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real side effect: countries stop importing, instead they start producing their own stuff inefficiently leading up to more pollution.

wiz21c 4y ago
don't think so. - producing concrete, steel, (including mining) etc is no more polluting in other countries - producing vegetables, bananas and other stuff is interesting because you want to have them in countries that don't have them => eat local stuff - water is the same in every country - clothes are not less difficult to produce efficiently etc. so yes, we could stop importing and building stuff right here. Now this would have two very educational effects: - mining stuff makes your nice countryside, well, not nice. Lesson learned: yeah, you do have some footprint and you must accept it. - building stuff paying workers at your country's rate may make things more expensive to you. Lesson learned: you must value work. We're talking about future generations here. If it means changing our core values, then, we'll have to change them.
hnbad 4y ago
Do you have a source for that claim? Outsourcing doesn't seem to have to led to less pollution. Most heavy industry that has been outsourced has been outsourced to companies with looser environmental regulations and labor protections and most reporting conveniently ignores a lot of the offshore pollution (which is often hidden behind several layers of indirection to avoid accountability) when measuring the pollution caused by domestic companies. I also wouldn't call the shredding and landfilling of consumer goods efficient and those practices seem to have largely arisen from the ability to mass produce goods cheaply making discounting them further less profitable than simply destroying them. This also ignores the inefficiencies promoted by global manufacturing that involves shipping half-finished products around the world many times over because shipping is effectively free compared to paying for all the manufacturing to happen in one place (and handling the finishing touches domestically allows marketing the product as domestically made). There doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correlation between efficiency (which literally just measures cost reduction, as externalities don't factor into it unless they have a price tag) and less pollution (unless you handwave carbon capture and offsetting as magic and ignore the real world effects to only focus on numbers on paper).
- hnbad 4y ago
  I think the one argument you can make is that cutting down on outsourcing will tank the post-colonial economies that are dependent on having their resources extracted and using their cheap labor to create margins for foreign markets. But that's really more telling of how exploitative supposed economic development aid has been for them by failing to restore any level of self-sustainability they had prior to colonialism. Child labor in arsenic mines (to use a graphic but not entirely hyperbolic example) may be contributing to GDP but that doesn't mean it's desirable or that the countries doing it are better off than they would be if it weren't.

wiz21c 4y ago

don't think so. - producing concrete, steel, (including mining) etc is no more polluting in other countries - producing vegetables, bananas and other stuff is interesting because you want to have them in countries that don't have them => eat local stuff - water is the same in every country - clothes are not less difficult to produce efficiently etc. so yes, we could stop importing and building stuff right here. Now this would have two very educational effects: - mining stuff makes your nice countryside, well, not nice. Lesson learned: yeah, you do have some footprint and you must accept it. - building stuff paying workers at your country's rate may make things more expensive to you. Lesson learned: you must value work. We're talking about future generations here. If it means changing our core values, then, we'll have to change them.

hnbad 4y ago

Do you have a source for that claim? Outsourcing doesn't seem to have to led to less pollution. Most heavy industry that has been outsourced has been outsourced to companies with looser environmental regulations and labor protections and most reporting conveniently ignores a lot of the offshore pollution (which is often hidden behind several layers of indirection to avoid accountability) when measuring the pollution caused by domestic companies. I also wouldn't call the shredding and landfilling of consumer goods efficient and those practices seem to have largely arisen from the ability to mass produce goods cheaply making discounting them further less profitable than simply destroying them. This also ignores the inefficiencies promoted by global manufacturing that involves shipping half-finished products around the world many times over because shipping is effectively free compared to paying for all the manufacturing to happen in one place (and handling the finishing touches domestically allows marketing the product as domestically made). There doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correlation between efficiency (which literally just measures cost reduction, as externalities don't factor into it unless they have a price tag) and less pollution (unless you handwave carbon capture and offsetting as magic and ignore the real world effects to only focus on numbers on paper).

hnbad 4y ago
I think the one argument you can make is that cutting down on outsourcing will tank the post-colonial economies that are dependent on having their resources extracted and using their cheap labor to create margins for foreign markets. But that's really more telling of how exploitative supposed economic development aid has been for them by failing to restore any level of self-sustainability they had prior to colonialism. Child labor in arsenic mines (to use a graphic but not entirely hyperbolic example) may be contributing to GDP but that doesn't mean it's desirable or that the countries doing it are better off than they would be if it weren't.