611–620 of 1001 posts
Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…
Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…
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The opinions of "elites" simply don't matter. There's only one guy who matters when it comes to policy now. And he's not known for his thinking abilities
You don't actually think he's making these decisions himself do you? He has advisors for these things.
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+1, exactly. Focusing too much in the money makes you forget about the power. At a national leadership level, there isn't much power in having a local Warhammer industry, fishing is much more strategic. In broad terms, this is related to the error the USA made. Manufacturing in China was a very profitable deal for the USA. A lot of companies view labour first and foremost as expense, wealth as as the goal, and power…
This is a bit harsh: the USA didn't devalue labor in general, just manufacturing. They hired software engineers from all over the world, along with a lot of higher value engineering and product development jobs. The error the USA made was in pushing the workforce up the value chain faster than everyone could handle, and a lot of Americans got left behind. China is moving up the value chain also, they are being forced…
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That doesn’t really make sense to me. The market cares about dollar returned vs dollar invested. If some piece in the middle of the chain goes up and end customer prices go up as well, that doesn’t directly affect investors at all. The way it could and likely will affect investors is if people start buying fewer shoes, but that is a different process than what you are describing. If I’m off base can you help me under…
If you can make $5k/year by investing $100k into shoe-selling, then those profits have to rise at the same rate as base costs, otherwise, people will just invest into eggplant-selling, instead. Another perspective is that Footlocker would sell you those $25 Nikes for $300 if they could-- but if they tried, someone else would get active in the retail business and invest into a slightly less profitable operation (with…
Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…
> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…
Warhammer employs hundreds, enriches a half dozen and addicts a millions.
I'd rather keep the fishermen
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There are two parts to the fishing thing. From a pure economic perspective, fishing is insignificant. But within living memory obtaining food was a national security issue for the UK (during world war II). In a world in which states look not to grow their economy, but to harm others - and guess what, that's where we just arrived - not all industries can be considered purely on their revenue. Man cannot live on warham…
A precision injection moulding factory can (I assume) relatively quickly start producing other plastic parts for military use. Post-Brexit, there's now increased incentive for Games Workshop to build their next factory in the EU. (Games Workshop is one company, but this applies to every manufacturing company in the UK.)
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This is a bit harsh: the USA didn't devalue labor in general, just manufacturing. They hired software engineers from all over the world, along with a lot of higher value engineering and product development jobs. The error the USA made was in pushing the workforce up the value chain faster than everyone could handle, and a lot of Americans got left behind. China is moving up the value chain also, they are being forced…
A lot of our “value chain” is bullshit. If and when China becomes twice as big an economy as the US, much of our “edge” in marketing, finance, and services isn’t going to mean squat. E.g. how much “GDP” will evaporate overnight when American universities no longer have the cachet that comes along with being the best universities in America?
No it isn't, productivity has to increase, that's why we constantly get rid of jobs that do not provide much value. People want more money, and the only way we get there is with more productivity (doing jobs that make more money).
> If and when China becomes twice as big an economy as the US, much of our “edge” in marketing, finance, and services isn’t going to mean squat.
China gets to 2X our GDP by doing what we basically did in the 90s, so you are definitely right! They will have their own marketing, financing and services. The only difference is that they won't need to outsource manufacturing to China (well, they are outsourcing it a bit now, but also investing tons in automation).
> E.g. how much “GDP” will evaporate overnight when American universities no longer have the cachet that comes along with being the best universities in America?
I don't know what you are ranting about, but I get the feeling that if I did know what you were saying here I would probably agree with you.
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The US appears to be trying to end the reserve dollars. Something that surprisingly few people have mentioned recently is that having the biggest trade deficit is the same thing as being the global reserve currency . Because they're the same thing, ending one of them also ends the other. There does seem to be some sort of cycle in play: first a slave-driver-type economy creates a whole lot of wealth, then people get…
> Something that surprisingly few people have mentioned recently is that having the biggest trade deficit is the same thing as being the global reserve currency. Can you explain this a little more? Why does having a trade deficit make your currency more valuable? My naive assumption is it would put more dollars in other countries, so they don't need them as much, making dollars less valuable.
Its the other way around, having the reserve currency drives demand for it and therefore imports are cheap and budgetary deficits are free (since interest rates are low).
You get free stuff and free debt, but over time your industry collapses
Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…
Another thing is when you basically have 10 Japan or 20 South Korea, which is what China is with the 1bi population.
Which means not that they will have a lot of consumers, but way more competitive companies in general (if they continue growing as is).