18 ms·

Is The World Deglobalising?

154 points by gscott 5y ago

Ericson2314 5y ago
It would be good to see some breakdown of "real" flows of stuff vs valuations. A lot of east asian exports are low margin, and a lot of US assets have crazily increased in value. This may make the US appear more self-contained, but doesn't reflect the actual material self-sufficiency of the place. The mythical "cost of embargo" can tell very different story.
- veritascap 5y ago
  So low margin high volume versus lower volume high margin? Anyone have ideas where to look for data on that? Or what a decent proxy could be?
tomjen3 5y ago
I am biased, but I certainly hope so. I work in a company that makes stuff for robots and if that manufacturing comes back from China, no matter where it then goes to, the market for robots is going to go up massively. Because there is no way you can produce most of the stuff we make in China cost effectively without massive number of robots.
- pas 5y ago
  It's a tough cookie either way. China is cheap because it doesn't have the same safety regulations (overtime, social security, healthcare insurance, occupational safety, and so on). It needs a more advanced economy (that has a better input-output value ratio, so its productivity needs to increase) for it to be able to factor in the cost of those "luxuries". of course a big problem is that the created economic productivity is not distributed in an equitable way, it tends to be captured by the elites (let's say Jack Ma, but of course the political elite is even more powerful and rich in many aspects). automation tends to amplify this effect. (capital vs labor) If some countries/regions decide to not do business with China then that will have a twofold effect. First China loses business, which means unemployment, internal tensions, and likely fallback to producing less valuable things, which means that there will be even less economic surplus to spend on those "luxuries". And second, that region now needs to find different trade partners, which is a disruption in trade, supply chains, which has a cost. (Which could be spent on a lot of other things, eg. education, infrastructure.) Of course this is hard, because it's a coordination problem. Were the participants able to find a good solution magically then it'd be great, but usually their own short/medium term interests override the long term ones.
danrl 5y ago
Peter Zeihan argues that we already started with deglobalizing the world. His arguments are quite convincing. Life After Globalization (Peter Zeihan) - 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kch4Z1GpNOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kch4Z1GpNOQ
- GravitasFailure 5y ago
  Zeihan made a particularly interesting point about 3D printing in one of his talks: Manufacturing is increasingly being moved closer to the consumer. Toyota pioneered a lot of this with their JIT system, moving the factories to the region the vehicles are being sold in, and retooling as needed based on what was selling. While we've seen a lot of failures of JIT in the past two years, we've also seen a lot of failures due to centralization and long supply chains, so the idea of deglobalization is probably making a lot of sense to a lot of people right now.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    How does that square with the known vast benefits of economies of scale? That is why industries are dominated by megaconglomerates as opposed to a vast number of small practices. Contrast that to say law firms and private practices of doctors. While there may be some law offices who warrant their own skyscrapers they don't come close to matching even insurance companies in centralization. Different situations may call for different approaches. Logistically difficult and custom goods are where 3D printing and automated mills work especially well, and time sensitivity favor local approaches. If you make eyeglasses to order 99.99% of the time, prosthetics or similar then it makes sense.
    - vineyardmike 5y ago
      Laws around law firm ownership also limits their size. They can’t have share holders and traditional corporate structures as we typically see in big biz.
      - yourapostasy 5y ago
ajmurmann 5y ago
I hope that this isn't because more of the population is adopting a zero-sum view which increases the likelihood of war.
gvv 5y ago
I hope so at least in some regard such as manufacturing, self reliance on resources and intelectual capital.
aiscapehumanity 5y ago
The metaverse is a new kind of globalization
- aiscapehumanity 5y ago
  I meant this in a positive way. Thanks for the negative karma, clowns
foofoo4u 5y ago
> The global pandemic, which started in manufacturing-centric China, continues to disrupt supply chains and draw attention from politicians calling for a reshoring of production. The United States is not alone; calls for reshoring can be heard around the world: in France, Germany, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. > But is reshoring the answer to a nation’s manufacturing woes? Not completely. Better than reshoring is the broader concept of resilience — a manufacturing sector that can adjust in real time to supply chain disruptions anywhere while minimizing any loss to customers. > The pandemic is inducing actions by U.S. manufacturers to enhance the resilience of their supply chains. And the government is not standing idly by. Relevant excerpts on the topic from [The Emerging American Industrial Policy By Keith B. Belton ](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-emerging-american-industrial-policy/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-emerging-amer...)
- XorNot 5y ago
  Supply chain resiliency has less to do with "reshoring" then it does about common-sense redundancy to just-in-time manufacturing chains. Toyota understood this and has faired better then most through the pandemic, whereas most others stalled out and had no real recovery plans. It's also crucial to note that the car companies in particular have managed to demonstrate a shocking lack of foresight here: half the problem with the chip shortage was executive panic at gasp maybe having old stock on hand, and completely mispredicting that car sales would go up and not down.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Re-shoring something like electronics manufacturing is going to be quite difficult for those countries that outsourced it all to China. For starters, you need factories i.e. physical buildings. Pick and place machines, machine shops for making precision plastic moulds, the trained personnel to run them and re-shoring all the knowledge for how things work and how to keep them working. The entire supply chain for electronic components will also have to be re-shored as well. A lot of that depends on a local network effect (why Hong Kong was successful and why Shenzhen is successful). In Australia we still have small pockets of electronic manufacturing (most of which was decimated by Japanese imports in the 1970s) so we are 50+ years from when things like that were routinely made here and rebuilding that is not going to happen at the stroke of a pen, it's going to require a lot of investment. That is something governments used to do quite well but the neo-liberal political movement not only killed manufacturing in this country, but also makes it impossible to restart it. It costs me 1/10th of the price to have our circuit board made in China compared to the quotes I had from Australian factories. That is the kind of price difference that would kill my product stone dead.
ivanstame 5y ago
I don't see a problem with that.
friedman23 5y ago
I think it's natural that the world is deglobalizing. As we move away from fossil fuels a massive amount of trade that flows across borders will disappear in the next 30 or so years.
- anshumankmr 5y ago
  If you think fossil fuels will vanish from our lives in the next 30 years, think again. For sure, more Developed countries will make more significant strides for sure but the way I see it we are surrounded by products that use fossil fuels. Plastics are an easy example that are used in almost every industry in one form or another in our daily lives. Petroleum based products are also used in several industries. For example, the electronic, the pharma industry (https://orionmagazine.org/article/medicine-after-oil/ https://orionmagazine.org/article/medicine-after-oil/) and the manufacturing industry etc. The elephant in the room is cars and the power generation. Cars will become increasingly electrical for sure but in colder climates, I don't see how the electric cars are yet able to solve that issue . This is due to the fact that electric cars are simply not as good as in warmer climates(https://www.insidehook.com/article/vehicles/can-electric-cars-survive-winter https://www.insidehook.com/article/vehicles/can-electric-car...). Power generation is probably going to have a major revolution quite possible but unfortunately, many people are still against nuclear power and wind/solar will require massive investments that I only see developed countries being capable of doing so. I can't say we will be able to remove fossil fuels from our lives so quickly considering our whole society has been extremely dependent on it. Especially not so soon.
  - friedman23 5y ago
    I never said vanish. Transportation makes up a massive proportion of fossil fuel use and many states in the US are outright banning the use of fossil fuels for transportation within the next decade. So I don't think I'm reaching when I say that in the next 30 years fossil fuel use will disappear for transportation.
    - richwater 5y ago
      > many states in the US are outright banning the use of fossil fuels for transportation within the next decade Source?
whatever1 5y ago
Raw materials are not abundant everywhere, so globalization is here to stay (even if that means that regional wars will be fought to secure supply of these materials). Maybe the value of the materials traded will erode since we will value tech and virtual “materials” higher and higher, but the actual flows of physical materials cannot go back to where they were 50 years ago, unless a global war erupts and the global standard of living and population goes to hell.
markus_zhang 5y ago
I think globalization may setback but in long term it will pick up. Back in late 19th century Britain managed to pull off a globalization through empire building, advancements of technology as well as global trading. The two world wars and the cold war put globalization on hold for seventy years, but then US picked it up and started the second trend, which gradually see setback after the financial crisis.
- jcadam 5y ago
  Hey, it's possibly cyclical. The end of the Pax Romana resulted in the collapse of Mediterranean trade for centuries - if you think of the ancient mediterranean world as a smaller form of "global" there might be some historical parallels to the waning of the current "system."
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    It looks like it may have reached a plateau. I would be surprised it it reversed, especially with the anti-immigration sentiment that seems so common in the developed world right now. https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1421115868117979137 https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1421115868117979137
  - anshumankmr 5y ago
    I personally fear that in a de-globalized world, there is a higher chance of a third World War. Of course, there is the policy of M.A.D, but that seems like such a weird place to be in.
    - jcadam 5y ago
      Absolutely. I think we're returning to a multi-polar situation like we had prior to WWI. Without a clear global hegemon - great power competition could definitely lead to a major war.
      - anshumankmr 5y ago
        To be honest, we are already in a multi polar situation. USA is still a superpower, China is definitely one. Russia is not "super" but it is reemerging as a force to contend with. The OPEC Countries are one bloc of their own. Then there are places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba that are somehow immune to foreign pressure.Then there are countries like India where we play on many sides.
kumarvvr 5y ago
De-globalizing certainly helps in all round development of all countries and allows for much more dynamic relationships between countries. It helps build local economies and lets countries make best use of local resources. What Globalization should have been is a butter smooth system to trade goods and services. Concentrating all manufacturing in China leads to power centralization, as is evident, and forms the basis of creation of another hegemony. The effectiveness of military power goes only so far. There is no realistic scenario where the US and China go to war. So China has great leverage and will continually nibble its way to global dominance.
- dash2 5y ago
  Why wouldn't the US and China go to war over Taiwan? Both countries plan for that possibility. China perceives the US as weak, divided and unwilling to sacrifice for foreign wars. It has said it wants to resolve the Taiwan issue.
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    US can't afford to not go to war if China invades Taiwan. Otherwise they will lose access to much of the semiconductors supply and also they will become irrelevant for international affairs. Nobody will care about US anymore. But China also can't afford to invade Taiwan. That will be a major economic and political disaster. It would bring China back 20 years. Regardless of actually winning the war or not.
    - mrep 5y ago
      How would the US lose access without all other countries also losing access putting everyone on equal footing? I highly doubt the foundries would survive an invasion.
    - esturk 5y ago
      The foundries aren't nearly the lifeline people think it is. If China uses sneak attacks to destroy all the foundries, then what? Do you suppose US won't intervene? If US will still intervene then it was never the critical piece to begin with.
booleandilemma 5y ago
Whenever this topic comes up I think of the opening lines to Romance of the Three Kingdoms: The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.
atlgator 5y ago
COVID and the resulting supply chain issues certainly highlighted the need to produce basic necessities (e.g. food, medical supplies, antibiotics) rather than rely on imports. It remains to be seen whether it goes further than that.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  Lack of redundancy got exposed. To globalize or not to globalize is entirely different from relying on one source for everything. We seriously have no where else to get semiconductors other than Taiwan? That has absolutely nothing to do with the pros/cons of globalizing and everything to do with having a bus-factor of one.
pphysch 5y ago
Globalization is a bell that can't be unrung, but neoliberal globalism (financial & cultural) is definitely in retreat.
webZero 5y ago
I am happy this is happening. Doing business with authoritarian governments is a very very bad idea and the policymakers should have known this. I have been avoiding stuff that comes from China for many years it makes feel happy you know that i am not funding the biggest global mafia
bullen 5y ago
Samsung phones are made in Vietnam?! Talking about those I just fixed my Play installation by "uninstalling" in settings, which really reinstalls the original one and re-updates. This is the second time my Android phone nukes itself (by popping up "App is crashing, closing it" over and over again) without any interaction from me, because of some hidden update; last time it was Chrome, and the fix is always to reinstall the offending app which not a single help page in the whole internet describes! I'm building my own phone: http://radiomesh.org http://radiomesh.org
gremloni 5y ago
For globalization to disappear most modern forms of transport and communication need to break down.
rackjack 5y ago
I feel like, if I had the perspective of a tree, I would be able to see the heartbeat of all these schemes of man with full clarity. But I don't, so instead I must live it.
based2 5y ago
Korea is missing. typo at: Vietam
DeathArrow 5y ago
Ideally R&D and manufacturing would be spread all over the world,with short supply chains. Ideally regions wouldn't be very dependent on what happens on very distant other regions.
sudhirj 5y ago
There's so different kinds of globalization, physical and virtual/informational. I think informational globalisation is on the way up. The internet has made it easy to do knowledge work globally, and the pandemic has normalised it. Broadband is becoming pretty ubiquitous, and projects like Starlink should make it easier to ignore geography when it comes to information, knowledge work, culture and entertainment. I live in India, work for a company in the US, write SaaS apps that are used and paid for globally, watch movies and read books from all over the world, and have working relationships with people I've never met. Physical globalisation is cutting down, on the other hand. India is trying a major push towards self sufficiency, and from what I can see there's a lot of cottage/home industry coming up for food, localised farming, clothing, mechanicals and infrastructure. The "import everything from China, it's cheap" philosophy is no longer the default option — it's turning into "buy local". I actually think this is a good thing — having industry decentralised is more anti fragile, and probably good for the environment, economies of scale be damned. So yes and no, depending on which aspect of life you're talking about.
Yizahi 5y ago
It is not possible to deglobalise unless you you have a 1+ billion population in your country AND don't screw up at the same time. USSR is a perfect display of a country which desperately and seriously tried to deglobalise and failed at both points. If anything globalisation is only accelerating, but changing form. Big industrial agglomerations become more and more independent producing the select set of stuff which they specialize in, and then integrate with other agglomerations across the globe.
amai 5y ago
Democratization by globalization failed miserably. So we better deglobalize before it is too late and reduce the influence of dictatorships like China, Russia and Saudi-Arabia on our free world.
- golergka 5y ago
  We're continuing to witness an unprecedented growth of wealth all across the world, especially in the poorest countries. The only "failure" of globalization is the fate of the first world's working class which no longer enjoys the privileged position it had in the twentieth century.
  - frockington1 5y ago
    Economic metrics are still very good in the West despite a pandemic. Europe is lagging behind a little but certainly not enough to be deemed a failure
  - amai 5y ago
    Growth of wealth is not the same as democratization or an improvement in the human rights situation. Saudi-Arabia is very wealthy, but journalists get cut into pieces, when they dare to criticize the government. In China you can be very wealthy, but when you criticize the government you will simply vanish. And in Russia you will be poisoned or just fall out of the window, if you are not useful for the government anymore. Whats the point of all the growth of wealth, if basic human right are violated every day in these countries? In fact a growth of wealth in these countries even makes the situation worse, because wealth stabilizes a regime. Instead first a country must democratize and only afterwards it should be allowed to profit from global trade.
    - golergka 5y ago
      > Saudi-Arabia is very wealthy, but journalists get cut into pieces, when they dare to criticize the government. In China you can be very wealthy, but when you criticize the government you will simply vanish. And in Russia you will be poisoned or just fall out of the window, if you are not useful for the government anymore. Whats the point of all the growth of wealth, if basic human right are violated every day in these countries? This is awful, but it's not something that ever have been significantly better in any of these countries.
koonsolo 5y ago
I'm always sad that in these kind of global statistics, each EU country is treated separately. When comparing big powers like US and China, I would expect the European Union to be represented.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  There is a small problem though. What are you going to do with the UK? Count it in? Count it out? or have a big, artificial jump in the charts at the time of Brexit?
  - arlort 5y ago
    If the graph wants to show long term trends then the obvious choice is to count it out since right now and for the foreseeable future it'll be out If your objective is to write an history book about early 2000s and you want to put a chart then you'd count it in and have a big drop with a footnote
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    Good catch! :) But I would say count it out, since else the UK statistic would be 0 for some time :D. So it's "historical GDP of the current EU"
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
Good article by paul krugman: https://outline.com/FTZ8eN https://outline.com/FTZ8eN Basically in the article he outlines what the economists didn't get right and then pointed out that globalization caused virtually all income inequality. That the damage done has basically enabled the existence of people like Trump or movements like Brexit. The irony is that Krugman still doesn't see the forest through the trees. Not to mention big changes like many countries agreeing upon a minimum corporate tax rate. Which gives huge advantage to anyone who doesn't play ball. Though this is now less to do with economy anymore. This is bipartisan. Trump started the war with China, and Biden pressed the gas pedal. Tons of countries are clearly declaring their intentions and allies. You can clearly see where this goes, there is no alternatives. However, it's not going to be China as the victor. Sure they have all the factories and largest standing army of any country. They'll not be pulling any trigger and be accepting their depression; see Greece for what is about to happen to China. Followed by a peasant revolt.
- pas 5y ago
  fixed link https://www.slps.org/cms/lib/MO01001157/Centricity/Domain/9446/Inequalit%20Globalization%20and%20the%20Missteps%20of%201990s%20Economics%20Bloomberg.pdf https://www.slps.org/cms/lib/MO01001157/Centricity/Domain/94...
cannabis_sam 5y ago
When what we absurdly call “globalization” only concerns the free movement of capital, but not the free movement of people, of course this is the result..? What did anyone expect from wildly increasingly the leverage of capital? This type of pseudo-globalization is a recipe for inequality, and thus instability.. regardless of how many ideologically motivated “economists” gave their blessing to this idiotic idea.

154 points by gscott 5y ago

It would be good to see some breakdown of "real" flows of stuff vs valuations. A lot of east asian exports are low margin, and a lot of US assets have crazily increased in value. This may make the US appear more self-contained, but doesn't reflect the actual material self-sufficiency of the place. The mythical "cost of embargo" can tell very different story.

veritascap 5y ago
So low margin high volume versus lower volume high margin? Anyone have ideas where to look for data on that? Or what a decent proxy could be?

tomjen3 5y ago

I am biased, but I certainly hope so. I work in a company that makes stuff for robots and if that manufacturing comes back from China, no matter where it then goes to, the market for robots is going to go up massively. Because there is no way you can produce most of the stuff we make in China cost effectively without massive number of robots.

pas 5y ago
It's a tough cookie either way. China is cheap because it doesn't have the same safety regulations (overtime, social security, healthcare insurance, occupational safety, and so on). It needs a more advanced economy (that has a better input-output value ratio, so its productivity needs to increase) for it to be able to factor in the cost of those "luxuries". of course a big problem is that the created economic productivity is not distributed in an equitable way, it tends to be captured by the elites (let's say Jack Ma, but of course the political elite is even more powerful and rich in many aspects). automation tends to amplify this effect. (capital vs labor) If some countries/regions decide to not do business with China then that will have a twofold effect. First China loses business, which means unemployment, internal tensions, and likely fallback to producing less valuable things, which means that there will be even less economic surplus to spend on those "luxuries". And second, that region now needs to find different trade partners, which is a disruption in trade, supply chains, which has a cost. (Which could be spent on a lot of other things, eg. education, infrastructure.) Of course this is hard, because it's a coordination problem. Were the participants able to find a good solution magically then it'd be great, but usually their own short/medium term interests override the long term ones.

danrl 5y ago

Peter Zeihan argues that we already started with deglobalizing the world. His arguments are quite convincing. Life After Globalization (Peter Zeihan) - 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kch4Z1GpNOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kch4Z1GpNOQ

GravitasFailure 5y ago
Zeihan made a particularly interesting point about 3D printing in one of his talks: Manufacturing is increasingly being moved closer to the consumer. Toyota pioneered a lot of this with their JIT system, moving the factories to the region the vehicles are being sold in, and retooling as needed based on what was selling. While we've seen a lot of failures of JIT in the past two years, we've also seen a lot of failures due to centralization and long supply chains, so the idea of deglobalization is probably making a lot of sense to a lot of people right now.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  How does that square with the known vast benefits of economies of scale? That is why industries are dominated by megaconglomerates as opposed to a vast number of small practices. Contrast that to say law firms and private practices of doctors. While there may be some law offices who warrant their own skyscrapers they don't come close to matching even insurance companies in centralization. Different situations may call for different approaches. Logistically difficult and custom goods are where 3D printing and automated mills work especially well, and time sensitivity favor local approaches. If you make eyeglasses to order 99.99% of the time, prosthetics or similar then it makes sense.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    Laws around law firm ownership also limits their size. They can’t have share holders and traditional corporate structures as we typically see in big biz.
    - yourapostasy 5y ago

ajmurmann 5y ago

I hope that this isn't because more of the population is adopting a zero-sum view which increases the likelihood of war.

gvv 5y ago

I hope so at least in some regard such as manufacturing, self reliance on resources and intelectual capital.

aiscapehumanity 5y ago

The metaverse is a new kind of globalization

aiscapehumanity 5y ago
I meant this in a positive way. Thanks for the negative karma, clowns

foofoo4u 5y ago

> The global pandemic, which started in manufacturing-centric China, continues to disrupt supply chains and draw attention from politicians calling for a reshoring of production. The United States is not alone; calls for reshoring can be heard around the world: in France, Germany, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. > But is reshoring the answer to a nation’s manufacturing woes? Not completely. Better than reshoring is the broader concept of resilience — a manufacturing sector that can adjust in real time to supply chain disruptions anywhere while minimizing any loss to customers. > The pandemic is inducing actions by U.S. manufacturers to enhance the resilience of their supply chains. And the government is not standing idly by. Relevant excerpts on the topic from [The Emerging American Industrial Policy By Keith B. Belton ](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-emerging-american-industrial-policy/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-emerging-amer...)

XorNot 5y ago
Supply chain resiliency has less to do with "reshoring" then it does about common-sense redundancy to just-in-time manufacturing chains. Toyota understood this and has faired better then most through the pandemic, whereas most others stalled out and had no real recovery plans. It's also crucial to note that the car companies in particular have managed to demonstrate a shocking lack of foresight here: half the problem with the chip shortage was executive panic at gasp maybe having old stock on hand, and completely mispredicting that car sales would go up and not down.
smackeyacky 5y ago
Re-shoring something like electronics manufacturing is going to be quite difficult for those countries that outsourced it all to China. For starters, you need factories i.e. physical buildings. Pick and place machines, machine shops for making precision plastic moulds, the trained personnel to run them and re-shoring all the knowledge for how things work and how to keep them working. The entire supply chain for electronic components will also have to be re-shored as well. A lot of that depends on a local network effect (why Hong Kong was successful and why Shenzhen is successful). In Australia we still have small pockets of electronic manufacturing (most of which was decimated by Japanese imports in the 1970s) so we are 50+ years from when things like that were routinely made here and rebuilding that is not going to happen at the stroke of a pen, it's going to require a lot of investment. That is something governments used to do quite well but the neo-liberal political movement not only killed manufacturing in this country, but also makes it impossible to restart it. It costs me 1/10th of the price to have our circuit board made in China compared to the quotes I had from Australian factories. That is the kind of price difference that would kill my product stone dead.

ivanstame 5y ago

I don't see a problem with that.

friedman23 5y ago

I think it's natural that the world is deglobalizing. As we move away from fossil fuels a massive amount of trade that flows across borders will disappear in the next 30 or so years.

anshumankmr 5y ago
If you think fossil fuels will vanish from our lives in the next 30 years, think again. For sure, more Developed countries will make more significant strides for sure but the way I see it we are surrounded by products that use fossil fuels. Plastics are an easy example that are used in almost every industry in one form or another in our daily lives. Petroleum based products are also used in several industries. For example, the electronic, the pharma industry (https://orionmagazine.org/article/medicine-after-oil/ https://orionmagazine.org/article/medicine-after-oil/) and the manufacturing industry etc. The elephant in the room is cars and the power generation. Cars will become increasingly electrical for sure but in colder climates, I don't see how the electric cars are yet able to solve that issue . This is due to the fact that electric cars are simply not as good as in warmer climates(https://www.insidehook.com/article/vehicles/can-electric-cars-survive-winter https://www.insidehook.com/article/vehicles/can-electric-car...). Power generation is probably going to have a major revolution quite possible but unfortunately, many people are still against nuclear power and wind/solar will require massive investments that I only see developed countries being capable of doing so. I can't say we will be able to remove fossil fuels from our lives so quickly considering our whole society has been extremely dependent on it. Especially not so soon.
- friedman23 5y ago
  I never said vanish. Transportation makes up a massive proportion of fossil fuel use and many states in the US are outright banning the use of fossil fuels for transportation within the next decade. So I don't think I'm reaching when I say that in the next 30 years fossil fuel use will disappear for transportation.
  - richwater 5y ago
    > many states in the US are outright banning the use of fossil fuels for transportation within the next decade Source?

whatever1 5y ago

Raw materials are not abundant everywhere, so globalization is here to stay (even if that means that regional wars will be fought to secure supply of these materials). Maybe the value of the materials traded will erode since we will value tech and virtual “materials” higher and higher, but the actual flows of physical materials cannot go back to where they were 50 years ago, unless a global war erupts and the global standard of living and population goes to hell.

markus_zhang 5y ago

I think globalization may setback but in long term it will pick up. Back in late 19th century Britain managed to pull off a globalization through empire building, advancements of technology as well as global trading. The two world wars and the cold war put globalization on hold for seventy years, but then US picked it up and started the second trend, which gradually see setback after the financial crisis.

jcadam 5y ago
Hey, it's possibly cyclical. The end of the Pax Romana resulted in the collapse of Mediterranean trade for centuries - if you think of the ancient mediterranean world as a smaller form of "global" there might be some historical parallels to the waning of the current "system."
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  It looks like it may have reached a plateau. I would be surprised it it reversed, especially with the anti-immigration sentiment that seems so common in the developed world right now. https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1421115868117979137 https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1421115868117979137
- anshumankmr 5y ago
  I personally fear that in a de-globalized world, there is a higher chance of a third World War. Of course, there is the policy of M.A.D, but that seems like such a weird place to be in.
  - jcadam 5y ago
    Absolutely. I think we're returning to a multi-polar situation like we had prior to WWI. Without a clear global hegemon - great power competition could definitely lead to a major war.
    - anshumankmr 5y ago
      To be honest, we are already in a multi polar situation. USA is still a superpower, China is definitely one. Russia is not "super" but it is reemerging as a force to contend with. The OPEC Countries are one bloc of their own. Then there are places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba that are somehow immune to foreign pressure.Then there are countries like India where we play on many sides.

kumarvvr 5y ago

De-globalizing certainly helps in all round development of all countries and allows for much more dynamic relationships between countries. It helps build local economies and lets countries make best use of local resources. What Globalization should have been is a butter smooth system to trade goods and services. Concentrating all manufacturing in China leads to power centralization, as is evident, and forms the basis of creation of another hegemony. The effectiveness of military power goes only so far. There is no realistic scenario where the US and China go to war. So China has great leverage and will continually nibble its way to global dominance.

dash2 5y ago
Why wouldn't the US and China go to war over Taiwan? Both countries plan for that possibility. China perceives the US as weak, divided and unwilling to sacrifice for foreign wars. It has said it wants to resolve the Taiwan issue.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  US can't afford to not go to war if China invades Taiwan. Otherwise they will lose access to much of the semiconductors supply and also they will become irrelevant for international affairs. Nobody will care about US anymore. But China also can't afford to invade Taiwan. That will be a major economic and political disaster. It would bring China back 20 years. Regardless of actually winning the war or not.
  - mrep 5y ago
    How would the US lose access without all other countries also losing access putting everyone on equal footing? I highly doubt the foundries would survive an invasion.
  - esturk 5y ago
    The foundries aren't nearly the lifeline people think it is. If China uses sneak attacks to destroy all the foundries, then what? Do you suppose US won't intervene? If US will still intervene then it was never the critical piece to begin with.

booleandilemma 5y ago

Whenever this topic comes up I think of the opening lines to Romance of the Three Kingdoms: The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.

atlgator 5y ago

COVID and the resulting supply chain issues certainly highlighted the need to produce basic necessities (e.g. food, medical supplies, antibiotics) rather than rely on imports. It remains to be seen whether it goes further than that.

crate_barre 5y ago
Lack of redundancy got exposed. To globalize or not to globalize is entirely different from relying on one source for everything. We seriously have no where else to get semiconductors other than Taiwan? That has absolutely nothing to do with the pros/cons of globalizing and everything to do with having a bus-factor of one.

pphysch 5y ago

Globalization is a bell that can't be unrung, but neoliberal globalism (financial & cultural) is definitely in retreat.

webZero 5y ago

I am happy this is happening. Doing business with authoritarian governments is a very very bad idea and the policymakers should have known this. I have been avoiding stuff that comes from China for many years it makes feel happy you know that i am not funding the biggest global mafia

bullen 5y ago

Samsung phones are made in Vietnam?! Talking about those I just fixed my Play installation by "uninstalling" in settings, which really reinstalls the original one and re-updates. This is the second time my Android phone nukes itself (by popping up "App is crashing, closing it" over and over again) without any interaction from me, because of some hidden update; last time it was Chrome, and the fix is always to reinstall the offending app which not a single help page in the whole internet describes! I'm building my own phone: http://radiomesh.org http://radiomesh.org

gremloni 5y ago

For globalization to disappear most modern forms of transport and communication need to break down.

rackjack 5y ago

I feel like, if I had the perspective of a tree, I would be able to see the heartbeat of all these schemes of man with full clarity. But I don't, so instead I must live it.

based2 5y ago

Korea is missing. typo at: Vietam

DeathArrow 5y ago

Ideally R&D and manufacturing would be spread all over the world,with short supply chains. Ideally regions wouldn't be very dependent on what happens on very distant other regions.

sudhirj 5y ago

There's so different kinds of globalization, physical and virtual/informational. I think informational globalisation is on the way up. The internet has made it easy to do knowledge work globally, and the pandemic has normalised it. Broadband is becoming pretty ubiquitous, and projects like Starlink should make it easier to ignore geography when it comes to information, knowledge work, culture and entertainment. I live in India, work for a company in the US, write SaaS apps that are used and paid for globally, watch movies and read books from all over the world, and have working relationships with people I've never met. Physical globalisation is cutting down, on the other hand. India is trying a major push towards self sufficiency, and from what I can see there's a lot of cottage/home industry coming up for food, localised farming, clothing, mechanicals and infrastructure. The "import everything from China, it's cheap" philosophy is no longer the default option — it's turning into "buy local". I actually think this is a good thing — having industry decentralised is more anti fragile, and probably good for the environment, economies of scale be damned. So yes and no, depending on which aspect of life you're talking about.

Yizahi 5y ago

It is not possible to deglobalise unless you you have a 1+ billion population in your country AND don't screw up at the same time. USSR is a perfect display of a country which desperately and seriously tried to deglobalise and failed at both points. If anything globalisation is only accelerating, but changing form. Big industrial agglomerations become more and more independent producing the select set of stuff which they specialize in, and then integrate with other agglomerations across the globe.

amai 5y ago

Democratization by globalization failed miserably. So we better deglobalize before it is too late and reduce the influence of dictatorships like China, Russia and Saudi-Arabia on our free world.

golergka 5y ago
We're continuing to witness an unprecedented growth of wealth all across the world, especially in the poorest countries. The only "failure" of globalization is the fate of the first world's working class which no longer enjoys the privileged position it had in the twentieth century.
- frockington1 5y ago
  Economic metrics are still very good in the West despite a pandemic. Europe is lagging behind a little but certainly not enough to be deemed a failure
- amai 5y ago
  Growth of wealth is not the same as democratization or an improvement in the human rights situation. Saudi-Arabia is very wealthy, but journalists get cut into pieces, when they dare to criticize the government. In China you can be very wealthy, but when you criticize the government you will simply vanish. And in Russia you will be poisoned or just fall out of the window, if you are not useful for the government anymore. Whats the point of all the growth of wealth, if basic human right are violated every day in these countries? In fact a growth of wealth in these countries even makes the situation worse, because wealth stabilizes a regime. Instead first a country must democratize and only afterwards it should be allowed to profit from global trade.
  - golergka 5y ago
    > Saudi-Arabia is very wealthy, but journalists get cut into pieces, when they dare to criticize the government. In China you can be very wealthy, but when you criticize the government you will simply vanish. And in Russia you will be poisoned or just fall out of the window, if you are not useful for the government anymore. Whats the point of all the growth of wealth, if basic human right are violated every day in these countries? This is awful, but it's not something that ever have been significantly better in any of these countries.

koonsolo 5y ago

I'm always sad that in these kind of global statistics, each EU country is treated separately. When comparing big powers like US and China, I would expect the European Union to be represented.

GuB-42 5y ago
There is a small problem though. What are you going to do with the UK? Count it in? Count it out? or have a big, artificial jump in the charts at the time of Brexit?
- arlort 5y ago
  If the graph wants to show long term trends then the obvious choice is to count it out since right now and for the foreseeable future it'll be out If your objective is to write an history book about early 2000s and you want to put a chart then you'd count it in and have a big drop with a footnote
- koonsolo 5y ago
  Good catch! :) But I would say count it out, since else the UK statistic would be 0 for some time :D. So it's "historical GDP of the current EU"

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

Good article by paul krugman: https://outline.com/FTZ8eN https://outline.com/FTZ8eN Basically in the article he outlines what the economists didn't get right and then pointed out that globalization caused virtually all income inequality. That the damage done has basically enabled the existence of people like Trump or movements like Brexit. The irony is that Krugman still doesn't see the forest through the trees. Not to mention big changes like many countries agreeing upon a minimum corporate tax rate. Which gives huge advantage to anyone who doesn't play ball. Though this is now less to do with economy anymore. This is bipartisan. Trump started the war with China, and Biden pressed the gas pedal. Tons of countries are clearly declaring their intentions and allies. You can clearly see where this goes, there is no alternatives. However, it's not going to be China as the victor. Sure they have all the factories and largest standing army of any country. They'll not be pulling any trigger and be accepting their depression; see Greece for what is about to happen to China. Followed by a peasant revolt.

pas 5y ago
fixed link https://www.slps.org/cms/lib/MO01001157/Centricity/Domain/9446/Inequalit%20Globalization%20and%20the%20Missteps%20of%201990s%20Economics%20Bloomberg.pdf https://www.slps.org/cms/lib/MO01001157/Centricity/Domain/94...

cannabis_sam 5y ago

When what we absurdly call “globalization” only concerns the free movement of capital, but not the free movement of people, of course this is the result..? What did anyone expect from wildly increasingly the leverage of capital? This type of pseudo-globalization is a recipe for inequality, and thus instability.. regardless of how many ideologically motivated “economists” gave their blessing to this idiotic idea.