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Comment by forgotoldacc | Hacker News Reader

The US seems to be at risk of becoming a Japanese style economy in the coming years. As in they focus on tech that sells well locally, but is of no interest outside the country. And that can work for their economy and is a nice way to package protectionism. But eventually, people years down the road see how much better tech is in the outside world and jump to it and never look back. Then your own industry starts to drown and is only held up by a class of elderly people afraid of change.

Examples are the strange Japanese flip phones and the computers with CF card and floppy drives with a 1.5 ghz single core CPU selling for twice the price of a MacBook Pro.

With BYD selling globally now, and Boeing losing its reputation, American vehicles of all sorts are at risk.

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And the sad thing this will just lead to a vicious cycle of protectionism for these companies. Their quality will decline. They’ll be more expensive than global products. US consumers will be the ones that suffer

The USA is a services based country, not manufacturing. Call me when Big Finance, Big Law, Consulting and Big Tech are threatened. Right they're doing quite splendid with cash rich piles.

The primary risk that China's auto industry poses is to Japan, South Korea, and the few parts of Europe with large scale auto manufacturing.

The US domestic auto industry was hollowed out decades ago. Germany's domestic auto industry is just starting to be hollowed out, that process is in the early days. China's auto rise will ravage European manufacturing, not US manufacturing. Auto manufacturing is a small share of the US industrial base, it's a large share of the German industrial base for example.

Boeing and Airbus will both lose large chunks of their global airplane business to cheaper Chinese competition over the coming decades. It's definitely not exclusive to Boeing. The US airline market is far more lucrative than the European airline market, US carriers like Delta are very profitable and can more or less be forced to not buy from China.

Yes, they've been using the Japanese model since 2020, and Japan only got there by making many huge mistakes. But essentially growth is dead and the entrenched businesses aren't going anywhere, they won't innovate and they won't be allowed to die, zombies.

On the other hand if I can buy a house for $75k, it might be worth it.

As long as you already have $75k, but I think it would make it harder for those that don't to ever accumulate that much.

Wow why do Japanese consumers buy those computers over the cheaper MacBooks and foreign PCs?

Well, in order to compete, they'd have to cut costs.

You can't cut costs infinitely. You still need to pay people, suppliers, and above all, people who had nothing to do with the company but hold a piece of paper saying they're entitled to profits.

It's probably the case that you cannot do that enough to compete with the Chinese if you're in the US, so they won't try.

We're in a post-"what about the long term economic outlook of our country"-era and have been since the 1970s. John Q. Public in the US and Helga Öffentlich in Germany don't care that their purchase of a Chinese EV hollows out their country's industrial base, they just care that they spent less on the EV. And why shouldn't they? The countries themselves are lead by people who do the exact same thing on a massive scale.

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