> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why?
This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.
Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.
> If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last
Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.
> 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated
Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's chicken tax trucks all over again.
> This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen
Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen so far. The budget is yet to come.
> If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.
This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.
(also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers, crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal migration control of hukou combined with media control?)
> Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.
It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point.
This is the part that is so frustrating to me, and not just with regards to tariffs. It's that I see the extremes being so laughably bad (though not necessarily equally - I'm not "both sides"-ing this), and more ludicrously bad is that I've seen positions that don't follow these extremes as being derided now as "centrism". E.g. before the administration's attack on higher education, I do believe a lot of elite universities had completely jumped the shark with their ideological purity tests like required DEI statements. And importantly, there were thoughtful, measured criticisms of these things, e.g. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/02/10/jon-haidt-goes-aft....
But the administration attack is so ridiculously egregious and demands an even worse, government-imposed ideological alignment, that making logical arguments in this environment feels almost pointless.
> making logical arguments in this environment feels almost pointless.
Unfortunately this is the culmination of social media as a controversy machine, that promotes the worst arguments.
> ideological purity tests like required DEI statements
Example?
There's a controversy industry that cherry picks the worst examples of student-politics excess in these regards and then carefully conflates it with university policy.
As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients from the website, etc.
At UC Berkeley, over 75% of faculty applicants were rejected solely based on reviewing their diversity statements: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/480603-what-is-uc-davi... Rather conspicuously, Asians had the highest rate of rejection, followed by whites. Latin applicants had the second highest pass rate, Black applicants had the highest. The diversity statements were not anonymized (as in, the reviewers could see the ethnicity of each applicant when reviewing their diversity statement).
Diversity statements were widely suspected of being a smokescreen for racial preferences. Much like the "personality score" Harvard used to curate its desired racial makeup in its student admissions.
If you’re basing your understanding of the subject based on one anti-DEI activist’s misinterpretation of policies he doesn’t actually know anything about, who didn’t talk to anyone at those schools (even critics of the policy), and who very likely misread statistics and intentionally misrepresented processes, then you are not getting a fair picture. This piece you linked to is a mess of unsubstantiated statements. Several of the links are broken but the one that is still around does not say what he says, so I wouldn’t trust any of the rest of his summarization either.
Of course one should not use an opinion piece as the source when that opinion piece is just commenting on information found elsewhere, but also, in this day and age there's no reason to give up when you encounter a broken link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200202194620/https://ofew.berk...
A total of 993 applications were received, of which
893 met basic qualifications. The LSI Committee conducted a first review and evaluated candidates based solely
on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion. Only candidates that met a high standard in this area were
advanced for further review, narrowing the pool down to 214 for serious consideration.
Ok, so what exactly is the "high standard" here, and what about the standard do you find it objectionable? The fact that something exists doesn't count.
If you don't know, you're just spreading urban legends and ghost stories.
The text in italics is a verbatim quote from the archived PDF I linked, wherein UC Berkeley describes their hiring process. I encourage you to read it if you want to know further details.
Not the one you're asking, nor the one you meant to ask, but I find it rather objectionable that we are now restricting the production of new memes in academia to the ~25% that is most aligned with a moral fashion that is patently hostile to intellectual freedom. It's good to be willing to consider DEI like any other idea but to endorse it is a clear indication that you only care about truth insofar that it is socially advantageous to do so. You're basically unfit for the job at that point.
> However, other University of California schools have published this information. In one recent search at UC Berkeley employing substantially similar evaluation techniques to those that UC Davis used, there were 893 qualified applicants who submitted complete applications that met the basic job requirements. Of those applicants, 679 were eliminated solely because their diversity statements were deemed inadequate.
Do you have any substantial criticism of the factual claims made here? Or are you just insisting that this is a misinterpretation, without any evidence?
There's no facts to refute - he just states that this conclusion is true without evidence of how he knows that or what the criteria he's using is.
That's the problem with all the DEI hysterics - it's never given any intellectual rigor. Instead, it's all profoundly mid men telling each other ghost stories.
* Of those applicants, 679 were eliminated solely because their diversity statements were deemed inadequate.
If someone seeks to disprove the claim that 76% of applicants were rejected based on their diversity statements, they can find alternate figures for the numerator and denominator and offer reasons why their numbers are more authoritative.
> That's the problem with all the DEI hysterics - it's never given any intellectual rigor. Instead, it's all profoundly mid men telling each other ghost stories.
3 out of the four companies I've worked at engaged in explicit discrimination on the basis of gender. As in, alternate interview pipelines where women got multiple chances to pass coding interviews where men got one. And one company even augmented that approach with outright withholding a portion of headcount for "diverse" applicants (which was defined as women and URM men, and in practice women made up over 95% of "diverse" applicants).
If you haven't been witnessed to discriminatory DEI practices, that's fortunate for you. But that's not been the experience of many people. DEI is widely perceived as a dogwhistle for discrimination, because it often is used to refer to discriminatory hiring practices, and I don't think condescension is a way to convince people otherwise.
You don't know what the "diversity criteria" even is. Neither does the parent article. You assume you do and therefore it is bad because something something woke. That's not being condescending, that's just true.
As I said, the entire DEI thing smacks of hysteria and paranoia. Frankly, DEI programs do very little, in general.
I have seen a lot of guys overvalue their skills and undervalue others and then blame "DEI" instead of their own mediocrity.
When I was young I went to school to become a chemical process technician. This was a very attractive education for women because it allowed them to work in factories and oil rigs without getting their hands dirty. It's mostly just sitting in control rooms and such, taking walks to make sure things are running smoothly.
The companies hiring had gender quotas to meet, so this was one field where they filled a lot of their quota. Our class was exactly 50% men, 50% women. I worked my ass off, we were graded 1-6 where 6 is best and I had all 6es except one 5 in one class.
Everyone applied for apprenticeships to Statoil (now Equinor) and from our class they hired one guy with literally perfect grades, and nearly all the girls. Over 80% of the girls were accepted, girls with a grade average of 4.2 compared to my 5.9 got the job. I didn't and neither did any of the other guys in the class except one.
When I worked at a bank, the DEI initiatives were limited to documenting in my yearly review how many rainbow cakes I ate each year and counting my participation in various celebrations.
But I think I was also a beneficiary of DEI, because my boss once told me I couldn't quit because I was the only representative of my race in our department.
My experience with DEI programs at Fortune 500 companies is as follows. At one, candidates got a special box ticked on the list if they met diversity criteria, where one is considered diverse if they're from what is considered an underrepresented group. HR uses it to pressure interviewers into being more lenient in their evaluations and guilt trip about how it's such a shame we're not be able to advance a diverse candidate. Conversely they love hearing when a diverse candidate does well "That's great they did well, and their diverse too!". It all feeds into this subtle culture shift that tries to encourage discrimination without being overtly illegal. At another they decided that management pay would be tied to advancing diversity in the workplace.
I hear all these arguments about how DEI is misrepresented, it's all about making sure everyone feels welcome at the workplace and people aren't discriminated against for their appearance, name, background, etc. It's about introducing diversity of thought to challenge the status quo and avoid group think (good luck expressing any moderately conservative opinion at any of these places though). It's also marketed as making the workforce better reflect the customer base so as to create better products for all. I am completely supportive of those aspirations and feel that DEI programs have done more harm than good in advancing them.
Many people quietly become upset when they see the comparatively mild practices like I have described. They start to wonder if they're going to be targeted unfairly during the next round of layoffs so some manger can help to improve their team's diversity score. They wonder if it's going to be more difficult for them or their kids to get a job. They don't like how any criticism of these programs is silenced and/or dismissed as racism/sexism/fascism/etc. Resentment builds, our society becomes more polarized, extremist views become more palletable, and they take their frustrations out at the ballot box.
These kind of risible DEI ghost stories are exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all take a toothless, mostly lip-service kind of program and have hysterics about it.
Honestly, probably rightly, because mediocre was previous the acceptable status quo, and now they have talented competition.
> They wonder if it's going to be more difficult for them or their kids to get a job
I see. So....only certain kinds of people are entitled to jobs? Those other kinds of people don't struggle with needing jobs or having kids?
Gosh. Sure can't understand why you immediately followed up that statement with a highly defensive one about being "silenced" by being called racist or sexist lmao.
> Y'all take a toothless, mostly lip-service kind of program and have hysterics about it.
How is a reservation system toothless? We were literally designating a chuck of headcount as women-only. This is the most explicit form of discrimination there is.
> Honestly, probably rightly, because mediocre was previous the acceptable status quo, and now they have talented competition.
I stated factual observations of how I observed DEI being implemented, and some insight into how some perceive and react to them negatively. You're attempting to dismiss that with hypotheticals about the talent of the employees and the candidates, both of which you have no basis to make any claims about.
> So....only certain kinds of people are entitled to jobs? Those other kinds of people don't struggle with needing jobs or having kids?
This was not what was stated or implied. You do not get to take a sentence out of context, misrepresent it, and then attack your own misrepresentation.
Everyone deserves the dignity to be gainfully employed without being discriminated against based on their identity. The programs I described are explicitly designed to give advantages to some groups over others.
What has it lead to? There's some who become demoralized and resentful because they perceive their opportunities are going to be limited by their group membership. This is independent of whether these programs are actually affecting hiring decisions or not, the perception matters. It's also led to doubts when a diverse candidate does succeed. The emergence of the DEI hire meme is leveraged to downplay the accomplishments of diverse candidates.
> Gosh. Sure can't understand why you immediately followed up that statement with a highly defensive one about being "silenced" by being called racist or sexist lmao.
The misdirection to color my criticism of DEI as racist/sexist precisely proves my point. It's a tactic to silence opposition to an ideological viewpoint rather than confronting it.
On top of that even the official guidelines are ridiculous. Statements along the lines of saying that people should be treated equally regardless of skin color are officially grounds for rejection.
Of course. The point of this kind of propaganda is to have you reacting so negatively and emotionally that you don't examine the claims calmly and rationally. Emotions > facts. If no-one appalled, then it isn't doing its job.
It’s an overhyped exaggeration at best, but very likely a complete misrepresentation of the policies and how they were used in reality. What you should be outraged by is that lazy hacks can make a living by stirring up fake controversies over intentionally misinterpreting this stuff.
For the schools that have them, I consider legacy admissions to be more appalling. Those are overwhelmingly white.
The other issue is that many of these schools have not been expanding enrolment numbers to population growth. Less seats per-capita mean more exclusivity over time.
Get rid of them both (DEI and legacy admissions) and the government should create a policy that those endowments need to be used to expand the size of the schools.
> As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients from the website, etc.
This is literally my exact point. There absolutely should be a rational place that denounces both these diversity statement ideological requirements and the egregious memory-holing that the current administration is implementing.
These are statements, not quotas. Basically these are statements where you note that you support teaching all kids, will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class has an inclusive environment, etc…
There is no requirement on the race of the applicants.
> these are statements where you note that you support teaching all kids, will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class has an inclusive environment
If you look at one example of the actual assessment criteria [1], merely teaching without discrimination or exclusion earns the lowest possible score.
[1] Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement (for example, "I always invite and welcome students from all backgrounds to participate in my research lab, and in fact have mentored several women." - https://web.archive.org/web/20200302212643/https://ofew.berk...
The instructions make it pretty clear what you need to write. This seems reasonable to me as PART of a total application, but not as the gate to get into the review process.
These statements are performative bullshit, and everyone who writes one knows it.
> Basically these are statements where you note that you support teaching all kids
Do you really feel today's university professors need to write an essay saying they support teaching everyone?
> will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class has an inclusive environment
Again, say someone is teaching calculus, what does this exactly mean?
It's absolutely makes sense to me that a university has policies in place to ensure classrooms are inclusive and that discrimination does not occur. But these statements are nonsense.
Any policies to "ensure classrooms are inclusive" are going to be decried by some people who say that it's "unfair" for whatever reason. Because when you have a class or classes of people who have been discriminated against for centuries, who are at the bottom of the heap, they don't just magically gain parity with other classes, in terms of being able to take advantage of equal opportunity (the promise) simply because they're no longer legally discriminated against. It takes active policies, not just passive ones, for inclusivity to take root. (Once it's taken root, in time those policies may no longer be necessary.)
> Do you really feel today's university professors need to write an essay saying they support teaching everyone?
Yes, actually. Having it be a very explicit part of the job is a good thing. Because a lot of people absolutely need to be told.
It's why we have sexual harassment training. A lot of people don't need it, a few sociopaths will do whatever they want, but a lot of people do, in fact, need to be told to keep their hands to themselves. It really does make a difference.
>> will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class has an inclusive environment
> Again, say someone is teaching calculus, what does this exactly mean?
I honestly got a chuckle out of this, because this is the most STEMlordy thing I've heard in a while.
I'm going to presume you're male, because you'd know why if you'd been the only female in a physics or math class and made uncomfortable and singled out because of it. Often by guys assuming you're a DEI and didn't earn your spot.
If we'd enslaved whites and then turned them second class citizens with minimal rights and very few economic opportunities until fairly recently, putting them in conditions that make it very difficult for them to achieve equal opportunity, then yeah, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
I went to school in south Atlanta, where both student body and teaching staff tended to be overwhelmingly Black. The school had a policy of hiring a certain percentage of non-Black teachers, including white teachers, and it had programs designed specifically to attract students from white and Hispanic communities.
The goal was not to give non-Black students and teachers a leg up; it was to promote diversity and ensure students graduated ready to meet all kinds of different people in the workplace. These policies were popular and uncontroversial, at least while I was there — though I dare say they would be deemed illegal now.
Tangential comment, but I now see people adding disclaimers reiterating their political affiliation to their posts regularly and I want to say that you shouldn't have to justify bilateral criticism. It doesn't imply equal magnitude, and it's only taken that way by bullies in dogmatic bubbles.
The commenter is right that you shouldn't have to state those kinds of beliefs, but pragmatically this is a message board that invites all sorts of responses. Those additional notes are an attempt to head-off annoying and wrongly-based counter-responses built on assumptions that shouldn't have been made. But just because they shouldn't be doesn't mean they won't be.
Your comment evoking a victim complex on the other hand I find a far more annoying element of online discourse.
Thank you, because this is exactly why I did it, and will continue to.
So often when I write a comment I find responses either missing the point, laser focusing on something offhand/tangential I wrote, or imbuing my post with a viewpoint I didn't make. Sometimes the fault is mine, sometimes the fault of the responder.
I state where I'm coming from not as some sort of "tribal identifier", but simply to add clarity, and to stave off misdirected responses that I can find annoying.
I couldn't agree more and worry that even if the country makes it out of this period in one piece the well will have been poisoned on a lot of these topics. We should have big initiatives to make government more efficient, and reduce the national debt, and get back to merit-based processes. But after so much bloviating and fake initiatives that claim to do those things, but actually do the opposite, it's going to be a tough sell to make a real push in the foreseeable future.
You’ve been conned if you think overactive DEI was anything more than a minor annoyance in 99% of American universities. Did some people overdo it in a destructive way? Of course. But it wasn’t anything that was going to lead to major problems. The problems come from the folks who can’t just roll their eyes and move on but instead feel personally attacked and hold a permanent grudge instead of realizing that they themselves probably weren’t all that special.
Uh, I think it does. A lot of people, myself included, have major problems when "overactive DEI" leads to race being a primary, if not the primary, factor in hiring and admissions decisions. This isn't something one should just "roll their eyes over" and move on.
FWIW, that was my original approach, and I thought that the worst excesses of "wokeism" were just caricatures that the right was using to paint all on the left with a broad brush, so I was pretty dismayed when, over time, I felt that a lot of this "race first" thinking had infested many areas of elite universities. Many university professors (ones who would not have in any way identified with being "on the right") who I deeply respect have spoken out about this, sometimes at great professional cost.
> and more ludicrously bad is that I've seen positions that don't follow these extremes as being derided now as "centrism".
You can't stake out a position without getting called some name somebody invented to denigrate that position. Welcome to modern politics on the internet.
The weird part for me is this:
While the economy was evolving, Production was offshored from US for cost-reasons, but also in part to focus on higher-skill labor in US, delegating the low-skill mass-production to China.
Over time, China also developed mid/high level skills, complemented their low-skill production offering with it and now competes in new industries, new tech, etc.
So...to compete with China, the country with 4x the US-population, the solution is that low-skill labor needs to return to US....?
Shouldn't instead the focus be to again foster mid/high-skill labor, moving the part that is offshored again towards low-skill labor...?
I think the mistake here is the model of low-skill/high-skill labor is not a useful distinction. Manufacturing is high skill period, however there are low-infrastructure and high-infrastructure products and factories. The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor in product costs. By bypassing investment in US manufacturing skills and infra, the US sat itself on the sidelines for the ability to build, staff, and supply modern low, medium and high infrastructure factories.
It's not impossible to build back, but it would require long term stable policies to favor it at more levels than just tariffs.
The solution is to pay everyone a living wage, regardless of job, and disconnect healthcare from employment. Lots of inertia against those ideas though. So, instead, "good manufacturing jobs" is the parroted point. Any job is a good job if you can live off of it.
(tariffs do nothing to address labor shortages in healthcare, teaching, and other domestic service based sectors, for example)
That’s a solution of human rights and is orthogonal to becoming competitive to China. No question human rights needs to be fulfilled and we need to pay people living wages.
But the conversation here has he orthogonal goal of being competitive with China as well. I can assure you just paying everyone living wages is one of the main reasons why we are not competitive with China. It’s the main reason why China is beating us today.
So paying everyone living wages doesn’t really do anything to solve the problem because the products created by people who are paid living wages are by definition more expensive due to labor costs.
What tariffs do is they allow us to pay people living wages and sell expensive products and still be competitive because products from China are tariffed to be the same price.
> So paying everyone living wages doesn’t really do anything to solve the problem because the products created by people who are paid living wages are by definition more expensive due to labor costs.
They aren't though. In America, "Paying living wages" always means "pay way more", because America underpays labour and overcharges for literally everything (products, services, basic cost of living -- every product on American soil has a insane profit margin on it)
In China, "Paying living wages" doesn't necessarily mean "pay labor more", because they have stronger control over pricing and margins, so it often actually means "make orgs charge way less".
You end up with Chinese folks living in a major city in China, with a 2bed apartment that costs $200USD/month, and a meal out cost $2USD/each, cars that start at like $6k, and they get paid $5USD/hr, but they feel like they're living well, despite only making around $640USD/month, because they can save 10% of their income each month, and have like 40% of their income as discretionary spending, and still get to own their apartment.
But in the US, a 2bed apartment in a big city like that costs at least $2,000/month or more, a meal out there costs at least $20/each, and a basic starter car starts at like $26k, so you can pay someone in a ostensibly-"high labor cost" job of $20/hr, and they feel like their constantly underwater, and have zero chance of ever owning a home, because they only have like 20% of their income as discretionary spending, and they can't save anything at all. (and that's before we even mention differences like how you don't have to worry about being hit with a crazy bill for an ER visit or an Ambulance in China, but Americans have to worry about that 24/7/365).
(It's the same reason many American's dream of getting a job in Europe and leaving the US, because despite making less money-on-paper, you get to generate more real wealth and do so with less life risk and life stress)
The Factories and the labor pool and the infrastructure being absent in the US is hard to solve for, of course -- but it isn't even the hardest part of any of this. The American view of capitalism would have to be completely rewritten to be more diverse, more equitable, and more inclusive to Americans who do actual labor, before Americans could be anywhere close to competitive with most of these Chinese industries.
Yep. With one difference. The US is regressing and now we want to reignite manufacturing without relying on exploitation.
My argument is that this isn't possible. Well let me rephrase that. It is possible but you need to inflict some form of pain to get it going. Tariffs is one way to do this.
I don't think the four year presidency is enough to do this. You need to do this for at least 2 decades.
"What tariffs do is they allow us to pay people living wages and sell expensive products and still be competitive because products from China are tariffed to be the same price."
Tariffs don't do that necessarily. Maybe a tariff applied to a specific strategically important product or industry, could achieve that. Basically you are then subsidizing an important sector of the economy in a way that is economically inefficient and will make us all poorer in favor of some other interest like national security. The kinds of tariffs applied by the Trump administration cannot even achieve price competitiveness because price is nowhere in their extremely dumb equation. They cannot achieve national security because they are applied to inputs and outputs. They cannot achieve anything useful. They can only make us all poorer.
Those are preferences, and unique to each individual. I work in trades, I work the overnight shift, and I do 4 10's. I wouldn't want to change any of that. Someone else will feel more at home in an office, and that's okay.
The important part is having a job, that you enjoy, and that allows you to live comfortably while saving for the future. It can be in IT, sales, management, maintenance, whatever - but some people will rather leave a more tangible, visceral, and physical difference in their work at the end of the day, and their preference does not make it a worse job.
> Those are preferences, and unique to each individual. I work in trades, I work the overnight shift, and I do 4 10's. I wouldn't want to change any of that. Someone else will feel more at home in an office, and that's okay.
No, those are not only preferences, they also have objective health impacts.
Working nights typically decreases life expectancy.
The distinction is between high- and low- skill politicians and managers, not labour.
One of the foundations of conservatism is the priority of hierarchy over effectiveness. In a conservative culture it doesn't matter how well things work as long as the right people in charge.
We're seeing the limit of this now, where it's literally more important to maintain hierarchy by denying facts and rationality than to "lose face" by admitting that power isn't absolute.
You can't run a modern country like this. You can't plan for the future, make effective decisions, govern, have a working legal system, build housing, create health care - anything at all - when all decisions are made according to the whims of a despot.
Power and resources - including wealth - have to be distributed. Or at least there has to be the illusion they're somewhat distributed. Anything else guarantees terminal contraction and decay.
Not disagreeing with you, but isn't the issue that the US stopped investing in the skills and infra which made mass-production low-skill in the first place?
Instead, the offshore-destinations kept offering more and more services in the value-chain, until the entire skillset to actually create the low-skill labor processes to offshore was replaced with "let the offshore company manage".
Yes climbing the value chain was a necessity for nations like China. But in the US popularized in the 90's, was a business strategy trend that strongly discounted the value of long term capital investments - particularly for this discussion, investment in factories. They do require extra management attention and they do tie companies to strategies in longer time frames at lower margins - but they deliver long term value and long term synergistic growth benefits (in the vein of go slow to go fast). Many US business elected to chase short term growth, and short term and higher margins and minimize long term investments.
See a list of leading US companies that are off of being king of the hill - Boeing, GE, Intel, ... leading industrial US companies continually divested from manufacturing, or shorted long term investment, not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't profitable enough in the moment. It took decades, and many dividends and stock growth was taken in the middle, but the shortfall manifests in time.
Intel never outsourced its production, and it turned out to be the wrong call for it. They just made losing tech bets, while they kept investing in manufacturing.
You make that sound like it was emanating from the business community - the US has had a pretty significant period in there of 0% interest rates determined by a central committee. Return on capital doesn't really matter in a low interest rate environment, the important thing is access to the lending markets. Investors making sensible investments would have been eaten alive by those focusing on companies that were living off credit in ill-advised ways.
Uber still hasn't managed to make a net profit over its lifetime as a company, by the way.
I agree with the rest of your comment, though. The US public markets reward creative accounting and mortgaging the future for quarterly gains. GE and Jack Welch are a great historical example.
Maybe, but 0% interest should have make it easy to invest in capital intensive endeavors that would have turned into great protective moats when the interest rates inevitably bumped up. Did that happen with factories and manufacturing?
I also think a significant influence on the Fed was a financialized business community demanding 0% interest.
> Maybe, but 0% interest should have make it easy to invest in capital intensive endeavors that would have turned into great protective moats when the interest rates inevitably bumped up.
It doesn't - if you look at the situation in real terms, the amount of resources available to invest is about the same (probably shrinking because some are diverted to people who aren't creditworthy and consume them). So the major effect of artificially low interest rates is to add a whole heap of artificially supported highly wasteful companies to the mix.
All that changes is the market started rewarding people with access to credit instead of people who were responsible and effective. The credit people aren't particularly capable and it'd be better if they had been forced out.
China invested their low interest fiscal capacity into developing over decades via coordinated policy of their central bank / industrial strategy nudges to their businesses. China's factory ecosystem and the ability to build stuff meets my definition of a protective moat. Its very hard to replace and one can only contemplate it over relatively long time frames.
US businesses were free to do the same over the past low interest environment, but we did not have the same incentives, not inclinations in terms of prevailing business strategic appetite for factories. In contrast, for big tech, there was interest and appetite for it and significant capability with protective moats were built - but one could argue that software based tech moats may be faster to bypass.
>Many US business elected to chase short term growth, and short term and higher margins and minimize long term investments.
I would like to add that this was due to the influence of Milton Friedman. He put the emphasis on shareholder returns being the most important, without considering the survival of the company itself.
More generally, the financialization of the US economy (and of the Western economy more generally speaking) has a big part of the blame in this.
Yes, more evolved financial markets provided easier access capital, but, as it so happens in those types of situations, access to capital and enjoyment of said (liquid/financial) capital became a target in itself, the rest of society didn't matter. In fact, the whole (Western) society was moulded around (liquid/financial) capital, it became its raison d'être.
Actually I think it’s variation of this. Tariffs can protect high skill jobs with high value product output. They can also force the Chinese to make cheap stuff even cheaper ( back down below $1 goods plus tariffs ).
We don’t want the Chinese making high value goods at slightly lower prices. We want Americans making high value goods and we want to push cheap stuff as cheap as possible. Next step is enforcing environmental rules on Chinese goods and requiring escrow of the funds to pay the Chinese in American accounts until the goods are inspected and pass.
America already makes high value goods in China and takes most of the value from them since they did the IP and the software for those products. China desperately wants in on that, they are no longer happy making the product while America takes most of the profit! They would swap places with America in a heartbeat if that’s what Trump is offering.
Your second links puts the number of slaves in China at 4 per 1000. The USA is at 3.3 per 1000. Why not mention that the USA could make more use of their slaves?
> The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor in product costs.
Not disagree with your main points, but labor inputs are still very much a huge part of product costs, and often the biggest driver of where to build a new factory when a company is scaling up. Companies aim to build their new factories wherever there's a sufficient pool of cheap labor with the necessary skills.
> Companies aim to build their new factories wherever there's a sufficient pool of cheap labor with the necessary skills.
Of course, even where labor cost is truly inconsequential, you would still do that as all the correlations that come alongside cheap labor are still very attractive to manufacturing.
> I think the mistake here is the model of low-skill/high-skill labor is not a useful distinction.
IMHO it still is. There are tasks, especially in assembly, that for now require humans to do because robots can't match our dexterity. Stuff like mounting through-hole components like a cable from the battery compartment to the main PCB. That's a few seconds worth of time, and you need barely more than a few days worth of training to get a worker up to speed - a low-skill job. China, Thailand, Vietnam and a bunch of other places have an ample supply of people coming out of utter poverty, which means the pressure on wages is massive - a Chinese worker on average earns about 13200 dollars a year [1], an American worker is 3x-4x that amount and more if the shop is unionized. And on top of that, Chinese workers work 996, American or European workers have much MUCH more employee rights.
The problem is, low-skill employment opportunities are going down and down because automation gets better. For now, China can compete because Chinese workers are cheaper than machines... but once that changes, it's going to get nasty.
> The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor in product costs.
There's soft factors as well. Stuff like workplace safety/OSHA regulations, environmental regulations... Silicon Valley is a bunch of Superfund sites from decades of toxic emissions. China? They barely have regulations in place, and other sweatshop countries are even worse.
The core problem we're talking about anyway is that a certain percentage of any population is just, plain and simple, dumb as rocks. Over half the US population is barely literate [2]. No matter how good your education systems are, no matter how much money you invest into equality in schools, no matter how much you protect them from stuff like lead - they are dumb, will remain dumb, and probably their children will also remain dumb. In ye olde times you put them on farms, meatpacking or in factories so they had gainful employment... but that all went away, and now we got hordes of utterly dumb people with no hope of ever getting smart and, crucially, no hope of ever getting a meaningful job.
Moving the low-cost jobs offshore was fine until automation filled a lot of those jobs. Now the high skilled automation skills and infrastructure (production lines and robots) are also offshore. I have done my fair share of western factory tours and the number of people on the factory floor is soberingly low... they are simply not needed, as they line runs like a vast, complicated machine.
Japan led in automation in the 90s before the rise of China put a stop to those investments paying off. Now China is making those same investments at a time when the tech is much better. America could solve its manufacturing problem in the future just by importing China automation tech.
It is theoretical, I also doubt China would help the USA develop like that directly and lose its advantage. We would have to trade something really valuable in return (like modern semiconductor or jet turbine tech).
Trump et al. really run a motte-and-bailey argument here. They woo reasonable people who agree that critical industries: food, energy, defense-adjacent, metals, etc. - must have substantial capacity on-shore or at least very near. They then flip to what amounts to massive handouts for his rust belt base, basically saying we should make everything here.
The obvious answer is this:
1. it doesn't matter if our t-shirts are made in Bangladesh.
2. it does matter if our stuff is made in an enemy nation (china).
3. U.S. labor is too expensive to move back to mass manufacturing the way we used to do it, c.f. baumol's cost disease.
4. offshoring and illegal labor have suppressed investment in automation and manufacturing technology for decades, which will be painful to undo.
The sensible outcome of these facts is
1. Focus on moving everything out of china to other cheap countries with reasonable levels of human capital.
2. Focus on re-shoring critical industries.
3. Launch moonshot investments into robotics and automation. Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.
4. Invest in large-scale roll-out of SMR energy so we have reliable power for this new industrial build.
I do disagree somewhat with point 4. I think this is frequently overstated:
Building and operating automated factories is just as wage-dependent as anything else (just the coefficients are a bit smaller). You still need engineers, construction crews, supervisors, repair crews, etc. (and those could all be doing something more profitable as well).
You can see this very clearly in the EU, where there is a pretty smooth wage-gradient, and even the super highly automated automotive manufacturing has moved down that gradient towards Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, despite language/culture barriers.
> Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.
I think a decent sized manufacturing industry is a realistic goal long term. But longer term US global supremacy in it is not even a realistic goal to begin with, because not only are you gonna fight against the wage gradient now, you are also gonna face the fact that the US is only ~5% global population, and manufacturing will naturally drift towards the very biggest markets for its goods, which the US probably won't be in half a century or so, simply because of demographics and economical growth in China/India generally.
So basically, Biden's CHIPS act plus infrastructure (energy, roads, etc.) investments (e.g., solar and wind and battery part of Biden's IRA plus additional baseload). Yeah, we had all that going under the previous administration, and the current administration is distracting us from their dismantling of these sensible investments and incentives by strangling the entire global economy. Is it still "fringe" to think Trump is a foreign asset?
> 3. Launch moonshot investments into robotics and automation. Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.
Absent sufficient jobs, or some other arrangement for the masses that provides both material comfort and some sense of purpose, you'll never get to the automation because you will likely have a revolution first.
Ya, but not being intact doesn’t mean completely destroyed. I just don’t think the Europeans will ever trust the USA enough again to let them have a close relationship, even if Trump’s presidency ends with the US still a democracy.
Thing is, manufacturing in America is up. The 2008 crises dealt a blow, but manufacturing has been building-back. I don't think people realize how many high-value items are made in the United States. Let the East Asians make our mass-consumer junk while we focus on the high-value stuff.
Just goes to show the administration isn't working with facts and doing the hard-nosed analysis required to drive effective policy.
The administration is probably aware of this and doesn't care. A huge portion of his base were rust belt voters who want what are essentially handouts, which trump intends to achieve by forcing the American consumer to pay $30/hour for el cheapo goods that could be made elsewhere and have no tangible security impact.
You're mistaking the rhetoric he uses to sell this idiocy to the rest of the country for a good-faith argument.
Yeah personally I buy very little and live pretty minimally so I'm not impacted much either way. I think most people's takes, however, are influenced by what is best for their pocketbooks short-term rather than for the nation long-term. And Trump is influenced by what's best for him short-term.
I'm looking at the first chart, "Manufacturing Sector: Real Sectoral Output for All Workers" [1]. It grew until Q2 2000, when it was at 97.2. In Q4 2024 it was at 98.6. And let's not ignore how almost all leading semiconductor manufacturing (which are in and required for nearly everything) has moved to East Asia.
I didn't notice it before, but these are not per capita numbers. In 2000, the US population was 281 million, and in 2024 it was 340 million [1]. So per capita, manufacturing went from 97.2 in 2000, to 81.5 in 2024.
agreed but Trump just gutted the CHIPS act for no other reason than because it was enacted by Biden (the typical "undo everything the last prez did" just like Trump 1.0).
You can argue that Intel is a badly run company, not worth saving etc etc, but if want to save US manufacturing, then Intel, and its ecosystem, would be the first place to start. Otherwise, TSMC, Samsung and China (still playing second-fiddle but investing billions to catch up) will dominate. Certainly better than trying to keep coal plants open.
Ideology aside it's really hard to find _any_ rational thought behind these moves.
It turns out good policy takes a long time to play out and isn't well suited for the current destabilized US political system where nothing good gets done and the rare things that do get reversed within four years.
That IS what Biden was trying to do though with the CHIPS Incentive Act. He was trying to onshore production of semiconductors in a partnership with TSMC. Didn't do him any favors, and Harris lost the state of Arizona anyway. Americans had the choice between a party that was serious about trying to onshore some manufacturing and a party that wasn't, and it made the wrong choice because vibes, basically.
This may be more accurate than you realize. Both Democrat and old Republican party rhetoric and policies were pro-globalization/offshoring, with the occasional exception such as CHIPS (and corn subsidies). It's not surprising nobody believed they were changing direction, if for every "we're bringing semiconductors back", they heard ten "your car is German your phone is Chinese your tacos are Mexican, how dare you interfere with glorious Free Trade!"
Also one can't ignore that the GOP managed to remarked the CHIPS act as a key source of inflation, which they also managed to pin on "Bidenomics". Which was another source of "vibes, basically"
Weren't we hearing for years about how it went to waste because Intel did stock buybacks or whatever using the CHIPS money. Now we are supposed to believe it's critical?
CHIPS incentive funding is way bigger than just Intel, so it’s a bit disingenuous to write off the whole program just because of one (or even several) high profile bad actor. We should have a nuanced discussion and fix the shortcomings of our programs, but at least assess things in a balanced way.
If you check the transcript of the confirmation hearing for the current Commerce secretary, practically every Senator brags about their state’s CHIPS funded R&D hub. Lots of growth in small and medium businesses there. And CHIPS incentive funding played a huge role in bringing the new TSMC fab in Arizona
This entire post is so wrong, it is difficult to know where to start. The first sentence about taxes is wrong. The second statement is an entirely unsupported opinion. The final statement miscategorized "cost centers" as some sort of federal investment? As for "clear path", the road US exceptionalism is paved with the gold derived from sensible investments in R&D and tech advancement. There was no clear path to paying back our investment in the federal highway system, but it did pay back indeed. There was no clear path to paying back our investments in basic physics, chemistry, and biology, but it did pay back indeed.
> R&D is a cost center that can no longer be written off of a company’s taxes.
Can you elaborate on this? It was my understanding a company only pays taxes on profit. So isn't the revenue that goes into R&D effectively taxed at 0%, since at that point it's not yet profit? I.e. only dividend payouts get taxed.
2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made it less beneficial to use R&D for tax credits because they had to be amortized over five years. Not good when you're an MBA looking to financially engineer your way into a fat bonus.
We were getting the slow and steady version at least for chip manufacturing with the CHIPS Act but Trump has a major need to get credit for everything so that's being torn apart too.
The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards to bringing manufacturing back. China had it easy because they had most of what you could want; a huge labor force that could upskill to manufacturing (the rural poor population), cheap labor (kind of an extension to point 1 but also includes their lower COL and wage expectations over all), and low environmental barriers.
To bring manufacturing back to the US is a way harder lift; we have a lot tighter labor market, if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they leave. We (well I at least don't enjoy the idea of going back to when rivers caught fire on the regular) don't want to strip environmental protections back to a level to make it cheap to dispose of waste. The best targets are low labor, high price, high skill goods, like, I don't know, chip manufacturing!
>The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards to bringing manufacturing back.
I saw a headline yesterday that says there are more pets than children in Japan. How long until this is true in the US? The truth of the matter is that there is no workforce left in the United States, and will be less of one by the time manufacturing does spin up. In WWII, the Army was happy at how many of the young men there had come from farms and were familiar with using/driving heavy equipment, how many knew some welding, etc. Then after the war, that translated right back into mnufacturing there these now older men were familiar with "making things". They could do actual labor. How well will the part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers and Dollar General shelf stockers do on the assembly line?
>if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they leave.
If we could bring back manufacturing, then we would need to restructure our society such that those jobs lesser/menial jobs could go undone (or be automated). But we can't really bring it back, and they will bring in others on any number of weird visas no one has really heard of to do the lesser/menial jobs which are the only ones left. The people who set this in motion aren't even just retired, they're already dead of old age and there's nothing anyone can do about what's coming.
People are part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers because there aren’t other jobs available, and people can pick up skills faster than you think.
I know a lot of people in the Bay Area with serious fabrication skills (mainly applied to art), who would love to have a stable job using those skills in a factory setting, but who are constantly looking for gig work instead.
There were two different fabrication jobs I nearly took the last time I was looking for work. I have what amounts to a second job as a creative producer and art fabricator, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so I need a day job. All else being equal, if factory work was enough to pay the bills, I’d choose that over a full time job with a heavy mental load.
It’s easy to dismiss factory work as menial, but like, seriously watch Starbucks baristas working during a morning rush, when there are tons of mobile app orders and also tons of people in line. It’s an assembly line. Different technical skills, but similar structure and pace. And at least in a factory you can sit down.
tl;dr I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce, and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
>and people can pick up skills faster than you think.
Possibly. But they can't change the attitudes that created them from childhood up. The barista that complains on r/antiwork that their manager is a douche and that they're taking another mental health day because standing upright is too challenging for an hour at a stretch isn't going to like mandatory overtime spot welding or manning the torque wrench. Can they be taught to do it? Yeh, probably, theoretically at least. Supposing they don't get out because they'd rather be scrolling on a phone.
I can foresee this, it's not prophecy... just common sense. But I suppose other people need to run the experiment and see the results for themselves.
Out of high school, I must have worked 4 or 5 factory jobs (even in the early 1990s that was drying up), and so I have some idea what this is like. It's not a long-form media article for me. I don't think it's menial. When I use that word, I'm talking about the person at the cash register at Dollar Tree, or the job where you scrub the toilets at Wendy's.
>I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce,
Maybe. But I'm not understating its size, or the demographic projections that say it's shrinking quickly.
>and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
They'd be great. But you can't just make a magic wand and have them appear, and if you could you'd never fill the positions.
> It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight.
There were a lot of slower manufacturing on-shoring incentives during the Biden administration that would have presumably continued under the Harris administration. Mainly around green energy and electric vehicle manufacturing incentives - which have successfully resulted in new auto, battery, and supply chain factories being built mostly in red states - and semiconductor manufacturing. The Biden administration also maintained and increased tariffs on specific types of products coming from China including EVs.
So I don't think your categorization of the two choices Americans were given is quite accurate.
As someone watching EV & battery plants break ground in my state (GA), this is absolutely my take.
Biden's infrastructure and funding bills were basically doing exactly this, and their foreign policy largely aligned with this goal as well.
I was not a huge Biden fan early in his presidency (Breaking the rail union strike and the complete lackluster response to actually prosecuting criminality in the outgoing admin were not my desired policies - democrats are markedly too corporatist in general).
But his infrastructure bills were sorely needed practical steps to doing a lot of good for a lot of folks in the US. There's a reason so many politicians then tried to take credit for them (incl Trump).
Well, money talks and it's hard to choose the other option. On one hand bring manufacturing back to US and pay them higher, because otherwise the pay in McDonald's is better with a less demanding physical (cmiiw, don't live in US).
On the other hand, keep manufacturing outside of US for cheaper labor to keep price low and having bigger margin. It's an easy choice to make.
And again this is not a US specific problem, it's almost all of countries nowadays have a massive wealth gap that makes people racing to the bottom of living / working standard.
The thing is also that absolutely nothing about the overall situation changed meaningfully over the last 50 years or so.
People had the exact same concerns and fears when electronics manufacturing started shifting to Japan like 50 years ago-- they went in the same way up the value chain that China did, and they started losing a lot of the industry with rising wages, too, exactly like what we see with China => Vietnam/Indonesia/... nowadays.
I think 90% of the whole political debate about the economy is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic local wealth inequality-- poor countries lifting themselves up by manufacturing stuff for low wages is how the whole system is actually supposed to work from my perspective; describing that as "ripping off the American people" is completely unhinged, misinformed self-delusion to me.
> I think 90% of the whole political debate about the economy is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic local wealth inequality
When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate is really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII happens?
Manufacturing capability and capacity is an incredibly precious resource if you find yourself in a large scale war, and there is growing concern (realistic or not) that America has given it away/lost it. It makes no difference in peaceful times, but there is growing belief that the era of peace is coming to an end.
In fact, if you take a higher level view of what is going on, like the wanting to annex Canada and Greenland, it seems the entire motivation for it all is preparing for the possibility of war with Russia (and China).
> When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate is really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII happens?
I'm not buying that whole argument. At all. Because this looks too much like a "lets find favorable talking points for the middling plans we already put in motion"-exercise.
Can you honestly argue that current economic policy and decisionmaking was mainly driven by strategic military interests and planning, as opposed to Trump being a big fan of tariffs as a concept?
Because I don't think you can. And I think we don't need more than a glance at the liberation day proposals to identify this; if the aim was to war-proof US supply chains, then you would expect a big focus on military relevance of tariffed goods, coupled with long term investments into defense-relevant local industry and a glut of defense-spending in general.
Instead we got blanket tariffs that were so ill-conceived, they mostly had to be rolled back/suspended the next day, and generally pretty much no apparent guiding focus or much thought at all.
Concerning possible war: Russia is not a credible military opponent to the US and is not gonna be one within decades, either. Their land army basically got stopped by a country a fifth of their size on mainly donated (and frequently old) western equipment, and the Russian Navy embarassed itself even worse.
China is a somewhat credible opponent, but what would they even go to war over that would actually affect the US? Panama? They might be more serious about taking Taiwan back, but I honestly doubt that the US would involve itself in that business too much anyway; considering how the whole support for the Ukraine, whose territorial integrity it formally agreed on to protect, amounted to some military hand-me-downs and a bit of intel sharing (no longer even that from what I know?), I would NOT hold my breath waiting for US carriers in a Taiwan invasion...
>the whole support for the Ukraine, whose territorial integrity it formally agreed on to protect, amounted to some military hand-me-downs and a bit of intel sharing (no longer even that from what I know?)
Let's not forget that Trump and his clown show are now attempting to bully Ukraine into paying the full, inflated to the max, US government contractor price for the new versions of those hand-me-downs. Partly because that was how the accounting was done - very often, $X of "military aid to Ukraine" = $X spent on a new weapon for US military to replace the decades old weapon to be sent to Ukraine.
> Can you honestly argue that current economic policy and decisionmaking was mainly driven by strategic military interests and planning, as opposed to Trump being a big fan of tariffs as a concept?
Well, like we established in a discussion here yesterday, argument only takes place if you don't know. It is the mind's way to explore and learn. So, yes, obviously I could as I don't have enough information to know for sure. If I did, there would be nothing argue about, now would there? I'd already know everything there is to know. It would be a pointless endeavour.
But I don't think an argument is what you are actually looking for. It seems you're simply looking for someone to do free work for you. As great as that may sound to you, there is no reason for anyone else to cater to that. For the sake of good faith, I'll spare you anything more that would be serving to me.
They gave you plenty of things to rebut or discuss, but instead of doing any of that you got hung up on a rhetorical device that is used to imply poor or empty argumentation which, frankly, seems to be on point.
well, if the first step to prepare for WWIII is threatening to annex nearest allies with their own sovereignty (Canada), I'd say it's a very very bad preparation. Secondly, imposing tariff for raw materials and tools while you don't have all the groundwork domestically to do the manufacturing, is also a very very bad preparation. If this is the best US can get, I'm disappointed.
Seeing it as a "rip off" is indeed delusion, but turning a blind eye to the dangers of becoming (ever more) dependent on a foreign country is an even worse folly.
>It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight.
Excuse me, but I am old enough to remember Biden's program such as CHIPS, a slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry.
America had the choice. It chose wrong. Are Americans going to assume the consequences of their choices or are they going to lie to themselves they weren't given the choice? That last option would fit more with the "character" of the America nowadays, the one who voted Trump: make mistakes and blame someone else for it.
> The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point
The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between industry and government, which is incompatible with democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years where the new administration begins to tear down everything the previous administration did because they serve different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.
It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work. Even TSMC Arizona had to bring half the workers from Taiwan, and it's not like they're making tchotchkes.
They were brought from Taiwan due to their expertise and familiarity with TSMC processes. America doesn’t have a glut of people with EUV fab experience — they all already work for Intel.
Sure, but it's not like they're paying them super competitive wages. Some people on HN said the Taiwanese TSMC Arizona workers already started applying at Intel.
If you want to kick-start manufacturing, you're gonna have to attract people somehow initially, either through more money, or free education/training, etc
>The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between industry and government, which is incompatible with democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years where the new administration begins to tear down everything the previous administration did because they serve different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.
The message of "we're gonna find some way to undo some of the damage of off shoring and find some way to put heavy industry back to work" has been included in one way or another in every presidential candidates platform at least as far back as Obama's first term.
The specifics change from party to party and candidate to candidate but this isn't a new thing. The common man has been clamoring for some sort of change from the status quo for the better part of a generation now. It's only recently that the situation has become such a priority that elections are won or lost on it.
I fully expect that whatever administration comes next will continue on the path of on-shoring, if perhaps in a more reasonable way.
>It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work
The people who actually run manufacturing and heavy industry really resent the current off-shoring status quo. They only do it because the sum total of other policy pushed by short sighted wall street financiers and/or environmental/labor advocates makes it the only viable option. I think they'd be happy to come back if doing so was financially viable, they just want it to be predictable (something current policy making surely isn't, lol) so they can plan around it because investments in those industries are made on decades long timelines.
I think we're at the point now where there's the political will to let the punch press eat some fingers to keep the factory open.
There's various forms of democracy and many are not as chaotic as the US kind in regards to long term plans.
A good example is the general global approach to Net Zero. It's slow, methodical, science based, negotiated.
But if anyone brings up planning for 2050 it's usually in the context of "It's all bullshit, politicians are crap, they're just lying to you and kicking the can down the road till they retire" (and if you scratch the surface you'll have even chance that the person saying that has been radicalised into not even believing there's a problem to be solved).
But only the US is in and out of the Paris agreement etc.
What makes the US more chaotic (and UK to some extent and probably more) is the political system first-past-the-post which does nothing to promote collaboration. Quite the contrary the winner does its best to crush every sprout of the loser to make his future win more likely. Now if you had a few parties which would be forced to forge alliances to govern, they would probably govern in alliances in the following terms as well so some of the politics for sure get carried over. But, such ideas help now nobody, the current system is how it is.
Countries change policies all the time based on the whishes of industry lobby groups or voters, not just the US. People focusing exclusively on what Trump is doing are myopic or arguing in bad faith.
And the global approach to net zero is not global, nor is it binding, it's more of a gentlemen's agreement bet which is basically worthless. Ideologically it sounds good, the issues are always when the tires hit the road, and then some spanners get thrown in on top: wars, pandemics, revolutions, natural disasters, political feuds, etc.
So yeah, outside of bubbles of privileged mid-upper class people in safe rich countries, nobody gives a crap about what's gonna happen in 2050 when they can't pay next month's rent/mortgage or their car doesn't start and their bank balance is red.
Capitalism got us chasing next quarter returns at the expense of what's gonna happen in 2050, so we'll be kicking the can down the road until everything falls apart, first very slowly, and then very suddenly.
> Countries change policies all the time based on the whishes of industry lobby groups or voters, not just the US.
It is irrelevant what other countries do.
What matters is whether or not other countries and industries trust that a country has sufficient stability to do business in and with. If there are actual or perceived signals that suggest chaos, rational people will not be interested to be tethered to that dispensation.
> The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point.
I think this is because China is an autocracy, so they can make long-term plans. Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does is no place for that, and that's not limited to the new administration.
Did America stop being a democracy under FDR? Conflating specific term limits with autocracy/democracy is a bit dramatic.
There isn't anything physically stopping America from doing what China is doing. We literally did it first (in modernity)! Albeit for too short a time before the robber barons and foreign interests retook control.
I think what I wrote here covers what you're saying:
> Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does
It's not "robber barons" etc. It's just two very different worldviews existing in one place that cause big swings in policy when the other one is elected.
I'm not talking about Red vs. Blue. US national policy doesn't actually swing that much when Red switches to Blue and so on. Yes, Trump abandoned this or that agreement, but Biden generally didn't reverse.
I believe Lee Kuan Yew said "In China, you can't change the government but you can change the policy. In America you can change the government but you can't change the policy", referring to the postwar neoliberal / Deng era.
Was it absent? The "Green New Deal" was hitting on some of that. You can't beat "<Some other country> is going to pay for it" and "Coal jobs are going to come back", especially when there's no accountability or fact checking.
But Americans were given that choice? The chips act was an industrial policy play based on the industrial policy playbook of east asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan.
I'm not a fan of industrial policy or the chips act, but it seems to be just the choice you are asking for.
I find it annoying that you think the other choice was “offshoring is great.” Spending on US factory construction surged under Biden. This was largely due to stuff like the IRA and the CHIPS Act. If voters had made different choices in November 2024, in Congress as well as the Presidency, I think we could have had even more aggressive industrial policy — instead of this absolute shitshow that will permanently damage the US’s economic position.
On the other hand, I am a believer in the idea that voters get the government they deserve. So maybe we deserve this.
There are carrots and sticks. The current plan seems to be to cut down giant trees at random and hope they don't fall on anything important. If they do there will need to be government welfare applied anyway to keep businesses alive just like during the previous Trump administration.
I've mostly decided to stop arguing about this stuff, since it's fairly obvious that Trump is going to ruin the economy and discredit his party for a generation.
The candidate who opposed Trump during the primaries would have done something very similar to what you said. But then she was born with ovaries so the Republican Party wanted nothing to do with her as the top boss.
Democrat voters didn’t want anything to do with her during the 2020 primaries and didn’t turn out as much for her in 2024 as they did for Biden in 2020, so who are the real misogynists here?
And this is why Democrats lost. Why admit and address that perhaps they ran a candidate that was deeply unpopular, even within her own party, when they could just instead blame the “misogynistic Republican” boogeyman.
Ah my mistake, I missed that this was referencing the Republican primaries here. Forgive me, the whole "Harris wasn't elected because Americans are misogynists" trope has been repeated so often I had that burned into my brain.
Addressing the primaries, no one was beating Trump, it has nothing to do with his closest but still far distant challenger being a woman.
Republicans would have voted for a Republican woman, they aren't the misogynists. Its more common for conservatives to elect women than for progressives to around the world, most female national leaders are right wing.
The reason there aren't many women in the Republican party isn't the voters, its that not many women likes right wing politics no matter where in the world you are.
> Democrat voters didn’t want anything to do with her during the 2020 primaries and didn’t turn out as much for her in 2024 as they did for Biden in 2020, so who are the real misogynists here?
Are you talking about Harris? I'm pretty sure she wasn't in the republican primaries so that isn't who the previous comment was talking about.
NO candidate should get a free pass. They should _all_ _always_ have to primary. That would have likely sorted out Biden earlier in the cycle and we might have had real choices other than Harris to replace the incumbent who flubbed that debate so badly that it was clear they were not going to get elected.
> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why?
>> This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.
I believe the comparison is absolute production, not per person.
Anything else would be odd. Considering China has 4x the capita of US it would mean that in absolute terms China is producing 8x the energy of the US. In reality it seems to be roughly 2x (although both sources are a bit outdated):
US 2023: 4.18 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity from utility-scale generators. Additionally, small-scale solar photovoltaic systems contributed around 73.62 billion kWh 1.
China 2021: 8.53 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity
--
But the staggering difference is how much of the electricity is attributed to the Industrial sector:
China: 70% (~6 trillion kWh)
US: 26% (~1 trillion kWh)
So overall China allocates 6x the electricity to production compared to US...
China electricity consumption is growing by 6-8% a year and is likely to hit 10500 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2025. Which at $0.10/kwh the avg is a $1 trillion dollars. Though from what I understand in China home users are charged about $0.07 and industry $0.08 so $7-800 billion a year on electricity alone.
They are rapidly moving to renewable with grid scale BESS auctions avg $66-68/kw they are likely to have electricity prices at $0.01-0.02 over the next few years. I think it will be extremely tough to compete with China in manufacturing unless there is huge investment in renewable and storage systems to keep electricity prices competitive with China who are going to move on from coal over the next decade.
Not only that. Renewable tech is also a major export sector for China. Most batteries and solar panels bought elsewhere are Chinese. And they are dominating EV manufacturing and manufacturing of pretty much everything else. China has invested and is now getting enormous returns on investment. The rest of the world has divested and is now missing out. Not investing enough was a mistake that needs to be corrected.
It used to be that the Chinese economy was based on just cheap labor. It's now increasingly based on cheap energy and automation. Replicating that elsewhere needs to start with modernizing energy infrastructure. Without that, there is no chance of competing. Manufacturing is energy intensive. So, cheap energy is indeed a key enabler.
The cost per kwh is a good one to call out. I think the medium term target for that should be < 1 cent per kwh. Effectively it trends to zero because there is very little marginal with solar, wind, and batteries other than the depreciation of infrastructure, equipment, etc. over time.
> I believe the comparison is absolute production, not per person
Original article definitely said "per person".
China allocates much more to industry and/because it allocates much less to personal consumption. Especially things like air conditioning. US per person consumption is still 2x that of EU average.
Yes, not your fault, I believe the AUTHOR meant to compare absolute production.
> China allocates much more to industry and/because it allocates much less to personal consumption
Let's not fall into the same hole: In relative terms, US residential is more than 2x of China's residential power use, but that's relative to the much larger production use. In absolute terms their residential power-allocation is not that different actually:
CN: 15% (1.2 trillion kWh)
US: 35% (1.46 trillion kWh)
Now, on a per-capita basis the difference is staggering, as China consumes 20% less to serve 4x the population...
China is also more electrified generally than the US. They only just pulled ahead but the rate of change is startling.
Since 2000 they've gone from 10% of final energy being electricity to nearly 26% while the US has been basically flat around 23% and they are both predicted to grow (or not grow) at roughly the same in the next few years.
I did some quick research on this. McKinsey has a pretty slick-looking web-facing report titled "Global Energy Perspective 2024" report [1] has a table [2] showing breakdowns by industry.
Because VAT is collected at the border on imports, some people (wrongly) consider VATs a tariff. Considering that VAT is rebated on exports, VATs are trade neutral.
Sales tax as implemented in the US is not as tax efficient as VAT due to the impact of sales taxation on intermediate transactions during manufacturing. VAT only taxes the incrementally the value added at each transaction) whereas sales tax applies to the entire value at each stage.
Hmm how is it different in the US do you not get back in the sales tax that you paid for your input. Here the middle man pay tax on the buying price and then collects on the sell price. Then has to pay the government minus what they paid as input sale tax. So all increments on the price gets taxed till the end user. But the tax itself is not taxed again.
Many B2B transactions are tax-exempt but it's complicated. And gets really complicated once international transactions are considered. And also whether the company has a physical nexus in the place the product is being purchased. All in all, I think it would be simpler if the US adopted VAT. But that seems very unlikely.
Last I checked VAT is the same rate regardless if the product is made in China or by pinguins on Antarctica so why anyone in the US gives a damn is beyond me.
At an individual level, it’s not more complicated: it’s reimbursed instead of exempted. And if you’re charging it, it’s easier, since you simply always charge instead of maintaining your list of exceptions.
On crime they most centrically do, watch the China Show (not the bloomberg one) on youtube. One example given on the show is that Once you go into northern villages and small towns you start seeing propganda posters on why you shouldn't take drugs. Homelessness is widespread and present too but you just wont see it in city centers more on the outstkirts.
Police in cities will beat homeless people and get them back on buses to where their hukou is, so the homeless that remain are very good at hiding. Hostile architecture is also very common in China. But there is a lot of sub quality housing (eg in sub-basements that lack windows or good ventilation) that allow much of the working poor to at least be technically housed even in expensive cities (many restaurants also provide housing for their staff in the dining area after closing, or did at least 20 years ago). The outskirts used to have more slums than they had today in Beijing, most of the slums have moved into sub-basements as far as I can tell (called the “ant tribe”).
Crime really is much lower than it was a decade ago. People have more money, societal trust is higher. Drug use in clubs has always been a thing, but China differs from the USA in that their is no social support at all for addicts (so they either get clean with help from their family or they die).
Do not watch it please unless you want to consume worldview-distoring propaganda and become more ignorant as a result. It's made by 2 American expats who gotten kicked out of China when visa-requirements were tightened, and no-skill immigrants were no longer welcome.
They've become anti-China youtubers serving the hungry China-hating audience on how China is bad and a paper tiger.
Instead watch this guy (https://www.youtube.com/@Awakening_Richard). I'm not saying he's unbiased, either, but he's thoughtful and I think he brings insight into how the Chinese intelligentsia thinks about how the world works.
But back to your point - it's oft repeated that Chinese population decline will destroy China in the long run and poverty in Chinese society.
The TLDR version is that about half of the Chinese population lives in desperate poverty (and are economically invisible), and just a couple decades ago 90+% of Chinese lived like this. One cannot bring about a transformation into an industrialized wealthy lifestyle overnight, but coming from the experience of the past decades, the Chinese have been remarkably effective in this, and the following decades will see these people lifted up to modern societal standards as well.
By this alone, one can conservatively expect a doubling of Chinese GDP, as there will be twice as many consumers and laborers who consume and work at the level of the current workforce.
This also means that China has a huge and high marginal utility domestic demand for goods, and even if sanctioned, they wont run of people to sell to.
When I visited China, the expats told me that recreational drug supplychains were strictly compartmentalized. There was the supply of illicit drugs for Westerners (imported by the sons of Nigerian businessmen, the cliche went), the supply of illicit drugs for Chinese people (who only dealt with Chinese people), and then there were the vast array of drugs that are completely legal to get over the counter in China without a prescription (at a pharmacy or CTM shop) that would be controlled substances in a US pharmacy.
That the official line from the CCP was that China had no drug problems, no prostitution, a variety of other things†, and that there were no gay people in China; That these were all Western ailments.
Urban China is a panopticon state not only digitally, but culturally. Housing is much tighter than the US, walls thinner. Your underwear is hung out to dry in clear view. "Privacy" in terms of politeness norms mostly consists of pretending you don't see or hear a thing. Neighbors generally know a lot about what each other are doing. 7% of the population are Party members, and in Marxist-Leninist systems this connotes something closer to earning a military officer commission; The Party is not trivial to apply to, the Party is strictly regimented, Party rules are held above and before the civil law, Party members are expected to be informers and have a strict lawful-good orientation from the perspective of the regime. Penalties for commerce in illicit drugs are even more extreme than the US, and due process is not bound by the same presumptions.
There are lots of factors conspiring against the sort of informal US inner city street drug distribution being as big of a deal in China.
Disclaimer: All my information is more than a decade out of date, and was only ever a thin slice of opinions from mostly Westerners in some first tier cities.
† From an academic paper: "2 The Six Evils are prostitution, drugs, selling women and children, pornography, gambling, and feudal superstition. Criminal gangs, or triads, are often counted as a seventh evil. These vices represent impediments to modernization and throwbacks to social problems that were present prior to the Communist takeover. Elevation of a problem to an "evil" symbolizes that the Beijing regime will mount a "campaign" or "struggle" against it."
> hat the official line from the CCP was that China had no drug problems, no prostitution, a variety of other things
Reminds me of a book I read years ago about the Soviet Union. Officially prostitution didn't exist there either, so there were no laws on the books about it. Enforcement usually was around various "antisocial" laws and usually for the street-walkers. Crime in general was mostly fine, so long as it wasn't a threat to the state, against well-connected people, or otherwise visible.
No wonder Russia got so bad after the strong state dissipated.
> The Party is not trivial to apply to, the Party is strictly regimented, Party rules are held above and before the civil law, Party members are expected to be informers and have a strict lawful-good orientation from the perspective of the regime.
Once again, want to point out how this is simply American leadership not wanting to accept their loss and move on. For the first time in the history they're not being perceived as the "global leader", and that's not acceptable from their POV. Now it's just freaking out and hoping that some extreme policy changes will change the course. From my personal experience, most people act this way when they're in distress and can't think ahead because of all the externalities.
This isn't just ego. This is an impending existential issue.
America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace.
China will soon have the ability to take Taiwan and Korea and Japan. If that happens it's game over for any American interests and perhaps democracy as a whole.
Wargames[0] paint a grim picture of an upcoming conflict between China and America over Taiwan with the US barely winning at a great cost including the loss of many ships, aircraft, and the depletion of missile stocks.
The Chinese have a naval production of 260 times that of America and account for an ungodly amount of global steel production so they'll be able to bounce back faster than the US can. With a lead time for producing American missiles measured in months and years it will be just a matter of time before they take the countries in the region that are critical to American manufacturing if they're so inclined.
Do you think that global hegemony by force is long-term (centuries) sustainable at all?
What makes you confident that this could ever work on a longer term? The US is only ~5% of people globally, and I would expect any industrial/technological lead to melt over the years unless there is a monumental, continuous difference in spending (like what the US military did since WW2).
But I see no indication that you can keep that situation stable over the long term, and I honestly think that attempts like the current tariff approach don't help one bit in the long run while having massive harmful side effects (price inflation, loss of planning stability/soft power/productivity).
Global hegemony of the US is based not on 5% of people, rather the US sphere of influence. US, Canada, EU, Japan, Australia, South Korea, etc. The combination is immensely rich, powerful and advanced. Even more so when you keep India on board as well.
It at least stands a fighting chance if it wasn't the case that this alliance is being destroyed before our eyes.
I will admit that even an integrated alliance cannot push around China in the way it could decades ago.
> America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace.
That does not make sense.
Low value manufacturing has been disappearing from the US for decades and arguably the US -- up until the recent turmoil -- has continued to maintain its hegemony.
Great, but as I said, it does not make sense for the US to chase low value manufacturing.
Apparel, shoes, things you might find in a big box store -- zero sense. Low value manufacturing - leave it to China, Vietnam, India.
Jet engines? Advanced polymer materials? Batteries? All make sense! CHIPS act was intended to accelerate US IC R&D and manufacturing...which was cancelled.
I am concerned that the United States does not have the industrial capacity or institutional knowledge to make relatively simple but essential things for war.
In a protracted conflict with China will the US have the industrial capacity to produce enough ammunition? Does the US have a sufficient stockpile of ammunition to buy enough time to scale up the industrial capacity to manufacture more ammunition? Are there enough skilled people in the US who can teach more people to become skilled in this endeavour in time?
Does the US even have enough industrial capacity to produce enough iron, aluminum, nickel, copper and other such things to do this?
It is specifically "US hegemony" and not "western democracy hegemony" because the US is so extraordinarily powerful in economy and military.
Interests/culture with other democracies aligns well enough (and the power differential is large enough!) that US leadership is tolerated/supported.
But Canada, EU, Australia, Japan are NOT vasall states: If interests would clash and/or the US lose a lot of its relative power, those would cease being majority supporters and push for domestic interests instead.
Calling them "fairweather friends" might be too cynical but I think it's much more accurate than considering them integral parts of the US hegemony.
I think "centuries", plural, is too long for anything much to last since the industrial era. I'm not comfortable guessing past 2032 even without any questions about AI.
The United Kingdom of England and Scotland didn't exist until 1707, and even that was sans-Ireland until 1800.
And yet, even with the biggest empire the world had ever known, WW1 could only be won with the support of another huge empire (France) and the subsequent arrival of the USA; shortly after this, most of Ireland became semi-independent.
WW2 was "won", again with huge support, but a pyrrhic victory from the UK's point of view, and India soon after became independent. The Suez Crisis was 1956, and showed that the old empires of the UK (and France, Union française) were no longer economically hegemonic — even when working together — and the US had replaced them in this role.
Looking into the future, there's no way to guess. The more tech advances, the easier it becomes for a single person to cause enormous, world-altering impacts: hackers are already relevant on the geopolitical stage; there's good reason to think that quality of life is directly related to how much energy a person can process, but once you have sufficient energy per-capita, it's not hard to use a cyclotron to brute-force the purification of weapons grade uranium, or to transmute depleted uranium into plutonium; simple genetic manipulation has been a standard technique for first year biology students for at least two decades, and can be done in a home lab, and at some point we will have risks from someone trying to use this for evil rather than decorative bioluminescence. All these things can topple a hegemon that spends its tomorrows looking at yesterday's battlefield.
The UK continues to exist because it was replaced by a democratic American hegemony.
If an authoritarian country like China achieves hegemony the continued existence of democracy is at risk.
I want to live in a democratic world, not an authoritarian one.
America's democracy is a flawed one but of the two choices -- American hegemony or Chinese hegemony it is the best path to a flourishing global liberal democracy.
Can you foresee Chinese hegemony leading to increased democracy, individual property rights, due process, and rule of law?
No, I do not, but I also do not much stock in America's policy of spreading democracy. I believe that America will do best by setting a good example at home, and it is failing in this regard. China is obviously not a democracy.
My fear is that people will look at China's might and economic success and conclude that democracy is overrated.
France and Spain continue to exist and they were former hegemons. China has stably existed with long periods of turning inwards after more regional hedgemony.
It's really straight forward -- Do you consider things like liberal democracy, property rights, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of association, due process, and the rule of law to be essential features of society?
If you don't -- Chinese hegemony and the path it will lead the world down is the one for you.
If you do -- Then American hegemony with all its flaws is something worth fighting for.
It’s hard to convince people to think the US is in any position to protect those principles when the current administration is attacking each and every one them head on.
Being ideals, all of those ideals in reality are implemented with different tradeoffs in different nations with different risks going forward. Discussing in more detail how one arrives at that particular choice of options is more interesting than an end presentation of what looks like a fallacy of false dichotomy.
People value freedom in different ways. Personally, I would ally myself with tomorrow’s bully, rather than today’s. I understand the implications, but it looks like most of nations are shifting in the same manner.
One note, some of the things you’ve listed has been proven as “mostly on paper, once people get their way, mental gymnastics will overcome the reason” in the past month. For a bastion of “freedom and democracy”, it’s really not looking like one from outside.
Authorian to democracy transition happens more often than democracies come back from severe backslides, which... is basically never. I struggle to think of an example.
Stop and think about this for a moment -- do you think that China doesn't spread authoritarianism across the globe because they don't want to or simply because they can't do it yet?
One is actively threatening, and one may threaten in the future.
Also, I am Canadian, but I could also be Panamanian, or Danish. Maybe it would be different if I were Taiwanese or Vietnamese or Japanese, but, China is far away and playing nice, and America is close and not.
It’d be amazing, but I don’t have a lot to do with that one way or the other. If it happens, I might reconsider my stance on US v China. Right now it looks unlikely.
They were really close to not existing. France stopped existing, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, all stopped existing. China, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, New Guinea, Guam, East Timor, and Nauru all stopped existing.
It certainly was. You think nuclear weapons are less or more likely to have countries not exist anymore? If you believe MAD works, then countries can easily not exist the conventional warfare way. If you think MAD won't work, countries can easily not exist the nuclear war way. The only difference is speed.
Of your list I've been to France, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, France (you seem to have it twice for some reason), Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.
They all most definitely did not stop existing.
Also I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when you say the United Kingdom came really close to not existing.
I did. Austria, Belgium, France etc all existed during WW2. They were occupied, but they existed. Also lots of countries you listed definitely don't meet any sort of reasonable definition of "hegemon".
To pick another example, Singapore was a crown colony before the war, then they were occupied by Japan during WW2, then they were a single nation with what is now Malaysia, then in the 1960s they two countries became independent from each other. They didn't under any reasonable reading of the situation cease to exist and they also have never been a hegemon of any kind.
So what's your criteria for existing, dirt in the same place? Their governments were dissolved. That means they don't exist anymore. Does the confederacy exist since the boarders are the same and the dirt is in the same place? I would argue not.
>Also lots of countries you listed definitely don't meet any sort of reasonable definition of "hegemon".
I agree, just pointing out countries that no longer existed.
Genuinely, USA as of now is threat to both peace and democracy - both at home and abroad. Whether it manages to bring back manufacturing is irrelevant to that.
> America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace.
This argument is based on experiences in WWII, i.e. the previous war. You need to be cautious about basing military doctrine on the previous war. I’m not sure the next war will be won by churning out aircraft carriers.
I don't know why people keep thinking that China will attack Taiwan. It took HK and Macao without a shot. I think China is following Sun Tzu.
"subduing the enemy without fighting," is the epitome of strategic thinking in his book, The Art of War. This means achieving victory through cunning, deception, and maneuvering, rather than through direct confrontation and bloodshed"
They are increasing their military knowing that US military costs 4+x as much. It might be 4x better so don't fight. Just bankrupt the US. Trump wants a $1T military budget next year.
Why would China want to conquer the West? Buying what it wants is cheaper than an uncertain military battle fought with Nukes.
1) Historical claims - the CCP views Taiwan as a breakaway province and considers unification important. After the Chinese Civil War ended in 1948, the defeated Republic of China (ROC) government fled to Taiwan while the CCP took control of China.
2) Political legitimacy - successful unification would be a nationalist victory for the CCP
3) Strategic importance - key geographic asset. It lies in the first island chain, a line of US-aligned territories that can potentially restrict China's naval access to the Pacific. Control over Taiwan gives China more leverage over sea lanes critical to global trade and security influence in East Asia
4) Economic, technology bonus points - Taiwan is a global tech powerhouse, especially in semiconductors. TSMC is the world's leading chipmaker.
5) Global power dynamics - unification would weaken US influence in the region
1-2 really just do not matter; I can't imagine anyone in the CCP views that as more important than their own internal matters.
3 as I said, they can just negotiate and throw money at the problem; it's cheaper than fighting a war.
4 they can already buy hardware from them and was doing so just fine before US stepped in. DeepSeek seemed to do fine and China may likely surpass Western AI development in the near future
5 I don't see how that's the case when the US has very little presence in TW compared to SK or JP. Taiwan is a hair on a gorilla's right knee.
1 and 2 are the biggest reasons by far and matter a lot.
Dictators are people too, they are susceptible as anyone to their minds being poisoned by too much nationalism. And even if it wasn't for that they would still view it as a way to get back flagging support from a nationalistic public(even dictators need a minimal amount of support from the population).
They do see Taiwan as an internal matter, that's the problem they don't recognize this sovereignty and don't like or understand Democracy.
It's like Russia with Ukraine but they'll also claim Taiwan isn't a country because even most western nations technically don't recognize them. It makes me think we made a mistake not recognizing Taiwan as it's own country back in the 90s when China was less powerful.
Just answering your question "What I still don't get is what could China possibly want with Taiwan?".
If you don't believe the rational I sketched, informed by analyses such as that by the Council of Foreign Relations[1], you can also learn more by reading directly from China's Mission in the EU about the China One principle: http://eu.china-mission.gov.cn/eng/more/20220812Taiwan/20220...
Are you trying to evaluate their intelligence or predict their actions? I for one agree that attacking Taiwan is strategic folly. That doesn't mean they won't do it. Invading Ukraine was strategic folly too. The CCP are smarter than Putin, but not immune to mistakes. And again, look at their built strategy.
Regardless of the reasons (mostly political rather than rational, as my sibling comment laid out), the beach invasion barges we've been seeing are IMO a dead giveaway of intent and resolve to take Taiwan. Between that and American fecklessness, if I was Taiwanese I would be shitting my pants.
I'll charitably assume you meant first time in post-war history.
USA as "The Global leader" didn't emerge until after Europe was ravaged first by The Great War and then WWII.
No-one was looking toward the USA for leadership during The Great Game. Even by the time of the outbreak of WW1, the size of the USA's army was very small, half the size of the British army, which was itself considered small compared to the French and German armies.
US foreign policy was still inward looking, protectionist and isolationist until it could no longer ignore the case for war.
The foreign power projection really didn't kick into gear until 1945 onward and the determination not to let too much of the world fall to communist ideas.
I was a few drinks in on a sunny Tokyo day when I wrote it, my bad. But yeah, sorry, that’s what I meant. Basically since gaining the “leadership”, which you’re completely right about.
Regarding the potential to annoy small businesses, it’s actually pretty easy to hire a firm to represent you in the EU. You’ll need a lawyer at some point anyway so it’s often the same firm.
If we had the same requirements here in the US it would likely become the same.
Delaware / Ohio corporations? I think those already exist for 'business friendly' incorporation states. Might also be Nevada and Texas, though I'm more speculating there or recalling singular offhand cases I heard about.
That is really the big problem with the current policy in the US: it's completely unclear what the policy is and how long it will last. This is not a stable climate for investment. Would you invest in a country where the president plays Russian roulette with the economy?
Most corporations will wait it out. Corporations that have an established interest (like Big Tech) will bribe Trump to get the exemptions they need to continue their business. Everybody else will have to decide how much they will want to depend on such an openly corrupt system. There industries that see no problem in dealing with corrupt regimes.
> To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative.
American companies? Register for EU tax system?
I can buy from anyone in the US and worldwide for that matter, and as long as they're willing to figure out shipping they don't need to register anywhere, I can handle taxes myself when receiving.
Individuals (sole traders, contractors etc) can claim VAT rebates. You don’t have to have a lawyer or an accountant if you’re prepared to figure out the rules yourself.
Tl;Dr: The author makes a strong case for broader, higher tariffs but understands it is impossible to help American manufacturing knowing that the next administration will cave to China and Wall-street and immediately move to undo everything. The solution is to work together to make American protectionism work.
1. They are not high enough: Correct. Raise them more.
2. America's industrial supply chain is weak: That is why we need to bring the factories and resource extraction home.
3. We don't know how to make it: Perhaps we can steal the IP like China? We will figure it out.
4. The effective cost of labor in the US is higher than is looks: Then raise the tariffs higher.
5. We don't have the infrastructure to manufacture: You have to build it first, This will get cheaper and easier as we continue to bring industry home.
6. Made in America will take time: Blaming permitting time and Bureaucracy is a ridiculous excuse. The federal government can override all state and local requirements here. Its a choice to slow projects down.
7. Uncertainty and Complexity around tariffs: Democrats will have a hard time undoing progress if there is movement to reshore industry. War over Taiwan seems basically inevitable and this will harden resolve.
8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing: Most (well a very large and non-negligible percent of) Americans are going to loose their jobs because of AI. Most of us hate our jobs already, manufacturing will pay better. There are always endless service industries...like delivering food, if they do not like supervising a robotics controlled factory. It is disingenuous to imagine a return of American manufacturing without Huge AI and robotics investments. More factories will be lights out than the alternative. The jobs will be in servicing the robots, computer systems and quality control. We aren't talking Rosie the Riveter and the author must know it.
9. The labor does not exist to make good products: This is why there must be some discrimination over tariffs and why they should not be a simple even percentage. We can choose to bring back GPU manufacturing but pass on fast fashion. And during the process of negotiation we can give up those industries we do not want in exchange for support of a China embargo.
10. Automation will not save us: The author cannot imagine a world where manufacturing is not motivated by global trade. They fail to understand that it does not matter how much more productive China is when protectionist policies prevent trade. The goal is to get America to a place where it can manufacture everything it NEEDS on its own.
11. Americans file lawsuits: Good- this will increase the quality of goods we enjoy and we can get past the disposable foreign garbage that floods our markets.
12. enforcement will be uneven and manipulated: so get on board and help to improve it, stop undermining the attempt to help this country.
13. tariff policies structured in wrong way: Really not a terrible idea to have a disparity in tariff between input goods and finished goods but it is a half measure. We need the entire supply chain from resource harvesting, to tooling, to components to final finished manufacturing if we want to ensure national security in a world post-NATO.
14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball: Was there serious consequence to MJ trying his hand at baseball? We got through COVID. We have survived massive supply disruptions and the market has been pumping as hard as ever. If you are not currently retired it is absurd to worry about fluctuations in the stock market. And if you are, you likely invested in companies that sold out America.
> The goal is to get America to a place where it can manufacture everything it NEEDS on its own.
That is just incredibly stupid.
The only country that tries to do this is the hellhole known as North Korea and even they fail. No country is an island and doing this will just ensure America becomes a third world country or worse
This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.
Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.
> If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last
Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.
> 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated
Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's chicken tax trucks all over again.
> This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen
Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen so far. The budget is yet to come.
> If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.
This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.
(also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers, crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal migration control of hukou combined with media control?)