as well). If anything, this just backs up my point in how higher value activities de-emphasize manufacturing (even super high end manufacturing as in semiconductors).
You can replace perceived value with actual value if you don't agree with the value judgement calls that were made, which is entirely reasonable.
How much is this exacerbated by the lack of domestic hardware manufacturing in the US for the hardware people? Seems like software boom starting in the late 1990's happened as China came online for hardware outsourcing. Not suggesting a causal relationship there, just complementary effects.
Not quite. It's all about labor and getting rid of the class that used to (and could have) threatened the elites.
Dude, how have you completed missed the ongoing push for AI to replace developers?
More developers isn't at odds with the previous comment. That is how you can more easily push the jobs to low cost areas! When 张三 in rural China is given his first computer he can jump right into being a programmer too. Thus you can give him the job instead of a high priced developer in America.
You haven't even put developers out of job as you must remember that I also wanted to build a thing, but couldn't because you had all the available developers tied up. Now there are two freed up who can come work for me. There is no end to all the software we want to write.
Or both. That would be my bet. The industry in general will see a decline. The massive growth in developer numbers will place enormous supply-side pressure. But certain experts who remain supply constrained along with increasing demand for those special services amid the explosion of new software being written will make a killing.
If US has both it might shift the scale a bit.
In regards to the auto industry, I'm not sure what you mean by "look where auto manufacturing investment in the US is". Most auto manufacturing jobs are still in the rust belt [1]. Most EV Production investment is in the rust belt [2].
[1]: https://engaging-data.com/auto-manufacturing-state/
[2]: https://www.assemblymag.com/articles/98988-ten-us-states-dom...
So, do we let US companies invest US consumer derived revenue in the Indian economy, just to boost profits a bit, or do we protect good jobs at home instead, and have a virtuous circle where US profits get plowed back into the US economy?
I'd prefer we look to other countries that have solved the problem in other ways, such as including representatives of the employees in the board.
Also, we need to remember that corporations exist at the mercy of the state, having received a special dispensation (corporate charter) to exist. Those companies that are not a net benefit to society have no right to exist and ought to be dissolved.
You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas
If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money
Those sectors you let die might not matter right now, but they might matter later. And you might have to scale up fast.
Convert that to usd and you will see how much premium is being charged.
Many of the EU farming and fishing subsidies are to NOT produce anything.
"We will pay you 5 euros per kg of fish sold in supermarkets to consumers" is different from "We will pay you 500,000 euros a year to keep fishing".
There is a very reasonable argument in fisheries starting at least a century ago (and locally long before that), that we're looking at a partially renewable good - that it would be easy to cause an unsustainable population collapse with unrestricted harvesting, and so you should try and intervene in the market to sustain fish populations and stabilize harvests. Subsidies intended to do this are distinct from subsidies intended to keep fishermen employed fishing.
I feel like money is overwhelmingly how we denominate value, effort, and agency in our society. Almost every time somebody says "You can't just throw money at the problem", they are arguing that we shouldn't even try that, contrary to all established reasoning about how society works.
There are diminishing returns to funding, but the people who use this expression are typically at a tiny fraction of where we would expect to hit them.
If you want to have a fishing industry because fish are your idealized heritage, then choose to subsidize it heavily either to continue to exist, and/or to expand it into waters and economies of scale where you can still fish profitably. Like the Japanese and the Chinese do, respectively.
Money is something you give people so they can eat and stay warm while they do the thing you want. They still have to be doing the thing you want. Sometimes there's enough reputation and legal threats on the line that you can assume the person will do the thing just based on the fact they're taking money from you and not freaking out. Companies do things this way a lot - individuals not as much.
The abstraction is not the territory, and the idea that money denominates value is an abstraction... often we define "value" as "that for which money is exchanged", making the abstraction tautological, at no gain. This is often done by people who want to think the thing they're spending a lot of money on is very valuable, or want to make you think the thing you're spending a lot of money on is very valuable.
This is exactly what Dr. L. J. Hart-Smith wrote in "Out-Sourced Profits – The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting", a paper from 2001 https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2014130646...
See also How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/, where the author asks, "In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain?"
Once you've outsourced everything except the management work, the organization forgets how to do the thing they're supposed to be managing.
I think a lack of seafood would have less of an impact to the general population than say, lack of satellite navigation or communication technology.
I had no idea that Warhammer was such a huge industry - they must sell almost 600 sets a quarter.
Note that a standard printer won't be anywhere near as nice quality as official models. You need a resin printer for that, which requires ventilation, some basic PPE, and additional labor to clean and cure the prints correctly. Not something you want to do with small children or pets in the house.
We resin print most of our models. We use FDM for blocky things like tanks and buildings, though. And some complex or very large models can't be printed (although we sometimes use alternatives for those).
Warhammer is an unusually expensive game, too. Other games like One Page Rules will sell you STLs to self-print, or charge very reasonable prices for pro-printed minis. You can buy a 2-player starter kit for OPR for about the same money as one WH40K unit.
But cool to hear you're printing them. I can imagine they don't want to allow it at official tournament to protect the golden goose :)
Of course it's not the resolution of a good laser resin printer but resin is also much more expensive and it's a PITA to work with as discussed here.
The extra cost of resin is negligible at this scale, it's mostly the safety requirements and extra labor that makes it harder.
It's fine as a token for the game, but people enjoy the painting etc too.
A resin printer isn't safe for use in an apartment, otherwise that would probably be more common.
That rules out most apartments in countries like the USA and UK.
* Do not locate dedicated work/personal spaces in close proximity to the printers if odors are a concern
That rules out all small apartments, where there isn't a room that can be dedicated to the printer.
* 3D Printers and uncured, open resin vats should be stored and operated in a well ventilated area or with local exhaust
That rules out all apartments in northern countries (like here in Denmark) with lots of insulation
And if you actively went it outside carpet and close proximity should ok ok'ish health wise. It's just effort and noise that a lot of people don't like to put in.
Yes I've always wondered why they love carpets so much. When I lived in such an apartment it was terrible. Always dirty and dusty. I'd much rather have a plastic, wooden or tile floor (the latter not ideal due to breakage though).
But you can ventilate, especially if you blow the air outside through an active blower.
And finally, makerspaces are a great way to do these things anyway. A community that can support and help you when you run into issues, friendly people around to borrow equiment and materials from, and they're usually pretty cheap if you don't get a fixed desks.
It's no more dangerous than a craft like woodworking or spray painting when you follow very basic safety protocols, but the safety culture is near nonexistent in the community.
Not everyone is as careful with the stuff so that doesn't really help.
We need a resin printer tuned for mass production of tiny pieces, just like belt FDM printers are tuned for mass production.
FDM prints are either slow or have obvious layer lines or both. If you're painting it maybe that doesn't matter.
I have several printers and I ususually have something "in the oven" while I WFH (my job is not related to 3D printing sadly)
The limitation with injection molding is typically the cost and complexity of having mold plates made when you don't have a demand for all that many units.
The stuff they’re putting out these days is really quite good.
I can't say what's more difficult to manufacture - millions of identical bricks that snap together, or a huge range of different, detailed designs which fit snugly together but don't lock.
Just the first thing on the home page: https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/shop/Deathlords-Mortarchs-Ma...
Clearly you are not aware of the extraordinary range of Lego pieces.
Just from a quick search, within a year Games Workshop offer about 3000 different model kits, each of which will contain ~1-4 unique moulded sprues. There seem to be at least 50 new kits each year, possibly 100, otherwise what's available rotates around the older kits.
Lego have produced about 15,000 different sets since 1950, and a huge number of the parts are shared between sets. (That's the whole point of the toy, no?)
Which is an issue because it makes the sets way more difficult to reuse than 30 years ago. Go figure what to build with a random ninjago set except the official model. But that’s another ~~rant~~story.
The manufacturing isn't easy, sure, but it's more or less a solved problem and not at all reflected in the cost.
So when GP says priced like Lego, they just mean that - priced based on something completely different from the cost of materials, manufacturing, etc.
Micromolding is very hard, and Lego is the best at it.
Lego does not outsource brick making. They tried it out back in 2005 with Flextronics in Hungary and got a painful lesson. Lego runs all their factories themselves now.
I don't think the official Lego China factory products get sold to the US, only Asia?
Nowadays it's kinda irrelevant to the greater point anyways, because some of the knock off factories make parts that are just as good. (Some knock off factories push out terrible QC)
https://www.lego.com/nl-nl/product/lego-education-spike-prim...
https://assets.ctfassets.net/ost7hseic9hc/1alE9DriNd0GJq1SYK...
Of course. That way they can sell you the official paints.
Fortunately, it seems they’ve dropped that you’re required to use the official paints if you want to enter a sanctioned tournament.
And yet, California's entire agricultural sector only totals to $50 billion in annual revenue. There are multiple tech and entertainment companies in California that individually surpass that, in some cases (like Apple and Amazon) by an order of magnitude.
You cannot have a drying rack manufacturer in the US that pays a bunch of workers $35/hr. There simply is not enough value in drying racks to achieve this.
This is what is lost on the populist crowd. They compare themselves to high value workers (i.e. workers that produce a lot of raw economic value per hour), and then want to legislate that low value work pays on the same order.
To put that into simple terms, they want to make it so that producing a single $20 bill per hours pays them $30 an hour. No matter what, that isn't going to work out well.
Drying racks aren't considered terribly valuable today, but if you lock up manufacturing to a single country and impose a number of other restrictions, sentiment can change quickly. The latest episode of Ted Lasso might not seem so important anymore.
And people are spending all their money on this? That's why we're not mining asteroids right now?
I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.
For example, if you are in the target group, you buy it exactly because it does not uses AR glasses; If you are proficient, you are sleepwalking the damage/distance/all other calculations within seconds in your head, you don’t even have to take a single look at any rule book. The biggest selling point, however is: there are others sitting in front of you, it can be very competitive, you can see the reaction, like in chess.
This is a _feature_ for the target audience. There's a sizable chunk of the playerbase who enjoy painting more than the game. I even have friends who paint these miniatures professionally as their side gig.
> And people are spending all their money on this?
No. Most people are playing at home on a budget, similar to other board games. A very tiny fraction of the playerbase plays competitively and have larger collections.
> I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.
You can play this game in Tabletop Simulator, which supports VR. It's _far_ less fun than playing in person with real objects. TTS is mostly used to test strategies before committing to buying the required miniatures.
As sibling comment mentions, the damage calculation is rather simplistic, and it's an exciting moment around the table when you roll a fistful of dice, kind of like gambling. I'm not even that proficient of a player and I can calculate a 17 dice roll attack while sleep deprived at 3AM, no computer needed.
There are 3x as many fishermen in the UK than employees of Games Workshop, and much more again if you count the number of related fishery jobs.
At the end of the day, politicians and voters alike respond more to employment than nominal monetary figures. A broader employment base is generally better for social and political stability than explicit wealth redistribution (e.g. tax + entitlements). The latter is what economic theory tends to emphasize--i.e. equivocate incomes based on state wealth redistribution schemes--but such economic theory is how we got Trump, Brexit, and a host of other ills. Economics hasn't figured out, yet, how to price the constituent inputs that produce political and economic stability. GDP, Gini, per capita income, employment rate, etc metrics are gross approximations that work well until they don't (though they're still better than rhetoric and handwaving). But to be fair, social and political theorists haven't solved that problem, either; at least, not with a rigorous quantification model.
What good did it do for us? At the time everyone was running around rubbishing and laughing at the "outrageous" claims of 10% GDP loss, and where are we now?
Impossible to say, as it was swamped by the pandemic. My guess as to the fatalities due to Brexit is also untestable as a result.
For what it's worth I'm not sure if the number is actually 10%, but I'd hazard that it's more than 5/6.
Just like farming, it's everyone living out there. How the fishers and farmers are being treated is how those communities at large feel like they're being treated. And they always feel like they're being shafted, even though that's just progress and other industries got shafted much worse in the past.
So for every 1 fisherman, there are 20 other votes. And they all generally vote conservative, those are blue strongholds (blue over here is conservative, red labour).
For every 1 Games Workshop employee, there's no other votes. Even spouses will be fairly uninvested in how the government is treating toy exports.
But on the other part of your comment, there's been no 10% GDP loss. Note, I voted remain, and would vote to rejoin in a heartbeat.
But we're roughly at the same position today in the world as we were in 2016, compared to other countries. Sitting about 6/7th in the world. Everyone's suffered since covid, everyone's struggling with growth. There's been no big drop in GDP. So it was actually scaremongering. It feels like there's a conspiracy of economists who lie, heavily influence markets, but their lies don't match reality. It's ideological propaganda for free-market capitalism, rather than fact.
Something not really addressed in all of this is that a lot of the people whinging about British jobs and so on, especially in high-Brexit areas, are actually themselves retirees.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36619342 "Of the 30 areas with the most elderly people, 27 voted leave".
Now, they're often living in economically depressed areas. I've seen Blackpool and Lowestoft (the sad little marker of the UK's easterly point, right next to a gas terminal). But you can't give them their jobs back, because they're not working any more. It's nostalgia.
I'm going to keep hammering the question of "why should people move from lucrative, comfortable email jobs to harder, less lucrative factory jobs, or, god help them, fishing?"
The UK is actually at ""full employment"" (NAIRU): https://obr.uk/box/the-equilibrium-unemployment-rate/ - that is, economists believe it cannot go lower without causing inflation, as shortages mean you can't hire people without having to offer more wages to poach them from other jobs.
(Another conundrum: people want higher wages without higher prices. How are you going to do the arithmetic on that?)
. This is what stops revolutions and civil wars.
See "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy":
> I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war.
[…]
> If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced. But this graph doesn’t actually capture the full scope of the decline, because it doesn’t include outsourcing via unfunded mandates — things that the government could do, but instead simply orders the private sector to do, without providing the funding.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...
Mentions the paper "State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, And How to Get It Back" (22pp, so short):
* https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/br...
And the book Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government:
* https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/templeton-press/bring...
> If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced.
The money is going to social security payments. Social security went from <1% of federal spending at its outset to more than 20% of federal spending today. Medicare and other assistance programs are a similar story. Most of the money from these programs goes to paying benefits rather than administrative costs, which is generally regarded as a good thing. But they're also what together now constitute the majority of federal spending.
Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Computers were invented. Things that used to be done by hand are now done by machine, and then you don't need as many clerks and bookkeepers to manually process paper records. This is also generally regarded as a good thing.
The points it makes about unfunded mandates and NIMBYs holding everything up with meritless lawsuits are valid, but the "ministerial review" it proposes is the existing permitting process. The problem is we have unfunded mandates and NIMBY lawsuits on top of that, which could simply be deleted and replaced with nothing.
This really seems like the fundamental misunderstanding:
> And guess who’s responsible for monitoring Medicare spending? Bureaucrats. So that’s at least a 2300% return on investment in bureaucracy!
If you only look at the most efficient thing a bureaucrat could be doing, look how efficient bureaucrats are!
Meanwhile the government is still paying thousands of people to process paper records because although computers were invented many decades ago, only parts of the government have discovered them and there are still many things you have to do by bringing physical documents to government offices to be processed in person even when those things have no legitimate reason not to be a government website.
What we need is not to have more bureaucrats, but rather to finish computerizing the things that have no reason not to be so the existing government employees can do the high value stuff instead of wasting time shuffling paper that should have been bits.
Uh...excluding the very recent cuts this year under Trump; the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily. [0]
We had 23.592 million civilian employees in Jan 2025. 21.779M in Jan 2021, after being largely stagnant overall the previous 10 years. That's a net change in excess of 1.8M employees under Biden.
I do find it interesting that it appears that employee count was flat, or even down under Obama, but until COVID, there was a steady increase under Trump v1.
The graph you provided is not Federal government, it’s all US government which includes state & city, and other types of government employees. It should be expected this grows with population size, and to get a sense of whether it’s really shrinking or growing, you should divide by population. But in any case, this chart doesn’t backup your claim that Federal government is growing.
The link to the Federal government was just underneath that graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001. US Federal government absolute size peaked in 1991 and has gone down slightly since then. If you divide this one by population, the decline would be a bit stronger and more obvious. The ~10 year spikes are census workers. Notice we can see the peak in 1991 with or without the census spikes.
Oh, boy, let me tell you, the 'State capacity' of the United States, when it comes to doing things that aren't making war on its own, or other people, was both rotten to begin with, and won't survive another four years of this regime.
Dysfunctional as the UK is, it's government is not stuck at a triple point of learned helpelessness, intentional sabotage and paralysis (the US is currently, among other things, doing its best to bring cured diseases back), and a deeply negative-sum culture.
I've heard that the United States was a magical land of milk and honey in this respect, back when 'competent bureaucracy' wasn't a swear word in it, but I understand that ended ~45 years ago. (With a few surviving holdouts, like the Fed)
But that isn’t what I asked.
Or decide that Brexit was never going to work the way those who peddled it said it would.
Personally I don't 'agree' with brexit, but it's the reality that we're in. In typical british fashion we're trying to stay friends with the EU, even though they basically hate us, while also trying to do trade with the rest of the world. Predictably we can't really do much of 2 without 1 becoming a problem (and vice versa). However 1 is currently our biggest trading partner (as a bloc, US as a country) so what have we done? Sat in the middle not doing anything radical hoping we can be best friends with everyone.
Take this Eitas Visa for example, this is literally just sowing resentment towards the EU in the UK. It benefits nobody and is totally insane, it's just making people hate the EU. Same with not being able to use the digital passport machines at airports.. why?? We're a pretty secure country, we have digital passports. Brexit happens and now every time I go to Europe, which is a lot I've got a 50/50 chance of waiting 3 hours at the border for someone to stamp my passport while the digital gates have no queue. That means I now have to arrive 3 hours early every time just in case. If I bring a tool for work I need to spend weeks of paperwork on something called a carnet so I end up buying there and throwing out.
At the moment we're trying to give security backing for Ukraine and you're asking us to give up our fishing rights for the honour of helping secure Europe.
I get it, actions have consequences, but the thing is that only a minority voted for Brexit, most of us didn't. Each year you're disenfranchising a new generation of would be Europeans with this path. To me it's all dreadfully regrettable, the whole things a mess.
It's impossible for us to 'come to our senses' while we get treated like this in my view.
You are not trying to secure Europe, you are trying to sell something to Europe. We would rather build capacity to make whatever you want to sell us ourselfs.
I agree we should work closely together, more so after US started dancing naked around burning brides. But everyone is looking into how to secure themselfs, without depending on 3rd party, and from EU's perspective UK is on the outside (even if not as crazy as US has become).
So then you won't be wanting our troops there for peace-keeping, something only ourselves and France have even offered. Nor any of our finance, we can stop giving billions a year to Ukraine as the EU want to take over?
Seriously it's ridiculously isolationist to be thinking like this. Not working with us just because we left your club is beyond mad.
It took serious damage to imports and an invasion for them to move during the last World War.
The argument here is they don't want to buy our weapons because we might decide to stop selling to them. Do you really see that as even vaguely likely in a war against Russia?
2. Thank you for confirming our fears. We decide not to buy something for you and now you go full crybaby and deny Ukrain help. Yes, you guys sound like totally dependable.
3. It's not isolationist and we do want (or should want to) cooperate with you, but Eu has just learnt what happens if you outsource your own defense and US elects idiot for the 2nd time. And lets not forget that you have political party on the rise, (Reform UK), that seems to be a bit too friendly with Trump, Farage supposedly received money from RT (russ sponsored Tv) in 2022. One of your previous PMs (Boris Johnson) had appointed Russian oligarch as Lord and is said to have ditched his own security to party with Russian intelligence officers while he was in office. So, if eu and russia come to blows, whos side will UK be on? Depends on what party is in government.
The offer from the EU for a youth exchange program was rejected by the UK.
The fish thing looks like anti-EU nonsense. The anonymous source "hinted", whereas the people speaking on the record denied it.
Starmer ruled out joining the customs union, so blame him for the tool import paperwork.
> but the thing is that only a minority voted for Brexit,
So with such a failure of democracy, it's no wonder that the EU would require changes to the voting system (for example) before Britain can rejoin.
The EU doesn't want a half-in half-out Britain. It had that for decades.
Re the fish;
>But in an interview with POLITICO, the minister said EU member governments were unlikely to sign off on a security deal with the U.K. unless negotiations are also resolved on other “sensitive” issues, including access to British waters for European fishing fleets. A deal on fish would also help in “building trust” between London and Brussels, she added.(1)
It's just a combination of low turn out and a 52/48 marginal split, it does not mean we have a failure of democracy, that's a bit of a stretch.
(1) https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-eu-defense-pact-really-do...
It's not the Labour party that's campaigning to repeal this act.
The loudest voices calling for a scrap are exactly the people you DON'T want deciding what human rights you'll be "allowed".
And incitement to violence is, and always should be, unprotected speech - your silly "two tier kier" is informing me greatly that you're on the "they locked them up for hurty words!" bandwagon.
It’s literally the policy of this country to sentence white men to harsher custodial sentences with more chance of a custodial sentence than any other group, simply for the crime of being a white man. Are these the sorts of people you think should decide our rights?
If the government would do what people have been voting for for decades and end mass immigration and take real action on this ridiculous and purposeful misuse of the human rights act, then nobody would want to redact it.
But they won’t.
The sentencing council is an independant body, they are not the government, and the government has said "no, that's not right" so they're passing a bill to stop the new guidelines coming into effect: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-introduce-l...
It doesn't matter if it's set by parliament. It doens't matter if it's set by an independent body. The fact is that you will receive a harsher sentence for being a white male than you will if you belong to any other group. That is the policy. The Conservative government thought that was the right thing to do.
Apparently the new government 'will' introduce a bill to stop this, but they haven't yet. So it's still the policy.
Meanwhile it's legal and popular to discriminate against white men and women on the basis of being white - the government, police and military regularly put out jobs only for none whites. But if I were to put out a role only for whites, that's against the law. This discrimination extends to our top universities where it's becoming much more difficult (relative to population %) to obtain a spot as a white student.
That's why people think this country is now a two tier system, and they're right. Opportunities are being taken from those who have earned them and given to those who have not. Meritocracy and equality under the law is already long gone.
You probably didn't even realise that the sentencing guidelines were put on hold on the 31st of March.
Got any proof that the fall in white admission to university is down to discrimination, and not the relative poorer showing of the native population compared to first and second generation immigrants who put a higher premium on doing well at school?
Also can you respond with some of the "non whites only" job postings?
It's possible that some percentage of this is because of better academic achievement, though in that case it's confusing that Oxbridge are looking to remove exams due to underperformance of students of ethnic minority background in tests [2] - which would support my view that it is easier to study at these institutions if you aren't white. but it's also possible that the education system is systematically 'letting down' white boys, which is a view supported by an education committee report (and countless others) in 2021. [3]
- 31 white pilots were let go / held back / paid off so that the RAF could prioritise diversity hires [4], [5].
- Police roles only open to BME candidates [6] - there are countless other examples of this, various government departments have used 'positive action' racism clauses in the same way.
You're just regurgitating what Labour talking heads are saying. You probably didn't even realise that it's legal to be racist against white people. Perhaps you should read more of the news, so you can understand what's really going on.
[0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/admissions-stat...
[1] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/file...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/oxford-cambridge-move-away-tradit...
[3] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com...
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66060490
[5] https://news.sky.com/story/raf-recruiters-were-advised-again...
[6] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/09/west-yorkshire-p...
On [3] it was found to be unlawful so your assertion that "It's legal to be racist against white people" careers headlong into reality that no, it's not.
As for the west yorkshire story, do you not want the police to be representative of the area they serve? There are far more white men than there are as a proportion of the local population.
It feels like you're grasping at straws here.
As of time of writing this comment, I believe both are at 10%? Of course that could change at any time.
> enshrine freedom of speech in law
ECHR already does this. I presume there's some other weird definition of free speech going on here like unrestricted use of the N-word on TV or something.
This isn't just a UK issue:
"Fishing is a relatively minor economic activity within the EU. It contributes generally less than 1 per cent to gross national product."[0]
and if you look beyond fishing, agricultural policy as a whole is - not sure how to put this politely - not easy to understand:
"The CAP is often explained as the result of a political compromise between France and Germany: German industry would have access to the French market; in exchange, Germany would help pay for France's farmers [..] The CAP has always been a difficult area of EU policy to reform [..]"[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
Completely barking mad.
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-rejects-eu-plan-tie-defen...
Well, we'll see that and raise you the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
The EU could get rid of this idiocy overnight, except - well - France.
(I have nothing against the French, I've visited France dozens of times and have many friends there.)
"Once a month the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg at a cost of £150m a year as lorries transport paperwork."[0]
"Top EU official brands Strasbourg shuttle 'insane'"[1]
"EU parliament’s €114m-a-year move to Strasbourg ‘a waste of money’, but will it ever be scrapped?"[2]
[0] https://news.sky.com/story/meps-on-the-move-madness-of-stras...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/eu.politics
[2] https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-y...
I'm not saying it's what happened to the UK, but we asked for what we needed, got turned down and then left.
If you haven't already done so, read up on TARGET2[0], things could get somewhat spicy if a Eurozone country were to leave the EU.
[0] https://data.ecb.europa.eu/publications/ecbeurosystem-policy...
All I remember was Cameron asking to expel jobless immigrants, which confused the EU as Britain was already allowed to do that.
I remember Poland stopped us from getting it (supposedly).
The french didn't want us to exempt from financial regulation that was primarily targeted at the euro even though we use the pound.
Various nonsense, that people at the time felt strongly about (keeping the pound, not giving benefits and a council house to people as soon as they arrived, or some such exaggeration)
We need to distinguish between paying over the odds to keep industries which are essential to have in an antagonistic scenario, from loss-aversion and nostalgia for industries which don't provide as much employment as they used to.
Post-Brexit, there's now increased incentive for Games Workshop to build their next factory in the EU.
(Games Workshop is one company, but this applies to every manufacturing company in the UK.)
However, if we got a free trade agreement with the US would the inverse be true, EU companies are better off moving to the UK due to brexit? What about just a FTA with all commonwealth countries (why haven't we done this??)?
A FTA with the USA would come at a significant price — the UK would be pressured to accept low-quality American agricultural produce, and lower many other standards from their current European level. If it does this, that reduces the global value of British exports.
iirc Trump did say he wanted EU to accept our livestock to reduce the trade deficit, leading Lutnick to memorably proclaim "They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak!"
It's not something that will be forgotten easily. British people on all sides were against reducing food standards.
And then today all the tarrifs are suspended (down to 10%) so it's hardly like there's a reliable advantage there.
We are literally in the process of moving some of our operations to LATM to avoid this uncertainty.
You have to assume that the US is sane a maximum of four years in a row and in four years another Trump 2.0 will again be completely ignoring all their agreements.
In my opinion, the US cannot be trusted with any treaties ever again the way they currently are.
Is there any fishing going on in the Black Sea at the moment? (genuine question)
yes, while fishing vessels fairly rarely broadcast AIS, there's plenty of turkish, bulgarian, and even three russian fishing vessels broadcasting AIS in the black sea right now. No ukrainian vessels that I can see, but again, AIS is fairly rare for fishing boats anyway.
Yes, but not a lot since the fish is very scarce and it supplies a small part of the local consumption. Romanian vessels used to fish in oceans. I presume Russian vessels, too.
I strongly suspect the US cannot maintain its outsized per capita wealth, on the back of the reserve dollar, in a world where China has an economy twice the size. Just as the UK couldn’t when the US economy overtook the British empire and the dollar replaced the pound as the reserve currency.
The question, instead, is how we’ll be able to adapt to that new reality. And I suspect we’d rather be Germany in that future than the UK.
Also, even after the marshall plan, Germany kept its existing advantages in industry in large part simply by actually encouraging them to exist. The UK has no industrial policy and actively shed most industries in the 1980s, relying instead on direct investment and deliberately not growing domestic companies.
The observation is depressingly simple - competent economic management leads to great results. Typically that involves investing a bunch into developing industrial capability. Listen to people like Ed Deming. Let people build things. The US isn't doing that, we haven't seen any new industrial capability out of them in decades. Silicon Valley is the closest thing they have in the modern era and it is mostly services.
If you ask where the wealth is supposed to come from in the Chinese economy there are a lot of obvious answers - it could be energy innovations from the nuclear or renewable sectors. It could be manufacturing innovation as they work on improving their factories. Maybe they're going to come up with hot new products out of Shenzhen. They're big players in the AI revolution and working to build up domestic semiconductor capabilities. Maybe they're just going to wait for other people to come up with good ideas and copy them with speed and scale on their side.
The US has a much less obvious story. Biotech could be an amazing path, but they've left the ring for a lot of the more promising industrial options. And holding the health industry up as being the way to a bright future seems a bit weird. Maybe they succeed in building a services economy that impresses people; that'd be a cool first.
If you want to explain MAGA you have to understand it's a convenient alignment of the upper class and the lower class for different reasons.
Trump is currently causing an earthquake on behalf of the middle-lower class. Maybe blue tinted glasses prevent them from seeing it, but right now he is definitely doing the opposite of "entrenching the power of billionaires and the elite".
Unfortunately, I believe that this is a severe miscalculation on Trumps part, as the "kill the billionaires" class seems to be much more fueled by anger than by rational understanding.
So much of the US government has been focused on maintaining the global hegemony, US citizens wellbeing was sacrificed.
Trump was elected in reaction to rising global hegemony, or at least the effort put to maintain it, not the end of it.
To say US hegemony is numbered doesn’t make much sense. The US economy has only pulled headed further from any Western rival, and China’s economy is stumbling to the point it’s questionable if it can grow enough before it’s population starts shrinking. Russia has been stagnant since the 1990’s.
If anything, US ability to project power is greater now than any time in the past.
Absolutely not. It caved to Russia in the first place, it is weak against Russia. It WANTS to project power, but while doing so, it is showing itself crumbling into itself.
The sword remains unchanged.
> He represents what large part of Americans are - for internal reasons that have nothing to do with geopolitics.
No, it's all about geopolitics. Perhaps the most thorough analysis of the 2024 election concluded that Trump won 18-25 year old men (white + non-white). Trump did better among younger men than men 75+. Trump also won young white women. (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...)
Whatever preconception you have about what motivates Trump voters, you're incorrect. MAGA is about the impending loss of America's stature due to immigration and free trade. It's all about geopolitics.
Impending cause of loss of stature.
> Whatever preconception you have about what motivates Trump voters
By a large, based on what they themselves say and write, they wanted to cause harm to their perceived enemies and have fun watching it. That is primary reason for why conservative and republican voters vote.
Thats dumb to be polite but not surprising when considering where it comes from. Republicans simply can't admit their candidate is incompetent pos, superior ego thing or something. The incompetent part is what matters in this specific discussion, way worse than first term which was tampered by more reasonable people delegating actual tasks.
There does seem to be some sort of cycle in play: first a slave-driver-type economy creates a whole lot of wealth, then people get human rights, then they stop being driven like slaves and coast off the accumulated power, but forget the basic principles of wealth creation in the process (see also "good times create weak men" etc) and just spend all their resources arguing about who gets the wealth that is there instead of creating more. And I'm not saying that in an individualist framework - the reason individuals can't do it is a problem with the whole society, not with those individuals.
Can you explain this a little more? Why does having a trade deficit make your currency more valuable? My naive assumption is it would put more dollars in other countries, so they don't need them as much, making dollars less valuable.
Its the other way around, having the reserve currency drives demand for it and therefore imports are cheap and budgetary deficits are free (since interest rates are low).
You get free stuff and free debt, but over time your industry collapses
Having a huge trade deficit is another way of saying you've sent a lot of your currency to other countries and haven't received it back yet.
I'm sure you can see how those are the same thing.
Almost nobody is spending resources in the US. And that's half of the problem. It's spent elsewhere, therefore labor stagnates or falls, only leaving low tier jobs to work. No factories locks out advancement reducing morale and draining the best that could have their kids advance.
In the US, you had skyrocketing prices on basics like healthcare and housing too, way more than elsewhere. UK has a lot of this problem too.
That together ultimately causes a reduction in teaching and educational standard, which further shrinks the high end advantage.
Short version: economy and people hollowed out in the middle is unsustainable.
And you can't make work sustainable and level the playing field when you have free trade with developing countries.
People cite Ricardo like gospel, but the math of free trade treats every safety net, worker safety protection, etc., as a loss of "comparative advantage." You know how Texas takes jobs from California by having lower standards, lower wages, etc.? That's what happens when you have free trade with third world countries. It's a race to the bottom.
Here is my take on this:
For those things, you probably need a lot of technical training and/or advanced degrees.
For fishing you just need to be more or less healthy and be able to follow instructions.
Most people are more or less healthy and are able to follow instructions. A small subset of those has advanced technical training and/or advanced degrees.
Therefore, fishing becomes important because a lot more people can do it, and those people vote.
Fishing distributed about 1 billion in household income in the uk.
Fishing supports about 12.000 direct jobs plus 5.000 in related industries in the UK.
Warhammer has about 3000 employees GLOBALLY. Trickle down is not really present here.
Businesses that do not distribute wealth in the general population are much less relevant than those that do. Taxes are nice but businesses are good at avoiding them ( especially via Ireland ), whereas income tax is the major supporter of our states.
For example, what about the people who work in Warhammer adjacent companies (plastics production, importing and labelling to name just a few, but also freelancers in publishing, illustration and design ) who would not appear in the 3000 Warhammer employees, but who earn the majority of their livelihood from Warhammer.
For a period my brother dated someone from the family that supplied grey plastic to Games Workshop - they probably had over 100 permanent employees, and were a 'small' regional company.
US citizens often fail to realise that earnings of an industry are almost irrelevant, it is how much said industry distributes into society that matters, both for people and the state.
Classical industries like mining and steel distribute a significant percentage of their revenue.
Digital businesses does not, neither does warhammer.
The interesting point is, that in the end the value of the money digital good as as well as plastic toys are measured in is based on physically realised wealth: Without physical businesses, the money warhammer is evaluated on would be ethereal.
None of those are state capacity issues.
Those are "State is pointing a gun at anyone who would fix them" issues.
Friendly reminder that 95%+ of the UK railway system was built by private for profit companies, with state involvement being primarily limited to not preventing it from happening.
All of these issues are 100% self inflicted by the state getting in the way.
All that needs to happen for them to fix themselves is to stop actively preventing private individuals from fixing them.
They've had 30 years to make it work, and have failed.
Do you honestly think private enterprise could raise the financial and political capital to build a new regional rail line through a major city like London or Manchester?
Conversely, full privatization of the railways with no restrictions would instantly result in all the rails within 50 miles of London being replaced with lucrative housing.
The elite/ruling class need to be replaced with the more capable and smarter ones
I wonder how deeply connected all this politics of nostalgia is to the fact that birth rates have been declining for decades and populations are older.
Given the older population and the country’s history as a bygone empire I bet nostalgia is thicker in England than the US, but US side there sure is a lot of it.
A lot of MAGA is about making the country the way it was when boomers were kids (50s, 60s) to prime age adults (80s to early 90s).
There’s even a hint of genX nostalgia too. A while back I was hearing some IDW type railing about how “woke” killed comedy and it hit me that there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for the 90s when comedy and pop culture were all about being an edgelord. The fact that edgelording is "out" is blamed on "woke" and they lament that "comedy is dead" etc. I'm not sure how much "woke" has to do with it. I think... well... edgelording is just out.
Change reminds people of their mortality and it always generates a backlash. You’re not young anymore.
Warhammer employs hundreds, enriches a half dozen and addicts a millions.
I'd rather keep the fishermen
It's way more profitable for me to work than to sleep but I still sleep.
The good news is though that if EG steel manufacturing moves to China and starts using cheap coal fired energy and selling back to the UK, it helps the UK meet its Net Zero targets.
Dollars don’t vote, people do!
[US-wise] Coal and cereal grain agriculture automation have also seen ~98% drops in employment while raising production levels. The industry doesn't have to disappear monetarily for the jobs to be gone.
I’m not sure if you’re just speaking on what you experience or because of this post but the OP is a clothing guy so it makes sense he will look at it from a clothing (including shoes) perspective.
I agree though, if Americans truly do see Asia as just the cheap clothing factory continent they’re sorely mistaken. All you have to do is to just look at TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and realize that if you were impacting just that company alone you would get a slap in the face as a country, all (~70%) the major chips come from there.
I am aware the US is developing a Semiconductor factory in their own country but it is not done yet and it will not go as tiny in nms as TSMC already is.
Even a simple metro ticket.
You can also smile at the CCTV cameras, which are in groups every 100m or so within cities.
Tourists must wait at the ticket window. Foreigners aren't usually asked to show the passport unless they look Chinese.
1/100th the amount of smiling at the CCTV cameras compared to the UK then.
All via train. In cities that are 1300km apart.
Malaysia is handicapped by the resource curse (lots of oil) dysfunctional government and race politics that serve to drive out everybody who is not ethnically Malay.
I didn't see any shoe manufacturers :)
Comparative advantage means countries benefit from specializing in producing goods or services where they have the lowest relative opportunity cost - not necessarily where they're the best overall. Even if China focuses on technology (and this is far from decided), America can still thrive by specializing in other areas where its relative efficiency or unique capabilities are better.
Examples: Germany specializes in high-precision manufacturing, India does well with software development, IT services, and medicines, Australia exports minerals, natural resources, and agricultural products, etc. Everybody brings something to the table. The world economy cannot possibly get worse by adding 1B people doing top-level work.
> Ricardo's theory implies that comparative advantage rather than absolute advantage is responsible for much of international trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
BTW these would have been great ECON 101 discussions to have before the election.
It's never been about protecting Americans...
It's impossible to not see that Trump is trying to bring back the 1950's rust belt all American factory family.
It remains to be seen how different 2010's China—with 90% of the population being under 60—is from 2050's China—with only 69% of the population being under 60.
(It was also not as absolute as people in the West think. There were exceptions for rural China and minorities.)
The Sichuanese might not get along with the Cantonese, but they’re ethnically the same people with a shared culture
One China is a convenient fiction invented by an authoritarian regime, not a day to day reality on the ground.
Westerners buy into it through some combination of propaganda (coming from the Chinese state and our own, both of which benefit from an exaggerated sense of Chinese unity) and our inability to distinguish the various ethnic groups because we're overly fixated on skin color as the primary physical marker of ethnicity.
It's easy to track differences between people around you, in your country, and very hard to track difference between people in other countries. This creates an illusion of "We are very different, and they are all the same".
The 90% Han Chinese number isn't especially useful because it's comparable to the way that most of Europe has historically identified itself as the successor of Rome. That they all identify as Han doesn't make Han a truly useful grouping for judging diversity when they all have different ideas of what "Han" means.
Not at all, these are pretty universally agreed upon by global sociologist.
>Europe is extremely ethnically diverse, as is China
Indeed, Europe is extremely diverse, much more so than China.
>they just don't use skin color as the primary ethnic marker the way that is commonly (and still incorrectly) done in the US.
Neither does the US. Skin color is not a primary ethnic marker. No one versed in sociology in the US considers a Black American ethnically similar to an Eritrean. Nor do they consider a Ukrainian ethnically similar to a White American.
>The 90% Han Chinese number isn't especially useful because it's comparable to the way that most of Europe has historically identified itself as the successor of Rome.
It is extremely useful because the subgroups specifically make these claims: "Modern Han Chinese subgroups, such as the Cantonese, the Hakka, the Henghua, the Hainanese, the Hoklo peoples, the Gan, the Xiang, the Wu-speaking peoples, all claim Han Chinese ancestry pointing to official histories and their own genealogical records to support such claims."
Germanic people do not make the claim to be of Roman or Mediterranean ethnicity nor origin. The languages are vastly more varied in Europe versus China, where 70%+ speak Mandarin.
Additionally, Han Chinese are much closer genetically than Europeans. Italians, Brits, and Estonians have much more varied genetics compared to Han Chinese.
by the standard of most large landmasses, China was, in fact, far more cohesive and united - compared to the hundreds of local lords and kings with their tiny little fiefs in, say, India
Comparing Chinese unity favorably to India is damning with faint praise, and doesn't do anything at all to help your original argument that China has better "social cohesion and political stability" than Western countries by virtue of having less immigration.
We're not comparing the social cohesion of landmasses, we're comparing the social cohesion of states, and India is a particularly disjointed example to use.
China's rise was due to smart planning and investment in their people and infrastructure. The country went from peasant farmers to the manufacturing hub of the world in a generation. Now they're in the process of becoming a major hub of knowledge workers while keeping a strong manufacturing backbone.
And one thing I rarely see mentioned is that the Chinese government keeps its currency artificially devalued in order to sell their products cheaply and undercut competition. Looking at their economy purely on a GDP basis really underestimates how big their economy is. GDP by PPP is more accurate. If China ever decides to stop loosely pegging its currency and let the value naturally rise, their GDP will very likely swell, since GDP is measured in US dollars.
Where did you get this from? I am Indian and this is the first time I'm hearing of it.
The one child policy means there are no people to do the manufacturing in China in the future. The population pyramid is inverted. You can't do manufacturing without lots and lots of people. Or at least you'll get out competed by your neighbours who have lots of labor.
China invested heavily in machinery and automation many decades ago. They'll be fairly fine.
I visited India a few months ago. Loved it. But I saw construction being done with donkeys hauling dirt and people shoveling the loads onto the donkey's cart with tiny hand shovels. Scaling up from that to the degree of manufacturing powerhouses like China have is not going to be easy.
It also means they no longer do the cheap high volume manufacturing, which will go elsewhere where the cheap labor is.
This is how it goes. Manufacturing keeps migrating to cheap labor. China is running out of cheap labor and volume manufacturing will find it in East Asia and India and Africa instead, because these places will still have lots and lots of young people while those in China have aged out.
https://ifr.org/downloads/press2018/2024-SEP-24_IFR_press_re...
https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robotics-race...
This is a nice way to put it.
Anticipate a world within your life time where China is the dominant economic, technological, military and cultural super power.
Anticipate jealousy, anticipate fear, but know that as Americans who have been top dog for decades there is nothing wrong with not being the best.
Additionally anticipate a changing world view less focused on the view that freedom and democracy as the only possible way to lead and anticipate that despite the fact that China is a communist country and centrally controlled they don't want conflict and they don't want total war.
China and the US are not perfect. The US needs to accept this fact and it needs to accept that another is about to take it's place as the top dog.
My impression is that Chinese culture has very little appeal elsewhere (at least in the West). They can't seem to be able to (or care to) package it in an appealing way. Sure, they're being catered to in films and video games but I see very little organic interest in Chinese culture, especially compared to Japanese or Korean culture.
It's changing though. Wu Kong Black myth and even the top grossing film of last year was chinese animation. See the comments under the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsiAYjyiIBM. The film was apparently incredible.
The core culture of China is actually foundational to much of Asia. The stuff you see coming out of Japan and Korea is surface level aesthetics built on top of this foundation. You're probably thinking Nintendo, KPop and anime.
Once China makes the aesthetics just as good as other parts of Asia I can see China becoming a cultural power house. Even the mythology surrounding China historically in terms of say one thing like Wuxia is better than anything out of Korea, Japan or the west in my opinion.
Really in the end people are more attracted to the aesthetic presentation of everything. Japan does this really well while China has always been unskilled, crude and rough on the edges. But this is changing at a nearly breakneck pace.
I've had similar experience with film. Just compare the stuff coming out of Hong Kong today with what came out during the 80's and 90's.
Comedy is another thing I don't see go on export any time soon...
I actually don’t get what happened with Hong Kong. Stuff was good then it went bad. But in general it’s expected that stuff will be bad. Generally writing and story telling is the hardest to improve while production and special effects are easier.
The great story telling from China comes from its mythology and I feel China hasn’t yet found a method to depict this on screen without being too cheesy, fakeish or over the top.
I think this is why animation and video games work here temporarily. China will eventually get its act together.
But you also have to note there’s a shit ton of propaganda against China. I’m not even sure where it comes from given that we have freedom of press. you likely have no interest in the good stuff coming out of China likely because you don’t even know about it.
Think of it like this. You probably don’t think of BYD at all. Most Americans don’t. But to the rest of the world it’s a superior car to Tesla. And cheaper. It’s like Americans have some propaganda veil pulled over their eyes and I have no idea where it’s from. This absence of consideration of BYD is very similar to what Americans think of China. It’s just a very inaccurate perspective and full of holes.
Also a side note. Nobody inside China or Asia really gives a shit about Seinfeld, Sex and the city or friends. I love Seinfeld and friends but that's because I'm American. Outside of this culture those shows are just garbage. You need to look at the things with true world wide appeal across all cultures. Something like Avengers End game, which was an international phenomenon. (I know there's a lot of snobbish types who don't like it and I can understand why as it's not very sophisticated and it is a little too popular)
Anyway, China has yet to have something like Avengers End game. Or Star wars even. But out of all the countries in the world, it has the most chance of producing something on par with what America has done.
It's not a matter of growing the industry because it's already orders of magnitude bigger then what it costs to accomplish.
They want to visit Hollywood because they want to see the technology that built these blockbusters because internationally everyone understands heroism, sacrifice and special effects. Additionally these movies aren’t watered down. The writing and the effects have gone through years of development to get to that point. It just doesn’t cater to your sensibilities. The term is snobbish.
The writing for Seinfeld and friends and sex and the city took years to get where they are. These aren’t inborn cultural talents. You can easily compare stories from past American movies to see how cheesy and stupid they are. It takes development for stories to come to where they are today and it’s a back and forth between the audience and writers. As writers write more stories audience members learn and become more sophisticated and twists and humor that worked in the past become cliche. Why do you think you’re too snobbish to appreciate something like avengers? You think someone in the 50s wouldn’t appreciate it? Fuck honestly if the whole mcu up till end game came out in the 50s that whole thing would win a Nobel peace prize.
China is 100% going through this learning process right now. The audiences sophistication and the writers as a result are growing at a breakneck pace. I think movies from China that might appeal to who you are is crouching tiger hidden dragon or Hero as these movies share the more universally appreciated parts of Chinese culture and since that is what you’re interested in, I recommend them to you.
They know of it for different reasons. It has nothing to do with the shows.
>It's not about quality, it's not about blockbusters,
Blockbusters are a form of quality. Just not your form form of quality. You prefer sex and the city.
> Are you suggesting that overseas, the lesson we should take on Chinese culture from Chinese media is that China is infested by demons, has no electricity and is a feudal system??
People know about NYC because it's just a famous city. It has nothing to do with some shows that nobody in Asia watches. I'm also not talking about any of China's cities as marketed by media. I'm talking about the idea of China itself.
The idea that America is a powerful country and that NYC is a great city is slowly dying. Dying because the reality of it is dying as well. It's a slow death one that may never finish in your lifetime but there's no denying that we see a lot of decline.
Tencent has a streaming focused on international market called WeTV, there's also IQIYI. There's Viki too, that is from Rakuten - that is Japanese, but there's a ton of Chinese content there (which she also watches).
My nephew even learned a few words of mandarin (and Korean too) because she keep watching that all day.
Kdramas are really popular here, and don't think it's as popular as the US, my guess it's just the soap opera consumption Latin America was always huge, so it makes Asian dramas more palatable, as they are more soap opera style.
Now for music yeah, don't think Chinese music is that popular or will ever be compared to kpop.
I see it as one side of a coin. The yin to a yang.
Sadly, the recent election shows otherwise for a lot of Americans.
A few months ago, I'd have said soft-power and goodwill built over decades with the rest of the western world, which roughly equals China in population size. Instead, I agree that the US is staring down a "managed decline" like the UK, but hopefully not as steep.
Many parallels may be drawn: austerity vs DOGE in gutting government services, the deluded nativist/isolationist core of Brexit vs the tariffing the entire world, xenophobia, and most obviously a nostalgia of past-greatness that doesn't quite fit the present circumstances.
Game-over.
If the statistics aren't very wrong, it doesn't seem like a solution.
go to any county/state jail and try to find a single H-1B visa holder there... its all home grown foundational Americans, raised on McDonalds and Coke
Now, legal resident noncitizens are being deported for having political views that oppose the ruling executive party. This is not normal in the US.
and on balance it changes demographics dramatically, that also shapes US policy in the future. It will be harder for USA to continue to be bloody warmongering machine with Military industrial complex dictating the policy and bombing countries and blowing up civilians around the world.
You get your birth rates up, but you also risk alienating your native born population and electing far right morons into office
Jury’s out on whether a tfr of 1.0 of native born people is better than a tfr of 1.4 with immigrants
A couple of reliable sources say: 1.7 births per woman
Where did you get 1?
This is an outstanding article on the subject: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...
In the US, parenting time is up 20-fold, from a few hours per week to 24/7 adulting.
Companion to that is that free-range land has shrunk from many sq/mi to a few sq/yds. Car culture and trespassing culture has eliminated the irreplaceable environments where adult-free, peer time nurtured mental health and abilities.
As near as I can tell, parenting and childhood is irreparably broken in the US.
We certainly seem incapable of recalling what sustainable parenting once looked like.
On rare occasion someone will recall that kids once roamed all over. Maybe that gets connected to less mental health issues. Either way it's all forgotten moments later.
Today kids live entirely in adult curated, adult populated boxes. I'm not inclined to blame ipads for that.
The point of OP and what people don't get is that it's far easier to shift policies to brace for tough situations when you have a uniparty system and you're willing to make sacrifices. No 4 year administration is in any way incentivised to enact policies that only become effective after the next election. Note that I'm not saying that undemocratic systems are the solution.
Most wealthy countries have already solved it: immigration.
I wrote this not long after (10y ago) and I think this view is still unpopular now as it was then (for reasons beyond me):
I fully expect Baidu and other tech giants on the Chinese shores to try and push the boundaries of technology. Silicon Valley (and the US) in general has always been the hot-bed of innovation. But with enormous increase in wealth in China (and to an extent in India), I can see these companies being more and more ambitious. Not long ago Andrew Ng of Coursera and Stanford AI Lab fame joined Baidu to further their rival to the 'Google Brain' project.
Xiaomi has long been positioning itself as a company with design chops of Apple, engineering chops of Google, and e-commerce chops of Amazon, all rolled into one-- and I can see where they are coming from. If they manage to pull it off, I guess that's when we'd start seeing the proverbial "Death of Silicon Valley" as in, it loosing its strange monopoly and strangle hold on tech world in terms of both talent and innovation.
It might help to understand that the resistance you have faced is probably driven by deep-seated biases and stubbornness.
The vast majority of us were over that decades ago. Please catch up for the sake of all humanity.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/employment-in-agriculture...
You could just as easily massage statistics to call the US a nation of gig workers or something, but neither is productive or informative.
Let’s not pretend that peasants and farmers represent the same thing
All peasants are farmers, but not all farmers are poor.
So, no, not as a group. Midwest farmers, on balance, are going to be some of the richest people you can find in the country (mostly because of their land wealth, which Chinese farmers don't have). There are likely to be individual farmers in the midwest who you would call peasants, though.
Chinese farmers, on the other hand, are likely to be very poor. Some individual farmers in China are rich, but as far as the group goes... It is not as bad as it once was, but as that group they still lag well behind the typical urban dweller. As that group they are peasants.
He did not refer to all Chinese as peasants. China would like you think that though.
I don't want to discuss whether he is genuinely racist; I think that's besides the point. Words can have a lot of impact, especially when uttered by a public figure in such a powerful position. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the Vice President of the United States to carefully weigh the consequences of his words before speaking.
He did carefully weigh the consequences of his words. He deliberately chose the most inflammatory and insulting of possible words. Knowingly and intentionally.
You unsurprisingly choose the third option. Uncouth, crude and or ill-bred people are probably not especially productive in their working life.
We do know that in China, rural people flock to the cities (where they have diminished welfare provisions and 'rural' status, do the work and are then expected to return to their homes in the country.
My comment on another thread about how China is now a developed country was downvoted by some HNer who swallowed some Guardian anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43627315
Exponential growth is a hard concept to internalize.
China has a development level similar to Thailand, which while not undeveloped, is far from the living standards in the US or Western Europe.
I blame Peter Zeihan for this kind of thinking. His views are immensely popular in the very powerful and influential circles. And he constantly derides China's capabilities. Since 2014 he's been saying it's going to collapse any day now. He still says it.
He also seems to be veering into fabulism. He's recently said in multiple interviews that there's a clothing factory in North Carolina that is so automated that only 2 "guys" are needed to run it. Raw cotton comes in at one end, and finished clothing comes out at the other (hence Chinese labor is not needed to stitch clothes, hence China is going to collapse any day now).
Why do I believe this is fabulism? He never names this company. And the story has evolved. In earlier interviews he used to say that cloth comes out at the other end. But in a couple of recent interviews he's said finished clothing comes out at the other end.
We should be doing that right now.
https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution-spies...
Not quite. USA is big enough to be able to be self sufficient if they keep mexico and Canada tightly bound via NAFTA or military might. UK have no option but to trade. UK was rarely able to feed and fuel itself after the industrial revolution.
Brexit worked out fairly badly for rich folks. I'm not sure how well it worked for the folks who were voting for it, but it's possible "take the rich folks down a few notches" even if it lowers the median income, if you yourself don't earn the median income, is still seen as worth it.
I'm sure that the US still has many edges over China in high-end technology. I remember I read a research article back in 2012/2013 which listed all fields that China were lagging behind, including pharma, computer chips and some other stuffs. It's a fairly long list. I'm sure China managed to catch up in some of the fields but I doubt all of them.
And if you could guarantee that they'll never catch up in the others, we'd all feel a bit better about the permanency of American superiority.
Absent that guarantee, we need to bench test those scenarios and be prepared with plans that best serve American interests should those scenarios come to fruition.
The US pre-WW1 was an isolationist nation with few I'd any exports, not the global manufacturing powerhouse it became afterwards.
Things change and always change.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec...
China leads in 57 of 64 technologies but the US leads in only 7?
It ranks China far ahead of the US on aircraft engines, of which, China can’t even produce its own right now. What?
(and they are now producing their own engines, as seen on their new fighters, though they aren't believed to be ahead yet.)
They do lead in many areas now. They have a lot of engineers, hands-on manufacturing heft at scale (inc. a lot of internal competition), and a government that has been pumping and subsidising physical industries for many years.
Will China eventually catch up? Absolutely.
But I’d temper any fear of China pulling ahead in research when they can’t even put today’s technology into full production.
The city at the center of the Missouri and Mississippi if it were in europe would be a major civilization. In the US its saint louis. The US, CA, and AU have an option few countries do -- at any point they want nominal gdp growth all they have to do is open the door.
I agree with you though that china's incredibly impressive.
Yes, it's lowpop, but that's about it.
Somewhat similar for CA, but CA is a lot better off than AU.
They bring money and wreck the environment, which gets less pushback in Australia because very few live in the mining areas.
Point is: The best and brightest go where they think their life will be most fulfilling. Up to last year that was California for tech and New York for culture.
Even the Chinese think china is oppressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping#:~:text=Tang%20ping%...
All things considered, most Chinese would prefer to stay in China, and if you're rich there you've got it made.
Unless they manage to get to the US they return, because they would not be safe from harassment anywhere else.
Also, the structural inequalities of Chinese society dwarf the West, meaning that the Chinese middle class gets a lot more bang for their buck: ridiculously cheap delivery services, taxis, and other services.
With respect to "career success" you can have 50 million people in your country with IQs >140 and there's still a limited market to sell to. There are diminishing returns on capacity - you can have business analysts or call center folks with the IQ of Einstein and they'll be limited by the systems they are placed in.
The other side of this is that just because you are smart doesn't mean you are capable of doing well in the real world. Recall how there are a lot of "dumb rich people" and "smart poor people".
I'm not being critical of China here though, I'm just being critical of the original discussion point. Quantity has a quality of its own, but it has trade-offs.
I suspect this will simply make labor more expensive on top end of the talent curve
In the USA it is less fashionable and more frowned upon every year to show intelligent traits. And it has been the case for the last 20 years.
Oh, hackernews, how you’ve fallen :(
"AI Overview
It's difficult to provide a precise number of Asian countries where farmers don't earn a living wage without specific, up-to-date data and a clear definition of "living wage." However, many Asian countries face challenges in ensuring farmers receive sufficient income to cover basic needs."
I will assure you, from being an eyewitness, its worse.
it almost seems like we're trying to clear immigrants out of the chicken plants to make room for laid-off graphic designers.
Yeah, Americans are going to go back to working in factories. But not for low wages, because errr ummm actually it’ll be robots doing the work! So where will Americans be working? Errr ummm well… in the factories! (??)
It seems to be the new image of America as some kind of wounded animal who is acting aggressively to protect itself from China. It might not be the case but perception is important and in my opinion it’s changing fast and in the wrong direction.
It’s almost like Americans are now begging for low tier jobs or something.
It's just one of many possible theories, but it's consistent with itself and the evidence...
Not sure where exactly I've seen the idea. It might have been: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn6b8GRAXgo or its source material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID8Xq3chNi4
The likely answer lies in the fact that this would mean China & America are both high-income countries. There are likely to be other countries looking to be "the next China" to ascend the income ladder. As is now, rich countries will outsource work to those poorer countries.
This doesn't have to be zero sum.
Is it even possible in terms of resources? there are limits to growth and it may not be feasible for 1.5 billions people to consume and pollute as much as an average American.
Also are the US willing to lose their supremacy peacefully?
In so much as generalizing a nation can still leave large exceptions, wars of conquest are useless to America: it hates running occupations, and it's own citizens are not going to move abroad in sufficient numbers to provide a labor force to utilize the conquests.
Moving against EU would not get them anything and the same bit as regarding China applies.
Truth is, war is an expense. You need to count on a serious long term benefit to wage it.
China’s per capita GDP is 1/7th that of the US.
To match the US GDP per capita would require China growing at 10%/yr for 35 years (while the US grows at 3-4% per year).
Thats 35 years of phenomenal growth, with no recessions, no “slow” years of only 5% growth (like the past 3 years). Assume an average of 7% growth (and US 3%) and now it takes 50 years to match the US per capita GDP.
This is why GDP growth of 5% is regarded as “bad” in China. They need double that.
And China needs to do this all the while having massive debt overhang, a world moving away from free trade (which their economy is highly dependent on) and a shrinking and rapidly aging population (by 2050 it will be 1 worker per retiree).
I don’t have a crystal ball, so who knows, but suffice to say if things stay relatively the same it’s going to be 2060-2070 before China is as rich as the US on a per capita basis.
Perhaps you should have considered that like in Art, the first step to proficiency in anything really is mimicry.
As you state they haven't been "only" copying for a while and my problem with people keep repeating this "logic" (mea culpa) is precisely what's at stake right now: designing and "creating" is critical, but I'd argue that civilization is not made my design or one-off (or limited) editions. Civilization is the ability to innovate in mass production, in doing so, consistently in lower and lower costs. China excels (and will continue to excel) while they continue to appreciate this. The "service sector" world stopped caring about this.
China didn’t invent the iPhone or chat gpt. But they excel at optimizing.
Also in places where Chinese electric cars are not being blocked they are really taking off. In 20 years for billions of people the most common car will be a Chinese one.
China is able to build nuclear reactors while the US is floundering.
The Chinese may well be the first to produce electricity from fusion.
People come back from Shenzhen now to the US and say that the US now feels less advanced.
The US certainly leads in some areas. But not longer all areas and things are moving toward China.
The other thing to look at is the number of high impact papers in Materials Science, Chemistry, Engineering, Comp Sci and Physics and look at where they are being written. Check the image from The Economist in the article below :
https://asiatimes.com/2025/03/behold-chinas-innovative-golde...
It's great for the world that China now has hundreds of millions of people who are able to have much better lives and tens of millions who are making great contributions to the world.
China has done what the US did in copying Europe 150 years ago. The US copied Europe and then went further. China is now doing that.
If fusion is successfully done in China rather than the US it will still be great for people in the US. The US can copy it.
The only thing is that the US's dominance is ending.
If following the pattern it will also be invented in the West and optimized in China.
Once again optimizing on technologies invented in the west.
> the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now
The US and UK are totally different animals at the height of their "empire". The UK currently has little land and alot of it is devoid of minerals(sans coal). They achieved most of their might subjecting other countries and extracting resources from their colonies. Once the colonies and the rest of the world objected the British empire began to crumble as the colonies broke off from the UK.
Contrast that with the US which if it were to jettison its "colonies" (Puerto Rico, Samoa etc) you would see very little drop in GDP. The US has vast swaths of land which is excellent for farming, energy extraction and contains valuable minerals. It has widespread and diverse populations with wildly different ecologies and climates. In addition to a huge amount of resources it has a kings ransom of some of the best universities in the world(stanford, harvard, MIT, etc) and a highly educated society with living standards just below some small asian and european countries. The US also has a peerless military (we need hypersonic weapons however) and many aircraft carriers and nukes as well as world renown special forces groups. And lastly of the top largest 100 companies in the world, 65% are US based and this despite the US only having 4.2% of the worlds population, looking at GDP per country is almost comical as the US has 30T compared to the next largest economy China(19.5T), 3rd place is Germany at 4.9T.
I would say that the USA also has an advantage of open immigration for intellectuals to keep our universities strong but the anti-intellectual Trump administration is destroying this advantage as fast as it can!
The greatest advantage that we ever had was to lead the free world in ideals. A friend of mine was telling me yesterday that every child in India when they reach the age of six wants to go to Harvard and settle in the USA. They want to stand up for freedom and for democracy and for putting down all the evil dictators in the world. We are losing this image very very quickly it could be gone in a matter of months!
Don't brag about our aircraft carriers it would take us 25 years to build 11 more. We are nowhere in ship building we destroyed our domestic shipbuilding in the 1980s when we reoriented it for military shipbuilding and then the Berlin Wall fell down and we drastically cut the military shipbuilding budget and that caused our shipbuilding to go to almost zero overnight (3 heavy ships per year nationwide whereas China's largest ship builder does THIRTY!).
But it wants to throw that out the window now too, for some reason. Crazy.
They have their own straight-C-plus high schoolers they can train in finance.
I'm a US American living in Asia. I can't tell you with 100% certainty that in terms of technological progress, China is far far ahead of the US.
Four times bigger absolutely will not happen; China's demographic disaster is already baked into the cake. Forecasts suggest China's total population will be around 1.5x the USA by 2100, but the average age / working age population will be in the USA's favour.
> …China equal to America on a per capital basis
Hmm, what number do you mean will be equal? Income per capita? If the Chinese system paid Americans the same as the American system does, why would Nike operate its sweatshops there? Kind of tautological, no?
Another thing is when you basically have 10 Japan or 20 South Korea, which is what China is with the 1bi population.
Which means not that they will have a lot of consumers, but way more competitive companies in general (if they continue growing as is).
There seem to be a lot of companies in the S&P500 that would dry out without access to Chinese workers and goods. Just take cloud providers. Where is their gear sourced from? Is there any realistic chance to provide that from within the US? Given the current state that would become necessary but seems highly unlikely to be achievable.
I can’t tell if you’re brainwashed by propaganda or just spreading propaganda.
China is great at making things flashy. But the quality things like EVs is low. The battery quality is not good. The promise of long range cars is often 30% of the promise. Cars leaking. Rusting like American made cars.
Military
That is an environmental apocalypse best avoided as early as possible.
China is super far away from that and its demography is a time bomb that will get there first
I walked away realizing they are still copying the tech (IP theft, etc), but don't understand it nearly as well. The main thing that changed was the time-gaps, and by bypassing safety and other regs/norms, they just get to market first, but with a subpar product, usually with major issues.
I'm not nearly as afraid of this version of the future having experienced that, but of course, that was from a limited perspective.
That said, the sheer amount of $ being pumped into infrastructure of all types in China is a sight to behold, and also woke me up to how much our own government and big business entrenchment is suppressing American ingenuity.
When will China start innovating instead of copying?
The truth is, China is already the most advanced country in the world and if we ever manage to modernize our infrastructure and manufacturing, we will be copying them.
Trust me I would love for China and India to start innovating and advancing the human race but taking the idea of a train and making it faster is just an iteration on a previous technology.
Thing I disliked most about the movie Blackberry (and I liked the movie!): The Blackberry lost to a phone that could only have been made in China.
I have been having similar discussions over the last week with people about synthesizers/pro audio gear (a topic I happen to be expert on), and the market dynamics are roughly the same. The goods themselves have a much smaller market and a much higher median cost than shoes, obviously. But components, assembly, and a significant amount of technical (PCB) design originates in China.
I don't understand this paragraph. If Footlocker was okay with $50 profit/shoe, why do they need to claim $75 profit/shoe in their costs per shoe go up? The costs of handling the shoes, retail space, advertising, and labor are all fixed.
Sorry: I intended to reply to the grandparent.
The market cares about dollar returned vs dollar invested. If some piece in the middle of the chain goes up and end customer prices go up as well, that doesn’t directly affect investors at all.
The way it could and likely will affect investors is if people start buying fewer shoes, but that is a different process than what you are describing.
If I’m off base can you help me understand what you are saying?
Think in the extreme. $1 billion can probably earn more in a saving account than as a shoe that generates $50 profit after 2 weeks.
A shoe doesn't sit for a year waiting to be sold.
It turns over quickly.
I hope you can see how spending $75 to make $150 revenue and $75 in profit is a much better position than spending $50 to make $100 in revenue and $50 in profit, if you are limited to how many transactions you can make in a day by physical infrastructure.
I think it's understandable for the store to charge more for their shoes, and for the stores to make more than $50/profit per shoe to cover higher capital investment and increased risk of loss, but I don't understand the logical leap where the store now can make 50% more profit per shoe.
Now this analogy has a LOT of problems but the point is it directly affects investors, even if the interpolations inbetween are imperfect.
So basically the money a business uses to produce the next tranche of goods (so to speak) normally comes not from income from sales of the last tranche, but rather from external funding sources such as loans or capital injection from investors?
Is that really so common as to be universal and affect investor behavior like you suggest? Like for certain types of business, and especially for early stage businesses, I do expect this to be the case. But does it apply to the market broadly? Scary if so, since it seems like a destabilizing force.
Whereas a business that can figure out how to be paid significantly before it delivers can run on much slimmer margins.
Another perspective is that Footlocker would sell you those $25 Nikes for $300 if they could-- but if they tried, someone else would get active in the retail business and invest into a slightly less profitable operation (with lower margins) to eat into their market share.
But if the costs for everyone rise, raising the prices proportionally (instead of by fixed amount) makes total sense because it is not really gonna cost you market share (only decrease total market volume depending on consumer price sensitivity).
Note: We just observed those exact dynamics with Covid/Ukraine driven price increases, where retailers and other middlemen actually came out really good instead of sacrificing their margins to keep consumer costs down.
(If it's not bought on credit, there is still opportunity cost, since that money could have been used for something else.)
All that being said, tariffs drive up the cost of living, which drives up wages, which makes everything more expensive.
-Some of their costs are in fact linear based on the cost of the item.
Inventory cost doubles, perhaps now they have to take out higher interest debt to finance that. Things like insurance would also at least double.
Transaction fees (like card fees at about ~2%) and other parts (like returns risk) also increase linearly.
-Reduced sales due to increased prices.
If an item is less affordable people buy less of them. Theft will also go up. If trainers were $100 a week ago and are now $200 - you will sell less, they will be stolen more.
All in you actually do need more than the fixed $50 of margin if the wholesale cost of the item changes from $50 to $100 - it may actually be that $100 is the correct number, or even too little - sales volume would concern me the most, particularly on this 'luxury' item.
All of that would typically be tied together as inventory cost (aside from theft, though some people do).
Lots of fascinating things in retail. Around half of all theft will be from your own employees, for example.
I would think that specialised and expensive shoes have less markup than cheaper and more common shoes. But if the cheaper and more common shoes become 50% more expensive then there aren’t really any cheap shoes left to feed the bottom line…
People will go and shop around for the best price on a $300 item, but for a $10 item they'll buy whatever's infront of them, so long as it's not clearly outrageous.
The retailer & the wholesalers involved all have a reasonable idea about what people will pay for the products in question. The portion of that final consumer price that stays with the retailer is just the result of negotiation.
The retailer can likely buy decent alarm clocks from anyone, so alarm clock makers & wholesalers have no pricing power and the retailer can demand high margins.
But the retailer can only get Garmin from Garmin. If Garmin has done a good job promoting the brand, such that the retailer feels they have no choice but to stock it, they will have to suck it up and accept low margins.
I'm pretty sure Footlocker doesn't borrow money to pay Nike up front for inventory. Nike is smart enough to know that there's zero chance their shoes will be sold if they sit in a warehouse, so Nike might as well ship them to retailers and get paid gradually as the shoes are sold to consumers.
The general point is that additional cash is tied up in shoes which cannot do something else. Who bears the burden of the loss of that additional cash changes over time (Nike to Footlocker to consumers) but the burden is bourn.
(And that's before you count the impact of the inevitable reduction in unit sales. There're various kinds of overhead that don't scale linearly units sold, or that have a long lag before scaling, or have a significantly-sized step function in the scaling.)
BTW, where did the cash go? Oh yeah, into the hands of the US federal government. We have a word for that: tax.
If the shoes don't sell, their losses can get much larger.
They need the potential to make more profit to offset this this potential for larger losses.
It's kind of like asking why Sears needs to make $200 in profit selling a refrigerator but only $2 selling a t-shirt.
Because that's just how it works...
I've never found Nikes that work for me, but Brooks seem custom made for me personally, so that's what I get. They're about the same price as my wife’s Nikes.
If you spend more money and get a proportional increase in quality, that's not luxury. A luxury good occurs when the marginal increase in quality cannot be justified by the increase in price. For example, you could buy a quartz Casio for $25 that's more accurate than a $10,000 mechanical Rolex. Both tell you the same time.
Apple sells lots of phones at different price points. So there is some price sensitivity via a vis value for money or competitive pressure.
Plus, higher secondary market prices drive demand for the less desirable shoes as everyone can't afford to spend a week's wages on a pair of shoes but can stretch their budget for the still-kind-of-cool models. I'd go so far as to say the secondary market prices drive more demand for the lesser models as the cool kids want to be seen wearing what the rich cool kids are wearing.
I'm sure they spend a lot of time discussing what price they can charge without people openly revolting against their 'predatory pricing' strategies.
Food and clothing, anything with complex supply chains tend to be cost based pricing. As a rule of thumb, it's x3, maybe x4 for a well-branded item like Nike or Calvin Klein. Most innovations are on supply chain. E-commerce was such a big thing because it could cut out one middle man and lead to 30% price cuts or profit margins, and yet all these online shops ended up appearing in malls anyway.
Software is price based costing because there's no fancy supply chain. iPhones may be somewhere in the middle, hardware tends to have the worst of both worlds - high fixed costs and lots of middle men.
A McDonald's may have franchises and may own some restaurants internally, but they don't want to lose money, so they may base it on the lower profit margins - it makes no sense for a burger in one spot to be $4 and a burger in the franchise to be $5; both need to be $5.
Generally luxury brand do use more expensive parts, whether or not those parts add to the quality. And they do have higher profit margins. But the retailers, distributors, etc still take a 30% cut or so. And in the end, Louis Vuitton is still probably making lower margins than Plants vs Zombies.
Let's say Foot Locker tries to keep the same absolute profit $50 and retails the shoes for $125 instead of the previous $100.
Now demand goes down, because more people will skip a new pair of sneakers. So Foot Locker's absolute profit goes down.
But they still have the same fixed retail space, advertising, and labor as you said.
So to try to keep their profitability, they need to increase the price more, which reduces demand even more, but it settles somewhere higher. And the place it settles (where total absolute profit is maximized) tends to be around the same 100% markup as before.
It doesn't need to be exactly the same, but as a general rule of thumb, these things do tend to work in proportional terms rather than absolute terms. And we're fortunate they do, because when manufacturing costs fall, that means absolute profit per unit can fall as well (while percentage remains the same), because it's made up for by more people buying.
So to have the same quality of life, you expect higher returns.
Which mean that you will choose to invest into companies that offers a better return, and for that, these companies will have raise their prices, which in turn, spirals into additional price raises.
Yes investors look for maximal returns, but those are limited. Fundamentally the ceiling is set by demand and by your competitor's prices.
You can usually change what you buy.
A lot of the costs come from bidding against other retailers for employees and retail space. If you don't make as much as the rival retailer they'll outbid you.
You can sometimes get around that by buying direct from the internet.
For example, you may announce to public markets that your profit has increased $10M despite margins eroding from 50% to 30%. You will likely be punished in terms of stock price. This is because you sold a lot more or trimmed some expenses (which is short-term good) but you are also now more risky because if sales decrease you will more easily run into trouble breaking even/covering operating costs (which is long-term bad).
If you sell $75 shoes, you can sell 1000 units/mo, but if your shoes are $100 you can only sell 700/mo and it will take 1.5 months to sell 1000 units.
This effectively increases fixed overheads per pair of shoes and decreases net margin per pair, given constant demand
Some extra costs are real and linear to their "factory" price (returns, insurance, stolen stuff, less people buying less shoes, so they need higher margins to survive, etc.).
On the other hand... they can raise their prices today by $whatever_tarrif_trump_mentioned, and blame trump for the price hike and pocket the extra profit.
From a $100 shoe that sells for $76:
- $24 goes overseas (22 cost, 2 freight)
- $8 goes to the US gov't (3 import, 2 Nike tax, 3 Footlocker tax)
- $33 goes to US employees or businesses (5 Nike marketing, 11 Nike expenses, 17 Footlocker expenses)
- $5 goes to Nike (11% return)
- $6 goes to Footlocker (8% return)
But now with 100% tariffs, it's a $100 shoe that sells for $100 (or a $132 shoe that sells for $100) and:
- $24 goes overseas (22 cost, 2 freight)
- $29 goes to the US gov't (22 import, 3 Nike tax, 4 Footlocker tax)
- $33 goes to US employees or businesses (5 Nike marketing, 11 Nike expenses, 17 Footlocker expenses)
- $7 goes to Nike (11% return, 7.15 exactly)
- $7 goes to Footlocker (8% return, 7.45 exactly)
And if a US shoemaker wanted to undercut the import, a Made in USA shoe that sells for $100:
- $7+ goes to the US gov't (? shoemaker tax, 3 Nike tax, 4 Footlocker tax)
- $79 goes to US employees or businesses (46 to shoemaker, 5 Nike marketing, 11 Nike expenses, 17 Footlocker expenses)
- $7 goes to Nike (11% return, 7.15 exactly)
- $7 goes to Footlocker (8% return, 7.45 exactly)
* Domestic consumers and companies are incentivized to potentially go for the 2nd best product. This over time can impact productivity as the tooling will decline over time as inferior solutions are bought.
* Reduced competition. We've seen this with the 25% "chicken tax" on pickup trucks. Arguably one culprit in US automakers falling behind is that they had a protected market around pickup trucks where it was hard to impossible for foreign competition to keep them on their toes. So US automakers retreated more and more into this safe haven.
* Destruction of economies of scale: If everyone wants the entire supply chain to be replicated in their country, we obviously loose economies of scale and thus efficiency. This sounds like it would be small but having multiple Shenzhen's is just not viable and we'll have to deal with higher prices and less product choice.
* Galapagos island syndrome: Over time separation of markets can lead to incompatible technologies which amplifies all other points.
There are still stupid edge cases. The cake-versus-biscuit saga in the UK comes to mind.
Flat rate sales tax has its problems, but avoiding Jaffa cake situations is entirely desirable.
The way they are done in the US is maddening. You go to the counter and find the price is higher than the tag price by some random amount. It seems to vary wherever you go and depend on what you buy.
A tariff might actually be better.
It makes the taxes visible and painful and they will therefore (potentially) not rise as fast or as much.
Need to balance transparency in pricing vs. visibility of taxes. I don't think sales taxes are actually all that visible most of the time- it's not like the cashier is telling you "and your taxes are $X." But it does make it much harder to detect if the store is charging you more than list price.
But yes, that’s exactly why the American right makes taxation so cumbersome and horrible: to make people think that taxes are bad, as there’s this assumption you can have civilization without paying for it.
A Made in USA shoe that sells for $100:
- $7+ goes to the US gov't (? shoemaker tax, 3 Nike tax, 4 Footlocker tax)
- $79 goes to US employees or businesses (46 to shoemaker, 5 Nike marketing, 11 Nike expenses, 17 Footlocker expenses)
- $7 goes to Nike (11% return, 7.15 exactly)
- $7 goes to Footlocker (8% return, 7.45 exactly)
The blog also doesn't acknowledge the externalities of shipping. Having a "Nike USA" brand that becomes their premium domestic flagship won't incur the same logistical expenses or tariffs. I may be biased because I'm from a debtor colony that understood there's no way free people can compete with slave labor, but the distaste for compensating workers is largely a classist taboo.
People are theorycrafting ways to lose, but I would only expect that from a company that was trying to signal their disdain for current trade policy, not actually run their business.
If Nike shoes exceed the cost of domestically produced shoes, isn’t that… like… kind of the point?
How much capacity do you think the US has to manufacture these things? and what about the supplies?
Running a manufacturing business in the US is more expensive. Consumers largely won't pay more, it's a limited market. The machinery for molding soles only makes economical sense at a large scale.
The US does massive amounts of injection molding. I just signed off on my molds to be cut and run this month, how much experience do you actually have with this I wonder?
> And if Footlocker purchases Nike shoes for $75, then they retail them for $150. Everyone needs to fixed percentages to avoid losses.
The problem with your breakdown is you're mixing unit costs and net profit in a way that doesn't work. For example, say after increasing the price in accordance with your summary, the volume of sales halved (just to pick an easy number). Then the $17 marked as "Footlocker expenses" increases, likely to around $34, and Footlocker's profit becomes -$10. The absolute expenses haven't changed. They're still paying the same amount for their employees and storefronts. But with half as many shoes sold, the expense per shoe is doubled.
It's not just sales volume that affects the $17. Other costs like credit card fees or shrink scale with the unit cost as well.
Somewhere in there you have to also figure in the cost of the fact that shoe factories and the suppliers of the goods to make shoes also don't exist in the US and will cost millions, and years, to get setup.
I'm not saying things should be different, just wondering why it is the way it is. If Footlocker was also selling some cheapo shoe for $50 presumably they do the same amount of work to bring that to the store. Are they only paying $25 for those? Why does it cost half for them to handle a cheaper shoe?
When it comes to the retailer, there's a huge increase in the amount of work and overhead for each shoe sold. And the labor cost for that work is much higher than on the Asian side of the supply chain. That's also where you get potential waste from returns and discarded inventory and such. The retailer also have their own marketing costs.
I don't find it strange at all that the retailer expects a 100% markup.
The flip side however - e-commerce with its totally different cost structure and same traditional RRP as brick and mortar retail - should be - a gift from above for retailers.
The good thing about rent is it’s relatively fixed so it’s possible to gain leverage with volume. That is also a risk if volume shrinks, etc.
But consider Footlocker sells a lot of other shoes for much less than Nikes. Those shoes don't cost any less to manufacturer and depending on the brand are just as well established so the 50/50 ratio still applies. It's just that at each level the overhead adjusts to meet the ratio over time.
For fringe brands the retailers markup can be huge 10x or more.
Welcome to Europe
Footlocker probably doesn't have much of a margin, the price they charge is due more to high labor and real estate costs in the US which are being passed on.
The amount of risk increases at each step.
That $24 in "discounts." Almost certainly some amount of that is "shrinkage." Storefronts are expensive in more ways than one.
You could take your monthly rent and costs and then divide by size of a product times the average hold time before sale. Each item has to pay this price plus whatever you want in profit to "earn" it's place in your store. That time multiplier gets worse at each step with an extra kick in the behind if you took those items on credit.
The manufacturer holds the product for almost no time. The retailer may hold it for months.
> They're turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers.
> But what's the real cost?
> 'Cause the sneakers don't seem that much cheaper.
> Why are we still paying so much for sneakers
> When you got them made by little slave kids
> What are your overheads?
>Footlocker’s purchase price (read footnote #3) for every sale of $100 shows up as $66 in their financial reports, and not $50. In plain terms, Footlocker sells its merchandise for a 24% discount on the average.
So $100 was never the sale price, just some made up, hoped for number that only appears on the shoe box, and not on anyone's financial statements. Really this should be Footlocker makes $6 on selling a $66 sneaker, for a margin of ~9%.
BTW, both Footlocker and Dick's have gross margins ~30% but Dick's has an operating margin around 12% while FL is 1-2%. Clearly FL is an inferior retailer.
And the linked article does cover Nike selling directly...
>And what happens if brands skip the retailers and operate their own stores? adidas and Nike already have their own shops, but direct-to-customer retail comes with its set of challenges. Brands will incur costs otherwise absent in the wholesale business model; spends like leasing+manpower+operational costs, store set-up and periodic re-modelling cost, the entire risk of inventory, and costs associated with warehousing and distribution. That’s only at the store level, there will be additional off-site resources needed in the back-end to support retail operations. The brands will make some extra margin selling out of their own stores, but the best case scenario will be an additional 10%, which is slightly above what a highly evolved retailer like Footlocker makes annually after taxes.
I would argue that a great deal of selling today is direct, no stores involved at all.
That assumption burnt the previous Nike CEO post COVID.
Like unless you just know you specifically want some Nike shoe you aren't likely to visit Nike.com to buy shoes.
yes. but any arguments you see in favour of onshoring manufacturing would use undiscounted list prices, so it makes sense to start from that place.
> BTW, both Footlocker and Dick's have gross margins ~30% but Dick's has an operating margin around 12% while FL is 1-2%. Clearly FL is an inferior retailer.
So if you build a SaaS app, your company will incur a number of costs. You need to pay AWS for hosting, your support team, your sales team, your annual team retreat to Mexico, etc.
When you start measuring your profitability you then will separately measure the profitability of your product vs. your business.
The profitability of the product is your gross margin - essentially your revenue minus your cost of goods sold (COGS). Not all of your business expenses fall into here - only the costs that directly relate to supporting the product.
So… - Your annual team retreat won’t hit your gross margin: this cost isn’t essential to supporting the product - Your AWS costs will hit your gross margin (if you turned off AWS tomorrow, your product stops working) - Your Slack bill does not hit gross margin - Your product & engineering team normally doesn’t hit gross margin, but DevOps does (because DevOps is seen as essential to supporting the product while R&D is not)
Now in reality it does get a bit more messy. Businesses might allocate a % of engineering costs to GM to account for essential maintenance and bugfixes.
So the way to look at it is: what costs are essential to the continued delivery of the product and what are nice-to-have?
And then operating margin essentially considers all of the non capital costs. It’s a more comprehensive view of all the businesses revenue and costs.
For a smaller business it’s very normal for operating margin to be razor thin or even negative. Because just one or two engineers could cost more than your entire revenue.
But this entire concept is why software companies have historically been able to be unprofitable for so long. A business that’s losing a ton of money every month might only be losing that money because it’s investing very heavily in R&D. Or maybe it just moved into a new
As you scale the relative impact of a lot of those costs will go down significantly - e.g. your engineering team cost will stop being 300% of your revenue and will start being 20% (you don’t hire engineers linearly with growth).
So the theory is that if you can find a software that has: - a big market - great gross margin
Then with just some upfront cash investment you can provide the business enough runway to grow the revenue to the point where the impact of some of these expenses becomes very small. At a certain scale, a product with 50%+ gross margin will be producing so much cash that it can pay for the rest of your operational expenses without further investment.
This also doesn't make sense because buying shoes from Nike.com costs roughly the same as Footlocker. Is Nike taking that 50% cut in this case? Article definitely hand waves away a ton of the complexity around tariffs and global trade.
My favorite line is: "Asian manufacturing in Asia produces US jobs. You go to Footlocker to buy a pair of $100 shoes because you can afford them. This creates jobs for the Footlocker employees".
It feels like people have completely flipped their views on offshoring manufacturing in the last 6 months. If you go back 10 years ago we were barraged with stories about Foxconn, corporations exploiting workers in developing nations, and scenes of abandoned manufacturing cities like Detroit. The popular view was that we needed to build our manufacturing base back up and that using developing nations to pump out cheap disposable goods was bad for everyone except giant corporations.
Now we are getting told that corporations offshoring all their labor to developing nations is good, and that the USA should not do manufacturing. This article even asserts that we will lose jobs if we produce things domestically.
I don't agree with the ham-fisted bullying approach Trump is using, but I do agree with the philosophical underpinning. Offshoring all our manufacturing is not a good long term strategy and will slowly erode the value of labor and our economy.
Fiscal Year | DTC Sales (in billion USD) | Total Sales (in billion USD) | DTC as % of Total Sales
----------- | -------------------------- | ---------------------------- | ----------------------
2020 | 12.4 | 37.4 | 33%
2021 | 16.4 | 44.5 | 37%
2022 | 18.7 | 46.7 | 40%
2023 | 20.3 | 47.6 | 43%
2024 | 21.5 | 48.2 | 45%Rockwell is price competitive with both kuka and fanuc. If you want to talk about 'Difference in manufacturing cost', why don't we start there?
People forget why manufacturing was moved out of the US. Manufacturing jobs sucked major ass. Then they sucked less ass, when unions started gaining power. Then the companies saw their employees had prosperity, said “fuck you”, and left.
We’ve crippled unions to such an absurd degree that the reality is that, if manufacturing came back, the quality of life for average Americans would go down significantly. It’s not 1955 - you’re out of your goddamn mind if you think a factory worker can maintain the quality of life now, let alone afford a suburban home on one income like in the past.
Okay, then we'll have unions then. I don't see what the issue is here. I have heard this reasoning several times, even in person, it seems to misunderstand the action of protectionism in the first place.
You can't have an industrial economy if workers don't have any leverage to demand sufficient wages or if unions have so much power that they bring the balance of labor negotiations to unprofitability.
I don't think manufacturing jobs suck ass. They probably aren't great for your physical health, but it is better for society spiritually in the long term to have the majority of society focused on producing something real rather than just having an endless network of fake jobs as a means of wealth distribution.
The factory worker of today can't afford anything because they are competing with third world wageslaves to outsource manufacturing to our geopolitical rivals.
America wont have unions nor consumer protections. For that matter, it wont investigate crypto scams either and will accept industrial pollutions to save factory owners money. Meaning, workforce will be less healthy due to impact on air they themselves are breathing.
There is no planned change to create protections for low level employees, but there are many changes allowing owners to do whatever. Once competition ranks up, they will be forced to pollute and mistreat workers or go out of business.
>it is better for society spiritually in the long term to have the majority of society focused on producing something real rather than just having an endless network of fake jobs as a means of wealth distribution.
OK, you want to sacrifice health of some for "spiritual benefit" of others. But those jobs will be as fake as healthier jobs those people have now.
Why not? I would vote for it.
IDK how consumer protections fits into this, but avoiding crypto scams is pretty easy, just don't invest in crypto if you don't know what you're doing. It's only on the utility/monopoly scale that the government needs to be involved in consumer protections. Net Neutrality is a great example of the dems having the right idea.
I think democrats would have a decent chance of winning elections if they abandoned idpol stuff.
>There is no planned change to create protections for low level employees, but there are many changes allowing owners to do whatever. Once competition ranks up, they will be forced to pollute and mistreat workers or go out of business.
Okay, then we'll change regulation to better suit this. The purpose of protectionism is to reduce this competition.
>OK, you want to sacrifice health of some for "spiritual benefit" of others. But those jobs will be as fake as healthier jobs those people have now.
I don't think so. The end purpose of industrial jobs is to produce something real. The purpose of most jobs today is to do literally nothing while acting as a wealth distribution mechanism: our country basically makes money by selling our currency to be used by other nations as the global reserve currency.
David Graeber has a good book about this called "Bullshit Jobs" if you are interested in this theory.
Each worker can negotiate easily on their own behalf or simply work elsewhere. Unions are unnecessary and always end up corrupt and wasteful.
This is a complete re-writing of history.
Unions were not "abusive". Typical union negotiations pushed for safe(r) working environments and reasonable wages.
Companies moved overseas not because they were abused (Jesus Christ). They moved because there's lots of parts of the world where you have access to psuedo-slave labor.
I don't want to be a slave. My fellow Americans don't want to be slaves, either.
> Each worker can negotiate easily on their own behalf or simply work elsewhere.
This is delusional.
Let me put this bluntly. If you're not even willingly to acknowledge the obvious asymmetry in leverage during labor negotiations, then your opinion on unions is worthless. You're not an honest party, or maybe you have trouble coming to terms with reality. Unfortunately, that means your opinion is better suited for the loony bin, and not any serious discussions.
As an aside, there are lots of great arguments to make against unions. Do that instead.
I disagree with forcing employees to join a union who do not want to. I disagree with forcing a business to negotiate with a union that does not want to.
Manufacturing also requires young people. You can't work in a factory in your 40s. The west is demographically ill-suited for those jobs.
(Most)Shitty job conditions can only exist if there is an abundance of labor; why can fast food joints get away with irregular scheduling? If the supply of labor is tight, jobs have to add bonuses to keep workers.
Why is health insurance tied to jobs in the US? Because during WWII, the government set limits on wages so companies started adding insurance and other items to attract workers.
During the GFC, what did companies do after cutting workers? Start cutting benefits, the workers couldn't walk since no one was hiring.
Look at pensions, they went away in the 80's. If you google why they went away, the answer is 401k became availible, however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1980s_recession
> Even the “father of the 401(k),” Ted Benna, tells The Journal with some regret that he “helped open the door for Wall Street to make even more money than they were already making.” >Other experts agree: On its blog, the Economic Policy Institute recently declared 401(k)s “a poor substitute” for the defined benefit pension plans many workers primarily relied on, which provide a fixed payout for employees at retirement, and which have now become increasingly rare. Nowadays, “just 13% of all private-sector workers have a traditional pension, compared with 38% in 1979,” reports The Journal.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/04/a-brief-history-of-the-401k-...
https://time.com/archive/6686654/a-brief-history-of-the-401k...
I recently visited the Philippines and a friend bought some knockoff Crocs at a market. The little rivet thing holding the strap to the shoe had the logo printed right on the exposed plastic, and after a few days, the logo was mostly scratched off. But my wife's Crocs that she bought a decade ago still look fine because there's some sort of sealant on top of the logo.
Is that worth an 800% markup? Probably not. But the knockoffs do cut some corners that the genuine articles don't.
I don't know enough about shoes to explain why, but the difference in comfort level was huge.
The only two modes of failure of this sandal is "drying up" after a couple years and broken thong straps (yes, 3rd parties sell those as replacements..)
I guess they make sure they have cheap offerings and are always investing in design and marketing so no one can enter this market..
You can get the genuine ones for $18 to $35 on ebay depending on the color, so while I'm sure you can save some on clones it's not worth it for the durability and comfort.
Lets say a nike shoe costs $120 or so today(searching air jordans in google lists a huge number of shoes at that price point), in my mind this is quite cheap as I wanted a pair of Air Jordans in 1990 and they were the same price, $120 for kids shoes roughly 35 years ago. Adjusted for inflation thats roughly $303 USD in 2025 dollars. So basically through outsourcing manufacturing to China and supply chain efficiencies Nike has brought down their product price by roughly 1/3.
Another thing to think about is the insane amount of money offered to athletes in sponsorship deals, I believe Jordan was one of the first athletes to command big money from a company(they made a movie about it a few years ago). This cost paying hundreds of athletes millions a year is a huge cost on Nikes bottom line.
In addition to the sponsorships some athletes have profit sharing (Jordan for sure) so a percentage of sales go to said athlete. Throw in marketing and you have another huge cost.
Would I rather see manufacturing jobs come back to the US and Nike curtail sponsorship money and profit sharing, hell yes. This is easy money to get back and would bring tens of thousands of jobs back to this country, if people were snapping up air jordans for the equivalent of $300 a pair back in the 90's they will do the same in this day and age. And if don't want to cut back sponsorship money, just raise the shoe prices, things are really really cheap compared to what they cost 30 years ago and Nike would still make a hefty profit.
Fun fact - I always buy new balance shoes that are made in usa, they sell both outsourced and domestic production and would rather have my money go to a US worker. At the very least I hope to see other companies do this so I have a choice, most give no choice and force consumers to buy Chinese made products.
In all fairness, most of those jobs would still exist if manufacturing was brought onshore. The fact that they were manufactured in Asia makes no difference here, except for perhaps the longshoremen that was included in "other US people."
This is about consumer footwear, not agriculture (nor all of manufacturing).
The US (and most other nations that can afford to) is perfectly used to throwing ~$20 billion at the sector to keep local agriculture operational.
We did not do this for literally every industry in the past because we had (and have) neither the idle workforce to do this, nor does the local population want to do the work (even for slightly uncompetitive wages), nor do consumers want to pay for the difference.
My personal prediction is that people will realize this pretty soon with the consequences of the Trump tariffs manifesting and the whole thing will be rolled back and scaled down, with pretty much nothing to show for it.
Btw the one thing that will be left to show is a wider realization that it's a bad idea to elect a crazy person.
Regret to inform that all of them are crazy.
I'm sure it's comforting to assume that all politicians are equally corrupt and equally insane and so your vote doesn't actually matter one way or the other but Kamala Harris wouldn't be acting like this, nor would Biden. Hell, not even other Republicans.
See: farming, energy, and defense spending/subsidies.
There is no point in history where any nation, anywhere, has needed to be self-sufficient in the production of Nike Air Maxes.
That being said, my sneakers, New Balance 990v6s, were made in the US-- probably Maine. They're $200.
The shoes I typically wear for work, Red Wing Iron Rangers or Work Chukkas, were made in the US-- probably Minnesota. They're $350 and $290 respectively.
I don't know if increased volume will decrease the prices by much, they're only higher than premium imports by a little bit.
There is domestic production already here.
I don't think its reasonable to expect lower prices for domestic production at all, because the demand for domestic products is only going up (from people that used to buy Vietnamese Nikes).
Personally I think the whole tariff experiment is predictably going to fail, because "increased self sufficiency" does not buy you anything, and at some point people are just gonna push back politically if the cost increases get too bad.
The US exports ~1 billion worth of shoes per year, and imports ~25 billion (mainly from Vietnam and China), according to https://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts/2023...
I also think the argument is bad in general, because more/similar exports than imports would only really hold for the countries least affected by the new tariffs, anyway.
I see the argument for things of military significance. The common one is electronic components. But PCBs manufacturing is easy to spinup quickly. Which leave the critical components like IC where the ones we'd actually need are still exclusively overseas. The TSMC factory being built wont produce the newest generation chips.
Same for agriculture, if we're totally self sufficient, what happens when a blight takes out a staple crop or two? You can't just spin up food production or global food trade the way you can with manufacturing.
Meanwhile, having robust global trade is just a less lethal version of MAD, here being mutually assured economic destruction. It's much harder for other nations to turn on you when you both depend on each other for comfort, convience, or survival. Look at how the US is being seen by the international community. The reputation we had as a strong ally and worthwhile partner has been badly damaged. Why would other nations want to help us now? How are we stronger alone, instead of having their eager support?
There are two people, one grows all his own food, and makes all of the tools he needs. He doesn't need anybody. The other works with his neighbors, they share food, he kinda knows how to sharpen an ax, but he uses the ones made by the guy down the street, who's basically a professional blacksmith, even though he introduces himself as a gardener.
which one of those guys appears stronger? Who's more likely to survive something bad happening? who do you think is more likely to win in a fight? (yes their neighbors will come to help) which one would you rather be?
I mean the took over Hong Kong already. I think that is wishful thinking.
Ahh somewhat willingly, the lease to the land expired. So seemingly no choice was given.
I think what you're getting at is that China would have more leverage over the US if they attacked (attempted to invade) Taiwan, which they could use to make it more difficult for the US to protect Taiwan.
In that case they could do things like block some or all exports to the US until we, say, stopped escorting cargo ships in and out of Taiwan. But the notion they would "instantly cut off all exports to the US" is nonsense. There's no reason that's somehow a no-brainer post invasion.
You think they would supply their enemy? Biden said he would protect Taiwan pretty emphatically. I assume Trump would be advised of the same.
So if instead all of these weren't sourced from exclusively Asia, and were sourced from many different countries, including domestically, there wouldn't be a problem?
Also, is your assertion really that US military would be at a near term disadvantage, if exports from Asia stopped? That's a wild take.
> They would probably blockade Japan and other countries as well to keep them from exporting to the US, because that's the smart thing to do
You're the first person to try to convince me that it would be smart for China to start a world war with the US and it's allies over Taiwan.
Needless to say, I disagree that it would be smart, I disagree that china would be willing and likely to do it, and disagree they could do it if they actually tried.
As a Canadian, you just made the argument for strategic value for us. The economic damage caused at the whims of a single person in control of our supposed closest ally is exactly why. The argument for economic "MAD" assumes one country wont be self destructive enough to cut its leg off to spite everyone else and "win" in a way that leaves it worse off.
It doesn't necessarily follow that more expensive shoes will be easier to repair. It's more likely that shoes will simultaneously become more expensive for the consumer AND lower quality and therefore even less amenable to repair.
Reversing the transmission of western consumerism is not an easy change. Few people are willing to pay an extra $50 for a more durable good that lasts. Long term thinking isn't easy for most, and many can't even afford to think that way.
But the tariffs are really a tax, a federal sales tax on the consumer. Biden tried to put in "unrealized gains tax" (which is really Federal property tax). So both presidents are trying to use executive power and double speak to get their people to support new taxes that are ultimately horrible for every American.
Trump Derangement Syndrome runs both directions.
Free-trade brings into being products that previously would not have existed (Nike trainers for the masses).
Yes, if you waved a magic wand.
But considering bringing manufacturing onshore to replace Asian manufacturing will take at best years if not decades, no, those jobs will not still exist.
There is a market for $120 ones...
"While it's difficult to pinpoint exactly which country pays the absolute least for shoe manufacturing, countries like Vietnam and Cambodia are known for having lower labor costs and are major footwear exporters, making them likely to be at the lower end of the wage scale for shoe production."
In Cambodia, they pay $208 per month, which is assuming a 160 hour work month, which I guarantee is the bare minimum which gives them $1.30 in wages per hour.
"In Vietnam, shoe manufacturing workers typically earn wages that are significantly below a living wage, though some companies affiliated with the Fair Labor Association (FLA) pay double the minimum wage."
In Vietnam they pay $68/ month, which is $0.42 and 1/2 cents an hour.
The premise of the article, and the statistics they use are all based on preported manufactures claims, not the reality that exists in that country.
I would dismiss this article as pure fantasy.
Pray tell, if they aren’t slaves, are they free to leave, and where to? What an asshole.
Why? The article starts from the point where Nike pays $25 per shoe boarded into a container on a boat, where that number covers all expenses until that point. Yes, this includes the shoe workers' wages, but it also has the factory construction and maintenance, manufacturing equipment, the inputs that go into the shoe, transport to get the shoes packed into a container and to the port, etc etc.
So those are the article's sources. What are yours?
I'm also curious about your claim about $8-12 shoes that are equivalent in quality, because while you can, indeed, buy very cheap shoes on Aliexpress etc, the quality or lack thereof is usually commensurate.
Nike sneakers regularly sell to consumers for ~25 dollars, in brick-and-mortar stores, in countries that have 20% VAT.
Naturally Nike wants to claim their shoes are as valuable as possible, and they can perhaps somewhat truthfully claim 25 dollars by including the cost of R&D, sponsorships and marketing etc in the cost of making the shoes.
Then they can spread the total cost of Nike operations creatively over models that sell 1 million units and others that sell only 50 000 units.
If shoes cost 5 dollars to make but you feel you need to pay Serena and Tiger 20 bucks per shoe to sell them, suddenly they "cost" 25 to "make".
And yes, Nike has cheaper shoes too, but per article, if it's retailing for $50, it probably costs $12 tops to make.
That’s a hell of a dodge. The problem isn’t that these workers are mistreated, it’s that you’re a racist.
Source: brother works in a Nike factory in Vietnam; am acquaintances with the manager of an Adidas factory in Vietnam; and know that the legal minimum wage in Vietnam -- which is definitely enforced on foreign factories -- is far above $68/month.
My brother at the Nike factory makes almost 10x that assembling women's shoes.
Someone working part time at a convience store makes 3-4x your claimed number.
That means nothing without knowing what other jobs pay and what the overall cost of living is. It honestly feels a little dishonest to convert things to USD without either putting it in perspective to the rest of their costs or adjusting it to a value that reflects the spending power of that amount of money. Does $1.30 buy them one hamburger or would it buy them 10+?
Bringing “manufacturing back to the US” is a fool’s errand. The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs.
“Wholesome Biden & Obama memes” are probably propaganda. And videos about “fat Americans” being marched into factories sounds like something the Chinese could make.
The moment is threatened Canada , Denmark sovereignty and EU/NATO, countries are planning for life without US
In other words, not much would be lost except the devious lip service.
Eventually US will be in isolation.
The sooner we get out of our nation state well of stability as a species? I don't know what dopey star trek fantasy land you are living in, but we are sooner going to destroy the world than join hands and all sing kumbaya. Especially if we allow some autocratic regimes to come to power.
I will share a metaphor you can spread.
I run a mile every morning not because it is the most calorie efficient way to get around, nor because it is the most monetarily productive use of my time, but because it keeps my legs strong and me healthy.
Consider a case that was not unique, the growth of iron production in the great lakes area between 1855 and 1865.
In 1855 it was 1000 tons of iron ore. By 1860 it was over 100,000. By 1865 it was a few times greater than that.
Now consider even a single year in there where production is increasing by thousands to tens of thousands of tons. Good business. (The machines used to load and unload those boats and the change in boat designs is awesome by the way. Worth looking up.)
That was early. With much worse technology, and much less capital.
There were crazier deltas in production increase in the 1890's and across the guilded age.
The US natural resources are gigantic. There are 330 million people living there. It has more resources than ever before in history.
Steel and plastic are currently produced in the hundreds of millions of tons per year in the US. That is hardly a middle aged man who cant do a pushup.
With a proper 10 year boom, US production could be exponentially increasing year over year. If it and its people choose it.
A lot of people in the US seem to be envisioning this. It is a really non-abstract vision even for americans of... modest intelligence.
It may be the case that providing the world with banking and facebook, and silicon plans, though possibly much more lucrative than physical production, is just too abstract for the average american to identify with as a positive.
Or it may be the case that physical production is more lucrative than software service export, but that the US government has mismanaged the market constraints in the physical domain and so it just appears to not be the case.
I am not sure which is true. What I do know is that for the average person, the idea of making stuff and trading it is simple to understand, and people like it. Even people who do not make anything identify with this goal. Maybe instead of iron and steel it will be nvidias chips this time around.
I think Americans dont like being the social media export country. Its just not a good future vision you can identify with.
people don't want a job, they want money and purpose
most jobs barely deliver either
To that end, the future I want doesn't focus so much on money, but on needs. Letting a market dictate "needs" is clearly not working for the betterment of humanity a whole. While it helps with progress, I believe there is an upper limit when human behavior is brought into the equation.
That's because money lets people efficiently deploy resources where they feel it is needed.
What makes you say it's "clearly not working", other than comparing developed nations to a non-existent utopia?
Keep in mind that most people are unwilling and unable to sustainably maintain self-employment.
Now before you get all hung up how this isn’t possible. There is precedent. The government would do just this during the great depression, sponsoring artists knowing it is more valuable to have artists in the population than to lose that talent pool and benefits to culture over cold cruel economics.
Scarcity is very real, I'm not sure why you would feel otherwise. Fortunately, we have largely eliminated scarcity of the necessities of life due to economic policies that are as far from your suggestions as possible, but that doesn't mean that they are produced at no cost or that scarcity in general does not exist.
And you don't need to go back 100 years for precedent. We basically paid people to sit at home during covid, and I didn't see some sort of renaissance as a result. Why would this be any different?
Like I said, the people you're talking about just had a significant period of time where they were effectively paid to stay home and had ample time to pursue their personal interests, yet no meaningful innovation was produced by that cohort that I'm aware of. What am I missing?
I think the implication here is that such a society is not built on markets or even money, but rather by individuals working together to foster a collective community that meets everyone’s needs.
Yes, communism. The more advanced we become technologically the more sense it makes. We’re largely at a point where most jobs are made up - created to give people something to do because if we don’t then they die.
We’ve pushed consumerism to the absolute max. Now, most goods are pretty much worthless. But we have to buy them, or we die. That’s how markets works. We work, and we consume, or else.
That made sense when the work we were doing was beneficial and the stuff we’re consuming was needed. We’re past that now. Most people are working to produce something dumb, or worse, evil. New addictions, new poisons, new bombs, and new problems to be solved by new software.
Communism makes no sense until we reach a post-scarcity economy, which will never happen.
I don't know, but if suddenly someone really has a problem with the fact that the government is still not taking enough money from them to finance various unpromising projects, I am happy to take on the government's work and free of charge get any amount of money from them to implement the widest range of interesting projects.
there is no such thing as an art-based economy
money to survive, purpose to thrive
you don't need a 'job', and particularly a 'job' who's only purpose is to make profit for someone else
we really need to rethink society
How do you get money when you are unable to do so without an entity (e.g. a company) providing direction and resources?
> people don't want a job, they want money and purpose
And society will not give them any of that without a job.
There, now you should understand "the obsession with jobs."
> most jobs barely deliver either
And no job delivers even less.
Unless you are an aristocrat. Them your "job" was to fleece the peasants, and somehow "society" accepted this for thousands of years.
that is my point
> that is my point
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Realistically, you're not going to change society to give people "money and purpose" without a job. Fixating on an unrealistic goal takes focus away from more realistic ones.
I mean, for a least a century people have been proposing using productivity improvements to increase leisure time and distribute goods more equally. And in that time work demands have increased (e.g. going from one full-time worker in a typical household to two).
Until the 90s, that's the trajectory we were on. For life to constantly get better whilst human servitude is lessened over time.
We should be getting ever shorter work weeks and earlier retirement ages. It's the entire point of technology.
And since producing all this is not such an easy task, the people who produce the food and build the houses want something in return. That's what we call jobs.
So when you say that jobs is not needed - you mean that there is no need to live in houses or that there is no need to give the people who build the houses anything in return?
Even then the quality wouldn't be up to par. Since we've collectively agreed we don't need to have due process anymore, I guess I can look forward to making shoes will I'm being indefinitely detained.
The US just doesn't have the supply chain that China does. You need to be able to source the materials, and they have, effectively, entire cities dedicated almost wholly to producing those "intermediate" raw materials—eg, things like the grommets for the shoelaces, the big sheets of faux leather that can be cut to the right size & shape to make the body, etc. They also have the industrial capacity to do the molding for the soles, and produce the laces, at scale.
None of that exists here—in some cases not in the scale required, but in most cases not at all.
With across-the-board tariffs, the only way to fully avoid them is to start from the raw materials on up—mine and purify the minerals, raise the animals for their leather, pump and refine the oil for the plastics, harvest the trees for their rubber (are we still getting rubber that way...?). All here in the US.
Some of those raw materials likely don't even exist on our land in sufficient quantities to supply all our industrial needs, even setting aside how much time, money, and manpower it would take to set up the mines (and ranches, and oil fields, and rubber farms), the several stages of refining, and all the different ways the materials need to be shaped or alloyed or combined or extruded or or or...
And where is the money to fund all that going to come from? Clearly not the federal government (unless, I suppose, you posit that it's one or more of Musk's companies doing all this—I suppose that could be one of the aims here; just give Musk a monopoly over literally everything we make...). Every domestic company is going to be cutting back six ways from Sunday, because every product is going to cost massively more, so even the people still making as much money as they were last year are going to be buying less. And many people will be making less, either because of those same cutbacks (through layoff or hour/wage reduction), or because they were part of the federal agencies getting wantonly gutted for no good purpose, or among the companies that did business with them and now have lost a major customer.
Bringing manufacturing onshore for any significant percentage of our consumer or industrial goods is barely even a pipe dream. It's pure cloud-cuckoo-land fantasy.
Welcome, this is where we're going to be for foreseeable future. Prison made inferior Nikes will end up costing 500$ a pair. Not that anyone is going to have money to buy them.
As you mentioned we'd probably need to still source from other countries. The bigger issue here is the USD may lose its reserve currency status.
The rest of the world might just trade in Euros and Yuan. Inflation will truly take off then.
Who will?
The Trump administration? Why would they be selling counterfeit Nike shoes?
Nike themselves? Why would they buy shoes from someone else? And if you mean they'd just keep manufacturing them elsewhere...they'd still have to pay the tariffs when they hit customs, so they'd still be $$$$. Unless you're proposing that Nike is going to start an industrial-scale smuggling operation...? Or that the Trump administration is going to provide some kind of sooper sekrit tariff waiver just for them, so they can pretend to be selling Made in the USA Nikes? And that's only talking about Nike. What about all the other manufacturers of consumer—and industrial—goods?
None of that passes the smell test. Nike's not going to take a loss to pretend their foreign-manufactured shoes, which now cost them much more, are actually being cheaply made in the USA just to prop up Trump. And Trump is, to all appearances, 100% all-in on these tariffs: he would rather have them and utterly wreck the US (and global) economy than have things cost the same because no one is actually paying the tariffs just to "prove" that his bonkers excuse for an ideology actually works.
No; if Trump gets a third term, it will be, purely and simply, because he has managed to utterly destroy the machinery of democracy so that a free and fair election in the US is a wistful memory.
If an investor wants to build a factory to produce shoes (a process that can take years), they need to be sure that the tariffs won't just go away next year.
Trump's tariffs are anything but this.
That’s probably correct. But the current trajectory means that China will have the robot-operated factories, not the US. What do you anticipate the US will do to obtain goods from those Chinese factories? Especially when AI stands poised to obsolete a lot of the white collar jobs where the US still retains a competitive edge?
You can’t treat the reserve dollar as something that will perpetually defy physics. The pound used to be the world’s reserve currency not too long ago. There’s no reason for the world to continue flocking to dollars when other economies surpass the US.
I have rarely ever aligned with this president, but it is clear that we need to bring manufacturing home if we are going to have any future.
Why not let the market take care of it? It's cheaper to buy things from China then make them yourself. When that changes, production will naturally move to the next best place. I don't see the issue.
All three districts fell for “thousands of tech jobs”… turned out to be a couple dozen of people they brought in.
Meanwhile, if it ever gets to the point that automation has truly replaced humans, why not have the machines here at home? There's no good argument against it and plenty of arguments for it.
"I don't need 1000 pairs of shoes"
I am not sure why they think it left. The US manufactures far more today than it ever did in the past. The people were largely relieved by robots, granted.
> becoming a mostly service and consumer economy would be the final winning position.
Service isn't always fun. A lot of people don't like selling Big Macs. They are under the impression that if they could have a manufacturing job, they would enjoy work more. That is what drives it.
What they don't realize is that they could already have a manufacturing job. Manufacturers struggle to hire. But the problem there is that, per BLS, 70% of manufacturing happens in rural areas – whereas most people never look for work outside of the city they live in. Thus they conclude that manufacturing doesn't exist. Out of sight, out of mind.
Agreed about backups. I already miss that Uniqlo shirt that apparently isn't sold in Europe.
I used to be able to buy good running shoes on clearance every year at $30-$50
Even through 2020-2021 or so
But not anymore, now even on "clearance" they almost never drop below $100 and never ever to $50
Same story here - would you buy a pair of shoes from anyone, seeing the horrible conditions they work in, sleep deprivation and poverty if you knew they'd still get close to nothing? Probably not. You see a fancy store (or website these days), you see a product you like and you're invited to open up your wallet for a fancy pair of shoes. Deep down you still know they came from the people working in horrible conditions but, you know, out of sight, out of mind. And thus, you are willing to pay the extra price.
The most comfortable pair of shoes I own are also from Walmart and they cost less than twenty bucks.
How do my $3.50 shoes from Walmart fit into this picture that justifies why Nikes are $100?
This article fails the smell test. Or maybe it’s Nike’s business model that is failing the smell test, I’m unsure.
Also, anybody commenting who claims they “need” a pair of Nikes for their special feet should try being desperately unemployed and borderline homeless for a while.
You don’t “need” anything.
Also > Again, it's a popular misconception that all overseas production is sweatshops. Production can be done ethically abroad and still be relatively cheap because the cost of living is not the same everywhere. I encourage you to note assume that every Asian worker is a slave
No not necessarily slave slaves but I do assume they’re wage slaves, at least the line workers, the higher ups will be compensated a bit better I’m sure.
I'm wondering if part of our issue with crazy inflated prices despite low margin for industry and manufacturing actors is not because of this abused margin for retailers. That have also a huge power as it is difficult to negotiate when you depend on your product to be buyable in the market.
To me, that explain a big difference with asian world, where you notice, even for asian shops in western countries that prices are still quite cheap.
Something parallel to that that I have noticed is that decades ago we were used to buy from small individual shops, but now a few retailers and chains have almost a monopoly on the market.
I see the same pattern for movie theaters. They used to be independent mostly with affordable prices. Now 2 or 3 big chains bought them all, and it is very rare to still encounter independent movie theater. And once they got a good monopoly, ticket prices skyrocketed to insane levels.
Not according to the article. The retail price is $100 for a shoe they buy from the manufacturer for $50, but $24 of that $100 is "discounts". Therefore the average price sold at is $76, making the retail part of the price 1/3.
Movie theaters used to be extremely integrated with the movie studios. You had to go to a Paramount movie theater to see a Paramount movie. Antitrust laws broke that up until just recently Sony bought Alamo Drafthouse.
But that said, there's still a lot of different brands of movie theaters around me. On top of the normal Cinemark and AMC there's also Alamo Drafthouse, Studio Movie Grill, B&B, Angelika, and several other single-location theaters.
There's a lot of cost to running a retailer. If it was so easy to avoid the costs and the margins, you'd see more brands going direct to consumer exclusively, but most brands do a little direct to consumer and most of their sales through retailers.
Movie theater economics basically suck and have gotten worse over time. The projectors are very expensive, the pricing to show a film is bad, so ticket and consession prices go up and people stop showing up. Big chains have more negotiating power for film terms and equipment, which can help them survive. Sometimes the independents band together for group purchases, but I think that doesn't always happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_apocalypse
I would argue earlier as malls stopped being built by 2007....
First, adding $26 tariff at the port doesn't just add $26 to the final price. Everything here works off of percentages. In this simple model, we say Nike has a landed cost of $25, sells it to Footlocker for $50, and they retail at $100
Not sure I agree that everything works on percentages. Shipping has a fixed cost, etc.
Nike is the distributor in this case
For some reason there's no reply-link to your post, but this is the first time in a very long time I've even read a twitter thread because of how much more pleasant it was at threadreaderapp!
Very interesting analysis/breakdown of the various layers of costs as well!
You also need to put down a big whack of capital upfront and will see a return years down the line, hopefully.
With low enough wages, it could easily be financially better to rent a big building in the third world and staff it with actual people.
But will never happen because currently free market means one business is free to dominate and control a market.
Just to make this clear, a truly free market would be desirable but I don't see it materialize on this world.
You completely misread their comment. They said central planning, as in, a command economy.
Kind of sounds like a regulation and not a truly free market.
All you can ever do is trade manipulation. By who and to what agenda.
Spreading things out sound good until you realize it's doubled your costs or halved your productivity.
As for productivity, I think that's an issue that could be addressed but people generally avoid the answer to the why question.
[Citation needed]
Of course that can happen, but it's hardly guaranteed. If a company in the US moves a call center to a lower cost city, that's hardly foisting externalities onto anybody.
> people generally avoid the answer to the why question.
What does that even mean? What "why" question?
So OP, you want to defend your honor by making transparent what you intentionally left opaque here?
Sure it does. That new small city then needs to upgrade their infrastructure to support that business.
What type of intervention of the free market do you approve of as an alternative that would incentivize local production over economies of scale? It essentially comes down to tarrifs and protectionism.
Free market means voluntarism. You say that consumers ought to have the freedom to source goods anywhere, but the only way to preserve this "freedom" is to either force producers to operate in unprofitable conditions (which is not stable-state) or force consumers to pay a premium for those goods.
I'm sure (I hope, actually) that some policymakers, or some researchers, have done some conclusive researches about -- give X years into the future, and let's see we do not want to disrupt the current social-economic reality too much (no revolution, no major wealth re-distribution, no world wars, etc.), which industries can we bring back, and into which state, and sell its products into which countries, realistically.
We don't need to do research to decide what makes "sense". The market will figure out what makes financial sense themselves. The only thing we need to know is what the tax rate for foreign producers should be so that domestic companies are not the only ones shouldering the federal tax burden.
Probably not a great model, but it's simple and a reasonable guess. Remember all the competitors will have price increases too.
* - I have a large foot and believe I'm paying primarily for the materials in my shoes, which easily weigh twice what my friends' shoe do!
More interesting will be stuff like electronic components. Most of the cheap versions are all made in China. More expensive versions can be sourced in Japan, Taiwan and Korea (likely to do tariff deals). I think we might be looking at the end of very cheap electronics for awhile.
Whenever I enter any physical store it always boggles my mind how insanely inefficient the whole endeavor is for all involved. But that retail basically swallows half of the price is just unbelievable.
But most people don't consider them comfortable. More the opposite.
But no, the foam and rubber modern "comfortable" shoes are made of are not repairable. Fundamentally, the foam or other sole material simply breaks down. The rubber wears away. And the woven and plastic materials the upper are made of fray, lose padding, and otherwise break down as well.
I have very wide feet, so much so that I've seriously considered manufacturing my own shoes (possibly with a 3D printer). Shoe makers and repair shops do exist but they are becoming quite rare.
My understanding is that a good quality repairable shoe is about $500 or about 5x the price of the $100 shoe we're talking about. Repairing it is labor intensive and adds even more to that cost. So, I can buy at least 5 pairs of $100 shoes for the price of a good quality and repairable shoe and that doesn't consider the repair costs.
I don't think more extensive repairs are economical, and you are better off wearing shoes you like until they disintegrate. There is a bit of mythology about buying expensive boots and repairing them in the hope that it's more economical, but it's really not: https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111068432320682422
I mean if you pay $300 and up for a pair of shoes, it could make sense. If you pay $100 for a pair, you might as well just purchase a new pair. In my case I re-sole the shoes because my shoes fit me well, and they're more on the high-end and thus I've paid a bit for them at the time of purchase. Makes sense for me to re-sole a pair of $1k shoes, rather than purchase a new pair.
To get the prices down, you'd need a lot more cobblers though. And there just aren't many going to trade school for that. It is very much a "artisanal" craft today, akin to tailoring.
These are leather dress shoes though. As far as I know, this doesn't exist in the athletic shoe world. Considering the materials used in athletic shoes, I don't know how a "repairable" athletic shoe could exist without some serious re-engineering.
It goes to show how the big athletic shoe companies are taking the piss. Of course they have middlemen and retailers and whatnot who need to take their cut, but if I can buy a pair of nice leather shoes, made from leather from UK/French/Italian tanneries, with about a million steps done by a human, for the same price as some glued together foam and fabric...something is wrong.
The Asian made shoe of the same model out lasted the US shoe by a couple years. The US made started falling apart less than a year in.
If you're interested in the history: it took quite long after during the industrialization to invent a working sewing machine. There are quite a few interesting Youtube videos for example on the history and workings of the sewing machine.
I get they WANT to, and it's what a shoe retail strives for, but this isn't accurate.
Cars for example aren't 100% marked up. That would be insanity.
Shipping , customs , duty , port fees , transportation , packaging that can survive across the ocean should all be things that make the product unrealistic to make outside North America, not to mention environmental tariffs that should be applied to products made in Asia.
Fermi estimation is awesome and if you're one of today's lucky 10,000 who haven't heard of it, this is your day!
> But if we bump the cost of freight, insurance, and customs from $5 to, say, $28, then they wholesale the shoes to Footlocker for about $75. And if Footlocker purchases Nike shoes for $75, then they retail them for $150. Everyone needs to fixed percentages to avoid losses.
The point being that many parts of the supply chain don't operate on fixed costs and instead percentages.
That's how it was working in most wealthy countries, where tariffs were generally low or very low.
I don't see why it must continue to work that way in the USA with 50% or 100% or more tariffs. If Footlocker wish to charge double the post-tariff price, that leaves room for a competitor to change double the pre-tariff price.
(Or double the pre-tariff plus a tiny bit, to account for the increased cost of insurance, theft etc.)
Until you get to extremely high-end goods this multiplier system works fairly well to accommodate the various costs the business has. It is an assumption that there are many business costs that scale linearly with sale price. In reality not all do, but there are many: insurance, return costs, loss, and customer service expectations all scale with dollar values.
Edit: if we switched from an import tariff to a foreign goods sales tax we could avoid this particular problem.
How are these materially different in terms of what the end consumer pays?
The article explains the tariff scenario. In the tax scenario, Nike can operate like in the pre-tariff world, while the retailer would have to charge the tax.
Consider a fictional supply-chain with three players A, B, C. Assume that B and C have 50% gross margins.
In a no-tax world, if A sells the product to B for 10$, then B to C for 20$, C will sell it retail for 40$. (A:10$ -> B:20$ -> C:40$)
Now imagine a 100% tariff scenario for the transaction between A and B. Now, A sells the product to B for 20$ (10$ + 100% tariff), then B to C for 40$, C will sell it retail for 80$. (A:20$ -> B:40$ -> C:80$). This nets the government 10$
In a third scenario, imagine a world where this 10$ is not charged as a tariff but as a sales tax. A sells to B for 10$, B to C for 20$, and C to the customers at 50$ (40$ + 10$ freedom tax).
By changing where in the supply chain the tax is levied, we arrive at a lower retail price for the same tax income. This is a natural consequence of the above two assumptions, especially the idea that costs scale linearly. If maximum income from the taxation of imported goods is your goal, this is the way to go. Whether this would have the desired effect of discouraging imports is another matter.
For financial costs, higher inventory value due to tariffs increases the cost of capital (interest on loans/tied-up funds), insurance premiums, and potentially transaction fees.
For operations costs (handling and labor), increases due to indirect effects: As the price of the average consumer basket increases due to tariffs, the average citizen either demands and receives higher wages or has to reduce spending; this means that the per-item variable cost of processing goes up, either because the wages of those employees increased (higher wages) or because the sales volume decreases (reduced spending).
Of course this does not mean that every business will have exactly this outcome. And absolute size of these effects is also dependent on the actual demand elasticity.
This doesn't have to be the case though, right? It seems very weird that when you jack up tariffs, some middleman in America is seeing their profit jump.
have people always been like this? was this 'anything but agree' position common back in the 70s and 80s? is this an american thing or christian society thing?
Q: Is there a specific reason* that this thread links to threadreaderapp?
* other than politics, which we try Really Hard not to bring into HN...
I.e. bullshit jobs.
Now you're saying they're not, that Nike makes massive, massive profits on them.
Sorry if I'm not seeing your "subtlety" here. But instead of blaming me for misunderstanding you, it's fine to just say whoops, that you were mistaken about the term you used, or meant something else. We all have brain farts sometimes ;)
Also, the article itself gives actual numbers. You don't need to make up your own here, which are not correct.