Hacker News Reader

Comment by gethly | Hacker News Reader

West moved to service-based economies whilst east built their heavy industries and mining. As services can be always built, the west doomed itself the day it started shipping manufacturing to the east and thinking it can just do the high paying easy jobs from thereon. This is simply the effect of doing globalism the wrong way.

The best part? There is no fixing this. The west cannot afford to start industrialising because it lacks skilled manual labour, it put too many legal obstacles regarding ecology, the costs are astronomical which makes it unviable form day one, and most importantly - it lacks cheap energy which is absolutely crucial to have a blossoming heavy industries.

In short, the west is f'd. Especially Europe as the continent has depleted its natural resources over the millennia.

View on HN

There is always a way out and Europe is starting from an advanced spot. Japan went from a isolated medieval country with very little resources except for people and became an industrial power in 40 years.

And now their economy is in a very bad state.

They are talking about 1850 - 1890, not 1950 - 1990.

The trick is to not treat it like a zero sum game and to realise that to live a middle class life in America/Europe is to live life of luxury that almost nobody in human history could ever have dreamed of.

Well question is how long the structure that enables that life can be sustained. A lot of it is simply inertial from being tech hegemon which makes west price setters, i.e. FX fixers able to leverage indispensable technology to drive up western purchasing power. Once that's gone, when PRC basically can sell you everything the west use to that enables modern development all the leverage is gone and purchasing power will revert towards mean, which for developed countries = down. Things may only decline/contract vs others so fast, but likely noticable amount within a few generations.

The past 50 years of American economic policy has basically been "look how much money we can make if every other country acts against its own interests indefinitely".

> it put too many legal obstacles regarding ecology,

The biggest problem isn't ecology. It is labor regulation.

One example: Apple handled all its manufacturing to FoxCon because workers committing suicide in their factories is a FoxCon's problem hidden in Shenzhen, it isn't Apple's problem.

Another example: you can't have German companies starting huge projects because in Germany you just can't do the massive firings that Microsoft, Meta and AWS do when these projects fail.

And the list goes on to infrastructure and land rights. Building a pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, passing through farm land? Even Republicans would get scared of that.

The truth is that building physical stuff is very hard on the people that do it and sometimes even dangerous.

> One example: Apple handled all its manufacturing to FoxCon because workers committing suicide in their factories is a FoxCon's problem hidden in Shenzhen, it isn't Apple's problem.

That story was greatly exaggerated. First, the suicide rates were comparable to the rates for workers in the US. The absolute number was large because FoxConn factory there was very large, with up to 300k employees.

Second, the suicides did not happen at work. They happened during time off, just like most US employee suicides. Most of the workers did live in housing units owned by FoxConn, which probably led to some confusion.

> That story was greatly exaggerated.

Maybe. But facts don't matter in marketing and politics, what matters is what narratives stick.

Example: when you count number of deaths only, terrorism and crime kill a tiny fraction of people than junk food does with heart diseases. But guess which one makes the news.

> There is no fixing this. The west cannot afford to start industrialising because it lacks skilled manual labour, it put too many legal obstacles regarding ecology, the costs are astronomical which makes it unviable form day one, and most importantly - it lacks cheap energy which is absolutely crucial to have a blossoming heavy industries.

I enjoy doomerism as much as the next person, but honestly those all seem like incredibly fixable things that just require the right policy changes and sustained investment. Western countries certainly have the democratic government systems and financial resources necessary to do those things if they so choose.

People can be trained, legal obstacles can be removed and yeah it'll be expensive if they choose to do it.

That said if Putin went completely off the deep end and invaded eastern Europe you'd be amazed how fast planning laws on building stuff went out the window - Democratic governments can move fast when they have to but tend towards inaction when they don't.

It's also quite entertaining to just write off Western Europe based on resource availability - China itself is quite poor on natural resources (which is why they've played the long game in Africa so well, they get resources and build a market to sell manufactured goods to at the same time - it's been masterful realpolitik from them).

Also, Afghanistan. I met a Chinese woman while I was traveling Japan. She was showing me pictures of her last two trips, Nigeria and Afghanistan. She owns a business in her city and employs people from those two countries. They had invited her to visit their homes. I remember thinking looking at how much the people adored her in the images and videos from Afghanistan that she is very dangerous and probably doesn't know it. She had me holding her bags as she was shopping for Rolex watches and handmade tea sets in Kyoto taking advantage of the currency rates in Japan. I'm in South America now and saw first hand how China has huge influence in Peru and Panama. My neighbors in the airbnb in a luxury condo in Lima were mostly business people from China in the mining industry who also spoke English. There is a lot of Canadian mining influence in Peru also. China is also far more connected to Ecuador and Bolivia. Good thing the US still has close ties with Colombia .... oh, wait, they attacked the US Embassy with bow and arrows last week.

If Elon wants access to that lithium he needs to get his shit together.

Good thing for the United States the single most influential person in Latin America is from the United States, Bad Bunny.

Indeed - We are kind of inured to it the "west" (or western aligned so we can include Japan, Korea and Taiwan) because we use Chinese production but we don't use all of it preferring to buy our own brands even if they are using Chinese components or straight made in China but if you step to the edges of the west (say Hungary which is the one I know the best) you see Chinese brands everywhere because they are as good and frequently cheaper and outside of those areas the gap widens further.

The US did (and does) have a counter balance in its complete domination of the tech landscape, excellent sources of capital, "loose" immigration policies and excellent universities - all of which they set on fire for reasons I don't entirely as a European understand.

>which is why they've played the long game in Africa so well, they get resources and build a market to sell manufactured goods to at the same time - it's been masterful

There are definitely two future bad possible outcomes for the US, and one nightmare future scenario for the US.

One bad outcome scenario is that China and subsaharan Africa figure out that they're better off working in concert than working at odds with each other. (This seems to be happening.)

The other bad outcome scenario is that the EU and subsaharan Afica figure out that they're better off working in concert than working at odds with each other. (This doesn't seem to be happening as far as I can tell?)

The nightmare scenario is, of course, that China, the EU, and subsaharan Africa actually figure out that they don't really even need the rest of us.

Given the size of China’s internal economy I think they already know, just on their own, that they don’t need anyone else and any agreements with other countries are just cherries on top, because you can take Europe and fill a Chinese village with it. This is not a prediction of the future.

you can take Europe and fill a Chinese village with it

Pretty sure the EU is far bigger than you're thinking it is.

China doesn't have a strong internal economy. They probably have a lot of saving that might be able to be translated into an internal economy, but they seem to have a cultural leaning towards frugalness: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/business/china-economy-co...

China has a massive energy & manufacturing base, which can easily translate into military power, but until they decide to transform into a war economy, they need trading partners to keep their citizens employed, which is already a struggle for their young adults who I guess don't want to work in factories.

That frugality is likely temporary. The Greatest Generation were frugal due to lessons learned during the Great Depression. That frugality was lost in a few decades. The corresponding event in China was the cultural revolution, but poverty lasted past that. It's been a few decades, and now the Chinese are famous for their love of luxury status products.

All that is true, but my point regarding China's lack of a strong internal economy right now still stands.

Invest and contribute in your local community / neighborhood maker-space. If one doesn't exist, consider leading the initiative to create and promote one. This can be nicely partnered with a local business incubator / investment community.

This is an excellent guide for creating & running a successful maker-space: https://www.maker-works.com/operations-book

What's stopping China from repeating the US mistakes? Wages get too high, move manufacturing to cheaper countries, and the cycle repeats.

because China as a whole is driven by the CCP, not a quarterly-profit obsessed capital class?

Very hard but not impossible.

China is the idea-mine for western services these days too.

I for one enjoy my cushy white collared job and breathing air with little pollution. China has it's own very difficult problems that they have to deal with. Consumer demand is low for their economy, their birth rate is even lower than Japan's, and the finances of a lot of local governments are held together by some very opaque threads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com