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Peter Zeihan argues that we already started with deglobalizing the world. His arguments are quite convincing. Life After Globalization (Peter Zeihan) - 2021 ht

by 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
      If you're talking about the US, can you please post a cite of these laws? I've recently become interested in historical business law because I've read in passing one theory proposed that the massive US centralization of urban populations and the concomitant cost of living inflation is due in large part to US business domicile and operations laws that were repealed in the 80's-90's. That is, supposedly there were laws that for all practical purposes limited the size and centralization of US companies (hence my interest was piqued when you posted about laws limiting law firm sizes via ownership structuring permissions) by limiting specific aspects of their operations to within a declared domicile state. I know that happened to banking, but the original poster claimed it was for nearly all US businesses. But I can no longer find that discussion nor the relevant laws, and I'm hoping trawling your cite(s) might lead me to them.
      - vineyardmike 5y ago
        Unfortunately I don’t have any good citations just IRL lawyer friends. Should be easy to google the rules though. IANAL but The rule is basically that law firms can only be owned by lawyers. The idea being (i think) that lawyers have a legal responsibility to their clients and that’s be corrupted via existence of shareholders (or, shareholders without legal responsibility too). Regarding your theory, I think it’s bunk. There has been a consistent trend to centralized big companies throughout American capitalism long before the 80s. Just look at the history of GE. In fact, the growth of index funds actually indicates a shift away from big corps (or at least big corps with disparate business groups) because investors can pick and choose markets better without relying on conglomerates to do that for them. But it should be obvious that massive urban centers are not due to US laws… because we have 1k+ years of cities before that with good documentation of life and laws in those cities.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        The “general" rule here is Rule 5.4 of the ABA model rules [0], though the actual rules in a particular jurisdiction (state) may be different since the model rules are not the actual rules of any State. Note that this doesn't actually prohibit any particular structure (well, implicitly it prohibits publicly traded corporations), it just prohibits non-lawyers from being stockholders (if a corp) or partners in a law firm or (except as part of an employee compensation within a law firm) having a claim on revenue generated by lawyers through the practice of law. [0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/publications/model_rules_of_professional_conduct/rule_5_4_professional_independence_of_a_lawyer/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
  - pphysch 5y ago
    Yep. For every 3D printer printing passable products at the edge, there will be some crazy advanced and inimitable machine in a factory with an elite team putting out very high quality products at scale... Both models will succeed.
  - GravitasFailure 5y ago
    Economies of scale and large scale manufacturing certainly don't go away, but decentralization does add robustness and nimbleness that a gigafactory can't. Geographic diversification also helps if you scale beyond a level that the area your current factory permits (or any location that makes sense to move it to). Manufacturing processes are also changing thanks to automation and more general tools, like laser sintering 3D printers, that don't require extension retooling to make a completely different part. This is doubly true if savings from scale get nuked by shipping from wherever your factory is.
  - pas 5y ago
    > economies of scale there's also diminishing returns. there's an optimal point of factory size.
aeternum 5y ago
At least with tech there seems to be very little de-globalization. The vast majority of tech companies and even consumer products have both a workforce and customer-base that spans the globe. A few outliers like Huawei make news but not a global trend.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  I think we’re about to see this trend reverse - and fast. Countries/EU started passing intense laws and regulations that means companies start operating differently in different places. Faang will stay for a while but listen to how many HN commenters skip the EU for GDPR reasons. We may soon see national scope app stores based on recent anti trust cases. No one even tries to work inn China anymore. Japanese internet is still using Yahoo, and india is on-shoring their own industry fast. Russia practically has their own internet like China. Big hosting companies are setting up smaller and more frequent data centers in each nation. Just look at the AWS Korea and Indian data centers as a map of what’s to come. Or cloudflare selling “hosted nearby” services. They’re selling shovels for a world where data hosting has national borders and export laws.
  - gdy 5y ago
    "Russia practically has their own internet like China." No, we do not. For example, Google and Yandex are intensely competing for the Russian search market.
    - vineyardmike 5y ago
      Edit: this wasn't supposed to be a "firewall" type comment, but that there are local-market entrants. Yandex is basically Russia only, and there is a handful of alts to American companies that are Russia only.
      - gdy 5y ago
        "Yandex is basically Russia only" Not entirely. [0] Here is Yandex’s market share in several countries (Statcounter, July 2019): Russia: 48.79% Belarus: 22.38% Kazakhstan: 21.88% Tajkistan: 15.12% Uzbekistan: 11.87% Turkey: 10.67% Kyrgyzstan: 9.61% Turkmenistan: 6.73% Ukraine: 5.98% Armenia: 4.20% Moldova: 3.40% Georgia: 2.85% Azerbaijan: 2.06% [0] https://searchfacts.com/what-is-yandex/ https://searchfacts.com/what-is-yandex/
throwamon 5y ago
Gotta love how you can't add the video to "watch later" because it's classified as "YouTube Kids". YouTube sucks.

by danrl 5y ago

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
    If you're talking about the US, can you please post a cite of these laws? I've recently become interested in historical business law because I've read in passing one theory proposed that the massive US centralization of urban populations and the concomitant cost of living inflation is due in large part to US business domicile and operations laws that were repealed in the 80's-90's. That is, supposedly there were laws that for all practical purposes limited the size and centralization of US companies (hence my interest was piqued when you posted about laws limiting law firm sizes via ownership structuring permissions) by limiting specific aspects of their operations to within a declared domicile state. I know that happened to banking, but the original poster claimed it was for nearly all US businesses. But I can no longer find that discussion nor the relevant laws, and I'm hoping trawling your cite(s) might lead me to them.
    - vineyardmike 5y ago
      Unfortunately I don’t have any good citations just IRL lawyer friends. Should be easy to google the rules though. IANAL but The rule is basically that law firms can only be owned by lawyers. The idea being (i think) that lawyers have a legal responsibility to their clients and that’s be corrupted via existence of shareholders (or, shareholders without legal responsibility too). Regarding your theory, I think it’s bunk. There has been a consistent trend to centralized big companies throughout American capitalism long before the 80s. Just look at the history of GE. In fact, the growth of index funds actually indicates a shift away from big corps (or at least big corps with disparate business groups) because investors can pick and choose markets better without relying on conglomerates to do that for them. But it should be obvious that massive urban centers are not due to US laws… because we have 1k+ years of cities before that with good documentation of life and laws in those cities.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        The “general" rule here is Rule 5.4 of the ABA model rules [0], though the actual rules in a particular jurisdiction (state) may be different since the model rules are not the actual rules of any State. Note that this doesn't actually prohibit any particular structure (well, implicitly it prohibits publicly traded corporations), it just prohibits non-lawyers from being stockholders (if a corp) or partners in a law firm or (except as part of an employee compensation within a law firm) having a claim on revenue generated by lawyers through the practice of law. [0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/publications/model_rules_of_professional_conduct/rule_5_4_professional_independence_of_a_lawyer/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
- pphysch 5y ago
  Yep. For every 3D printer printing passable products at the edge, there will be some crazy advanced and inimitable machine in a factory with an elite team putting out very high quality products at scale... Both models will succeed.
- GravitasFailure 5y ago
  Economies of scale and large scale manufacturing certainly don't go away, but decentralization does add robustness and nimbleness that a gigafactory can't. Geographic diversification also helps if you scale beyond a level that the area your current factory permits (or any location that makes sense to move it to). Manufacturing processes are also changing thanks to automation and more general tools, like laser sintering 3D printers, that don't require extension retooling to make a completely different part. This is doubly true if savings from scale get nuked by shipping from wherever your factory is.
- pas 5y ago
  > economies of scale there's also diminishing returns. there's an optimal point of factory size.

aeternum 5y ago

At least with tech there seems to be very little de-globalization. The vast majority of tech companies and even consumer products have both a workforce and customer-base that spans the globe. A few outliers like Huawei make news but not a global trend.

vineyardmike 5y ago
I think we’re about to see this trend reverse - and fast. Countries/EU started passing intense laws and regulations that means companies start operating differently in different places. Faang will stay for a while but listen to how many HN commenters skip the EU for GDPR reasons. We may soon see national scope app stores based on recent anti trust cases. No one even tries to work inn China anymore. Japanese internet is still using Yahoo, and india is on-shoring their own industry fast. Russia practically has their own internet like China. Big hosting companies are setting up smaller and more frequent data centers in each nation. Just look at the AWS Korea and Indian data centers as a map of what’s to come. Or cloudflare selling “hosted nearby” services. They’re selling shovels for a world where data hosting has national borders and export laws.
- gdy 5y ago
  "Russia practically has their own internet like China." No, we do not. For example, Google and Yandex are intensely competing for the Russian search market.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    Edit: this wasn't supposed to be a "firewall" type comment, but that there are local-market entrants. Yandex is basically Russia only, and there is a handful of alts to American companies that are Russia only.
    - gdy 5y ago
      "Yandex is basically Russia only" Not entirely. [0] Here is Yandex’s market share in several countries (Statcounter, July 2019): Russia: 48.79% Belarus: 22.38% Kazakhstan: 21.88% Tajkistan: 15.12% Uzbekistan: 11.87% Turkey: 10.67% Kyrgyzstan: 9.61% Turkmenistan: 6.73% Ukraine: 5.98% Armenia: 4.20% Moldova: 3.40% Georgia: 2.85% Azerbaijan: 2.06% [0] https://searchfacts.com/what-is-yandex/ https://searchfacts.com/what-is-yandex/

throwamon 5y ago

Gotta love how you can't add the video to "watch later" because it's classified as "YouTube Kids". YouTube sucks.