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American Disruption

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Re: American Disruption

#11

Post by Jochim »

neogodless wrote: post #3
stevenwoo wrote: post #2

Can anyone give a manufacturing example for the phenomena for which he uses Uber? It seems off to use a gig economy company in this article with its tariffs/manufacturing focus.

> the company spent its early years building its core technology and delivering a high-end experience with significantly higher prices than incumbent taxi companies. Eventually, though, the exact same technology was deployed to deliver a lower-priced experience to a significantly broader customer base; said customer base was brought on board at zero marginal cost Ironically, this was the plan laid out for Tesla early…

The Uber example is also an outright lie.

They acquired those customers by burning billions of dollars to deliver rides below the cost of providing them.

Then they raised prices beyond their competition to account for their ridiculous overheads.

Re: American Disruption

#12

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #7
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #4

Sure, but aren't we past rational debate on this point? Not only are the new trade policies irrational, it's quite possible that they're intentionally irrational as a bargaining or maneuvering tactic. We're not going to reason or argue our way out of this one. As I commented yesterday, there's a playbook for reshoring that's being totally ignored: First you invite industry to reshore via subsidies and preferential ac…

I don’t think this playbook works for complex products. Before every component needed for an iPhone is locally manufactured, the overseas competitor manufacturers of those components would be many generations further. You’d be competing with the whole world.

The designers of the chips in the iPhone are basically US entities. (And more generally, Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, etc. are US companies.) They can gradually limit foreign production and re-shore with subsidies.

Sure, foreign chip manufacturers might gain a leg up, but it might not be totally ruinous. There's a way to do it that's smooth, gradual, and mostly painless.

Re: American Disruption

#13

Post by morsecodist »

Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is to maintain competitiveness with China in manufacturing for both economic and security reasons.

This may be important to the author but it isn't a top priority for the administration. Competitiveness with China and onshoring manufacturing are certainly talking points but they is not stated as the primary motivation for the tariffs. The administration characterizes trade imbalances as countries taking advantage of us. The tariffs are targeted based on trade imbalance. If manufacturing was the goal why apply tariffs to things like raw materials? If competition with China is the goal why apply tariffs to South Korea or Japan, pushing them closer into China's orbit? These are just not the goals of the tariffs and neither their rhetoric or actions suggest that they are.

People have a hard time dealing with values and motivations that are wildly different from their own so they construct all sorts of parallel explanations and defend those instead. But talking about these explanations is non sequitur. It is like the administration adopted a policy of jailing all Capricorns and only Capricorns and people started writing think pieces about how the criminal justice system would be more efficient if they focused on programs to reduce recidivism.

Re: American Disruption

#14

Post by eduction »

This essay seems to be built on a flawed analogy.

Clayton Christensen’s model of disruption (or models, counting his low end version) involves innovation by both the incumbent and disruptor. The disruptor’s innovation is immediately appealing to the low end of the market while the incumbent is focused on the high end.

His example of Hong Kong factories manufacturing Fairchild chips doesn’t fit this template even though he claims it does. It’s just targeting the low end of the market with lower prices. That’s just basic business competition, it’s not disruption as he defined it in this piece.

Side note, I’ve never been a big fan of his giant block quotes, especially when he does not bother to summarize them much. It’s asking the reader to connect to the dots and arrive at the insights he is supposed to be providing.)

Re: American Disruption

#15

Post by alabastervlog »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #8
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #4

Sure, but aren't we past rational debate on this point? Not only are the new trade policies irrational, it's quite possible that they're intentionally irrational as a bargaining or maneuvering tactic. We're not going to reason or argue our way out of this one. As I commented yesterday, there's a playbook for reshoring that's being totally ignored: First you invite industry to reshore via subsidies and preferential ac…

Preferences are independent of rationality, surely? If a guy with a finite lifespan has a preference for autarky, expansionist military invasions, racial hierarchies and a secret police regardless of the consequences and then rationally pursues those preferences in ways that are likely to bring them about before his death of old age, the guy doesn't qualify for the category "delusional" and instead fits into one of t…

One of his preferred "gurus" is a guy who pushed one of those self-help bullshit "if you just believe hard enough, you'll manifest your desires!" proto- The Secret frameworks, and he does appear to operate that way—strident bluster, declaring defeats and "white peace" as unqualified victories, willfully ignoring inconvenient facts, all that stuff. Like, look at the totally-bizarre sharpie incident in his first term, for a trivial but illustrative example.

However, it's worked out well for him personally (less so for those he does business with, or near, or for the US...) so despite being on-paper delusional, I admit the waters are rather muddied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Vincent_Peale#Influence

Re: American Disruption

#16

Post by af78 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #4

Sure, but aren't we past rational debate on this point? Not only are the new trade policies irrational, it's quite possible that they're intentionally irrational as a bargaining or maneuvering tactic. We're not going to reason or argue our way out of this one. As I commented yesterday, there's a playbook for reshoring that's being totally ignored: First you invite industry to reshore via subsidies and preferential ac…

Behaving irrationally, intentionally or not, is scaring investors away rather than attracting them.

Seen from abroad, trust in the rule of law and property rights has been eroded. Today Trump sends randos to El Salvador, maybe tomorrow he will nationalize enterprises or other assets, with no meaningful opposition from the Congress and the judiciary? Germany is already pulling gold from the US, that had been stored there for decades. Better safe than sorry.

Re: American Disruption

#17

Post by clodushid »

morsecodist wrote: post #13

Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is…

The primary architect of trumps tariff strategy in his first and second term is Peter Navarro. If you want to understand the tariffs today, just go read one of his many books. His goals are pretty simple:

reindustriaize America

No more free trade

China is evil and the worlds enemy

It should be no surprise to anyone observing trump since he took office that the end goal was always to decouple from China.

Re: American Disruption

#18

Post by matwood »

neogodless wrote: post #6
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #4

Sure, but aren't we past rational debate on this point? Not only are the new trade policies irrational, it's quite possible that they're intentionally irrational as a bargaining or maneuvering tactic. We're not going to reason or argue our way out of this one. As I commented yesterday, there's a playbook for reshoring that's being totally ignored: First you invite industry to reshore via subsidies and preferential ac…

Hopefully we're never past rational debate. I mean, the people making decisions might be well past rational, but hopefully there's always a contingent of people putting deep, rational thought into what might be the best plan to utilize going forward. And hopefully good ideas keep spreading and somehow find their way back to the top. Before it's too late.

The problem when someone only hires sycophants is that competence is pretty far down the list of requirements. And, even if someone is competent they won't share dissenting ideas out of fear they'll end up replaced by another sycophant.

Re: American Disruption

#20

Post by exe34 »

morsecodist wrote: post #13

Talking about the merits of these tariffs kind of misses the point. The person who wrote this article is very smart. I am sure they are smarter than I am. He has produced a pretty solid analysis of trade policy. But in articles like this people ascribe their own motivations and goals to the tariffs that aren't actually there. Buried in this article is the assumption that the motivation of tariffs and trade policy is…

> The administration characterizes trade imbalances as countries taking advantage of us.

it seems likely to me that they know their voting base is too dumb to understand, so they make up stuff that sounds good to get the support.

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