Saying that employees expecting a livable wage is "parasitizing earnings" is a pretty outrageous claim.
>It's an important difference for manufacturing physical things and it's why the West loses out to Asia in manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech.
The West lost out to Asia because their standard of living was so much lower that it was basically slave labor for a decade. You apparently have missed out on the repeated protests at factories across China with their workers demanding better working conditions and wages.
Expecting to be able to be able to do something more than just not starve to death isn't a western ideal, it's a human ideal. When the company you work for is printing money and you're living in poverty, something eventually gives. As has happened at literally every point in human history to date. Sometimes through violence, sometimes through government intervention. But the "unwashed masses" won't stay ignorant forever.
More defective programming in the wetware. Why is pay the only part of the equation? When Japan realized that their housing market was undermining living standards in the late 90’s, they cracked down on NIMBYism and took housing and land zoning authority away from cities. The housing market almost immediately corrected itself and housing prices in suburban Tokyo have been in free-fall ever since. You can get a 2000sqft family home for the equivalent of about 200k just 30 minutes outside downtown Tokyo today. We don’t do that because... why?
The West lost out to Asia because...
Again, more defective wetware. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan - these are democratic states with a high standard of living that have been able to control costs in ways that the West hasn’t. More people are homeless in the US per capita than any of those countries and it has everything to do with defective programming and talk of “liveable wages”. Of course everyone needs to be able to afford to live. But your own mistaken assumptions are emblematic of the political and social dysfunction of the West. Until we address that, no - those supply chains won’t be returning.
The world does exist outside of Silicon Valley. I can get exactly what you're describing in over half of this country, pick your state including the entirety of the midwest.
>Again, more defective wetware. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan - these are democratic states with a high standard of living that have been able to control costs in ways that the West hasn’t. More people are homeless in the US per capita than any of those countries and it has everything to do with defective programming and talk of “liveable wages”. Of course everyone needs to be able to afford to live. But your own mistaken assumptions are emblematic of the political and social dysfunction of the West. Until we address that, no - those supply chains won’t be returning.
The median income in South Korea is $3,000 less than the US. And they have universal healthcare.
Someone's wetware is defective, it isn't mine. You might want to do some research before showing up with that kind of condescending attitude.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
This is equivalent to saying sky-high housing prices in Tokyo didn't need fixing, since folks could always just live in Hokkaido--a pragmatic absurdity.
A city is a giant organism that needs people to play a variety of roles in order to thrive. All those people deserve (and arguably, for the health of the city, need) to be able to earn enough to live with some dignity. If only the wealthy can afford decent housing near a city, that city is no longer a functional community--it's a NIMBY bubble that creates a feedback loop of socioeconomic disparity.
It isn't even remotely the equivalent of saying that. The land mass of Japan is a fraction of the US, and the jobs are highly concentrated in their large cities. The US, as a whole, is nothing like that.
Regardless, it was a pointless argument for him to make in the first place, he was just moving goal posts by trying to equate calling employees parasites to San Francisco zoning laws. There was absolutely no point going down that path other than to distract from his original (disgusting) statement and implying that somehow people wanting more than minimum wage should really be blaming the Mayor of San Francisco for high housing prices. Which again... is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of the population of the US.
Most US industrial production is concentrated in about 5 regions. The US isn't that different.
Regardless, it was a pointless argument for him to make in the first place, he was just moving goal posts by trying to equate calling employees parasites to San Francisco zoning laws
Nonsense. Housing costs are the great misery-multiplier in the West and it isn't specific to SF. Look at Berlin or London or Paris or Toronto. Everywhere the dysfunction is the same and everywhere the working poor live with crushing housing insecurity, in spite of living in thriving job markets. With reasonable urban housing prices and rent most of the people in the "working poor" would advance to middle-class status and a lot of the inequality issues we have would be tractable. Instead, we just keep ignoring pricing theory and we just keep dumping more wealth into supply-constrained markets and we just keep wondering why these problems don't get any better.
There was absolutely no point going down that path other than to distract from his original (disgusting) statement and implying that somehow people wanting more than minimum wage
Ptooey! Pardon me, but I had to spit out all of the words you're stuffing in my mouth. I said nothing about minimum wage. You did. This is the same neurotic defective programming I'm talking about. The projection of intent in your response is what's disgusting.
Which again... is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of the population of the US.
Go look up what a lower-middle class family needs to pay for rent in suburbs in Atlanta or Austin or other cities with good job opportunities.
And besides, relaxing zoning is far from enough - you need to build vast and performant public transit systems, and in the case of Tokyo you need to make housing a depreciating asset.
South Korea was not a democratic state during most of its crucial growth period either - it was only after a revolution in the 80s, and even then democracy is a very gracious word for a country that was literally ruled by a cult for half a decade.
Taiwan also was in quasi-dictatorial KMT rule for most of its rise, and Japan to this day on the national level is basically ruled by the LDP in perpetuity.
But crucially, Japan, SK and Taiwan aren't where the kind of production China does happens. They are just as economically beholden to China as we are, sometimes moreso.
Yes - and as I said, this is the defective programming in minds of Westerners. The government does what we tell them to do and most people want this. It's everywhere - it's the entitlement to a suburban home and the subordination of all other interests, even the concept of personal property, in service to this. The fact that the media doesn't discuss these things in spite of the fact that smart people like Warren and others write about it is evidence of the bad programming.
South Korea was not a democratic state during most of its crucial growth period either - it was only after a revolution in the 80s, and even then democracy is a very gracious word for a country that was literally ruled by a cult for half a decade.
Taiwan also was in quasi-dictatorial KMT rule for most of its rise, and Japan to this day on the national level is basically ruled by the LDP in perpetuity.
Is it your contention that these countries aren't democratic and prosperous today? Is that your claim? Is your claim that their citizens live in near slavery, as the previous poster's was?
But crucially, Japan, SK and Taiwan aren't where the kind of production China does happens. They are just as economically beholden to China as we are, sometimes moreso.
The company that I worked at previously had to assess manufacturing alternatives to China in the wake of Trump's tariffs. Most of the parts on the BOM could reasonably be sourced by other Asian countries like those three at a small premium. US manufacturers either weren't available or were completely priced out. If the West could even just get their manufacturing costs in parity with those three - TW, SK, and JP - that in itself would be huge progress.
For reference, the US has roughly twice the manufacturing output of Japan.
The idea that manufacturing boomed there because the workers were almost slaves is fairly accurate.
It's much more to do with the steadily increasing complexity of products due to humanity having become very much a global species with heavy interdependence.
Look around the room you are sitting in: There will be items in it manufactured all over the world, from components also coming from all over the world.
That's not only how we manage to make these things so affordable, that's how we got them at this scale and complexity in the very first place.
The idea that a single country could emulate that, in complete isolation, is bluntly said childish. Isolationism like that doesn't lead to progress or innovation, it leads to North Korea style impoverished hermit kingdoms.
It's mind-boggling how few people seem to understand this reality in the year 2021, we are so interconnected that we can instantly communicate with somebody on the other side of the planet by just pulling a small device out of our pocket, it's considered the most normal thing in the world.
Instead we get shortsighted and small-minded nationalist blowback in the form of Brexit and "America first!" politics.
Even with the EU showing that economic cooperation and integration is one of the best and most constructive ways to ensure peace, stability and prosperity, particularly vs the alternative of alienation and vilification of whole nation states and their people as "enemies" that need to be fought in every way possible.
> The idea that a single country could emulate that, in complete isolation, is bluntly said childish.
Who is this “single country” straw man you are referring to? The western world is comprised of 50+ nations with over $40 trillion in GDP.
If you retool all of that to suddenly do something else, than you will be missing something else.
Because it's not like these 50+ nations with over $40 trillion in GDP are just sitting there and wondering what to do with all of that productivity, they are already plenty busy doing those things that got them all that GDP, the things they are good at.
That's why it's not really a "straw man", as the original argument implies globalized supply chains that emerged out of a given supply&demand could be artificially transplanted and rebuild in "the West", however that's even defined, to somehow reverse the reality of globalization.
Except that it is a straw man. This "childish" nation that seeks to thrive with no foreign trade ("in complete isolation") is a fiction inside your head that you're sharing as a target for your argument. It doesn't exist except as a straw man.
Nations such as China erect fig leaf regulatory regimes that are both ineffective and corrupt and are designed to attract Western capital that are avoiding the regulatory burdens (environmental regulation, labor regulation, etc.) in Western nations. These are Potemkin structures in that they offer plausibly deniable cover to the Western establishment for the purposes of trade agreements and other international instruments.
There is the other aspect of copyright violation and clones of products built when something is observed selling in the market. Still unresolved.
That said, when a few Chinese companies shipped consumer facing products that contained chemicals or other material that effectively poisoned people, my remembrance was that the management was executed.
Yes, those pesky employees should just STFU and be thankful for the scraps.
The people who outsourced things weren't simply trying to reduce gains made by unions, they were looking at price differences that could not exist in the US due to cost and standard of living. They certainly weren't looking at both sides of this in terms of long term effect either!
I don't want employees to get those earnings. I don't want investors or shareholders to get them either. I want consumers to get lower prices.
they were looking at price differences that could not exist in the US due to cost and standard of living
Again, what does that mean, "standard of living"? That we indulge industrial labor monopolies and pay more for manufactured goods than we need or want to like the 60's? How do you feel about paying $5000 for that computer? Or that we reward landlords and enrich landowners for participating in the creation of dysfunctional regulations?
I agree - Western industrialists have been able to play both sides of the equation - outsourcing production to places where industrial cost-control is effective and selling in to markets where there's a large upper-middle class of well-compensated credentialed professionals like us and entitled land-owners.
But I don't think that the solution is to give more power to industrial labor unions. My own pet solution is German worker councils - if only because they empower workers and make managers and industrialists accountable to employee needs, but at the same time can't coordinate labor demands across an industry. Managers can't ignore employee welfare but also employees can't gang up on consumers. But no one else wants this - industrialists hate the idea of inviting unions in to C-level planning and unions at their core want labor monopolies.
It means something very plain: nobody in the US would have accepted those wages to prevent profit-based outsourcing. So it wasn't a question of union parasites forcing people overseas, it just was something that would not have worked, structurally.
Consumers getting lower prices forever and ever is a single-dimension focus, like you otherwise seem to be decrying, since you're not answering any of the other questions there about how to prevent profiteering or powerful wealthy people from playing both sides. You're looking at just one side but proclaiming it as a secret insight that is the only way to move forward. I don't think worker councils would've done anything to let US production and labor prices compete with offshore labor prices in the past 50 years... if you can make t-shirts cheaper by stripping those labor costs to the bone, but the cost of everything else those workers need is untouched, how will it fix it?
When Westerners see an absurdly profitable company, they think, "why aren't they paying their employees more??!" and start a union to parasitize earnings.
When Asians (including the Japanese and Koreans) see an absurdly profitably company, they think, "why are they able to charge such high prices???!" and they kneecap the company's ability to exploit their market.
It's an important difference for manufacturing physical things and it's why the West loses out to Asia in manufacturing outside cutting-edge tech. It's defective wetware in our heads and how we think about wealth and creating value, so don't expect manufacturing supply chains to return to Western countries any time soon.