It's like everybody forgot that their neighbour's job depend on them.
We're repeating the same pattern with online shopping, malls and stores everywhere are closing because of our collective actions, we're not losing them like I lost my keys.
A huge part of that is rents. Basically, a store that owns their property outright or even on mortgage has far less worries when business turns down during a crisis. Take Covid - a year or two, depending on where you were, in more or less lockdown conditions.
A store that was owner-owned? No big deal. Staff was paid for by government assistance, not much ongoing cost for the building. Owned but mortgaged? Cut a deal with the bank, no bank wants to go through a 2007ff event again and they also got assistance for loans. But a store that was rented? Yeetie yeetie. Commercial renters have zero protections anywhere, and landlords are nonforgiving - especially when they are backed by REITs and other investment vehicles.
Recent history is filled with examples of investment funds that behave like vultures - seek out a company that has sizable owned real estate, buy stocks, force the management to sell off the real estate in a heavily biased sale-and-lease-back maneuver, put the acquisition debt on the company's ledgers, sell off the real estate and let the husk of the company wither.
And this is becasue huge international investors still own sites like malls and retail centers and still remember the massive rents they used to command for those units.
The bubble will burst when enough sites are written off, and IMO rents will come back down to a reasonable level in a decade or 2.
Oh no. It's US pension funds that own a lot of real estate, and these will continue to get bailed out or protected by the government.
The decision of the US to back pensions on the stonk market has insane, crippling side effects not just on their economy but also on the rest of the world.
Free trade does result in the best prices but it has other, negative effects, and it is when we think as policy makers -- as citizens, not consumers or business owners -- that we are accountable for those effects.
Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.
Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.
Really the mom and pop store was set to die in the US because of car culture. You'll pay a bit more to walk to the closest store, but if you're already driving there is very little cost in driving to a store a little farther is almost nothing.
We also have many US manufacturers moving sourcing their subcomponents from overseas to save a few cents per unit, there's no way to prevent that, nobody is going to check the BOM from everything they ever buy.
I think collective behavior is a large component but it is not quite right to declare it as the primary driver.
For example, I get a 40inch TV instead of a 65 inch or I buy a set of American made screwdrivers but then I can't get a bottle of Vodka.
Most people have their basic needs met. They just want as much as possible for their money even if it harms other Americans. At the same time, if they happen to work at a factory making extension cords, they'll want people to buy their US made cords to protect their job.
Because most people are selfish when it comes to people who aren't family or friends.
Are you talking about the small mom-n-pop shops that are only open when most people are at work, while with online shopping you can do it any time 24/7? The same mom-n-pop shops that refused to take returns, and had poor selection and would take weeks to order something for you, at a ridiculous price?
There are a lot of really good reasons online shopping has put so many stores out of business.
The college educated white collar professionals who are grossly over-represented in policy discourse?
Middle america, the formerly industrial northeast and the former bulk industry west have been complaining about this shit policy for over a generation.
Implicitly shuttering our manufacturing and heavy industry by subjecting it to policy that we knew would make it increasingly noncompetitive at the margin and would prevent continuing investment was a macro/federal level economic policy choice that was actively pursued for approx 50yr.
This is an American quality where a person who works in a factory that makes extension cords and needs their job to survive would buy the cheaper lamp even though it's made in China.
Most people aren't willing to make financial sacrifices to help people they don't know EVEN if they might be affected by another person having the same belief.
There used to be other times and more honorable businessmen. Then came the Dodge Brothers who managed to get a court judgement asserting shareholder supremacy over long term interests [1].
The only thing I never understood is how in god's name Amazon got away with reinvesting profits and never dishing out to shareholders for decades.
The 1930s through 1960s (i.e. industrialization had matured but you can't construe it as "modern" business) are chock full of corporate raiders, acquisitions with nearly monopolistic goals, cartels, etc.
Because in the US that's the case because people give a shit about cost - you could make financial sacrifices to help your community by buying local...but your costs of living are skyrocketing every year, the costs of your family are increasing, and the difference between buying from BigCorp (Walmart, Amazon) and from your local store (which is 1.3-1.7x the price vs BigCorp) adds up.
Sad but it's true.
The investment in capability that is necessary to build the next generation of manufacturing capabilities in the US is simply not within the public imagination.
If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.
It will never happen because there's too many industries and jobs that only exist because of all that regulation and will fight tooth and nail to avoid a short term haircut.
Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.
> It needs a careful long term approach from real leaders. Not a run-and-gun, corrupt, chaotic president throwing tariffs (taxes) up on a whim.
The problem is all the real leaders got indoctrinated and drank the globalization kool-aid. Unfortunately, it seems only an insane and chaotic person was able to actually buck the iamverysmart consensus.
This isn't "working harder".
This isn't "rebuilding infrastructure".
This isn't "training people in trades".
The numbers are so cartoonishly lopsided as to be a non-starter for categorically replacing Chinese manufacturing.
Establishing regulatory harmony across all those countries is obviously not possible in the same way it is in a single authoritarian state, but if the US made it a priority to create a trade bloc capable of replicating China’s manufacturing capacity, it probably could.
If the US wants to take on China, and actually needs Canada's help to do it -- I can assure you they just set themselves back 10-20 years from achieving that. We no longer have any interest.
The labour forces of Mexico and Canada are not at the US's disposal for these kind of games anymore. For several decades we have been exploited by the US for low wages and cheap resources -- and now there's a regime that's making cheap political points by accusing us of the opposite while trying to emmiserate our populace. So, yeah, no thanks.
Now it's the CPTPP and doesn't include the US.
Canada is looking to the Pacific and EU for trade now (and China as well), so is Mexico.
It's likely that the EU/UK trade bloc will connect with the CPTPP via both the UK and Canada, which connects them to the APAC/ASEAN nations.
Everyone is aware of the power of the Chinese economy and the idea of the CPTPP is precisely to build up a trade economy that can compete and co-operate with China on an equal basis.
In the meantime, China is using its Belt & Road Initiative as a sort of "Marshall Plan" to extend its influence by building infrastructure like ports and rail.
These trade initiatives are at least focused on increasing trade, as opposed to the US "trade policy" which is to use tariffs as a crude form of protectionism and extortion to "bring manufacturing back".
I think you got your timelines crossed - it was Trump who pulled out of TPP (though Clinton also opposed it during the campaign).
It's at the point now where it is self-sustaining, which is why you see China starting to enforce IP Rights, precisely because it is now generating its own IP that it wants to protect.
Any economist would say that if China did just "copy" US technology to make itself more productive, that's good economic practice, from China's perspective.
Moats only worked for a while to protect European castles, they don't exist now.
Ford is openly discussing the idea to have joint ventures with Chinese EV makers, the whole idea is to get Chinese EV techs in exchange for US market access.
TikTok takeover is another good example.
it could be less economical, so Apple has to innovate to be competitive on pricing - with automation, robots, etc.
If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.
If we’re serious about it, we are going to have to commit ourselves to economy-tanking tariffs (like thousands of percents) for many decades until the US worker is as poor as the Vietnamese worker.
> Apple here is the first step.
Pretty sure the much-touted Foxconn plant in Wisconsin was the first step, and just like this one it will be scaled down to a few hundred jobs as soon as possible.