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At the very least, medical supplies and drugs manufacturing will get pulled back into each country. The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly cl

At the very least, medical supplies and drugs manufacturing will get pulled back into each country. The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic. Whether it means all manufacturing will move away from China or if it means that they will spread it globally, is an interesting question. China will have more incidents of pandemics for sure, because they haven't learned from the last one, and they won't learn from this one. It's certainly less efficient to have the same products being produced everywhere, but maybe ruthless efficiency isn't good for the world or its citizens, especially when it comes to income inequality.

remarkEon 7y ago
Got a link detailing what happened between Canada and the US? My understanding of the 3M debacle is that they use a distributor model for their consumables, and essentially "wash their hands" of what their distributors do once they have product in hand - and in the 3M case, the PPE was just going to the highest bidder, regardless of national origin.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  Not at all applicable in this case. Some federal authorities in the US attempted to halt some 3 million (or 500,000 depending on reports, it seems) purchased shipments destined for Canada from 3M. It was only the intervention at the highest level of the Canadian government that stopped this. It's worth pointing out that without Canadian nurses from Windsor who cross the border every day to work in Detroit hospitals, the healthcare system in Detroit wouldn't function. Or that apparently the pulp used to make the 3M masks comes from softwood from British Columbia. I'm sure Chrystia Freeland made these points and many others abundantly clear when she got on the phone with the Trump administration.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    Which is why Canada keeps losing. Canada loses more than the U.S. does it they stop exporting pulpwood. The U.S. can replace Canadian forestry products easily. Canada can't find a new buyer so easily. Detroit makes up one fifth of one percent of the US population. Windsor nurses aren't going to set national policy for the United States. Chrystia Freeland keeps bargaining from positions of absurd weakness and gets the expected results. Not sure why any Canadian likes her but maybe they care more about the perception of eye poking than actual productive results for the Canadian public.
    - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
      Having 1/10th the population of the United States, and correspondingly smaller economy, puts us in a weak position no matter what. I never voted Liberal, never have, but honestly, Freeland is decent. Trudeau's dad said it best, to Nixon, in 1969: "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt," said the late Pierre Trudeau.
  - petertodd 7y ago
    The N95 masks are made out of plastic, not pulp. I looked into the pulp claim, and it's true that pulp is used to make some types of lesser surgical masks. But there's no reason to think there is anything all that special about that pulp - it could be sourced from the US too at somewhat higher cost.
muro 7y ago
Taleb describes this well: globalism allows for optimization (cost, efficiency), but increases risk. To reduce risk, add redundancy (locally).
- te_chris 7y ago
  Sorry, trying not to nitpick, but you mean Globalisation, not globalism.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  In some ways it decreases risk though, too. The risk of war, specifically. The US and Chinese governments are far from friends but our economies are much too interconnected to allow either side to instigate too much of a disagreement. For the most part globalization is good but the pandemic has certainly highlighted the value of strategic redundancy or at least an emergency plan B.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Isn't WWI the usual counterargument to globalization reducing the risk of war? Or were the countries back then not interconnected enough?
    - elliekelly 7y ago
      That's a good point. Perhaps globalization alone only marginally reduces the risk and it's the combination of globalization + trust (or at least not mistrust) that reduces the likelihood of war. If that's the case then the US government's efforts to take supplies away from some of our closest allies is even more dangerous and short-sighted than I initially thought. A month ago I would have said a mask factory in Canada vs. US is nearly equal in terms of national security because Canada could be trusted to help in a time of crisis. I'm sure many Canadians felt the same way. Now I'm not so sure that's true and I certainly don't blame the Canadians.
    - vkou 7y ago
      No shortage of ink was spilled on the wishful thinking that globalization will prevent future wars... All through the 1910s.
wendyshu 7y ago
Trade barriers, price controls, stimulus, etc. -- remarkable how fast economic liberalism goes out the window in a crisis.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  What I get from this is it's remarkable how inept the model established by 'economic liberalism', with its just-in-time delivery and 'globalized production to cheapest labour zone' is at delivering on people's real needs in time of crisis. It's amazing how quickly the very proposition that we can get by without any state-level macroeconomic planning, -- and that the free market organically produces superior results -- is shown to be an ideological fantasy the moment s*hit hits the fan, with bare shelves and missing medical equipment and millions set to be without health insurance in the US... My opinion: States that retain some capacity of a planned economy will do better in scenarios like this. And with climate change becoming more serious, there will be more of these kinds of crisis.
  - vkou 7y ago
    > What I get from this is it's remarkable how inept the model established by 'economic liberalism', with its just-in-time delivery and 'globalized production to cheapest labour zone' is at delivering on people's real needs in time of crisis. Indeed. The PPE/toilet paper/tasting kit/flour shortages are becoming farcical at this point. It feels like the Soviet Union, where wonderful pronouncements about the plenitude of _______ are made, but then you discover otherwise at the grocery, or the doctor. Of course, in 2020, the solution to these problems is rationing. It's almost as if rationing is the only way to solve these kinds of shortages. But since the rationing is per-shopping visit, people just hoard by hitting up multiple stores in one shopping trip...
  - dorgo 7y ago
    > with bare shelves yes, this is a mystery. Free market should have fixed that. Even if the last roll of toilet paper would cost $1000000 the shelf should not be empty. Is the price regulated in some way?
FooBarWidget 7y ago
> China will have more incidents of pandemics for sure, because they haven't learned from the last one, and they won't learn from this one. I disagree. They took many months to report SARS to WHO, yes. But this time, reporting to WHO took ~5 days. It was discovered by dr Zhang Jixian on Dec 26, then reported to WHO on Dec 31. Then it took them about another week to sequence the genome and share it with the world. Plus the whole lockdown shows that they obviously made plans beforehand. The difference is huge. Take a look at this timeline by the American Medical Association: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130 We've now been able to trace the earliest case back to November, but nobody knew about it until late December, so that doesn't count as cover-up. It wasn't good enough, that's true. And before human-to-human transmission was confirmed, they should have been a bit faster, though I would argue they couldn't have been much more faster than about a week or two. Mistakes definitely have been made, and it still isn't good enough, but "they haven't learned and they won't learn" is quite simply not true, and is more based on prejudice than fact.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Plus the whole lockdown shows that they obviously made plans beforehand. And the hospitals. Not even China can just one day decide, out of the blue, to build two large-scale specialized hospitals in 10 days. Having that capability requires recognizing the need for it and preparing beforehand - which is another thing they've learned from the past pandemics.
- not_exactly__ 7y ago
  > But this time, reporting to WHO took ~5 days. It was discovered by dr Zhang Jixian on Dec 26, then reported to WHO on Dec 31. False. It took much longer than five days. The WHO was indeed notified on the 31st but the Chinese government organs knew about this long before. First CCTV report that I recall was around the 15th. First confirmed cases were early December. There’s even US intel reports dating back to November. But when this started, the Chinese system did what the Chinese system always does: try to save face and pretend all is okay. I do not share any optimism that this trait will change especially given the crushing blows to press freedom in the last ten years.
tomp 7y ago
To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA. Obviously, cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency, (1) more a question of fairness, (2) can be done domestically (low-cost immigrant workers) and (3) there's plenty of cheap workers worldwide, not just in China. Another potential advantage could be, factories are closer to natural resources, but it seems to me that that's not as much a question of efficiency, as it is of lax (enforcement of) environmental standards. Which I personally don't see as a net gain, even if it results in cheaper production. The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses. Again, IMO it would be better to have a local high-skilled population of engineers & entrepreneurs.
- chosenbreed37 7y ago
  > The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses. Again, IMO it would be better to have a local high-skilled population of engineers & entrepreneurs. There are probably advantages for many large corporations. e.g. Nike, Apple. Design in the US, manufacture in China (or equivalent), reap profits in the US What perhaps we should be thinking about is the second order effects of unfettered globalization. In the good times we only see the advantages. Ultimately, it looks like it is better to have some redundancy (in certain areas/sectors at least) to be able to deal with situations like these
  - jbay 7y ago
    Why do the design in the US? Chinese engineers are doing great designs themselves, and for less than American salaries... And they can visit right there on the factory floor, talking to the manufacturers directly about how to make their designs, in the same time zone and the same language... Are US engineers imagining the same ideas about being irreplaceable that an earlier generation of American machinists, tool-and-die experts, and manufacturing workers also did?
mc32 7y ago
There was a spat btwn Sweden and France too. A Swedish company kept masks in a French warehouse and wanted to ship them home because they finally needed them. France blocked it till it eventually relented.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  To explain: a Swedish company warehoused millions of masks in France. Two million of these masks (million each) were supposed to be sent to Spain and Italy. France had confiscated all of these masks. It took two weeks of pressure by Sweden (and other EU countries) for them to release the masks and for them to finally be sent to Spain and Italy.
justin66 7y ago
> The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic. I think the Canadians worked that out a few years ago when the Trump administration declared Canadian steel a security threat to the United States so they could impose trade restrictions in contravention of our treaty obligations.
- magicsmoke 7y ago
  The last time Canada had a military backstop against the US was when the British empire was still around, back in the 1920s when stuff like War Plan Red and Defence Scheme No. 1 was floating around about how a US-Canada/British war would play out. After WW2 and the collapse of the British empire, Canada had no military last resort against the US. 100 years is a hell of a long time to develop Stockholm syndrome. To be fair, before WW2 Canada was a protectorate of Britain as well. Such is the fate of smaller players on the world stage.
obmelvin 7y ago
Absolutely. For example, companies in New Zealand are pursuing a coronavirus vaccine. Do you think they really doubt the willingness of Moderna [0] (Boston based biotech company) to sell them the vaccine if it is successful? I'd be willing to bet that no, the primary concern is how long they would have to wait to buy it. [0] Arbitrary choice, replace with anyone who gets a vaccine past trials
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
People have friends, countries do not. The country that doesn't understand this sets up its own misery. Also no government that wants to remain in power is going to ship out goods that are already in short supply in their own country. Excess goods of course will continue to be traded for economic benefit.
Nasrudith 7y ago
We have seen a lot of talk about a single point of failure but localizing the manufacturing isn't a pancaea by any means as they also shut down during pandemics. The only things immune are automated and unable to be contaminated. Also technically it is better for income inequality in global terms if it converges to a global median. That is why so many hate it because they are the ones with their ox gored by reduced inequity and they don't even consider themselves that rich! I recognize that is a glib and misleading truth in many ways given PPI differences mean that a salary to be locally comfortable in one locale could lead to homeless starvation in another, that inequality exists both locally and globally. It is more a note about the irony than any statement of morals.
- mbrameld 7y ago
  > localizing the manufacturing isn't a pancaea by any means as they also shut down during pandemics But you eliminate other failure modes related to the pandemic that don't involve the plant physically not operating due to worker sickness or curve-flattening measures. If Canada produces their own masks then the US can't take them.
- int_19h 7y ago
  In this pandemic, we aren't shutting down things that are deemed essential - and any manufacturing facilities used in pandemic response would, of course, also be essential. Whereas the current state of affairs is that China just stops exporting masks, and there's nothing we can do about it.
arkades 7y ago
No, it won't. Speaking as someone who is currently spending his days sourcing medical equipment for his medical center: the cheapest US-based face shield costs nearly 3x what the average face shield in China does (the most expensive US face shield is >10x). Even with shipping hiccoughs and the desire to buy American, I can't justify purchasing 1/3 the personal protective equipment.
- nn3 7y ago
  In the current situation they probably don't have a lot of incentive to lower prices. But the question is: how much premium would you be willing to pay for a local supplier? If the american company was "only" 50% more expensive, would it work out after the pandemic?
  - arkades 7y ago
    Probably not? I mean, as a personal consumer, yes - I'd pay a premium on my own products to buy American. I do, in fact, do that when it's an option. As an organizational representative, though, that's iffier. Healthcare reimbursement is pretty heavily regulated (most of the wild price fluctuation you see has to do with numbers used for public-facing negotiations, not the contracted rates we actually ever get paid.) The only way we get by is by minimizing costs; we can't really increase revenue effectively, except by increasing volume of services. As it is, operating margins in hospitals tend to run at about 2% - it's razor, razor thin. Upping expenses 50% on "critical" items (which for us is, you know, a huge proportion of our stuff) would put us out of business. It's not something we can do unilaterally. Either it has be funded through an increase in funding earmarked for that, or something equivalent.
nswest23 7y ago
Or we could all just prepare for pandemics the way we’re supposed to. Otherwise moving manufacturing will be a band aid at best.
theseadroid 7y ago
I disagree that China has not learned from the last one: https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2020/jan/23/china-coronavirus-sars-cover-up-beijing-disease-dissent https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2020/jan/23... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0771-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0771-1
Holmes 6y ago
What they should do is come up with a trade pact for countries outside China and increase production there. Sort of like a Pacific-wide partnership...

remarkEon 7y ago

Got a link detailing what happened between Canada and the US? My understanding of the 3M debacle is that they use a distributor model for their consumables, and essentially "wash their hands" of what their distributors do once they have product in hand - and in the 3M case, the PPE was just going to the highest bidder, regardless of national origin.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Not at all applicable in this case. Some federal authorities in the US attempted to halt some 3 million (or 500,000 depending on reports, it seems) purchased shipments destined for Canada from 3M. It was only the intervention at the highest level of the Canadian government that stopped this. It's worth pointing out that without Canadian nurses from Windsor who cross the border every day to work in Detroit hospitals, the healthcare system in Detroit wouldn't function. Or that apparently the pulp used to make the 3M masks comes from softwood from British Columbia. I'm sure Chrystia Freeland made these points and many others abundantly clear when she got on the phone with the Trump administration.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Which is why Canada keeps losing. Canada loses more than the U.S. does it they stop exporting pulpwood. The U.S. can replace Canadian forestry products easily. Canada can't find a new buyer so easily. Detroit makes up one fifth of one percent of the US population. Windsor nurses aren't going to set national policy for the United States. Chrystia Freeland keeps bargaining from positions of absurd weakness and gets the expected results. Not sure why any Canadian likes her but maybe they care more about the perception of eye poking than actual productive results for the Canadian public.
  - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
    Having 1/10th the population of the United States, and correspondingly smaller economy, puts us in a weak position no matter what. I never voted Liberal, never have, but honestly, Freeland is decent. Trudeau's dad said it best, to Nixon, in 1969: "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt," said the late Pierre Trudeau.
- petertodd 7y ago
  The N95 masks are made out of plastic, not pulp. I looked into the pulp claim, and it's true that pulp is used to make some types of lesser surgical masks. But there's no reason to think there is anything all that special about that pulp - it could be sourced from the US too at somewhat higher cost.

muro 7y ago

Taleb describes this well: globalism allows for optimization (cost, efficiency), but increases risk. To reduce risk, add redundancy (locally).

te_chris 7y ago
Sorry, trying not to nitpick, but you mean Globalisation, not globalism.
elliekelly 7y ago
In some ways it decreases risk though, too. The risk of war, specifically. The US and Chinese governments are far from friends but our economies are much too interconnected to allow either side to instigate too much of a disagreement. For the most part globalization is good but the pandemic has certainly highlighted the value of strategic redundancy or at least an emergency plan B.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Isn't WWI the usual counterargument to globalization reducing the risk of war? Or were the countries back then not interconnected enough?
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    That's a good point. Perhaps globalization alone only marginally reduces the risk and it's the combination of globalization + trust (or at least not mistrust) that reduces the likelihood of war. If that's the case then the US government's efforts to take supplies away from some of our closest allies is even more dangerous and short-sighted than I initially thought. A month ago I would have said a mask factory in Canada vs. US is nearly equal in terms of national security because Canada could be trusted to help in a time of crisis. I'm sure many Canadians felt the same way. Now I'm not so sure that's true and I certainly don't blame the Canadians.
  - vkou 7y ago
    No shortage of ink was spilled on the wishful thinking that globalization will prevent future wars... All through the 1910s.

wendyshu 7y ago

Trade barriers, price controls, stimulus, etc. -- remarkable how fast economic liberalism goes out the window in a crisis.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago
What I get from this is it's remarkable how inept the model established by 'economic liberalism', with its just-in-time delivery and 'globalized production to cheapest labour zone' is at delivering on people's real needs in time of crisis. It's amazing how quickly the very proposition that we can get by without any state-level macroeconomic planning, -- and that the free market organically produces superior results -- is shown to be an ideological fantasy the moment s*hit hits the fan, with bare shelves and missing medical equipment and millions set to be without health insurance in the US... My opinion: States that retain some capacity of a planned economy will do better in scenarios like this. And with climate change becoming more serious, there will be more of these kinds of crisis.
- vkou 7y ago
  > What I get from this is it's remarkable how inept the model established by 'economic liberalism', with its just-in-time delivery and 'globalized production to cheapest labour zone' is at delivering on people's real needs in time of crisis. Indeed. The PPE/toilet paper/tasting kit/flour shortages are becoming farcical at this point. It feels like the Soviet Union, where wonderful pronouncements about the plenitude of _______ are made, but then you discover otherwise at the grocery, or the doctor. Of course, in 2020, the solution to these problems is rationing. It's almost as if rationing is the only way to solve these kinds of shortages. But since the rationing is per-shopping visit, people just hoard by hitting up multiple stores in one shopping trip...
- dorgo 7y ago
  > with bare shelves yes, this is a mystery. Free market should have fixed that. Even if the last roll of toilet paper would cost $1000000 the shelf should not be empty. Is the price regulated in some way?

FooBarWidget 7y ago

> China will have more incidents of pandemics for sure, because they haven't learned from the last one, and they won't learn from this one. I disagree. They took many months to report SARS to WHO, yes. But this time, reporting to WHO took ~5 days. It was discovered by dr Zhang Jixian on Dec 26, then reported to WHO on Dec 31. Then it took them about another week to sequence the genome and share it with the world. Plus the whole lockdown shows that they obviously made plans beforehand. The difference is huge. Take a look at this timeline by the American Medical Association: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130 We've now been able to trace the earliest case back to November, but nobody knew about it until late December, so that doesn't count as cover-up. It wasn't good enough, that's true. And before human-to-human transmission was confirmed, they should have been a bit faster, though I would argue they couldn't have been much more faster than about a week or two. Mistakes definitely have been made, and it still isn't good enough, but "they haven't learned and they won't learn" is quite simply not true, and is more based on prejudice than fact.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Plus the whole lockdown shows that they obviously made plans beforehand. And the hospitals. Not even China can just one day decide, out of the blue, to build two large-scale specialized hospitals in 10 days. Having that capability requires recognizing the need for it and preparing beforehand - which is another thing they've learned from the past pandemics.
not_exactly__ 7y ago
> But this time, reporting to WHO took ~5 days. It was discovered by dr Zhang Jixian on Dec 26, then reported to WHO on Dec 31. False. It took much longer than five days. The WHO was indeed notified on the 31st but the Chinese government organs knew about this long before. First CCTV report that I recall was around the 15th. First confirmed cases were early December. There’s even US intel reports dating back to November. But when this started, the Chinese system did what the Chinese system always does: try to save face and pretend all is okay. I do not share any optimism that this trait will change especially given the crushing blows to press freedom in the last ten years.

tomp 7y ago

To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA. Obviously, cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency, (1) more a question of fairness, (2) can be done domestically (low-cost immigrant workers) and (3) there's plenty of cheap workers worldwide, not just in China. Another potential advantage could be, factories are closer to natural resources, but it seems to me that that's not as much a question of efficiency, as it is of lax (enforcement of) environmental standards. Which I personally don't see as a net gain, even if it results in cheaper production. The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses. Again, IMO it would be better to have a local high-skilled population of engineers & entrepreneurs.

chosenbreed37 7y ago
> The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses. Again, IMO it would be better to have a local high-skilled population of engineers & entrepreneurs. There are probably advantages for many large corporations. e.g. Nike, Apple. Design in the US, manufacture in China (or equivalent), reap profits in the US What perhaps we should be thinking about is the second order effects of unfettered globalization. In the good times we only see the advantages. Ultimately, it looks like it is better to have some redundancy (in certain areas/sectors at least) to be able to deal with situations like these
- jbay 7y ago
  Why do the design in the US? Chinese engineers are doing great designs themselves, and for less than American salaries... And they can visit right there on the factory floor, talking to the manufacturers directly about how to make their designs, in the same time zone and the same language... Are US engineers imagining the same ideas about being irreplaceable that an earlier generation of American machinists, tool-and-die experts, and manufacturing workers also did?

mc32 7y ago

There was a spat btwn Sweden and France too. A Swedish company kept masks in a French warehouse and wanted to ship them home because they finally needed them. France blocked it till it eventually relented.

Mirioron 7y ago
To explain: a Swedish company warehoused millions of masks in France. Two million of these masks (million each) were supposed to be sent to Spain and Italy. France had confiscated all of these masks. It took two weeks of pressure by Sweden (and other EU countries) for them to release the masks and for them to finally be sent to Spain and Italy.

justin66 7y ago

> The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic. I think the Canadians worked that out a few years ago when the Trump administration declared Canadian steel a security threat to the United States so they could impose trade restrictions in contravention of our treaty obligations.

magicsmoke 7y ago
The last time Canada had a military backstop against the US was when the British empire was still around, back in the 1920s when stuff like War Plan Red and Defence Scheme No. 1 was floating around about how a US-Canada/British war would play out. After WW2 and the collapse of the British empire, Canada had no military last resort against the US. 100 years is a hell of a long time to develop Stockholm syndrome. To be fair, before WW2 Canada was a protectorate of Britain as well. Such is the fate of smaller players on the world stage.

obmelvin 7y ago

Absolutely. For example, companies in New Zealand are pursuing a coronavirus vaccine. Do you think they really doubt the willingness of Moderna [0] (Boston based biotech company) to sell them the vaccine if it is successful? I'd be willing to bet that no, the primary concern is how long they would have to wait to buy it. [0] Arbitrary choice, replace with anyone who gets a vaccine past trials

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

People have friends, countries do not. The country that doesn't understand this sets up its own misery. Also no government that wants to remain in power is going to ship out goods that are already in short supply in their own country. Excess goods of course will continue to be traded for economic benefit.

Nasrudith 7y ago

We have seen a lot of talk about a single point of failure but localizing the manufacturing isn't a pancaea by any means as they also shut down during pandemics. The only things immune are automated and unable to be contaminated. Also technically it is better for income inequality in global terms if it converges to a global median. That is why so many hate it because they are the ones with their ox gored by reduced inequity and they don't even consider themselves that rich! I recognize that is a glib and misleading truth in many ways given PPI differences mean that a salary to be locally comfortable in one locale could lead to homeless starvation in another, that inequality exists both locally and globally. It is more a note about the irony than any statement of morals.

mbrameld 7y ago
> localizing the manufacturing isn't a pancaea by any means as they also shut down during pandemics But you eliminate other failure modes related to the pandemic that don't involve the plant physically not operating due to worker sickness or curve-flattening measures. If Canada produces their own masks then the US can't take them.
int_19h 7y ago
In this pandemic, we aren't shutting down things that are deemed essential - and any manufacturing facilities used in pandemic response would, of course, also be essential. Whereas the current state of affairs is that China just stops exporting masks, and there's nothing we can do about it.

arkades 7y ago

No, it won't. Speaking as someone who is currently spending his days sourcing medical equipment for his medical center: the cheapest US-based face shield costs nearly 3x what the average face shield in China does (the most expensive US face shield is >10x). Even with shipping hiccoughs and the desire to buy American, I can't justify purchasing 1/3 the personal protective equipment.

nn3 7y ago
In the current situation they probably don't have a lot of incentive to lower prices. But the question is: how much premium would you be willing to pay for a local supplier? If the american company was "only" 50% more expensive, would it work out after the pandemic?
- arkades 7y ago
  Probably not? I mean, as a personal consumer, yes - I'd pay a premium on my own products to buy American. I do, in fact, do that when it's an option. As an organizational representative, though, that's iffier. Healthcare reimbursement is pretty heavily regulated (most of the wild price fluctuation you see has to do with numbers used for public-facing negotiations, not the contracted rates we actually ever get paid.) The only way we get by is by minimizing costs; we can't really increase revenue effectively, except by increasing volume of services. As it is, operating margins in hospitals tend to run at about 2% - it's razor, razor thin. Upping expenses 50% on "critical" items (which for us is, you know, a huge proportion of our stuff) would put us out of business. It's not something we can do unilaterally. Either it has be funded through an increase in funding earmarked for that, or something equivalent.

nswest23 7y ago

Or we could all just prepare for pandemics the way we’re supposed to. Otherwise moving manufacturing will be a band aid at best.

theseadroid 7y ago

I disagree that China has not learned from the last one: https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2020/jan/23/china-coronavirus-sars-cover-up-beijing-disease-dissent https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2020/jan/23... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0771-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0771-1

Holmes 6y ago

What they should do is come up with a trade pact for countries outside China and increase production there. Sort of like a Pacific-wide partnership...