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Globalization is inevitable. Whether it'll eventually happen in our lifetime or not is up to our current elite and general population. I think Morris Chang is a

• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I agree. The efficiencies are too stark. Globalization is equivalent to specialization and division of labor. You can’t hope it away.
  • sremani 4y ago
    Security is not free. who is under-writing global maritime security and what do they get in return.. that is the bigger question.
    • remarkEon 4y ago
      >who is under-writing global maritime security and what do they get in return The United States. The conventional wisdom is that what the US gets in return is outsized influence in the internal politics of basically every country within that protection sphere, plus the petro-dollar. I don't totally agree with the second part, but that's what you'd find in an "explainer" from Vox or the pages of The Economist.
      • swader999 4y ago
        It's also helped to slow nuclear proliferation.
        • remarkEon 4y ago
          This, I will grant. The United States, despite inventing the thing and using it first, has done more to get rid of nukes than anyone.
    • fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Everyone. They get the benefits of trade. When piracy happens every nation will participate in ending it as is necessary to protect trade. Why would you think otherwise?
      • Retric 4y ago
        History shows a subset of countries are all to happy to support piracy for various reasons. It’s essentially a prisoner’s dilemma where individual countries are better off defecting.
        • ahkurtz 4y ago
          Prisoner's dilemma is solved and not a dilemma with repeat rounds (aka trust and relationships). Like the real world. This fits well with the fact that cooperation works, and is why civilization exists.
          • Retric 4y ago
            Yet piracy has been around for thousands of years. The thing is people and countries don’t all benefit equally from buying into the existing system. It’s the same basic reason people continue to run scams and steal stuff on land etc.
            • literalAardvark 4y ago
              So has trade. Piracy isn't a blockade.
              • Retric 4y ago
                Piracy has been used as a form of blockade.
      • robertlagrant 4y ago
        Because it's not everyone. It's (mostly) the US.
    • joshbaptiste 4y ago
      yup without the US trade route protection formalized during Bretton Woods, modern trade could not happen as snoothly as it has and the US is slowly backing out of that position
      • cthalupa 4y ago
        The tired Zeihan position that has been the same song and dance since his days at stratfor and still as wrong now as it was decades ago. He's also predicted that China would collapse a dozen times now, with timelines attached, and every time that timeline passes and China still stands he just moves the goalposts. He got Ukraine right, but it wasn't exactly a bold prediction and it follows the same Nostradamus method of throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. The US has not been the majority player in policing pirates in a long time and piracy is at an all time low - China and Europe handle the majority of the piracy actions around Africa today, the largest source of modern piracy. Even if the US were to withdraw, and it's just Europe and Asia trading with each other, what navy is going to magic into existence to threaten those trade routes? The 5th fleet is in theory always around to back things up, but even if you look at CTF-151 the USA hasn't had the comm since 2009, and basically all of the anti-piracy actions today are small potatoes and easily handled by coalition members. Yes, the US navy is the best in the world. Yes, without it, there is less ability to protect these trade routes. But if the people that are doing the remaining trade are the people with the next 20 biggest navies, where in the world is the threat going to come from? If globalization ends it's not going to be because the US navy took their ball and went home, because you have to go really far down the list of naval might to find people who wouldn't want to still be trading with each other.
  • uoaei 4y ago
    Efficiencies like moving kilotons of mass across the Pacific every day to save a few bucks?
    • Manuel_D 4y ago
      Actually yes: container ships are extremely efficient modes of transportation. As are trains. The most carbon-intensive parts of logistics are often the first and last segment when goods are transported via roads. Container ships produce a lot of emissions, but they also move a lot of cargo. On a CO2 per kilogram per mile basis, containers ships vastly beat out automobiles.
      • Tempest1981 4y ago
        Which type(s) of automobiles do they beat?
        • Panzer04 4y ago
          Everything? It's not close, trucks are very inefficient compared to trains and boats.
        • Manuel_D 4y ago
          Road transportation emits about a hundred times more for the same mass and distance. I'm sure they're referring to ICE vehicles not electric, but the former still accounts for the vast majority of automobile freight transport. https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation
          • uoaei 4y ago
            According to this link, rail is more efficient per tonne-kilometer than ships are, which contradicts many others in these comments claiming the opposite without supporting citations. Per the source above, rail is most efficient at 128k, then ships at 97.3k, then road at 10.8k, where units are in tonne-kilometers shipped per tonne of CO2 emitted.
• majormajor 4y ago
  Globalization in its recent form has been all about exploiting labor cost differences. Can that continue forever? I'm not sure that will come back in the same way because I think there will be a lot of pressure from both sides: * the most advanced countries have seen how quickly that edge can be lost if you outsource to this extent, which could lead to more proprietariness and a desire to enlarge gaps in absolute lifestyle instead of short-term cost-minimization; especially if armed conflict stays hotter than it was in the 90s * on the other hand, if closing labor cost and standard of living gaps continue in the future, globalization makes less sense because paying the logistics penalties and shipping costs in a world with more-or-less equivalent labor costs everywhere becomes stupid - sooner or later you run out of cheaper places to outsource too. Both knowledge work and "real-world" production benefit from short turnaround times and easy communication, so barriers based on specialization alone seem very hard to maintain in that world, especially across countries where IP restrictions often aren't enforced that strictly. Outside of raw materials, what do you need from halfway across the globe that none of the millions of people within a few hundred miles couldn't figure out how to do or copy?
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > Globalization in its recent form has been all about exploiting labor cost differences. What is the alternative? Richer countries voluntarily transferring wealth to poorer countries? Richer countries hoarding wealth because it is not politically popular to transfer wealth to poorer countries? Can also replace countries with tribes of any size delineated by any given arbitrary characteristic(s).
    • carom 4y ago
      Richer countries being self sufficient. Poorer countries being self sufficient.
      • thefounder 4y ago
        So your solution is to ban trade, right? No more coconut unless you plant coconut trees in your suboptimal environment (i.e in Norway). I can't wait for that small and poor country to manufacture its own modern chips (perhaps in 100-200 years) so that it can enjoy the technology available today(i.e cheap smartphones, TVs etc). I thought HN is smarter than that. The future is multi planetary not self sufficiency.
• snapplebobapple 4y ago
  If globalization is inevitable why has the previous state of the world never globalized? Why have the parts that formed trading blocks previously eventually failed and collapsed rather than making a global world? If globalization was truly inevitable I would have expected to see it in the history by now.
  • ken47 4y ago
    Nations have clearly been trending larger over history, on average. Unless there's a good reason for this trend to stop after thousands of years, globalization will be the end result. But the process will happen organically, and slowly -- perhaps slower than some would like.
    • snapplebobapple 4y ago
      I wouldn't say that is clear at all. Perhaps there is a trend of growing larger before collapsing spectacularly into a bunch of smaller nations, but that is about as far as I would ever be comfortable saying anything is clear on this topic.
      • ken47 4y ago
        Perhaps you're thinking about empires that were primarily held together by military force. Those are inherently unstable. As it pertains to globalization, the more relevant trend over time is the formation of nation states that primarily exist for any other reason.
        • snapplebobapple 4y ago
          Your hypothesis is the nationalism that is a recent invention of the last 400 or so years that drives nation states (that we have been trying really hard to destroy in the first world) will cause globalization rather than more of the friction and war it has caused in the past? Nation states only drive unity when there is an other to compete with and by design they can't cause the end game of globalization. At best that process is going to hold an area together through a spectacular collapse, not drive one world unity.
• remarkEon 4y ago
  >Globalization is inevitable. Globalization is a choice. Globalization - the contemporary concept as we understand it in this thread[1] - didn't exist before technology that enabled modern transportation and information networks. Like any sort of geopolitical arrangement there are tradeoffs, and one of which with globalization is of course labor cost arbitrage (that other people have mentioned in the thread). A lot of ink can and has been spilled on what these tradeoffs are, and whether cheaper toothpaste or plastic disposable goods all made in China actually do make things better off long term - for the Chinese or for everyone else. The "resistance is futile" crowd seem to always index on the economic calculation (not saying you are doing this), and seem to always ignore that there are intangible, qualitative aspects to this political arrangement that not everyone - even or perhaps especially in the United States - is happy with. [1] There's a pedantic argument about older "global" empire, religious or otherwise, but let's all sidestep that, shall we? It's not the same thing and I think we all know it.
  • ithkuil 4y ago
    globalization is a spectrum. Many of the biggest nations today are bigger than the entire known world in the past. It is thus possible to "stop" and put a boundary over the world and yet achieve almost all the benefits of "globalization" if your country has 300M people and spans the width of a continent.
    • mc32 4y ago
      Historically, there was little trade outside of empires, due to poor transportation routes and lack of refrigeration, or canning, so trade was in goods that could last the journey and were high value enough to be profitable. Dry goods, household items, textiles. But, most countries did not have vast trade --economies were local and regional. So, yes, humanity can survive and even prosper without "globalization" but progress may be slowed and progress may be less uniform, among other things.
      • somenameforme 4y ago
        One could also argue it might accelerate progress. We chose to ban China from the ISS under spurious rationale. And this ultimately drove China to shrug and create their own space station, which they've just recently completed. If they had been allowed on the ISS it's very possible, if not exceptionally likely, that today that Chinese space station would not exist. And it's unlikely the ISS would have been marketedly improved by Chinese presence. So excluding China from the ISS ultimately worked to expand the overall reach of humanity into space. I would predict the exact same will happen in various other venues, from semiconductors to movies. Necessity is the mother of invention, and globalism minimizes necessity. Minimizing necessity is good from a comfort/stability point of view, but not necessarily good from a progress point of view. Another great example would be the space race. If the US and USSR had been on friendly and positive terms, it's extremely likely that the space race (which was not only a cultural battle, but a weaponization proxy) would not have happened. In other words if we'd been a more global society in the past, it's very possible man would yet to walk on the moon.
• bitL 4y ago
  Why is it inevitable? Given the propensity of humans to destroy their own cultures over time (see all extinct civilizations), one could argue that diversity in cultures/nations is the only hope so that at any point in time at least one culture is sensible. Similar to what reinforcement learning or economics tries to achieve by exploration vs exploitation. Globalization is the ultimate exploitation phase, exploration would require many different cultures, often isolated.
  • csomar 4y ago
    Because, historically, people almost always favored trade over sovereignty. Even today, trade is still happening between Russia and the US. People just like to trade across the virtual boundaries that culture and nationality has made. Evolution will favor those who trade over those who don't since the ones trading will be more efficient. There will blips along the way but unless you can convince me otherwise how a closed system will be more efficient, in the very long time, globalization is our fate.
    • bitL 4y ago
      Look at what China did - they copied whole economic/technological systems of countries, each in a different region, then ran it for two decades, then evaluated which ones work best under what conditions. How would you get this effect with globalization and a single culture everywhere?
    • lm28469 4y ago
      > Evolution will favor those who trade over those who don't since the ones trading will be more efficient. Calling "evolution" as an argument is always extremely weird. Efficiency is also a single part of the equation. Slave labor was very efficient, burning fossil fuel is very efficient, there are dozens of other variables
    • onepointsixC 4y ago
      >Evolution will favor those who trade over those who don't since the ones trading will be more efficient. There will blips along the way but unless you can convince me otherwise how a closed system will be more efficient, in the very long time, globalization is our fate. You're looking at this wrong. The dichotomy isn't Globalization vs No Trade. It's more of Globalization & Free Trade vs Limited Conditional Trade. Throughout all of written human history there was trade. But there wasn't free trade like today where everyone is able to trade with one another so freely with little cost. Historically, only big powers who had massive navies to protect their own ships were able to trade in meaningful quantities. Today the USN guarantees all global shipping. Morris Chang has long opposed moving Fabs to the US where most of his customers were because so long as the cost of moving stuff was negligible it made little sense. But Taiwan's trade is not guaranteed by the Republic of China Navy. And it's customers are overwhelming American. Post Covid & Ukraine Invasion it is clear that neither the US government, nor US corporations believe that there is no cost to crucial supply chains being located abroad. Nor is the transport of those vital supplies considered to be effectively negligible. TSMC leadership likely had some difficult conversations behind closed doors which to effect amounted that with the current status quo they are too expensive, and if they do not relocate some of their fabs to the US, their customers will look to alternative partners.
• yucky 4y ago
  Globalization destroys diversity. If diversity is our strength, then we should fight to prevent globalization and the homogenization that it brings.