Yeah I mean look at how China has grown the last 25 years with their fully open markets. </sarcasm>
Every approach has pluses and minuses. Putting your own first is common and healthy. The US has been failing to do this for some time now, and the economy is pinned in a corner with no easy way out.
China is now much more open then they were for a long time and as it happens their growth really started when they did that. The are 1.4 billion people who have embraced mostly 'typical capitalism' that is comparable to most countries in the world do. Its not like they are the first to have the idea of tarrifs or helping strategic industries. China has continental scale and 100s of millions of people living on the coast with billions of people in close distance to export to. Of course they are gone do well, the internal market they generate alone is absurdly gigantic.
Just like the US in the late 1800 century, they also had some protectionism. But it crazy to suggest that is the main reason why they were successful.
Nobody says government should make important technology investment, have some strategic supply chain and so on. However just blanked Trump style protectionism across random industries is not really the solution to anything.
> Putting your own first is common and healthy.
This is a myth of what protectionism achieves. You protect some sector but potentially damaging other sectors considerably. The US protects Flordia suger farmers and as a result everybody else pays more for sugar.
Most of the time its groups that can lobby effectively that get tariffs and those groups then profit against the benefit of everybody else.
The pushback from many whenever it’s suggested that the US should undergo a general trend to bring back manufacturing jobs to America always fascinates me. I always wonder what’s going through their heads when they prefer that things continue to be made on the other side of the world in a sweatshop paying their workers cents on the dollar to make cheap, soulless, throwaway goods in countries with terrible environmental laws, where they’ll then be shipped using a ton of fuel to get those goods across the world to us.
Whatever happened to taking pride in what we make and buy? Quality over quantity? Paying more for something better? Looking out for your neighbors and community by supporting their gainful employment? Independence from countries that literally hate us?
It wasn’t long ago at all that we were making most of the stuff we bought. It’s time to go back to that. Call out every company you see that doesn’t make their products in the USA and ask when they’re going to stop selling out their own neighbors just for a buck.
It is bordering on racist to suggest that because things are US produced they will be Quality over Quantity. What you actually need to win is Quality and Quantity. The same arrogance the US manufactures had about Japan and got their as kicked.
At seems like you have some delusional fantasy that the world could run on locally made artisanal goods and that those goods then magically have more 'soul' (whatever that is) and would be better for the environment. And even if that was the case, these products would still depend on international supply chain.
Its equally false to suggest that everything outside of the US is made in sweatshops. China doesn't dominate because of sweatshops, but because going down stream, mining, refining. These are complex operations, requiring lots of educated engineering, capital and vision. Look at a company like CATL that is powering much of the worlds EVs. This is a company that exploded in growth in a highly complex industry.
> Paying more for something better?
So like car from Japan, Europe and soon China?
Where are you getting those high quality electronics, batteries, refined rare earths and so on? Please tell me the US companies who produce all these amazing things that are so much better then those from the international competition
> It wasn’t long ago at all that we were making most of the stuff we bought.
Who is 'we'? The US? Your family? Are you advocating to go back to per modernism where every woman was doing 40h of weaving for the family to have cloth?
The US never produced everything it needed. In modern history international supply chains are a thing.
And this was most true after the US literally bombed the shit out of Europe and Japan. And China was destroyed by Japan. Soviets and China turned communist. Maybe do that again and you can again do that? Even then it was the US and the British empire.
> Call out every company you see that doesn’t make their products in the USA and ask when they’re going to stop selling out their own neighbors just for a buck.
You can't fix problem by calling people out. If you force companies to make 'everything local' then they will simply no longer be internationally competitive.
If you seriously think to just cut of the US from the rest of the world would lead to a higher standard of living you are sorely mistaken.
Your level of understanding of the connection between international trade and living standards seems to be totally lacking. Your suggestion to just 'guilt' (or assuming with fines or whatever) every company into buying all local is a surefire way to completely destroy the economy and the competitiveness of the US.
And its simply anti-democratic. People might be willing to pay 1% more if something is marketed as locally produced. But most of the time people don't actually care. And they never cared. People care about themselves and their families and their standard of live. If Japan makes better cars, they will not simply buy American because its made in Detroit. The same goes for everything else.
If you want to improve standards of living, just cutting yourself of from international trade is literally the worst thing to do.
Opening up trade doesn’t necessarily make everyone better off. If makes everyone better off overall, at least to first order, but if you have national security requirements for needing domestic capacity anyway, that may make a bigger difference.
And you can make trade better for everyone period if you redistribute some of the gains of trade to those that it makes worse off. But… we don’t always do that…
It's not protectionism. It's anti-fragility. It's having strong domestic capabilities to meet our every need and not suffer when the world is uncertain.
It's having jobs and prospects for our future generations. The hope Millennials and Gen Z have is dim, and I can point my finger at a huge contributing cause.
It only leaves lower tiered hierarchies worse off and only in the short term. Extracting value that way is never a long-term plan since the needs will either be fulfilled or the extraction will be complete and no more value can be created.
If people don't want to buy a product because it is inferior in some way, the solution isn't to ban superior products but to upgrade those inferior products to be superior again. And inferiority/superiority doesn't just mean quality, it can also mean features and the price-quality balance in itself. At the same time, the rest of the world doesn't "go away" if you construct an island within your borders that nobody is allowed to join, so at best it's going to end up in some sort of useless industrial-cold-war.
> It only leaves lower tiered hierarchies worse off and only in the short term.
This is the refrain of those who do not understand reflexivity, and third-order analysis.
This analysis is correct to the first and even second-order effects, but completely misses the importance of slipstreaming floor expertise / experience into design and engineering iterating, or even holistic support. This kind of economic caste system thinking just as surely shackles the US as the Indian social caste system shackles that nation with enormous untapped potential.
I routinely make LinkedIn friends and actively solicit input from the operations people in all of my client organizations, and this has repaid me many times over. Where others within their very own organizations, much less outside consultants, snub these "lower tiered hierarchies", shedding light upon their experiences and expertise has taught me many valuable lessons about software design, debugging, implementation, and product management, among many other areas.
I learned to do this from reading about the nuts and bolts of how Japanese automakers applied Deming's quality principles. IMHO the buried lede in those stories wasn't all the charts and reports artifacts (similar to the Agile artifacts we use in our industry), but to my mind it was the attitudinal changes that flew in the face of common human hierarchical predispositions. Because it is a massive organizational cultural shift often enmeshed in wider prevailing ethnographic contexts, it is one of the most difficult leadership-led transformations to conduct.
One can get away with the hollowing out effect in the beginning, and if there is sufficient "mass" of value to strip in the industry to mask the effect, it can even be carried out through a couple more product and technology cycles to second-order ramifications as various affiliated supply chains are also stripped out. But once it reaches third-order ramifications often loftily projected as, "while we lead the toiling-for-peanuts offshore masses with our brilliant sales/marketing/product/accounting insights, the supercharged stock bonuses will just roll on in!", it is when reality slaps them in the face and they find out that those same "junior", "lower tiered hierarchies" toss aside the "onshore leadership" to cut out the middlemen to the customers.
After one is never too proud nor too lofty to lead from the front, be happily willing to (if even for a moment) do anything one would ask their direct reports or even their recursive direct reports to do, so to speak "sleep on the factory floor" if need be, a torrent of insights that would normally do not occur during design and engineering stages become available.
