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There wasn't so many mask makers in China before Covid. And after Covid there won't be as many either - in fact, they're just going to shrug it off and make som

There wasn't so many mask makers in China before Covid. And after Covid there won't be as many either - in fact, they're just going to shrug it off and make something else by then. People are talking about Shenzhen electronics all the time. It's that impressive because the supply chains are there. Yiwu, the Shenzhen counterpart for everything else is less mentioned: no matter its masks, toys, clothes, furniture, or MAGA hats, or Ukrainian flags (or Donetsk flags, or even RoC flags, they don't care), they make EVERYTHING and it's the place the world put orders to. It's the kitchen sink of the light industry, so that companies stay afloat instead of making masks for life.

noobermin 5y ago
You say that but those people not "making masks for life" controlled 90% of the mask market in the US. Who cares how they did it, the main issue is the fact this country is unwilling to build up local supply chains because they're too busy giving themselves fat bonuses by cutting costs while jacking up hospital bills on patients (speaking of the hospital admins who are responsible for this sort of thing) and no one in government or anyone else is going to stop them.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  > Who cares how they did it Isn’t that sort of the whole question? > the main issue is the fact this country is unwilling to build up local supply chains We don’t have a command economy. It also doesn’t make much sense to pay prevailing US wages to produce masks that sell for $0.50 per unit, you would need incredible scale to make that work, you’d need to be 3M, who does make them. > because they're too busy giving themselves fat bonuses by cutting costs while jacking up hospital bills on patients What? People who run hospitals are unlikely to every be involved in manufacturing anything, it’s a totally different kind of business. I’m not sure what you’re arguing here.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    > It also doesn’t make much sense to pay prevailing US wages to produce masks that sell for $0.50 per unit One could argue that there's an inherent ethical issue at play if the country needs masks priced at $0.50 per unit, but can't manufacture them itself while paying wages that it considers fair.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      You could make an argument like that for almost any good. The truth is that comparative advantages matter and its simple impractical to manufacture or claw out of the ground every thing people in a given country might want. Cheap masks are a great thing in a pandemic. We could have simply been maintaining the stockpile that the government had for just such a purpose. More simply put, Americans demand much higher wages than would make such a cheap mask possible. The cheaper a thing like a surgical mask is, the easier it is to use a fresh one every time you need one.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        Do you think Chinese workers who make those masks wouldn't prefer to get paid the American salary for that job? Everybody demands higher wages. The point is that some get the high wages, and some get to produce the cheap goods that make those wages effectively even higher. It's not about any kind of skilful or technological or natural "competitive advantage" - humans are the same everywhere! - it's about how much any given country is willing to abuse its workforce, and how much other countries are willing to look away while benefitting from it.
        ch4s3 5y ago
        > t's not about any kind of skilful or technological or natural "competitive advantage" - humans are the same everywhere! - it's about how much any given country is willing to abuse its workforce This is a terribly myopic view of the world. Having a much lower cost of living or relative stage of economic development is a competitive advantage in manufacturing low cost goods that require a lot of human input. Those wages can be and often are pretty good relative to local alternatives. Low skill, low cost manufacturing is usually a stepping stone in economic from subsistence agriculture to a more advanced economy. The conditions don't necessarily have to be bad, and are quite a bit better than a lot of agricultural work. Having lot's of people moving from farms to cities is a competitive advantage in low cost manufacturing. We're already seeing China moving aways from some of these types of manufacturing as their economy advances. Neighboring states are using this shift to try and shift their economies away from subsistence agriculture as well. It's fine to lobby for better working conditions, especially in trade deals, but we shouldn't deny people in other parts of the world the opportunity to move from agriculture, to light manufacturing, to more advanced economic activity.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    The US wasn't a command economy in the great depression yet somehow survived. Nice strawman argument. Also it's like you didn't read the article (likely didn't) that explicitly mentioned hospital admins cutting costs (the article says they're hooked on cheaper goods "like crack"), otherwise you would have seen the connection.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      I read the article and I'm pretty familiar with the economics of healthcare. I spent years working on projects to shift away from fee for service to value based care. My point was that hospital administrators have nothing to do with manufacturing. The people behind hospital consolidation and some of the self defeating cost cutting measures aren't responsible for there not being a supply chain starting from specialized Canadian wood pulp, to machines that make fibers and materials, all the way to finished masks. If domestic manufacturers could innovate and deliver a better/cheaper product people would buy it. It's ridiculous to think that we should have to manufacture every single important product domestically even if there are better opportunities for economically for firms and workers. We specialize for a lot of good reasons. The article has a really naive view of economics and takes an uninformed protectionist stance. for example: >To put it another way, the modern imperative of maximizing shareholder value will always put efficiency and cost over resilience. This means that the firms in question are aren't correctly pricing supply chain risk. Supply shocks will surely destroy a lot of shareholder value. But, paying too much for supplies necessarily means you have less money for things like pay, new equipment, etc. Even for goods 100% made in the US from US raw materials there were still supply disruptions. If a large percentage of all truckers and loading dock workers are sick with COVID, you still won't have the goods have and where you need them. Goods weren't unavailable simply because they were made abroad, they often were sitting unloaded in containers. There's more than a century of of economic research around protectionism and it's pretty clear that it doesn't pay off in the way it's proponents suggest. We got fucked on PPE because the stockpiles weren't maintained. The government promised the healthcare industry that ti the event of a Swine Flu like pandemic, that there would be a stockpile that they could draw from. So rationally, hospitals didn't keep their own stockpiles. The government after building up the stockpile initially, just didn't maintain it. The big problem with the buy American initiatives is that they sound nice, but are in the end just handouts to favored businesses. If you require highway projects to only use American steel for guard rails, you end up with fewer miles of highway for the same amount of money. Trying to tie corporate welfare, jobs programs, and things like infrastructure together in a single initiative is a sure way to do all three badly. We've seen this for decades. And the more domestic producers rely on the government to tip the scales, the less able they are to compete internationally. It's a lose lose, for the false promise of "resiliency".
Taniwha 5y ago
But masks were commonly worn in public in Asia by people with a cold or flu before covid - they already had a market for masks before the pandemic and manufacturers filling it
- ulfw 5y ago
  Yes but a tiny one. 1 or 2% of the population wearing a mask for a week isn't quite the same as 100% of the population wearing one for years (e.g. in Singapore or Hong Kong).
  - Taniwha 5y ago
    Not my point - Chinese mask manufacturers had an existing market to fill, they already new how to make them, all they had to do was to scale their manufacture which the govt helped them do because they knew it was important - not so much in the west
  - fomine3 5y ago
    Perhaps 4 month for 15% of people, in Japan. It's different scale but not very small.
throwaway4good 5y ago
Capitalism vs. communism I guess ...
- ackbar03 5y ago
  you got me confused there for a sec
  - blippage 5y ago
    Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, it's just the opposite. — John Kenneth Galbraith
user_named 5y ago
In China it's become semi-standard to wear a mask in the office even after just having a cold. So there's a definite change to something similar to Japan.

noobermin 5y ago

You say that but those people not "making masks for life" controlled 90% of the mask market in the US. Who cares how they did it, the main issue is the fact this country is unwilling to build up local supply chains because they're too busy giving themselves fat bonuses by cutting costs while jacking up hospital bills on patients (speaking of the hospital admins who are responsible for this sort of thing) and no one in government or anyone else is going to stop them.

ch4s3 5y ago
> Who cares how they did it Isn’t that sort of the whole question? > the main issue is the fact this country is unwilling to build up local supply chains We don’t have a command economy. It also doesn’t make much sense to pay prevailing US wages to produce masks that sell for $0.50 per unit, you would need incredible scale to make that work, you’d need to be 3M, who does make them. > because they're too busy giving themselves fat bonuses by cutting costs while jacking up hospital bills on patients What? People who run hospitals are unlikely to every be involved in manufacturing anything, it’s a totally different kind of business. I’m not sure what you’re arguing here.
- int_19h 5y ago
  > It also doesn’t make much sense to pay prevailing US wages to produce masks that sell for $0.50 per unit One could argue that there's an inherent ethical issue at play if the country needs masks priced at $0.50 per unit, but can't manufacture them itself while paying wages that it considers fair.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    You could make an argument like that for almost any good. The truth is that comparative advantages matter and its simple impractical to manufacture or claw out of the ground every thing people in a given country might want. Cheap masks are a great thing in a pandemic. We could have simply been maintaining the stockpile that the government had for just such a purpose. More simply put, Americans demand much higher wages than would make such a cheap mask possible. The cheaper a thing like a surgical mask is, the easier it is to use a fresh one every time you need one.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      Do you think Chinese workers who make those masks wouldn't prefer to get paid the American salary for that job? Everybody demands higher wages. The point is that some get the high wages, and some get to produce the cheap goods that make those wages effectively even higher. It's not about any kind of skilful or technological or natural "competitive advantage" - humans are the same everywhere! - it's about how much any given country is willing to abuse its workforce, and how much other countries are willing to look away while benefitting from it.
      - ch4s3 5y ago
        > t's not about any kind of skilful or technological or natural "competitive advantage" - humans are the same everywhere! - it's about how much any given country is willing to abuse its workforce This is a terribly myopic view of the world. Having a much lower cost of living or relative stage of economic development is a competitive advantage in manufacturing low cost goods that require a lot of human input. Those wages can be and often are pretty good relative to local alternatives. Low skill, low cost manufacturing is usually a stepping stone in economic from subsistence agriculture to a more advanced economy. The conditions don't necessarily have to be bad, and are quite a bit better than a lot of agricultural work. Having lot's of people moving from farms to cities is a competitive advantage in low cost manufacturing. We're already seeing China moving aways from some of these types of manufacturing as their economy advances. Neighboring states are using this shift to try and shift their economies away from subsistence agriculture as well. It's fine to lobby for better working conditions, especially in trade deals, but we shouldn't deny people in other parts of the world the opportunity to move from agriculture, to light manufacturing, to more advanced economic activity.
- noobermin 5y ago
  The US wasn't a command economy in the great depression yet somehow survived. Nice strawman argument. Also it's like you didn't read the article (likely didn't) that explicitly mentioned hospital admins cutting costs (the article says they're hooked on cheaper goods "like crack"), otherwise you would have seen the connection.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    I read the article and I'm pretty familiar with the economics of healthcare. I spent years working on projects to shift away from fee for service to value based care. My point was that hospital administrators have nothing to do with manufacturing. The people behind hospital consolidation and some of the self defeating cost cutting measures aren't responsible for there not being a supply chain starting from specialized Canadian wood pulp, to machines that make fibers and materials, all the way to finished masks. If domestic manufacturers could innovate and deliver a better/cheaper product people would buy it. It's ridiculous to think that we should have to manufacture every single important product domestically even if there are better opportunities for economically for firms and workers. We specialize for a lot of good reasons. The article has a really naive view of economics and takes an uninformed protectionist stance. for example: >To put it another way, the modern imperative of maximizing shareholder value will always put efficiency and cost over resilience. This means that the firms in question are aren't correctly pricing supply chain risk. Supply shocks will surely destroy a lot of shareholder value. But, paying too much for supplies necessarily means you have less money for things like pay, new equipment, etc. Even for goods 100% made in the US from US raw materials there were still supply disruptions. If a large percentage of all truckers and loading dock workers are sick with COVID, you still won't have the goods have and where you need them. Goods weren't unavailable simply because they were made abroad, they often were sitting unloaded in containers. There's more than a century of of economic research around protectionism and it's pretty clear that it doesn't pay off in the way it's proponents suggest. We got fucked on PPE because the stockpiles weren't maintained. The government promised the healthcare industry that ti the event of a Swine Flu like pandemic, that there would be a stockpile that they could draw from. So rationally, hospitals didn't keep their own stockpiles. The government after building up the stockpile initially, just didn't maintain it. The big problem with the buy American initiatives is that they sound nice, but are in the end just handouts to favored businesses. If you require highway projects to only use American steel for guard rails, you end up with fewer miles of highway for the same amount of money. Trying to tie corporate welfare, jobs programs, and things like infrastructure together in a single initiative is a sure way to do all three badly. We've seen this for decades. And the more domestic producers rely on the government to tip the scales, the less able they are to compete internationally. It's a lose lose, for the false promise of "resiliency".

Taniwha 5y ago

But masks were commonly worn in public in Asia by people with a cold or flu before covid - they already had a market for masks before the pandemic and manufacturers filling it

ulfw 5y ago
Yes but a tiny one. 1 or 2% of the population wearing a mask for a week isn't quite the same as 100% of the population wearing one for years (e.g. in Singapore or Hong Kong).
- Taniwha 5y ago
  Not my point - Chinese mask manufacturers had an existing market to fill, they already new how to make them, all they had to do was to scale their manufacture which the govt helped them do because they knew it was important - not so much in the west
- fomine3 5y ago
  Perhaps 4 month for 15% of people, in Japan. It's different scale but not very small.

throwaway4good 5y ago

Capitalism vs. communism I guess ...

ackbar03 5y ago
you got me confused there for a sec
- blippage 5y ago
  Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, it's just the opposite. — John Kenneth Galbraith

user_named 5y ago

In China it's become semi-standard to wear a mask in the office even after just having a cold. So there's a definite change to something similar to Japan.