[HN Gopher] Globalization Is Dead and No One Is Listening
___________________________________________________________________
Globalization Is Dead and No One Is Listening
Author : synergy20
Score : 145 points
Date : 2022-12-12 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (interconnected.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (interconnected.blog)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > No American, or any Western media outlet for that matter,
| bothered to cover this speech. Only Nikkei and a handful of
| Taiwanese outlets wrote about it.
|
| There were highlights of the speech, including "Globalization is
| almost dead" and "Free trade is almost dead" quotes, reported in
| the New York Times, which is where I first read about it:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/technology/tsmc-chips-fac...
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Exaggerated headline. Lots of production of various goods still
| going to places like Mexico, India, Vietnam, etc. Semiconductors
| moving back to the US is mostly a reaction to China's growing
| power. Most trends point towards increasing globalization outside
| of specialized industries like semiconductors just because
| capital and goods are so much easier to move than people, and the
| developed world requires cheap labor to support its living
| standards.
| [deleted]
| cesarvarela wrote:
| "X is dead" content needs a neologism if it doesn't have one
| already.
| la64710 wrote:
| I think we ought to take a longer term perspective of things and
| acknowledge the cyclical nature of things. It is interesting and
| somehow I think there must be a science behind all this.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Systems theory ? Cybernetics ? Cliodynamics ??
| fleddr wrote:
| There's no such thing as de-globalization or "globalization is
| dead".
|
| Even in this very best case example of a factory in the US, a
| country large enough that it can self-sustain in some ways, it is
| 100% globalized.
|
| The 5 million little parts that go into the factory are sourced
| from all across the world. As the article suggests, education
| comes from Taiwan. Rare earth minerals come from Africa and
| China. The machine comes from ASML, which in turn sources parts
| from all across the world.
|
| But yes, do go ahead and slap a "Made in the USA" on it if that
| makes you feel better.
| nodesocket wrote:
| Peter Thiel has talked extensively about globalization and was
| ahead of the trend it seems[1]. Despite what feels like the
| majority of people on HN being pro-globalization, Covid and the
| War in Ukraine hopefully taught countries a good lesson in the
| power of domestic first and domestic focused production.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/03/08/thiel-globalization-
| is-o...
| hirundo wrote:
| Between breakfast and lunch I've worked with three people from
| India and one each from Germany, Canada, China and a half dozen
| around the US. That's just a normal workday in a normal dev job.
| Globalization is looking hale and hearty from my chair.
| pphysch wrote:
| Many people are conflating "unipolar USD dominance" with
| "economic globalization", when the former is very much a subset
| of the latter. The former is definitely dying (see last week in
| KSA).
|
| If economic globalization is genuinely suffering, it is a direct
| result of Washington's unilateral sanctions and trade wars.
|
| Global logistics aren't suddenly collapsing. However, there is
| increasingly more red tape created mainly by Washington, and this
| causes strain on the system.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| The problem is that there is nothing to replace the US
| dollar/Euro -- e.g. the western capital markets, because other
| nations (excluding Japan) do not want to open their capital
| markets to foreign investment. So if this was just a matter of
| switching from one reserve currency to another, then
| globalization would be fine. But this is a situation in which
| the world is realizing that the dollar/euro system is no longer
| fit for use, _and there is nothing to replace it_ , which is
| why nations are realizing that they can no longer run these
| massive trade surpluses full stop. That's how you get to the
| end of globalization.
|
| > see last week in KSA
|
| Yes, let's look at this deal, because the KSA deal is a perfect
| example of the end of globalization. It's basically barter --
| Saudi will send China oil and China will send Saudi Huawei gear
| and build factories there. People are focusing on the fact that
| the oil will be denominated in CNY and assume this means a
| massive increase in Saudi CNY holdings -- but China doesn't
| want other nations to start buying up CNY assets, and it has
| capital controls in place to prevent that. So the CNY is not
| replacing the dollar as a reserve currency -- that would be
| China's worst nightmare.
|
| Instead, we are switching to bilateral, managed, balanced trade
| in which each side gets something tangible under their own
| control and there is no residual large cross border financial
| flow to finance the deal.
|
| Now let's assume this is how trade will be done in the future.
| You want to import natural gas from me? Fine, build me a chip
| fab. Or a port. This is a very different world than saying "You
| want to import natural gas from me? Fine, I'll buy lots of your
| bonds and keep my money in your financial system. Do you see
| the difference?
| jandrese wrote:
| There are a lot of grumpy people who see a headline like this and
| say "good". From their perspective globalization is just a way
| for companies to export jobs to countries with looser labor
| standards that allow the corporations to treat them like slave
| labor and avoid environmental and ethical regulations in the host
| country while also killing off a whole job segment of honest
| union factory jobs that support a robust middle class.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| And those people are in for an unpleasant surprise when this
| onshoring actually gets underway:
|
| > In Morris Chang's own estimation, the chips produced from
| TSMC Arizona may cost "at least 50% more" than the chips from
| TSMC Taiwan. Will TSMC pass on that cost to Apple or let it eat
| into its margins? Will Apple pass on that cost to consumers or
| let it eat into its margins? No one knows right now, but as
| TSMC Arizona starts churning out wafers, we will know soon
| enough.
|
| Jobs back in America is great in the abstract, until you have
| to pay for it. If everything in your life costs 50% more, then
| your effective income has fallen by a third. Are people
| actually going to be ok with that? We'll see.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| everything is a tradeoff, look at what happened during the
| Pandemic when we couldn't get ANY chips because of the supply
| chain issues.
|
| For economics the tradeoff is between efficiency and
| resiliency. Global supply chains taking advantage of
| comparative advantage are efficient but can collapse from a
| single link in the chain failing. In this case the US is
| sacrificing cost efficiency for reliability.
|
| Following your strategy is how you end up with Europe relying
| on Russia for energy, huge long term Black Swan potential in
| return for marginal savings in the short term
| adventured wrote:
| > Jobs back in America is great in the abstract, until you
| have to pay for it. If everything in your life costs 50%
| more, then your effective income has fallen by a third. Are
| people actually going to be ok with that? We'll see.
|
| This is a short-sighted, narrow view of what's possible for a
| superpower.
|
| HN isn't going to like this answer, but this is how the world
| actually functions and always will.
|
| First, _everything_ isn 't going to cost 50% more. Most
| things can reasonably remain unchanged in terms of
| globalization, imports/exports.
|
| How about the US strategically breaks most of the world's
| supply chains re chips after we build up our own production
| domestically? It provides a new, enormous point of leverage
| to wantonly undermine other powers that don't have that
| positioning. What if Taiwan's factories get turned to rubble
| by an assault from China, while the US factories keep running
| and then export, at greater cost, to the rest of the world
| (as with US natural gas recently)?
|
| It's the oil / natural gas / energy scenario now that the US
| doesn't need the Middle East's energy. There will likely come
| a time in the near future where it's beneficial to destroy
| the House of Saud in the style of Syria, to damage China and
| others (look the other way while a very violent civil war
| breaks out to topple the kingdom, wiping out the majority of
| their oil production). The US can afford a global energy
| shock in a way that most of the rest of the world can't,
| which has recently been demonstrated in the gap between the
| prices in the US and the prices in Europe due to the Russian
| invasion of Ukraine.
|
| If the US can meet its own chip demand, new options open up
| strategically on the table for a superpower to damage its
| enemies. The US can better afford a conflict in and around
| Asia, the less it depends on Asia for eg chips.
|
| Energy, chips, USD, weapons. Moats for a superpower.
| gedy wrote:
| > If everything in your life costs 50% more, then your
| effective income has fallen by a third. Are people actually
| going to be ok with that? We'll see.
|
| This already happens with the non-outsourceable stuff that's
| more expensive (housing, medical, education, etc). So who TF
| cares if flat panel TVs or Phones cost more? Not me TBH.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Electronic garbage and (some kinds of) entertainment are
| basically the only things for which "globalization will
| bring down prices" has really delivered, at least in the
| US. Turns out it doesn't help with most of the stuff that
| actually matters, and might even hurt.
|
| So a fry cook can save a little and put together an
| entertainment center that would have been the envy of the
| neighborhood--almost unimaginably good--in 1992. So what?
| They're facing a hopeless financial situation on every
| other front. I guess it's nice the 65" 4K TV, Switch, and
| budget surround sound system can provide a distraction from
| everything else being ruinously expensive and getting worse
| every year, with seemingly no end in sight.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| The things that are "ruinously expensive" are also the
| things we can't outsource - housing, medical, education.
|
| Onshoring doesn't seem to me like it will improve the
| domestic policies that make each of those unaffordable.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Its also a red herring. The reason costs went down is
| that this industry jumped on the same bandwagon as
| moore's law. Reducing the part count of items (compared
| to their 1950/60s counterparts) and handling a lot of
| tasks in a single piece of silicon that itself has been
| going down to 0 in cost is what really enabled the price
| of all this electronic stuff to become so cheap.
|
| Lets compare a 1960s TV to a 2022 TV for example. In the
| 1950s you had the power electronics, the control
| circuitry for the tube, the tube, the audio circuitry,
| tuning, and possibly some control stuff (primitive OSD
| whether visible or not).
|
| Now in 2022 you have the LCD panel which follows moore's
| law to an extent, a simple switch mode power supply to
| drive the TV(single chip solution also follows moore's
| law to an extent) and a single chip solution to handle
| audio, tuning, OSD and any special value add such as
| apps(also follows moore's law).
|
| We should really exclude this category from the cost
| baskets as it is only serving to mislead.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Right, I didn't bring it up in my post but obviously the
| March of Technology is (we are told) supposed to bring
| prices on that kind of thing down _independently_ of the
| effects of offshoring.
|
| I actually wasn't entirely fair--cotton and synthetic
| casual clothes are so cheap they're basically free,
| anything that can be made of absolutely terrible steel
| and stamped is cheap (really bad knives, terrible dining
| utensils that bend under ordinary use, that kind of
| thing), and so's any plastic shit without expensive
| IP/branding attached. I think that's all some mix of
| efficiency improvements (especially for the plastic shit
| --we put a lot less material in most plastic goods now,
| than we did in, say, the 1980s) and, maybe, some
| actually-beneficially effect of offshoring. Oh, and
| kitchen appliances guaranteed to break within two years
| because some nylon gear wears out and it can't be
| repaired for less than the cost of a new one. Those are
| cheap. Meanwhile, actually-good stuff is about as
| expensive as it ever was. Be rad if we could apply this
| alleged cost-savings effect of offshoring to, like,
| _nice_ things that function well and last, but
| _mysteriously_ it only seems to materialize in things
| that are also a level of quality so low that we didn 't
| used to even _have_ such a category. Or rapidly
| developing technology (consumer electronics). It 's _as
| if_ consumers aren 't seeing the bulk of these supposed
| benefits from offshoring, and instead what price
| decreases/stability we do see are mostly from tech
| improvements and obvious quality decline....
|
| I'd add that I think cost increases of onshoring are
| overblown. US-made goods in e.g. clothing often command a
| large premium, but that's because if you're going to use
| US labor instead of Vietnamese or wherever, you may as
| well also use better processes [EDIT: and better
| materials] to produce a higher-quality item, since you
| can't compete with poorly-made goods on price anyway
| (though, sure, some places try to cheat and turn out crap
| at US-premium prices while implying it's better than it
| is). For extremely price-sensitive goods like bottom-of-
| the-barrel T-shirts that wholesale at like $1, even a 10%
| increase in costs would mean you fold even if the
| _absolute_ increase in costs of the article is pennies,
| so of course those aren 't made in the US when there are
| other options.
| scohesc wrote:
| I think it'll mean that corporations will need to go back to
| making electronics, appliances, equipment, tools, etc. that
| actually last more than 3-5 years.
|
| "Can't go and buy another TV off the shelf since they cost so
| much, guess I'll have to take my TV to a repair place and
| have it repaired because I worked so hard to get this one,
| and it's cheaper than getting a new one."
|
| You'll see consumers want to get more lifespan out of their
| current devices/appliances/etc. and will be willing to pick
| brands that allow repairability, locally sourced parts, etc.
| etc.
| bombcar wrote:
| Estimates are an M1 processor costs about $50.
|
| The original Intel processor (Core duo?) was somewhere in the
| $150-200 range, apparently, in 2006 dollars (but let's assume
| inflation doesn't exist).
|
| So the CPU is already 1/3 the price, a 50% increase doesn't
| even get it close to what it had been in the past.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| Onshoring is really directed at goods that some other country
| might use an economic weapon by restricting supply. 99% of
| stuff doesn't fall into this category. No one cares if coffee
| mugs and pens are made in China. So you wont see rises there.
| It's not really the end of globalization for the vast
| majority of stuff. Of the stuff that remains, you have to
| consider what fraction of the value chain is actually going
| to a "problem" country. Often it's the final assembly. On a
| mobile phone that might be $10 of the store price. So
| manufactured in a more expensive low wage country at $15, you
| probably won't notice. Some of the chips in a phone are not
| made by TSMC but are made in South Korea, so probably no
| change there. Apple's A16 chip is particularly expensive and
| maybe costs $100 to make. So based on that TSMC quote, that's
| an extra $50, but they sell the phone at more than $1000.
| That article also seems to imply that some of that added cost
| is insufficient worker availability causing expensive
| training costs. That may change if there's a steady supply of
| jobs available. It is possible to make low cost electronics
| in high wage countries. The Raspberry Pi is made in Wales.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The price of things is so weirdly distorted at the moment
| because somethings can't be outsourced to cheap slave labor.
|
| I can buy a new laptop for the same price as getting a
| plumber come and clear the roots from my drain.
|
| It's cheaper to throw things out and buy new ones than repair
| them.
| 2devnull wrote:
| There's also people in the right who say good. These people
| seem to be focused on geopolitical stability ie defense.
| neon_electro wrote:
| Something tells me GP meant to indicate tongue-in-cheek that
| the "grumpy" people are the people in the right ;)
| 6510 wrote:
| I'm not grumpy but companies do export jobs to countries with
| _" looser labor standards"_ and perhaps treat employees like
| slave labor (or actual slaves!) but more importantly lower
| salaries. Other [competing] companies who didn't export their
| jobs will still have to compete in the same market. If the
| product involves enough labor we cant pay very good salaries.
| The other company _must_ now do the same. It is like
| multinationals are not sneakily trying to avoid taxes, if it is
| possible and everyone else is doing it they _must_ also do it.
|
| The "robust middle class" is a misconception. Jobs just vanish
| which renders people without any income and it pushes salaries
| down where products are not very labor intense. It would be
| preferable to scale down all salaries to match those paid in
| other countries. At least people would have work! (which isn't
| actually all that important) The political wiggle room is not
| sufficient to lower the salaries to you know 1 dollar-ish per
| day or anything in that direction.
|
| The real issue is that people in all those other countries get
| to elect or otherwise install their own law makers or
| dictators. We have been unable to manufacture good law makers,
| dictators and other rules. They are of unbearably low quality,
| their price can be in the hundreds of millions of lives. You
| would think at prices that high you would get a decent product
| but nothing could be further from the truth.
|
| You could have their country men make your pants, your shoes,
| your computer, your food, your bed, your car, your... your...
| everything and they will do it really cheap, big profit margins
| for the companies.
|
| And then, one day, it all ends or it might not end but they may
| make any demand, however insane the implications you would have
| to suck it up or at least consider sucking it up with the
| alternative being no pants, no shoes, no computer, no food, no
| bed and no car - all simultaneously!
|
| We are currently trying the _no gas_ thing here in the EU. It
| seems an obvious problem but then prices are going all the way
| up even in countries that produce their own gas!?
|
| Not having pants or shoes might be the least of your problems.
|
| I'm not grumpy, I'm confused people trust Xi Jinping and
| Vladimir Putin that much. They logically have no reason to.
|
| What you want is a world where each country can take care of it
| self and, if a crisis or natural disaster strikes we can be
| there for them.
|
| If any one crazy ruler can take the whole world down the abys
| you would have to wonder why we build it like that?
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| they may be grumpy, but, in fairness, they have a point
|
| maybe that's why they are grumpy
| sottol wrote:
| I don't think undoing globalization is going to mean going back
| to the old ways. Personally, i think those well paying middle
| class jobs are gone, the status quo is too enshrined in the
| minds of business leaders, political thought (not just
| politicians, the populace) and the economy.
|
| The end of globalization will be more of the status quo, but
| different, not how it was once was in the golden years after
| WW2. If i had to guess, same global companies, some of the
| workforce still making 10-100x the average salary but now many
| of the low-paying jobs simply onshored, maybe even furthering
| the socio-economic divide because you won't be able to buy an
| American-made 60" TV for $800 anymore.
| citilife wrote:
| I see what you are saying, but I think you're incorrect.
|
| What's more likely to happen in my mind is that there will be
| fewer people running factories. Recall, right now slave labor
| makes up a large amount of what you use. To adjust for that,
| you'll have to maximize worker productivity.
|
| That means more factories (potentially smaller and / or more
| generalized) and automation building various parts /
| equipment. Assembly often occurred in the host country
| anyway, so I don't see that changing too much. It'll be the
| tool and part making that'll have to return to places like
| the United States.
|
| I do think cost of goods will be high if we don't loosen some
| of the regulations, we need to keep people safe, but I think
| there's a balance.
|
| The reason people think it'll be an improvement has to do
| with competition. If there's a market for a set of goods
| here, it'll be filled. It may start off expensive, but as
| automation improves the process you need less workers and
| more machines. That's fine and eventually the product will be
| cheap to produce, but the people producing the good will be
| highly skilled (i.e. be well paid).
|
| Where I'm living there's a lot of factories. Salaries range
| from 65-110k in the factory work, all of which would be
| considered good wages in an area where the average home price
| is $300k (with low taxes).
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think de-globalization is a long-term boon for automation
| (at least in the U.S), but it's not going to operate at the
| speed needed to replace 3 billion workers dropping out of
| the labor force. Automation usually requires a lot of
| painful experimentation and tuning by highly-skilled people
| before you get it working right, and the pace of progress
| is typically uneven and unpredictable. Long-term, it'll be
| great for the salaries of software engineers, robotics
| engineers, material scientists, process engineers, etc.
| Short-term, expect higher prices and shortages. Until we
| find ways to build things with fewer people, we will just
| have fewer things.
|
| I'm also not optimistic about the American populace's
| ability to deal with shortages without rioting.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> Automation usually requires a lot of painful
| experimentation and tuning by highly-skilled people
| before you get it working right_
|
| A year ago I spoke to an Apple engineer who works on
| their manufacturing processes, who corroborated that. He
| said the reason they aren't fully automated is because
| human workers are still better at repurposing to new
| assembly lines making new devices than robots are.
| ryandrake wrote:
| They are _still_ better, but no doubt teams of people are
| working on improving automation to the point where they
| are not better.
|
| I believe, on a long enough timeframe, every product that
| can be produced and every service that can be performed
| will be done by automation/AI/robotics. It's the
| inevitable destination of the tracks we are currently
| rolling on. 1. An advancement in automation is made where
| something can now be done automatically that previously
| required humans. 2. Those humans no longer have a job. 3.
| Some of those humans re-train for a job not yet automate-
| able. 4. Goto 1. This cycle will repeat for generations
| and generations, probably for centuries. The jobs at the
| bottom of the skill pyramid will slowly be taken over by
| automation, and new high-skill, high-complexity jobs will
| be created towards the top of the pyramid. Humans will
| constantly be scrambling to get footholds higher and
| higher up the pyramid, before automation gobbles those
| jobs up too. The end destination: self-creating
| automation that can make and do anything. At which point,
| there is nothing left for humans to do.
|
| If, by that point, we still have not gotten past our
| primitive economic system based on money-for-labor and
| private ownership of the means of production, then
| humanity will simply no longer function.
| projectazorian wrote:
| > Recall, right now slave labor makes up a large amount of
| what you use.
|
| Citation needed
| trasz2 wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-
| prison-wo...
| projectazorian wrote:
| You've identified that slave labor happens in the US
| prison system and elsewhere, I think that most people
| would agree with this. I don't see any evidence that
| slave labor comprises "a large amount of what you use."
| trasz2 wrote:
| Well, no, most people don't realize US is using slave
| labor. Most people believe China does, though, despite no
| proofs. Sadly, people are still quite disconnected from
| verifiable reality.
| projectazorian wrote:
| China does use slave labor, mostly in its prison system.
| Just like in the US. It's a marginal part of the overall
| economy. Just like in the US.
|
| Yet people talk about China like it's an entirely gulag
| based economy.
| etherael wrote:
| Perhaps because of the suicide nets? I get the Foxconn is
| not technically slave labour, but you must admit that
| suicide nets may give to the observer the impression that
| the gap is not that large between whatever it is and
| slave labour?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| $11 billion of goods is a drop in the bucket. Not even
| close to a large amount of what anyone uses.
| difosfor wrote:
| Just compare the wages of the people that work on the
| goods you consume with your local wages? And look at the
| lack of regulation in the areas where they work and the
| resulting pollution etc. It's obviously not fair that
| someone from another country has less rights than you.
| It's a kind of slavery.
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| In what universe is that slavery?
| projectazorian wrote:
| Different countries having different standards of living
| isn't "a kind of slavery." Slavery is when people are
| forced to work and are not paid for their labor.
|
| You're correct that it's not fair that people have fewer
| rights in some countries compared to others. For example,
| as an American, I have fewer labor rights than most
| Europeans. Am I a slave laborer?
| nimbius wrote:
| the "good old days" were a time when capitalism itself was
| made to capitulate to the post-war reality of an America that
| very much distrusted the idea of the free market itself.
| Major companies like GE and Dow Chemical bankrolled themed
| rides and attractions at Disney not because they had the
| marketing budget, but because most Americans emerging from
| the great depression and the new deal had found themselves
| accustomed to the concessions they had made during their time
| in the bread lines.
|
| Americans had to be bought, in a way. Excellent pay, generous
| time off, and pension retirement was all on the table as
| industry bent the knee to capital that threatened slipping
| back into a pseudo-agrarian role after the war and in doing
| so rob the barons themselves of the capital they sought to
| exploit. By the seventies things had turned around. capital
| was eager to return to its former position of exploit, anyone
| from the WW2 era had been sufficiently promoted to leadership
| and their kids placated with the same, and Reagan-era
| liberalization could return the globe to various states of
| servile production and slave-classery oncemore.
|
| The death of globalization is stymied by major hangovers of
| the cyclical crashes of global capitalism itself. in the
| eighties stagnant wages meant everyone got a credit card, and
| in 2008 amidst the credit crash it meant everyone got free
| money in the form of low and no interest. the red flag of the
| death of globalism should have been when equifax and other
| houses of the guild of credit made the shift to stop
| factoring medical bankruptcy _at all_ as part of the credit
| report. another factor hindering globalizations death is the
| collective disinterest in considering real unemployment in
| favour of fanciful mathematic aerobics designed to appeal to
| policymakers and the very market such a KPI could inform. US
| unemployment judged at the U6 rate is more than six percent
| and compounded by other factors such as medical debt,
| undischargeable student debt, and once again stagnant wages
| and this doesnt even begin to cover things like COVID rent
| freeze debt and the chronic effects of the methamphetamine
| and opoid addiction crisis in the US still ongoing today.
| 2023 also sees the expiration of covid rental protections in
| numerous major states, which will likely drive up
| homelessness and unemployment oncemore.
|
| Finally theres the rampant inflation that not even a return
| to Clinton era interest rates seems capable of stopping. So
| if anything we'll probably "bail out" globalism before we
| advance past it.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The "good old days" were a time when every factory in the
| world other than America's had just been destroyed in a
| massive world wide war. That's not happening again. We are
| never returning to "blue collar american workers create
| most industrial products the world consumes" and so we are
| never returning to massive demand for unskilled American
| workers. Even if the US completely bans imports low skill
| workers still wouldn't have the advantage they did in the
| post war era because every other country will continue to
| import cheap goods from china instead of expensive american
| ones.
| rayiner wrote:
| Sure, that's probably true. But can we get back to "blue
| collar American workers create must industrial products a
| nation of 350 million people consumes?" Maybe we will
| have fewer TVs and fewer cars, and raspberries will cost
| $5 a quart because we'll be paying American-born workers
| to make everything and harvest everything. But if that
| gives everyone something to do and flattens the social
| hierarchy, that would be better.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > But if that gives everyone something to do and flattens
| the social hierarchy, that would be better.
|
| It won't. It will just make 90% of people poorer.
| anonyfox wrote:
| You're really optimistic. I do see a low but non-zero
| chance that some tensions between
| china/india/russia/middleeast with each other or someone
| else escalate into a wiping out of lots of factories, one
| way or the other.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| This makes for a great low effort narrative but I'm
| unconvinced the luxurious economic circumstances of those
| decades weren't just a result of the competition literally
| going up in flames.
|
| There was NO chance any industrialized nation was staying
| stagnant or moving backwards after WW2 created all sorts of
| potential for further industrial progress. That's just a
| non-starter in so many ways.
| roody15 wrote:
| Why are they necessary grumpy. Its kind of true.
|
| Lets look at Apple for example. They tout and market ideas of
| privacy, green energy, recycling, progressive social values
| etc... In reality they use slave labor in India and China that
| adhere to very little environmental standards. They also are
| not unionized.
|
| As long as the concept of a corporation is based on a legal
| obligation to maximize profit.. then "globalizing" this
| structure will not necessary "improve" the world on a social or
| environmental level.
| zimzam wrote:
| Apple does include their supply chain in their labor &
| environmental reports: for example when they catch underage
| workers they get sent to school at the supplier's expense.
|
| Many companies outsource their externalities but Apple isn't
| a good example of it.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >Many companies outsource their externalities but Apple
| isn't a good example of it.
|
| Agreed. In general, "flagships of their economic niche"
| companies in fat margin industries are generally on the
| straight and narrow. They can afford the luxury of ethics.
|
| You wanna see bad behavior, look at bottom of the barrel
| companies in razor thin margin industries.
| null_object wrote:
| > Lets look at Apple for example
|
| Would be great - just once - to read a discussion on HN that
| _didn't_ drag in an attack on Apple.
|
| Guess that's too much to hope for.
| nomel wrote:
| My friend works at Apple. He doesn't tell anyone, if he can
| help it. He says "in tech" and "I'd rather not say". I
| didn't believe why until I witnessed him mentioning where
| he worked at a social gathering. All interesting
| conversation, within ear-shot, came to a halt, with most
| proceeding to apologetically shit on Apple for the next 15
| minutes. When we would move to a new group of people,
| someone from the previous group would end up bringing it
| up.
|
| Seems like a great place to work, and do good engineering,
| besides the downside that you, apparently, can't tell
| anyone.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| They are the most valuable company in the world. Like it or
| not, it's entirely reasonable to use them as the go-to
| example when examining and/or illustrating the effects of
| capitalism.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> In reality they use slave labor in India and China that
| adhere to very little environmental standards.
|
| I would also add a lot of US companies export their toxic
| waste to China and India as well - then tout how much better
| we're getting as a country tackling climate change.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| Recycling as well. Most stuff like plastic can't be easily
| recycled so they just ship it to China. It's just cheaper
| to ship it offshore to be someone else's problem.
|
| This is a piece [1] 60 minutes Australia did, but all
| Western countries are doing the same thing.
|
| [1]https://youtu.be/lqrlEsPoyJk
| jandrese wrote:
| That doesn't really happen anymore. China stopped
| accepting plastic waste because there was no economic way
| to recycle it, even using Chinese labor. The plastic
| industry talks a lot about recycling and even includes
| those helpful triangles on their products, but in reality
| the vast majority of plastics go straight to the dump,
| even when you wash them and separate them out into the
| blue bins.
| jlokier wrote:
| > As long as the concept of a corporation is based on a legal
| obligation to maximize profit..
|
| That's not actually true, and never has been. Corporate law
| is more nuanced and flexible than that.
|
| If we're talking about how to improve the world using
| corporate structures, there are also more options, such as
| corporations with obligations to non-shareholder stakeholders
| representing the environment and employees human rights, for
| example.
|
| http://in-houseblog.practicallaw.com/fallacy-of-the-duty-
| to-...
|
| https://www.thesustainableinvestor.net/blog/2016/02/23/fact-.
| ..
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-
| co...
|
| https://www.legislate.tech/post/does-the-law-require-
| public-...
| conorcleary wrote:
| Ask people to explain how vehicles tires are made (from raw
| resource to manufacture and distro) and suddenly globalization
| makes sense - it's the only way toward the future. Subtext is
| required to discern what is good and bad about it.
|
| We need to teach students of all ages some lessons about
| logistics and supply chain - not only will they better
| understand how the world functions but that there are career
| and business opportunities at every node.
| adventured wrote:
| > it's the only way toward the future
|
| The primary matter is not globalization or no globalization,
| it's about what balance and for which countries and
| industries. These things will constantly shift back and
| forth, the pendulum will over-swing as it does.
|
| Just because N amount of globalization makes sense, that
| doesn't mean the extent we have at present, and its
| composition, makes the most sense. And obviously that (what
| makes sense) will vary significantly by the national interest
| of a given country based on its culture and stage of
| development. The world is filled to the brim with competing
| interests and that will never change, some benefit more or
| less from more or less globalization.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| There's globalization-the-way-things-are-made-now, and
| there's globalization-the-neoliberal-trade-policy-
| that's-dominated-US-politics-since-the-80s.
|
| The former's a fact, the latter's... less so, and has been
| pretty unpopular among voters on both "sides of the aisle"
| more often than not for the entire time it's been the driving
| force behind US trade policy (the donor and think-tank sets
| _love_ it, though, is why it 's persisted regardless).
|
| Trump's the only big-two-party Presidential candidate I can
| recall in that whole time span who ran on strongly anti-
| neoliberalism (so, anti-globalization, in the pop-culture,
| colloquial sense of globalization) messaging, which worked
| pretty well for him since most R voters (and a good chunk of
| true-swing, and actually a lot on the left though they mostly
| wouldn't have voted for him for other reasons) more-or-less
| hate neoliberalism--regardless of the movement's merits, it's
| unpopular.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| These people also complain when stuff that was cheap isn't
| cheap anymore, and also when their own people don't want to
| work the crappy domestic jobs--one or two steps above slave
| labor--that imported labor did.
| ambientenv wrote:
| Like many folks, I suppose, I thought I had a reasonable layman's
| grasp of globalization. Turns out it was mostly superficial. I'm
| currently reading "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" by
| Peter Zeihan [1] and it is enlightening. Highly recommended in
| helping to add (especially historical) perspective to
| understanding the death throes of globalization. Paired with
| "normalcy bias" [2], which I was vaguely aware of, and beliefs
| and behaviours begin to become somewhat more understandable and
| an opportunity to shift my worldview in an appropriate and
| preparatory manner begins to reveal itself.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_World_is_just_t...
| [2] https://jessicawildfire.substack.com/p/its-not-cool-to-
| overr...
| kkfx wrote:
| I think too many have ignored a classic logic: do your best to
| avoid SPOF.
|
| Globalization is the extreme evolution of works specialization,
| instead of being "different States in the World" anyone as
| autonomous / self-sufficient as possible we have reached a point
| of being a "single system all other the world" where States blend
| a bit their role and no one is anymore self-sufficient. Such
| model works beautifully well until it breaks. Like any hyper-
| centralized systems.
|
| Doing the best to being self-sufficient is expensive, slow,
| complex etc. BUT pay off when things goes wrong. That's the very
| same principles of having lifeboats&c on ships: 99% of the time
| they are just costly useless tools. We can spare more space and
| reduce costs cutting them. That's works very well until something
| goes wrong.
|
| That's is and that's also why the WEF corporatocracy model is
| equally crazy. They want the power of course, but they forget the
| fact that companies are not different: they tend to be all on the
| same line of thought. Witch means they inevitably copy one
| another, they are a single entity so a SPOF. WE NEED VARIETY to
| maximize evolution and chances to survive as a spices. That's the
| real missing point.
|
| That's why is terrible to see a Chinese leader with an English
| dress. We need to be different, very different, see each others
| and share, but anyone with a path.
| scottmckenzie wrote:
| I would recommend reading Peter Zeihan's books, or watching some
| of his interviews on You Tube, to get a fuller geopolitical view.
| It's fascinating stuff.
| woeirua wrote:
| Globalization and free trade are dead because most of the
| promised benefits for the west failed to materialize. Yes, we got
| significantly cheaper goods, but one of the major promises was
| that free trade would liberalize the world. Instead, China has
| taken all the benefits and used our money to build a system of
| oppression that would make George Orwell blush.
|
| Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align
| themselves with the west.
| [deleted]
| hilyen wrote:
| Not a fan of any authoritarianism, but USA could also be
| described the same way. We have massive data warehouses that
| just collect everything, phone calls, texts, internet packets.
| We just have different owners, but its the same game.
|
| If you haven't read up on the unclassified docs that have been
| released about the secret agencies of this country, you should.
| We've done everything and worse to our own citizens. Including
| firebombing entire cities, sending the military to kill people
| striking, dosing unaware Americans with LSD... the list is
| long.
| ledauphin wrote:
| I'm not a fan of any authoritarianism either.... and if
| you're describing the US the same way you describe China,
| then you're missing the forest for the trees.
|
| Two things can be and often are _true_ at the same time, but
| often the difference between them is that, for a given
| conversation, one of them is a proportionate contribution,
| and the other is a troll.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > Not a fan of any authoritarianism, but USA could also be
| described the same way. We have massive data warehouses that
| just collect everything, phone calls, texts, internet
| packets. We just have different owners, but its the same game
|
| This is hardly a reasonable comparison. Most of the crazy
| shit you're talking about like breaking protests with the
| military and the LSD trails are from 60 years ago.
| Firebombing cities happened during WWII and was the accepted
| (though terrible and it turns out strategically wrong) air
| doctrine of all sides.
|
| Yes, US bulk data collection is wrong, but we know it isn't
| being used to round up people en masse for wrong think. We
| don't run massive reeducation/forced labor camps for ethnic
| minorities. The Xinjiang internment camps have housed
| basically the equivalent of the whole US prison population
| and where there is institutionalized forced sterilization,
| mass rape, water boarding, torture involving electrical
| shock, and beatings. Even the worst US prison is basically
| day camp by comparison, and the people of Xinjiang are being
| rounded up largely for their ethnic identity.
|
| You false equivalence is frankly, fucking bullshit.
| hilyen wrote:
| Your ego is getting in the way of seeing the facts friend.
| Just because it happened before your lifetime doesn't make
| it somehow less of an atrocity. US was founded on slavery
| and genocide. Now we outsource genocide for oil, and do
| slave labor in our prisons in accordance with the 13th
| amendment.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| No it isn't ego, it's a command of basic facts.
|
| With respect to the injustices of the FBI and CIA, there
| was a congressional commission that investigated abuses,
| held people to account, and enacted some laws to change
| the situation. Such a process is impossible in China
| today which has no separation of powers. Hell you can't
| even talk about the Tiananmen massacre without being
| locked up and it's scrubbed from the internet but we can
| openly discuss domestic police abuses all day long
| without fear of reprisal.
|
| As for WWII it isn't even relevant to the discussion of
| domestic policy, notwithstanding the fact that it was
| near total war.
|
| The US was not founded on slavery and genocide, this is
| bullshit history. Half if the original colonies barely
| ever had slavery and had banned it before the revolution.
| The founders, if you've read any of their writings hoped
| to see the young republic end the institution within a
| generation, and expected to fade away due to epidemic
| pressures from the more productive north.
|
| War for oil is a stupid conspiracy theory. The Iraq
| invasion never took oil resources and immediately handed
| them over to the Iraqi state which sold them on the
| global market just like before. There was no US genocide
| there or anywhere for oil. This is just nonsense.
|
| Yes we do still technically have forced labor in prison,
| though it's actually usually voluntary these days. This
| is totally different in kind and character from what is
| happening in Xianxjang, again where people are actual
| victims of a real modern genocide.
|
| You're engaging in giahgallop and whataboutism here.
| Zircom wrote:
| >The US was not founded on slavery and genocide, this is
| bullshit history. Half of the original colonies barely
| ever had slavery and had banned it before the revolution.
|
| >Half of the original colonies barely ever had slavery
| and had banned it before the revolution.
|
| >Half of the original colonies
|
| So.... you're saying that half of them had full on
| slavery, and the other half had reduced to no
| slavery....to me it seems "founded" on slavery is
| absolutely accurate, especially considering that is
| literally enshrined in our highest governing document via
| the 3/5ths compromise, and went on to be the heart of the
| southern economy, becoming near and dear to enough
| people's hearts that half the country went to war to
| preserve it. And what would you call what we did to
| Native Americans if not genocide?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| You're very much ignoring the actual historical context
| and the writing of the founders. That even half of the
| new nation outlawed slavery was pretty unique in the
| world of 1776 where slavery was globally ubiquitous.
| Article 1 section 9 of the constitution set a sort of
| cooling off period after which congress could end the
| Atlantic slave trade, which it did. The writing of the
| framers from the time makes it clear that their intention
| was to end importation in 1808 under the theory that it
| would cause slavery to end. They were trying to do so
| without fracturing their unstable union, it was a
| compromise just like the 3/5 compromise. But again, this
| was an unusually emancipatory direction for any new
| nation in the 18th century when every other nation had
| slavery, serfdom, or both.
|
| I didn't address native peoples or genocide in my
| previous comment. But, if I were to do so I would
| probably argue that it was mostly carried out in the 19th
| century and was not a feature of the founding but its not
| an area of history I feel well enough versed in to make a
| super strong argument off the top of my head.
|
| But that's not even the point, I'm arguing that the OP is
| acting in bad faith by arguing that CHina's current
| crimes are excused by the bad behavior of the US 250
| years ago. Modern day slavery and genocide on the scale
| that exists in Xinjang are inexcusable and unparalleled
| since WWII. The US has made moral progress and the CCP is
| committing crimes against humanity.
| rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote:
| Wartime != Peacetime.
|
| Also, what do you mean firebombing our own cities. U.S.
| "strategic" bombing during Vietnam and WWII was on our
| enemies, not U.S. citizens as you claim. MKUltra was, sure,
| but it wasn't millions of people. And who cares about
| wiretapping; that's not even in the same ballpark. For most
| people in the U.S., we can live a free, safe, and open life,
| and so did our parents and grandparents.
|
| One example of how the U.S. is not currently authoritarian is
| that we're all able to have this exact discussion strongly
| criticizing the U.S., on a U.S. website, over the U.S.
| internet, and still no one from the government is going to
| have us whacked.
| hilyen wrote:
| the firebombing i am discussing is this one:
| https://exhibits.stanford.edu/saytheirnames/feature/black-
| wa... and the battle of blair mountain
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think we're about to find out just what globalization did for
| us. Globalization is what held down consumer prices as
| unprecedented amounts of money were injected into the global
| financial system over the last 13 years. Globalization solved
| our garbage problem - many municipalities are no longer
| offering recycling now that we can't ship it to China to dump
| in their fields. Globalization made the Internet much more
| useful - how many of you are fans of Factorio, Telegram, or
| World of Warships (all developed in former eastern bloc
| countries), or Alibaba or TikTok (both Chinese)? Globalization
| has led to unprecedented global peace over the last 30 years.
|
| I suspect that once de-globalization really starts rolling
| along, we're going to see economic dislocations that are
| civilization-destroying. We won't get nation-states, we'll get
| civil unrest, regional secession efforts, anarchy, and war.
| Then some new form of political organization will arise, but I
| doubt it'll be _either_ nation-states or globalization.
| burritas wrote:
| integricho wrote:
| This is an overly pessimistic extrapolation of current events
| and trends, your argument is pure speculation basically.
| safety1st wrote:
| Everyone printed money like crazy, not just the Western
| governments, nations at all levels of development are paying
| the inflation price. I don't think that alone will change the
| balance of power meaningfully.
|
| It's fair to say that less trade with a totalitarian rival
| power means less deterrent to war. Yes that's bad but the
| alternative of financing their military buildup and their
| oppression of their own people is not really a good one.
| rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote:
| I'm not sure "financing" their military buildup is the
| right way to analyze what's happening in China. Do they
| really have a dependence on U.S./western goods? It seems
| like almost all their production is domestic besides
| imports of chips and software (Microsoft, Apple, etc.). I
| doubt they'll have much trouble replacing those U.S.
| imports either. And, at least from western reporting, it
| seems that China has significant coercive control over
| their people even in their daily lives. If all this is
| true, then it makes no sense to quantify China's efforts in
| dollars and to think that somehow the West is financing it.
| It makes more sense to look at China as a self sufficient
| economy with a potential labor force of 1.4B and compare it
| to the U.S., EU, India, etc. which have a similar position
| and are for now buddies in competition against it.
| gruez wrote:
| > Globalization solved our garbage problem - many
| municipalities are no longer offering recycling now that we
| can't ship it to China to dump in their fields.
|
| Garbage was never a problem to begin with. US is a huge
| place. We'd be fine landfilling garbage for the next few
| centuries at the very least.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Globalization has led to unprecedented global peace over
| the last 30 years
|
| Millions of people worked towards peace, peacekeepers,
| activists, anti-war protesters, diplomats, lawyers, soldiers,
| etc. Many have laid down their lives.
|
| It's offensive. and disrespectfull for purely commercial
| interests to claim all the credit. There is not even a
| rational argument provided beyong a correlation.
|
| Maybe it's the other way round global peace has allowed
| globalisation. And it hasn't stopped Russia.
|
| > unprecedented amounts of money were injected into the
| global financial system over the last 13 years
|
| Every time I see a person that complains about government
| printing money, they can never answer how is money supply
| supposed to grow along with economy to enable economic
| expansion? The only mechanism is government printing money or
| banks creating loans
|
| Also do you know that many governments owe like 30% of their
| debt to themselves?
|
| 'HM Treasury owes PS2.1trn to holders of British government
| securities, of which approximately PS745bn is owed to the
| Bank of England'
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Every time I see a person that complains about government
| printing money, they can never answer how is money supply
| suppose to grow along with economy to enable economic
| expansion? The only mechanism is gpvernment printint money
| or banks creating loans
|
| Only really fringe people complain that the government
| prints money at all. The more normal complaint is that the
| government is printing way more money than it should, for
| the amount of economic expansion that's actually happening.
| Sevii wrote:
| Why can't we increase individual people's holdings of USD
| proportionally like a stock split? Instead for legacy
| reasons the government creates money in a way the dilutes
| the currency holder's position. People perceive this as
| unfair because they don't like their shares (of purchasing
| power) being diluted.
|
| People don't object to the money supply increasing. They
| object to their holdings being diluted in unaccountable
| ways.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Why can 't we increase individual people's holdings of
| USD proportionally like a stock split?_
|
| Because that would not serve the real purpose of printing
| money, which is hidden (and therefore politically much
| easier) taxation, to enrich the government and its
| cronies at the expense of everybody else.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> how is money supply supposed to grow along with economy
| to enable economic expansion?_
|
| Money supply doesn't _have_ to grow to enable economic
| expansion. Things can just get cheaper.
|
| When governments print money, what happens is not that
| economic expansion occurs that otherwise wouldn't. What
| happens is that things don't get cheaper--instead, a
| portion of the economic gains from increased productivity
| go to governments and their cronies, instead of to all of
| us. In other words, printing money is hidden taxation. It's
| much easier politically than overt taxation precisely
| because it's hidden; people don't directly _see_ economic
| value being taken away from them, even though it is.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's not hard to convince a peace activist to support
| peace. They're already inclined to it, and weren't
| seriously considering waging war to achieve their aims
| anyway.
|
| It is incredibly difficult to convince a greedy bastard to
| support peace. The natural order, for millennia, has been
| that when a greedy bastard meets a peace-loving activist,
| the greedy bastard takes the peacenik's stuff and then
| kills them. That is why we continue to have greedy bastards
| after millennia, and many of the original peaceful hunter-
| gatherer tribes have been killed off.
|
| Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment
| vessel. Historically, people who desire world domination
| achieve it by killing everybody else. Capitalism has
| managed to convince them that the path to world domination
| is making stuff and providing services for everybody else.
| This is a huge change in incentives.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-
| containment vessel.
|
| i used to think this as well, but as time has gone on, i
| wonder more deeply about this... like what are the
| conditions that create sociopaths in the first place?
| what causes these people to act in such ways?
| > Capitalism has managed to convince them that the path
| to world domination is making stuff and providing
| services for everybody else.
|
| but in the end, don't we still end up with sociopaths in
| charge?
| katmannthree wrote:
| You always will since they're strongly favored in short
| term outcomes. Think of it as a harm reduction strategy,
| of the viable options it's generally the least
| disfavorable.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Millions of people worked towards peace, peacekeepers,
| activists, anti-war protesters, diplomats, lawyers,
| soldiers, etc. Many have laid down their lives.
|
| millions sounds too much.
|
| I protested against USA war in Iraq 1 & 2, against USA
| bombing Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, against USA
| bombing Kosovo, against USA invading Afghanistan and
| against the too many times that the USA have bombed some
| place in the World, killing millions of innocent civilians.
|
| But I don't feel like I worked for peace, I simply voiced
| my opinion, which was simply correctly pointing out that
| the USA have become a problem for global peace.
| surfpel wrote:
| > Millions of people worked towards peace, peacekeepers,
| activists, anti-war protesters, diplomats, lawyers,
| soldiers, etc. Many have laid down their lives.
|
| This is idealism. It just so happens that resources are
| much more efficiently acquired through more peaceful means
| in this age.
|
| If the incentives were in the opposite direction, those
| lives would have all been wasted. People don't seem to
| realize how unprecedented this era of global peace is.
|
| Most of the population is fed news from the extremely
| wealthy who benefit from these peace oriented policies. It
| really doesn't take that much to take a population from
| benevolence to militarist nationalism.
| rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote:
| > I suspect that once de-globalization really starts rolling
| along, we're going to see economic dislocations that are
| civilization-destroying. We won't get nation-states, we'll
| get civil unrest, regional secession efforts, anarchy, and
| war. Then some new form of political organization will arise,
| but I doubt it'll be either nation-states or globalization.
|
| Why the leap from the end of unipolarity to the end of
| nation-states in general? (I assume you mean "countries"
| here, ex: the U.S. is not a nation-state) To me a Cold War II
| scenario and a bipolar world order seems more likely. I don't
| think there will be widespread civil uprising; I think you're
| underestimating how much control that governments (including
| democracies) have over their people.
|
| It will take some radical technological change to overturn
| this power dynamic and displace national governments with
| anarchy and unrest as you mentioned. One example of tech in
| this vein is DAOs, which seem like an attempt in this
| direction but the problem is they lack enforcement via force
| and coercive violence. Until you can disrupt that (killer AGI
| drones?), central governments will remain the efficient and
| viable solution to consolidating power and enforcing order,
| and therefore they will be the dominant form of organization
| in the world. The disruption of U.S. influence and the end of
| globalization will not be the end of countries, at least
| until a radical technological change happens.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Because the military conditions that led to the rise of
| countries don't exist anymore.
|
| The modern nation-state grew out of a confluence of
| technology trends that accelerated throughout the 1800s.
| Mass-production made for cheap, accurate, long-ranged
| rifles. These made large armies of relatively untrained
| soldiers effective, right in time for conscription to fill
| the manpower void. Steelmaking made mechanized armor
| impervious to bullets, which also required internal
| combustion engines to power them, which required oil to
| fuel them. All of this required supply chains, which meant
| that political organizations large enough to build complex
| industrial supply chains and man them could steamroll
| earlier feudal empires that were still relying on cavalry
| charges, swords, and muskets. This happened in WW1.
|
| Since roughly 2000 consumer electronics and inexpensive
| shaped-charge explosives have dramatically driven down the
| cost of fielding an effective fighting force. A ~6"
| diameter HEAT round can penetrate any reasonable level of
| armor, particularly if you can deliver it accurately enough
| to hit the same spot (defeating composite & reactive
| armor). Guide it with a microchip and you _will_ hit that
| spot, and without a whole lot of training. MANPADS can take
| out far more expensive helicopters & close-support
| aircraft. Add drones and your $100M fighter jet is no
| longer assured air superiority, plus you can strike
| infantry formations from the air.
|
| We've seen this already in those countries that _have_
| erupted into war. Afghanistan (repulsed first the Soviet
| Union then the U.S. using U.S-made weapons), Iraq
| (insurgency using IEDs), Syria (collapsed into anarchy,
| multi-sided urban war), Azerbaijan (very effective use of
| drones against Armenia), and now Ukraine (kicking Russia 's
| ass with Javelins and Bayraktar). IMHO the reason we
| haven't seen it in developed nations is that it is far more
| profitable to take people's money than take people's lives.
| The folks with the capability to field smart weapons &
| drones are busy getting people to click on ads and fleecing
| them out of their retirement savings rather than waging
| war.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| "Liberalisation" is a marginal benefit at best. Does it really
| matter to me what political regime is in place in another
| country across the world? Not really.
|
| A much bigger benefit is that globalisation promotes peace
| through increased inter-dependence. This is the same idea that
| was used at the very beginning of what is now the EU.
|
| Of course the West also benefited tremendously from cheaper
| imports and larger markets for exports.
| woeirua wrote:
| Except the war in Ukraine has also shown that this is false.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| No, it hasn't. Picking a war to demonstrate that the world
| is not more peaceful is not a convincing argument.
|
| The world has actually become much more peaceful.
| throwaway123989 wrote:
| > China has taken all the benefits
|
| I thought Trumpism is not welcome here?
|
| > Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align
| themselves with the west.
|
| So globalization is just westernization?
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| reddit is down the hall and to the left
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > I thought Trumpism is not welcome here?
|
| China having an export surplus precedes Trump's presidency by
| a few decades.
|
| > globalization is just westernization?
|
| I think the idea is that countries need similar regulations
| to complete fairly in a shared market. I.E. The US can really
| only trade with other western countries if they want to avoid
| a lot of the present pitfalls with global trade.
| philwelch wrote:
| > So globalization is just westernization?
|
| Yes, except "the west" these days includes Japan and South
| Korea.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Globalization and free trade are dead because most of the
| promised benefits for the west failed to materialize
|
| Not sure about that. [1] [2] [3] [4]*
|
| Global increase in purchase power have completely changed many
| markets, even in the West. Except, probably, the USA.
|
| My speculation: when people say "globalization did not work"
| they mean "for my western Country, that got rich exploiting
| developing Countries"
|
| But globalization is simply _" the process of interaction and
| integration among people, companies, and governments
| worldwide"_ and achieved most of what it promised.
|
| EDIT: talking a bit about the article, what's happening to TSMC
| is not due the fact that globalisation is dead, but because
| Taiwan is technically still part of China and the USA don't
| wanna go to war against China for Taiwan. Despite the fact that
| they support a free Taiwan, they never voted for its
| independence at UN.
|
| _" We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from
| either side; *we do not support Taiwan independence;* and we
| expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful
| means"_ (https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/)
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263770/gross-domestic-
| pro...
|
| [2] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263771/gross-domestic-
| pro...
|
| [3]
| https://i.insider.com/4d3dca0accd1d578410b0000?width=607&for...
|
| [4] https://ourworldindata.org/exports/gdp-per-capita-
| maddison-2... * warning: logarithmic scale!
| autokad wrote:
| There were good and bad. We may soon find out whether it was a
| good deal or not as globalization gets reversed. I think the
| timing of it was really bad, as we are choosing to end
| globalization as the baby boomers are retiring. We are going to
| find we don't have enough workers to produce the goods and
| services we want to buy. With all the hate on automation, right
| now automation is the only thing that can save us.
|
| As far as evil China, I don't disagree with that, but the US
| wasn't much better in a lot of regards. The US weaponized
| trade. We were like that drug dealer that gives you drugs for
| free to get you addicted, and then threaten to cut you off if
| you don't pay high prices. "you don't agree with our culture?
| we will cut you off!" It wasn't just trade, but the monetary
| system as well.
|
| Needless to say, I am not optimistic about our future.
| 33955985 wrote:
| >Globalization and free trade are dead because most of the
| promised benefits for the west failed to materialize.
|
| Your statement about the promised benefits failing to
| materialize is spot on, but this not the reason globalization
| is dead. Globalization is dead because the United States has
| stopped patrolling shipping routes with US warships and has, in
| general, lacked a foreign policy and interest in developing
| one.
|
| The two might be linked, but just barely --- I suspect that one
| too many generations of mothers and fathers saw their children
| killed, maimed, or traumatized by senseless military
| misadventures, thus the appetite for these excursions remains
| low. Coupled with the fact that the US is aging --- _fast_ ---
| and has fewer children to spare, the great unwinding is indeed
| before us. But I doubt, sincerely, that politically or
| spirituality the voting electorate had any realization of the
| sort you called out. That is, no contingency of American voters
| woke up to say, "Yes I can get a flat screen TV for $120, but
| what's the _real cost_?"
| darthrupert wrote:
| All countries should align with the west. Mankind really needs
| to unify in some common framework, and west's is the best we
| have come up with so far.
|
| Every other path will lead to doom. I mean, the framework could
| be something better than west's. But we first need such a
| thing, because it certainly has not been discovered yet.
| ken47 wrote:
| The promise of globalization was primarily about improving
| economic efficiencies, not liberalization. Has it succeeded in
| that regard?
|
| Given the extremely myopic system under which our largest
| corporations (in America) operate, they've engaged in
| globalization in a way that largely maximized short-term
| benefit (to them) without regard for the long-term
| externalities. It's a shame that globalization had to be given
| a bad name by being executed poorly.
| retrac wrote:
| > The promise of globalization was primarily about improving
| economic efficiencies, not liberalization.
|
| At the time, it was presented to the public as both.
| Inseparable. Liberalism was development. Development was
| liberalism. Besides the Communist Bloc, whose actual degree
| of development was rather questionable, no significant
| counter-examples existed at the time, and most recent
| political liberalizations had been followed by drastic and
| rapid economic growth as the country integrated into global
| capitalism. So it was a logical enough hypothesis. It was
| also the guarantor of global peace, supposedly.
|
| This is a quote from Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister of
| Canada from a speech he gave at the United Nations in 2014
| extolling the virtues of free trade:
|
| > [...] We also believe that they are the necessary
| foundation for a better world for more people, necessary for
| prosperity, and with prosperity comes hope, and with hope,
| the greater inclination of free peoples everywhere to find
| peaceful solutions to the things that divide them.
|
| > Indeed, we believe that freedom, prosperity and peace form
| a virtuous circle.
|
| Similarly, Bill Clinton, former US President, on why China
| should join the WTO in 2000:
|
| > The change this agreement can bring from outside is quite
| extraordinary. But I think you could make an argument that it
| will be nothing compared to the changes that this agreement
| will spark from the inside out in China. By joining the
| W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our
| products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy's most
| cherished values, economic freedom. The more China
| liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the
| potential of its people -- their initiative, their
| imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when
| individuals have the power, not just to dream, but to realize
| their dreams, they will demand a greater say....
|
| > State-run workplaces also operated the schools where they
| sent their children, the clinics where they received health
| care, the stores where they bought food. That system was a
| big source of the Communist Party's power. Now people are
| leaving those firms, and when China joins the W.T.O., they
| will leave them faster. The Chinese government no longer will
| be everyone's employer, landlord, shopkeeper and nanny all
| rolled into one. It will have fewer instruments, therefore,
| with which to control people's lives. And that may lead to
| very profound change. The genie of freedom will not go back
| into the bottle. As Justice Earl Warren once said, liberty is
| the most contagious force in the world.
|
| There it is stated openly as the justification for free
| trade. Trade will destroy authoritarian state control from
| within, expose people to freedom, which they will then
| demand, and that is why free trade with China is in the USA's
| best interests.
|
| Liberals (by which I mean essentially all mainstream politics
| in the West today) have, historically, believed this. The
| economic pattern and means of production define the social
| and political environment. Opening up to trade meant opening
| up to new ideas which would necessarily bring liberalism. I
| used to devoutly believe this myself! Our politicians, I
| think, actually believed it, possibly wishful thinking.
| eindiran wrote:
| I agree with you up until the last sentence, which reads
| exactly like American communists decrying Stalinist purges
| only insofar as it has given "true Communism" a bad name. The
| theoretical promises of some -ism are really only as good as
| their execution.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _" true Communism"_
|
| A typical true Scotsman fallacy. Pretty much the only good
| thing about communism was that the fear of it generally
| pushed the capitalism in the direction of a better, more
| socially-aware, self.
| quickcheque wrote:
| Well, how does futurism fit into this statement? After all,
| it is about the future so eternally theoretical.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Eh, there is _some_ truth to that too... Communism is great
| if you don 't have bad actors, that's also why small scale
| attempts are often loved by participants. It just breaks
| apart if you're trying to apply it to large nations.
|
| It's also good to remember that the person that's often
| credited for socialism, Carl Marx, didn't actually have a
| hand in it's creation as far as I know. He only wrote about
| what capitalism will cause, and his predictions were pretty
| much spot on.
|
| From acknowledging these issues, socialism was created...
| But the person that created it wanted to be in power, so it
| created way bigger issues then the ones they addressed.
| Aunche wrote:
| The difference is that Communism promised to distribute
| power to the proletariat, but that has been a complete
| failure with every iteration. Globalization _has_ improved
| economic efficiencies and dramatically increased the
| standard of living in Asia.
| imtringued wrote:
| Communism didn't even happen where Marx predicted it. He
| thought rich countries would spearhead it.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Contrary to popular belief, the US is socialist. Many
| people live on income received from the government.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Socialism is when the workers own the means of
| production. What you're describing is a welfare state,
| which is a feature of every capitalist society that I'm
| aware of.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The promise of globalization was primarily about improving
| economic efficiencies, not liberalization. Has it succeeded
| in that regard?
|
| Another goal in which it succeeded was in preventing major
| wars between the superpowers. US and China are so co-
| dependent in their economies that they can't declare war
| against each other. Russia less so, but, still, they can only
| engage through proxy wars.
|
| Where it failed is that these long supply chains are
| incredibly brittle and chaotic - a major shock puts the
| system in cascading collapse and it takes years to recover it
| to a workable state. This TSMC investment is a response to
| those collapsed long chains.
|
| Another failure was the promise to deliver better living
| standards to everyone. What happened is that industrial jobs
| in the developed countries were shipped to developing ones,
| favoring places where labor is so unregulated that it looks
| like indentured servitude.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| It was never about "liberalizing the world". That was just the
| argument used to persuade those who valued liberalization. Like
| the British Empire got religious Britains on board by focusing
| on the sending of missionaries that would Christianize the
| world. But the expansion of the Empire was not done to send
| missionaries.
|
| The idea of liberalizing -- e.g. converting to Western values
| -- was the more modern version of this missionary argument, but
| it's basically the same argument, and really the same target
| audience, just shifted in time.
|
| Shockingly, most of the world has kept their previous religion,
| although there are liberal inroads/enclaves scattered all over,
| particularly in coastal trading cities.
| jfengel wrote:
| China indeed has an oppressive government, but it's not much
| like the impression you appear to be getting. Many Chinese are
| very happy with the system, especially given how poor they were
| not long ago. China has lifted many millions out of poverty, in
| a very capitalist way.
|
| They don't have many freedoms you take for granted, like
| voting, but it turns out to be less fundamental than you
| imagine. If the regime does not oppress them they don't feel
| the need to change it.
|
| Obviously there are horror stories, magnified by their control
| over media. But we Americans have our own horror stories, and
| worse, many ignore them despite the fact that they are quite
| well known.
|
| China isn't the hell scape as it's often presented. Which
| actually makes them more dangerous to Western ideals and
| values.
| e40 wrote:
| I agree, but the fly in the ointment here is the behavior of
| CCP wrt to covid lockdowns. That is making the lives of
| people there much worse. The good news, it seems the
| government is finally easing the policies, but it is early
| days on that.
| sidibe wrote:
| The reason China was able to develop so quickly after Deng
| Xiaoping was because they didn't do it earlier. The same
| rapid development happened in Taiwan, HK, and SK decades
| earlier because they didn't have to deal with Mao and his
| sycophants who kept throwing wrenches in the gears.
|
| Xi is more in the Mao class of leaders than his predecessors
| (both are uneducated populists who are not interested in
| developing strong institutions). I wouldn't count on China
| continuing to do well until they find a way to smoothly and
| consistently replace non-totalitarian leaders, which I think
| is related to free press/speech, as leaders want to set
| precedents so they aren't persecuted by the next guy.
| ipaddr wrote:
| They are being oppressed in a variety off ways each day that
| they are and are not aware of. Are people on China happier
| today because of additional wealth (but also additional
| pollution / increased loneliness)?
|
| Surveying them would be like asking citizens in cold war era
| Russia if they are happier than before and if they are
| lacking what the west has. They might reject it but they
| don't fully understand what they are missing.
| pishP05h wrote:
| Aunche wrote:
| > one of the major promises was that free trade would
| liberalize the world
|
| This was wish a mix between wish-fulfillment and propaganda
| used to reverse the effect of Cold War propaganda. The main
| goals of globalization were economic and diplomatic, and those
| have been wildly successful. Billions of people have been
| lifted out of poverty, and nuclear war is completely
| unthinkable.
|
| > Instead, China has taken all the benefits and used our money
| to build a system of oppression that would make George Orwell
| blush.
|
| You don't need technology to build an oppressive regime. China
| were still closed off to international markets, they would be a
| lot closer to North Korea than it is right now.
| difosfor wrote:
| We got much more out of it than China at first; basically
| thanks to a modern version of slave labor. We were just short
| sighted to think that would work forever and for some reason
| that doesn't really seem to be changing as we just dig in
| deeper into our old ideas.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I suspect the answer to this question depends on if you are
| the upper middle class 'knowledge worker' that benefited
| greatly and achieved the American dream in the 21st century
| or a middle/lower middle class factory worker that now has a
| destroyed family legacy(due to drugs/suicide), a destroyed
| community, and an uncertain if any future.
| sitkack wrote:
| Don't worry, corporatism will come for the knowledge
| workers. Upper management is already asking how we can
| incorporate ChatGPT into our workflow.
| sublinear wrote:
| ChatGPT is still not a meaningful threat because
| knowledge workers are paid to do things with the
| knowledge, not merely know things.
|
| As well, there has been zero progress towards eliminating
| the need for a knowledgeable human participant to
| converse with the bot. A chat bot will, by definition,
| always need a human to push the conversation forward and
| that's the heavy lifting of the whole thing really. I
| have never seen an example of a chat bot questioning
| whether the human's query even makes sense let alone
| dispense constructive advice.
|
| ChatGPT replaces use cases where Google was always a bad
| fit, not knowledge workers.
| Nevermark wrote:
| ChatGPT isn't stable tech. It has been improving
| dramatically and qualitatively in its short life.
|
| Its interfaces are currently quite primitive too, so its
| current value may be underrated.
|
| I would love to be able to edit an outline, while
| watching a filled out essay update side-by-side. The
| ability to tweak the outline, add hints, and tweak
| wording or completely take responsibility for particular
| sentences or paragraphs in the produced essay, would be a
| massive time saver, and productivity multiplier.
|
| Note that demand for documentation tends to be a
| secondary, not primary, concern of the products they
| serve. So demand for documentation is not likely to grow
| dramatically just because documentation got vastly
| cheaper to write.
|
| In other words, a productivity bump like this could
| eliminate a lot of jobs in just one category of knowledge
| work.
|
| Add in the ability to use sibling tech to generate lively
| images, diagrams, figures ...
|
| And translate ...
|
| Note that the outline prompts, and other prompts, used to
| generate a document this way would be orders of magnitude
| easier to refactor to reflect future changes, than a
| manually written document ...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Every time industrialization, automation, robotics, and
| now AI, makes a great leap in capability, from being able
| to do Task A to being able to do both Task A and Task B,
| someone is always there to point out "Well it can't yet
| do Task C or Task D, so it's not a meaningful threat!"
| sublinear wrote:
| That is certainly the 10,000 ft view, but my experience
| has been that knowledge work is mostly about achieving
| consistency and agreement. Implementation is absolutely
| not independent from defining/discovering the
| requirements with this type of work. They're basically
| the same thing.
|
| We shall see :)
| luma wrote:
| It already did, H1-B is how it started. Now it's offshore
| contractors.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Oh I don't deny that at all. I believe this whole Twitter
| saga is a test to see if vultures can start buying up
| tech companies, slash them to the bone, extract all the
| value and then let the zombie company loose into the
| world to die off. So far it looks like its working (but
| way too early to tell).
| sitkack wrote:
| Twitter should have auctioned off its work force instead
| of layoffs.
|
| Don't they have a gross imbalance of H1B? Isn't there a
| ratio they are supposed to stay above?
| spookie wrote:
| I believe upper management should be more afraid of
| ChatGPT than any knowledge worker ever will lmao
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Expected liberalisation. Instead China has built a
| sotalitarian state
|
| > version of slave labor. We... thought that would work
| forever
|
| We expected forever slavery and freedom simultaneously..
| Sounds like our typical hypocracy. This checks out
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _hypocracy_
|
| An excellent word, you just invented!
| klntsky wrote:
| It is still possible that it will deliver, just not today or
| tomorrow. E.g. China has a large population that eventually
| will not be satisfied with just material comfort. They may
| start demanding more rights to themselves.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Even in the West you have complications, like the Schrems II
| decision which ruled that the US does not offer an acceptable
| data protection level.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align
| themselves with the west.
|
| That's just a return to status quo, isn't it? A patchwork of
| defense alliances and trade agreements?
|
| It's more interesting to me, to point out the relative decline
| in the relative power and influence of the West. Whereas U.S.
| was 25-30% of global GDP post WWII, we are down to 15% and
| declining. The so-called "global south" nations, interestingly
| a lot of these nations are rising in relative economic power
| and influence and yet many of them straddle the line between
| aligning with East or West (see India's oil / energy agreements
| with Russia, or south America's reluctance to join along with
| Russian sanctions).
|
| In this sense, it's more apt to point out that globalization
| will live on, but only for countries that neither strongly
| align themselves with the west nor the east.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Post WWII almost everywhere but the USA had all their
| production bombed and destroyed. What a strange statement you
| make. 'When most production in the world was destroyed, the
| USA, one of the few countries not bombed, accounted for most
| of the worlds production. Once other countries rebuilt, the
| USA's percentage went down'. Again, what a silly statement to
| make.
| trasz2 wrote:
| klipklop wrote:
| Ah yes, the propagandist take on things. I've seen more than
| a few videos of Chinese police robbing people/business right
| out in the open. Anybody that stands in their way gets
| brutalized.
|
| The CCP are so dishonest we have no idea what even happens to
| most of their prisoners. It is likely China executes the most
| prisoners in the world.
|
| You are comparing apples and oranges.
| trasz2 wrote:
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Also, the country with largest percentage of imprisoned
| people is US, not China. It's also not China where police
| routinely murders random people on the streets with impunity.
|
| This is a very tough argument to make given how China has
| very little freedom of press, speech, association or
| information.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm not sure what people think comments like this accomplish.
| Americans aren't super gung ho about America. The great
| universal American past-time is criticizing America.
| trasz2 wrote:
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > At the same time many Americans don't quite believe
| non-Americans are proper humans.
|
| I think it's the broad, off-topic, pro-China/anti-US
| comments, like this that make people feel like it's
| probably a bot or human equivalent.
|
| If the post was actually a reply or rebuttal to any of
| the comments content it probably would give that vibe.
| Fricken wrote:
| Yeah that's the thing. China rolled up it's sleeves and
| Americans bitched and moaned. HN is a particularly whiny
| place when it comes to China.
| godelski wrote:
| > HN is a particularly whiny place when it comes to
| China.
|
| China is the #2 economy in the world. America is
| constantly whining about the #1 economy in the world, why
| would they not also whine about #2? The truth is that
| there's nothing unique to Americans complaining about
| China. A lot of what Americans complain about China is
| quite similar to what they complain about America. This
| is especially true with authoritarian sentiment, with the
| fear that China will be the model used for the US against
| themselves. Yeah, there's a few "fuck China, America
| best" but I'd be shocked if the was anywhere near the
| mean or average sentiment. People are more complicated
| than this and Americans are just vocal about everything.
| Because they're so vocal, it is easy to ignore some
| things and pay attention to others, especially when they
| validate your internal biases (such as complaining about
| your country, which is nationalism).
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > It's also not China where police routinely murders random
| people on the streets with impunity.
|
| Tiananmen Square?
| rebelos wrote:
| ChrisClark wrote:
| The problem with these Chinese comment farms is they think we
| like the US. They take something bad about China as an insult
| to them personally, and think doing the same will bother the
| western world. Hah, nope, we hate it too.
|
| A fundamental misunderstanding of how people think. But they
| tie their identity to their own government so completely they
| are literally blind to the rest of the world.
| trasz2 wrote:
| bubblematrix wrote:
| ecolonsmak wrote:
| I've been reading Peter Zeihan's book , "the end of the world is
| just the beginning" the death of free trade being the central
| theme a near future where the US has abandoned policing the seas
| and formerly interconnected economies localize in response. Began
| reading it slightly sceptical of the premise but anecdotes like
| this above are adding up to a near term 30-50 year that might
| resemble a global contraction amongst trading relationships.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Reading the book too.
|
| It is a very interesting read, I highly recommend. The guy
| knows a lot and it has lots of interesting information.
|
| But I am not convinced. I think his approach is just too
| American, in particular, when it comes to China. I am not
| American and, sometimes, his jingoism is just too much.
| pkaye wrote:
| A lot of what is happening makes sense from a national
| security perspective. If the global supply chains get broken
| how much can a country continue to function.
|
| Like Germany cannot produce enough ammo because it depends on
| cotton from China.
|
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Ukraine-war/Germany-
| struggl...
|
| US onshoring cotton production.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUdIz21P7zE
| MR4D wrote:
| I highly recommend going back and reading The Accidental
| Superpower as well. Considering it was written a decade ago
| (pub. 2014) it's amazing how correct he's been in forecasting
| things.
|
| To be clear, there is a certain fuzziness in timeframes, and he
| mentions that, but in general, the timing he mentions is
| scarily accurate.
|
| One thing that I saw earlier this year was Sri Lanka. Many
| others will follow in various levels of degradation over the
| coming years.
| n0mad01 wrote:
| globalization is dead long live globalization.
| efields wrote:
| I'm listening. I've heard this three times in the last week. But
| I haven't been ELI5'd what this really means for the rest of my
| adulthood. I only know a "Globalized World". I was in elementary
| school when Bill Clinton was elected and globalization
| (economically) started, right?
|
| So is this a reversion? Is it socially bad but economically good?
| Does the $1 slice become the $2 slice in a couple years?
|
| Or are we trying to say something worse?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Here goes:
|
| First, let's define what is meant by "Globalization", as this
| word is used to mean many things. First, it does not mean
| _trade_. You will still be eating Chilean oranges. You will
| still have Vietnamese coworkers in your company. The history of
| the world is filled with trade - that 's not what makes our
| current era of "Globalization" unique.
|
| What it means is _trade imbalances_. The world as it exists now
| has one group of nations running persistent trade deficits and
| another group running persistent trade surpluses.
|
| To run a trade surplus means you take the money you get by
| selling goods to the world, and invest it overseas. China
| invests $2 Trillion overseas. Saudi Arabia $1 Trillion. Russia
| $750 Billion. Qatar $250 Billion dollars. This creates a web of
| dependencies, it _increases_ trade massively, and it also
| reduces the sovereignty that each nation has, as those who
| invest large amounts overseas are dependent on others that
| their assets are not seized, and those who are the recipients
| of such foreign investment become dependent on it to maintain
| their consumption levels and high asset prices (low interest
| rates). So in many ways, the world becomes smaller and each
| nation has less freedom to act independently. This is why we
| call it "Globalization". It refers to the globalization of
| _investment_.
|
| If the exporting nations did not invest this money overseas,
| what would happen is that their currencies would appreciate up
| to the point where their trade is balanced -- as many exports
| as imports. Now, what would the world look like if each
| nation's trade was roughly balanced. So that Saudi Arabia,
| Russia, China, Qatar, and the US all exported about as much as
| they imported?
|
| It would be a very different world than the one we have now.
|
| Now how did we get to this world of persistent trade imbalances
| - it didn't happen by accident, it was a long term project
| requiring:
|
| 1) A vast international web of investor rights, so that when
| Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, or China park their money
| overseas, they can be assured it is not confiscated and that
| the value of their investments is maintained.
|
| 2) Global trust
|
| What we are seeing now is this system is unravelling. That is,
| foreign investment _is_ being confiscated, global trust _is_
| eroding, and the international frameworks _are not_ able to
| maintain sufficient global trust to justify parking huge sums
| overseas. The canary in the coal mine was the US seizure of
| Afghanistan 's sovereign reserves, but really the increasing
| way that the US has been using the dollar system as a proxy for
| foreign policy, which undermines the usefulness of the dollar
| as a reserve currency for those nations that matter -- e.g. the
| exporting nations. The seizure of Russia's sovereign reserves
| was the fatal blow to this system. Now, it is clear that all
| these investor rights agreements are no longer being honored.
|
| And so all the exporting nations are scrambling for alternate
| places to park their money, many are preparing to begin a round
| of asset seizures and counter seizures, and are building trade
| systems based on specie flows, various hostage mechanisms, and
| limited bilateral treaties in which trade is roughly balanced.
|
| These are massive changes, and they don't get a lot of US media
| attention, but they are taking place in international
| conferences and high level diplomatic agreements all over the
| world right now:
|
| Saudi Arabia just signed a $40 Billion trade deal with China,
| it's largest deal ever, in which it will sell oil to China in
| exchange for Huawei coming in and building out a new telecom
| infrastructure in Saudi Arabia as well as constructing
| factories there. Note that this trade is roughly balanced, and
| it is occurring between net exporting nations. This is the
| future of trade -- something tangible for something tangible,
| so that nothing is exposed to being seized by a foreign
| government.
|
| Russia and Iran signed a $40 Billion trade deal along similar
| lines.
|
| At the same time, China has been structuring its capital
| controls so that it's impossible for Western companies to pull
| money out. For example, Apple has huge earnings in China, but
| it's stuck in China. China is preparing for the US to seize
| their assets and they will counterseize the Tesla factories,
| Apple earnings, etc.
|
| In terms of prices, what it will mean is higher prices and
| higher interest rates in those nations that have traditionally
| run trade deficits, and lower prices and lower interest rates
| (stocks will be worth less and cost of living will go up) in
| those nations that have traditionally run trade surpluses.
|
| But you will still be able to buy your Chilean orange -- there
| will still be trade, but it will be much more balanced, so that
| orange will cost more -- and your mortgage payment will be
| higher.
|
| A second casualty will be the anti-carbon movement, as it was
| depending on international investor agreements to be both the
| carrot and stick for mandating change. At the same time, the
| deficit nations will find it much harder to import the minerals
| and finished goods such as batteries and solar panels necessary
| to transition even their own energy grid.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I don't think anyone knows to what extent this will play out
| over the next decade. Yes, we are more reluctant to trust
| outsourcing production to China, and tensions over Ukraine &
| Taiwan highlight this rift between NATO nations and the East.
| But by no means has this stopped the inflow of goods arriving
| from China. I think that within industries that are deemed
| critical to national defense, especially semiconductors, these
| are going to be forcibly on-shored. Whether that spills over
| into "less critical" imports remains to be seen.
|
| When it comes to on-shore vs off-shore production, not sure it
| can neatly be described as "good or bad". There are trade-offs.
| When we outsourced more production and manufacturing to China,
| our economy became more service oriented. We lost some valuable
| manufacturing skills in the labor force in the process and it
| takes time to ramp that back up. We are also saddled with far
| more regulatory and legal issues in the U.S. and that adds a
| significant burden to costs.
|
| I think as article points out, on-shoring will contribute to
| CPI increases. Off-shoring offset some of the inflationary
| fiscal (spending from govt) and monetary policies (QE) of the
| past few decades. Ultimately goods will cost more. At the same
| time, it's likely that automation technologies get boosted
| investment. On-shoring may induce a robotics boom to counter
| act some of those higher costs (since the ROI will have
| increased). So maybe goods will be more expensive in short to
| medium term, but longer term, we may end up in a better place.
|
| The more open questions are how the world grapples with a
| "multi-polar" world and whether that leads to kinetic war or
| active trade wars between U.S. & China.
| andrejguran wrote:
| The one scary effect that is not mentioned here is that
| globalisation and trade are pushing towards peace. Without it I
| am afraid we might go back to much darker times
| yucky wrote:
| That depends on how you define peace. Many non-Western nations
| are not at all at peace with the idea of their cultures being
| displaced and destroyed through the cultural imperialism of the
| US. And our dominant economic role and continued push for
| globalization is widely seen as the largest factor in that.
|
| Many people in the West don't make that connection because our
| consumption of media is very insular. But it's been bubbling
| under the surface for awhile and now it's starting to boil
| over.
| Izkata wrote:
| The late 1800s was also a time of increasing globalization. It
| was exactly that interconnectedness that turned a local
| conflict into WWI.
| armatav wrote:
| Yeah - if you take it to the limit, and every small organization
| can produce/consume everything they could ever need in a local
| area; then of course globalization will approach an asymptotic
| "death".
|
| This is like the "limit" of technology. If ever we got an atomic
| assembler going, what use would there be for that interaction
| from a supply/demand standpoint?
| tareqak wrote:
| > No American, or any Western media outlet for that matter,
| bothered to cover this speech. Only Nikkei and a handful of
| Taiwanese outlets wrote about it. Not even C-Span carried footage
| of the speech. (And C-Span carries everything!)
|
| I find this news to be extremely surprising: everyone talked
| about the success of having the TSMC fab open, but nobody cared
| to listen to what the founder and former CEO of the company had
| to say. The fab might as well not be owned by TSMC.
|
| update:
|
| 1 . former CEO. Thank you `astroalex.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Chang .
| astroalex wrote:
| He is no longer the CEO.
| thephyber wrote:
| > The fab might as well not be owned by TSMC.
|
| Something similar happened with FoxConn in Wisconsin around
| 2018. Lots of talk about on-shoring factories, but that one was
| built and sits idle (last I heard it was partially converted to
| office space).
|
| TSMC didn't build US You fabs before. They are doing it now
| because the US government is throwing some money at a few
| current generation fabs to mitigate the geopolitical risk of
| Taiwan. The fact that TSMC owns it is almost incident for them.
|
| But this is a mistake. We should be fixing the upstream reasons
| why TSMC didn't want to build these fabs in the US prior to
| recent large government subsidies. Making sure local
| governments and NIMBYs have only a small amount of veto power,
| making sure there is a safe disposal system for the byproducts
| (the original reason chip fabs left the SF Bay Area), and
| making sure we are training the specialties required to build
| and run the current and next generation fabs. And in the case
| of the Arizona TSMC and Intel fabs, making sure there is
| sufficient fresh water for the region, which is needed to
| supply the fans and the local economy.
| efficax wrote:
| No factory was built at all for foxconn in Racine county. A
| weird globe building was built that contains some kind of
| data center, although nobody knows for sure what goes on
| there. The whole thing was a complete boondoggle, although I
| don't know if anyone gained anything, it didn't even get
| Scott Walker re-elected.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/23030465/foxconn-lcd-factory-
| wiscon...
|
| Hopefully this TSMC thing is real and not just a game around
| tax credits. Kind of bonkers to me to build it in the desert
| as the colorado river is drying up if water is so important,
| though.
| turnsout wrote:
| With all respect, Chang has this exactly backward. TMSC
| manufacturing 100% of the world's most advanced chips in Taiwan
| is not "globalization." If anything, it's the opposite.
| Globalization is about leveling the playing field, so companies
| can source products & services from countries across the globe. A
| fab in Arizona is literally advancing globalization.
| [deleted]
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Globalization will never be dead.
|
| Globalization, more than anything else, means a set of rules that
| apply to all countries (trade, human rights, or otherwise).
|
| Globalization is a philosophical consequence of belief in the
| rule of law and human rights.
|
| Here is the most thought provoking piece of literature I've ever
| read on American philosophy (giving it the benefit of the doubt
| or at least painting it in the best light):
| https://www.amacad.org/publication/what-does-it-mean-be-amer...
|
| In short, societies fall on a spectrum of one end being built on
| a set of values (are you an American because you love guns and
| freedom?) and the other being based on an ethnicity (are you
| American because your parents are American/you have a shared
| history with other Americans).
|
| This is the key divide between conservatives (ethnicity based)
| and liberals (value based).
|
| So we see the great philosophical fights of our time:
| isolationist/nationalist vs globalist ethnicity vs civility
| might makes right vs rule of law loyalty to people vs
| loyalty to ideas
|
| They are all share a root idea in where authority comes from.
| Does authority flow from people and the power structures they
| craft or does authority flow from philosophical reasoning.
|
| Anti globalization pragmatically follows the idea that authority
| flows from those with power. Globalization idealistically follows
| the idea that there are rules that must supersede power itself.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| We can now expect Tom Friedman, Joseph Stieglitz, and Paul
| Krugman to write new books explaining it all for their readers.
| Of course they will tell us how they knew it all along.
|
| The truth is that geopolitics has not gone away. The world is not
| "flat" but bumpy and separated by big oceans.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| Previous discussion on the referenced speech:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902422
| miguelazo wrote:
| Perhaps the American/Western version of globalization has failed,
| but the Chinese version seems to just be getting started. In
| fact, the decoupling that the US is forcing upon China will be a
| boon to them in the long run, as they become even less dependent
| on the US and care less about sanctions on severely underserved
| markets with huge growth potential.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| China ironically follows a purer form of capitalism where they
| pretty much keep it strictly business. They don't try to push
| cultural change on countries they are trading with, it's just
| economics and things that benefit China the most
| yourapostasy wrote:
| The majority of progressive liberals when faced with
| mainstream Han Chinese ethno-nationalism would go into
| epileptic seizures. It's not as prevalent in the Tier 1
| cities metros and the Tier 2 city cores, but wander outside
| of those areas (roughly 50% of the population), and the
| ethno-centrism is...not what the average HN reader is used
| to.
|
| To be fair, much of the rest of the world is fairly similar,
| only differing in detail and degree. What makes it notable in
| China is the CCP's surveillance infrastructure makes it
| impossible for the CCP to not know about this, and their
| tacit condoning of the sentiments reveals the cultural
| dominance narrative they subscribe to.
|
| You don't need to "push" cultural change when you are the
| 800-pound gorilla at the negotiating table. You only need to
| assume your world view is right, proper, due by merit and a
| birthright conveyed by thousands of years of "unbroken"
| culture, and the rest "falls into place".
|
| CCP coercion does not look like US coercion does not look
| like EU coercion, _etc._ , but it exists and is powerful all
| the same.
| oliv__ wrote:
| _" They don't try to push cultural change on countries they
| are trading with, it's just economics"_
|
| Umm, what?
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-
| univer...
|
| among other things...
| fmajid wrote:
| China is more accurately described as mercantilist. But in
| any case Xi Jinping has achieved absolute power, surrounded
| himself with yes-men and is busy dismantling China's economic
| success with his draconian zero-Covid policies that have done
| what no amount of US government pressure could: force Apple
| to move production to India and Vietnam instead because
| unreliable supply-chains is one thing it cannot abide, unlike
| human-rights abuses.
| dartharva wrote:
| Can you give an example where a Western player explicitly
| pushed a culture change and its Chinese counterpart didn't?
| miguelazo wrote:
| Go read the USAID and NED websites-- their entire premise
| is around realignment of target countries' cultures in
| exchange for "aid".
| three_seagrass wrote:
| Apple tried but just gave in to the government
| surveillance.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| China will demand, for example, that only Chinese companies
| can work on a certain infrastructure project, and then that
| company will migrate workers from China to Africa, which has
| no shortage of cheap labor, to do the work instead of
| allowing its companies to hire people locally. There's
| nothing "capitalistic" about that.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Is that what their censors keep telling Hollywood?
|
| "Guys, we want to keep this strictly business, that's why you
| have to change your movie the way Chinese state insists -
| puuuuuuure business."
| tristor wrote:
| Is that why every technology product has to be modified for
| the Chinese market and every single movie has to be edited
| for the Chinese market or edited before being made to be
| palatable for the Chinese market even globally? China's
| behavior is the exact opposite of what you state.
| trasz2 wrote:
| Lol, no. Every technology product has to be modified to
| comply with FCC, not with whatever Chinese equivalent is.
| Completely reworking TV shows for American viewers is
| commonplace (Top Gear, The Office). And there is a long
| history of absolutely wild censorship, eg
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist.
| tristor wrote:
| Ah, I see, so y'all are part of the 50 Cent Army to play
| up the whataboutism. Nobody here said the US, as the
| world's largest economy and hegemon, does not influence
| things. The claim was that China doesn't. This claim is
| false, period.
| miguelazo wrote:
| The absolute claim may be false, but the degree to which
| China interferes with its trading partners' projects and
| especially internal affairs is orders of magnitude lower
| than that of the US. That's not whataboutism, it's
| pointing out an important difference that actually has a
| major influence on how countries perceive the two powers.
| miguelazo wrote:
| It's naive to think that the US demands for cultural change
| are anything other than another tool to dominate. The US only
| does so when it serves its interests-- favoring one political
| faction over another. It is happy to partner with plenty of
| the most oppressive regimes in the world, like the Gulf
| States.
| lunatuna wrote:
| I see some instability with China as it has grown a stronger
| domestic market, which is positive, but they are going to have
| to more directly deal with their inefficiencies. They are and
| will continue to struggle to export themselves out of their
| economic problems. This also relates to their internal
| inflation. Belt and road is good for importing materials and
| exporting cheap goods, but it isn't enough. Not sure if the
| Chinese middle class are going to be able to pick up the slack.
| The current leadership doesn't seem to care at the moment and
| expect everyone to sacrifice for the party.
|
| I've seen this decoupling argument used in Canada a lot. It
| doesn't work very well there. The country is still completely
| dependent on the US market. They've tried Europe, Asia Pacific,
| and China, with a minimal budge in its current dependency. The
| disruption and economic pain are too high to force it in to
| existence and would be political suicide. Maybe the an
| authoritarian and central planning model can get over that in
| China? If the current internal investment inefficiencies are
| any clue, I would say no.
| thephyber wrote:
| I can't figure out why China hasn't priced themselves out of
| exports yet. Normally countries move up the value chain as
| their domestic standard of living improves and their currency
| strengthens. Then other countries find their exports
| unaffordable.
|
| I know China has pegged their currency to the USD and only
| rarely begrudgingly let it float slightly. It seems to me
| that "the ledger" isn't balanced and that something is being
| kept off the books.
| prewett wrote:
| There are lots of people from the countryside, where, as
| far as I can tell, one's options are basically subsistence
| farming. Until the supply of people from the countryside
| dries up (and it has, to some extant), there won't be a lot
| of wage pressure upwards.
|
| I don't think the RMB is pegged to the dollar. Certainly
| not like Hong Kong, which is an actual peg. The RMB has
| fluctuated between 6.2 and 7.3 the past few years. China
| does limit its daily level of change, though.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Thanks, USA. Globalization was only good as long as they thought
| they could come out on top and make everyone else dependent and
| obedient.
|
| We should have continued to strive for globalization, and left
| the USA behind to implode into its own collapsed mess. Now we're
| just turning our backs to China and Russia, pretend we're the
| "good guys" and that everything's amazing.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| ROTMetro wrote:
| The average working American sacrificed a lot in the name of
| striving for your 'globalization'. Your generic demonizing of
| these people is gross and dishonest.
| trasz2 wrote:
| Russia is a weird example here, being a fake nation
| (essentially a mafia which was granted a statehood) with a very
| tiny scientific and industrial potential, the only real export
| product being gas and oil.
| pishP05h wrote:
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| Ridiculous. This has the energy of "No one goes there anymore,
| it's too crowded!"
|
| Global trade is at record highs. Perhaps globalization will
| decline from here, even permanently (although I'm very skeptical)
| and I'm certain it'll continue to change like it always has, but
| declaring it "dead" makes exactly zero sense.
| brookst wrote:
| Absolutely this. That TSMC fab in Arizona? The lithography
| machines come from ASML, a company in the Netherlands. The EDA
| tools? Those are from Siemens, a German company. And on and on.
|
| And that's on top of our new remote-first world for information
| workers. You used to offshore departments or teams; now teams
| are as likely to be made up of people living in different
| countries as they are to be made up of people living in the
| same metro area.
|
| _Some_ aspects of globalization are changing. That 's normal.
| But declaring it dead is like declaring the Internet dead
| because it just got absorbed into all of the products we use.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > In Morris Chang's own estimation, the chips produced from TSMC
| Arizona may cost "at least 50% more" than the chips from TSMC
| Taiwan.
|
| I'd like to know why its 50% more. Labor costs? Regulations?
| Taxes? We aren't told and I cant read the linked WSJ article.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-12 23:02 UTC)