Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

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>It's our own dumb fault

Our being the office working city/suburb living HN posting white collar types who have no visibility into the non service parts of the economy beyond what is made available in our investment account dashboards.

The industrial workers, the farmers, the blue collar tradesmen, none of them wanted this even back in 1995 or 2005, the evidince that rampant outsourcing was bad in the long term just wasn't concrete enough for their opinions to gain traction and there were other seemingly more important issues that decided elections back then and we did make a lot of money selling our economy out so everyone was willing to let outsourcing hum along even if they didn't like it.

The people who made bank shipping industrial tooling to the far east and bulldozing old factories, the middle managers coordinating with overseas suppliers, etc, etc. didn't want to do any of those things, they were uneasy about the long term impacts but they did it anyway because the managerial class structured the economy such that that's what they had to do to keep the lights on.

These same workers, on the other hand, do enjoy the inexpensive consumer goods (clothes, electronics, home appliances, etc) produced in less expensive places like China or Bangladesh or Vietnam.

These countries also were lifted from poverty and into relative prosperity by this. It looked like a win-win, under a certain angle, back in the day; the US would turn into an innovative economy producing high-tech gear, doing high-grade R&D and engineering, and producing software, all the stuff the Bangladeshi or even Chinese were not supposed to be able to do comparably well. It just turned out that the engineering and development thrive next to the actual production capacity, and can be studied and learned. Now Chinese electronic engineering rivals that of the US, same for mechanical, shipbuilding, even aircraft / space and weapons.

A similar thing once happened to Japan, then to South Korea: they turned from postwar ruins and poverty into high-tech giants competing successfully with the US by exporting inexpensive, good-quality stuff to the US. But these are politically aligned with the US and the West in general; places like Bangladesh or Vietnam, not so much, and China expressly is not.

Consumer goods that on average are of lower quality and do not last as long, forcing consumers to make more frequent purchases, ultimately costing them more. In the 1950s one could buy a good quality toaster for life. It's very difficult to do so now.

That's a bad comparison.

A toaster off of the 1958 Sears catalog cost US$12.50 which amounts to ~US$ 160 today. We can make a $160 toaster today that'll survive nuclear war but no one will buy it.

Some things do get better with time, home appliances are the best example. They consume on average less energy today, are lighter, have more safety features, etc.

Cheaper prices are also a feature: more people have access to goods today because of it.

Not all that is old is great.

While not all that is old is great, it's still a solid example.

There are people who would buy a $160 toaster (I've seen different estimates closer to $130, I'm not sure how you calculated yours) if they knew it would last 50 years today.

This shift has more to do with what businesses want than with consumer demand. Companies moved toward manufacturing goods that don’t last as long, increasing demand by ensuring products deteriorate sooner, giving them more opportunities to sell.

>Some things do get better with time, home appliances are the best example. They consume on average less energy today, are lighter, have more safety features, etc.

While that’s partly true, putting a smart screen on a fridge doesn’t necessarily make it better. More often, businesses make changes to improve their bottom line, not to create better products overall. More durable materials were used in the past, and I would rank durability high among the most important features of physical products.

You are living under a rock if you think consumer demand is for expensive high quality things.

Look at the gangbusters runaway successes of shops like Temu and Shein if you want to know where the heart of American consumers is. Cheap shit. People love cheap shit. Even if they know it is shit.

Are we talking about the most in demand or demand in general? I was saying there is a measurement of demand.

Apple is an example of high quality demand and they're a trillion dollar company

I don't get this though. I had a $10 toaster from Walmart I bought when I went to college. It lasted me over a decade before I gave it away, still working fine. It was a pretty crappy and basic toaster (hot spots), but it was a crappy and basic toaster the day I bought it and was a crappy and basic toaster the day I gave it away. Are you people really destroying your toasters every year or two? How?

And there are absolutely high-end expensive toasters that are waaay better than the cheap junk. But most people are going to choose the cheap junk in the end.

Nope. It was well understood that the American worker was on the chopping block back in the time of Triffin and even Keynes. "Win-win" was always a line sold by people who understood that it would actually be "win-lose" but who expected to be on the winning side (and generally were).

More recently, US capital owners for the last 20 years 100% understood that they were selling off the industrial capability of the USA to the CCP. It was their monetary gain but our problem, so they went forward with it.

Yes, but it could be sold as a "win-win".

For last 20 years, I can agree; but the boom of outsourcung started nearly 40 years ago.

Externalize your costs, internalize your profits, build moats, gain cartel power, seek rent.

These are the goals of any "free market" company.

One of my great critiques of capitalism and the economic analysis of it is that all the economists seem to believe that every company wants to happily exist in a open market with lots of competitors optimizing entirely working to reduce costs for the consumer.

All you have to do is read my first paragraph and to see how utterly fantastical that notion is, and why regulation is needed to counteract every one of those simple game theory power politics end goals

Paradoxically for some, the state's power is needed to keep the markets free and competitive. An obvious example is the protection of property, hence state-financed police and courts. A slightly less obvious, but as important, are anti-monopoly protections.

Game theory should be taught much wider, I agree.

The American worker has gotten continuously richer over that time. Is it so bad to be a nurse rather than feeding widgets into the widget machine?

Adjusted to purchasing power?

> It looked like a win-win, under a certain angle, back in the day

This isn't really true except for perhaps the most naive sort of person. It was well understood by most folks that there were going to be winners and losers. You can't gut entire segments of the workforce in less than a generation and not expect extreme pain.

It's just those people had very little political power.

Exactly zero people in actual power are genuinely surprised by the outcome here. Perhaps they are at the political backlash and how powerful it became, but that's about it.

> shipbuilding

Shipbuilding? The US shipbuilding market is dead and stinking of deep rot. No one buys the US-made ships unless they _have_ to.

Shipbuilding has been absolutely protected by the Jones Act, so predictably it became globally uncompetitive and obsolete.

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