17 ms·

Globalization is dead and no one is listening

• rjbwork 4y ago
  Peter Zeihan has been talking our ears off on this topic for a while, if one can be bothered to listen.
  • throwawaymaths 4y ago
    His book is NYT bestseller, so it's hard to argue no one is listening
  • dangerwill 4y ago
    I really wish he would cite his sources for a bunch of the specifics of his research. Like China's navy not being able to go more than 500 miles off shore, or German solar/wind capacity being so over-built out that the theoretical (given endless sun and wind) power generation is twice that of the actual power generation. When I try to look up publicly available data on his claims, either I get nowhere or the data I can find is nowhere near as drastic as his summaries. I also find it baffling how someone so clearly intelligent and willing to burst bubbles seems to not be able to consider the US breaking down internally along with the break down of globalization. He's ignoring that the country is on the edge of long term civil conflict (or based on your view, has already begun the descent).
    • ericmay 4y ago
      > I also find it baffling how someone so clearly intelligent and willing to burst bubbles seems to not be able to consider the US breaking down internally along with the break down of globalization. He's ignoring that the country is on the edge of long term civil conflict (or based on your view, has already begun the descent). I think from what I read of his previously, it's more of a "we're not as bad off as them" and less of a "it can't happen here". But I don't see the US really breaking down in the near term politically because as bad and heated as words have gotten nothing substantial has really changed. It's mostly business as usual. If you will also recall back when we didn't really "know" what the pandemic was going to be the whole country was pretty united. There was some toilet paper hoarding but that was about it. I do think some of the homogeneity of the US will be lost and that will cause some local instability and terrorism like the terrorists who attacked power substations and such, but things have really calmed down and have been continuing to do so. We'll lose homogeneity because of the Internet and because we don't have a unifying voice or cause to crusade, but even white nationalists go to the movies and eat ice cream.
      • jandrewrogers 4y ago
        > the terrorists who attacked power substations People jumping to the conclusion that everything is terrorism in the absence of concrete evidence is part of the problem. They caught the Washington State substation attackers; it was caused by a couple of not-very-smart criminals attempting an ordinary burglary in a creative way. Actual terrorism is incredibly rare in the US, no matter how hard the media tries to find some.
        • ericmay 4y ago
          Of course it's rare (this supports my assertion that the US is stable), but Washington State wasn't the only attack [1] and won't be the last, and that's just a specific type of attack on specific infrastructure. We can move all sorts of goal posts around what is or isn't terrorism, but you can apply the easy rule which is if Islamic people did this would we consider it terrorism. If yes, then it's also terrorism when white supremacist groups do it too (or any politically motivated group). [1] https://myfox8.com/news/investigations/power-grid-attack/neo-nazi-power-substation-plots/ https://myfox8.com/news/investigations/power-grid-attack/neo...
      • Izkata 4y ago
        > But I don't see the US really breaking down in the near term politically because as bad and heated as words have gotten nothing substantial has really changed. It's mostly business as usual. > If you will also recall back when we didn't really "know" what the pandemic was going to be the whole country was pretty united. There was some toilet paper hoarding but that was about it. Also riots across the country and a whole bunch of "autonomous zones"...
        • ericmay 4y ago
          Yea the riots were annoying (in the sense of an annoyance to the established democratic government) but like other riots they went away. It’s pretty much back to business as usual.
    • throwawaymaths 4y ago
      > Like China's navy not being able to go more than 500 miles off shore This has been basically true until recently. china certainly has individual ships capable of long distance expeditionary activities but lacks the supply chain to project a large and sustained force globally, and not even in large numbers to places it cares about like the middle east (to protect oil shipments from piracy or state meddling). This is why they are investing in bases like Djibouti, gwadar, sri Lanka, but even so key choke points like Malacca are still vulnerable and those bases are not likely to be able to support say more than a small carrier group anytime soon I had a friend that worked in carrier supply. Let's just say it's a very involved system where you HAVE to have a network of extra national allies to do it well, you can't go it alone which is increasingly what china seems like it will have to face given its diplomatic attitude of late
      • dangerwill 4y ago
        Yeah but when I look at a map, all they would need to maintain access to Persian gulf oil is a partner in the Indian Ocean and a partner in the Malacca straits. They have strong relationships with Sri Lanka and Singapore and Malaysia. Warrior wolf diplomacy probably did kill the larger belt and road initiative (eg, getting a stronger supply chain to Europe and pulling Europe out of the American sphere) but keeping the lights on vis a vis oil seems quite possible for China.
  • nordsieck 4y ago
    > Peter Zeihan has been talking our ears off on this topic for a while, if one can be bothered to listen. He can be interesting to listen to, but I find that he typically paints the worst case picture - what will happen if no one reacts to the bad things coming down the pipeline. But when he's talking about stuff that's coming decades out, that's a pretty unrealistic premise.
    • marcosdumay 4y ago
      > what will happen if no one reacts to the bad things It's almost a "people will starve if nobody acts up and eat!" take. Specifically, the idea that the seas will be impossible to cross if the US specifically stops caring about them is a joke.
  • hbarka 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34238855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34238855
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• outside1234 4y ago
  Thank goodness When China does something crazy like Russia we have to be ready to cut economic ties with them - and the TSMC story (and Intel building fabs in Ohio and Europe) are the first steps towards that.
  • vkou 4y ago
    That's about as likely as the rest of the world cutting economic ties with the US when it does something crazy, like invading a middle eastern country to satisfy it's presidents ego. (Finishing the job Dad started.[1]) Russia is not China, all it brought to the table was exporting a single commodity, while being utterly dependant on imports. And either way, India and China didn't play ball with sanctions. [1] There were a few other causes for that conflict, but 'Colin Powell lies his ass off in front of the UN' wasn't any better, and neither was 'we paid defectors money until we found one that would sing to the tune we wanted to hear'.
    • ElevenLathe 4y ago
      Absolutely, the Chinese economy is the world economy. Everywhere else is the periphery.
      • Retric 4y ago
        US China trade is vastly smaller than many seem to think. China is #1 in imports, but that’s only 1/6th of the total US imports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa... US GDP is roughly 50x as large as what we get from China.
        • ElevenLathe 4y ago
          GDP is a horrible way to think about actual international trade, because western GDP is pumped up by services, IP (and monumentally expensive machines that are mainly IP wrapped in steel). Meanwhile China exports actual stuff. In a real "embargo China" situation, China and their sphere of influence could easily replace Europe and the US while the opposite is not true.
• m00dy 4y ago
  looking at container price index is another indicator
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    I think the post-Covid economic boom and acute shortages played a bigger role than the alleged end of globalization. NO one could have foreseen in early 2020 at the depths of such a serious pandemic that things would recover so fast, such as home prices, stock prices, GDP, consumer spending, truck sales, tech, etc.
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33955985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33955985
• super256 4y ago
  This article sounds more like “globalization is dead for semiconductors”.
  • nine_k 4y ago
    Not even that; TSMC hasn't closed its factories, and Samsung is as strong as ever. Sony still makes excellent image sensors. Bosch and Siemens still churn out colossal amounts of power and control semiconductors. Etc. That is, globalization of semiconductors is still there, but suddenly it has less Shenzhen and Hong Kong in it.
    • twic 4y ago
      Over 70% of RAM is made by South Korean companies. Most of the rest is made by Micron, an American company, at fabs in Japan and Taiwan.
      • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        Doesn't Micron still have fabs in the US as well?
        • floxy 4y ago
          Yes, Fab 6 makes DRAM in Manassas, VA.
      • nine_k 4y ago
        Top 10 semiconductor manufacturers (countries with significant chip fabs) include also Israel, Malaysia, Netherlands, and the UK [1]. Smaller semiconductor fabs, and non-chip semiconductor (like MOSFET or LED) manufacturers are even more widely spread. OTOH EU is now considered sort of one quasi-state, so the massive cross-Europe trade, which would be considered a sign of globalization in 1923, just passes as an unnoticed baseline in 22023. [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-semiconductor-manufacturing-countries-170616248.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-semiconductor-manufact...
  • 4y ago
• api 4y ago
  The idea that seems to have been disproven is that trade liberalization will lead to political liberalization. Turns out you just end up with super rich dictators and authoritarian single party bureaucracies. If anything it’s gone the other way with authoritarian ideas being imported into democracies and dependencies on overseas supply chains making companies into hostages to authoritarian regimes. The latter effect seems like a large scale version of what forums and social media has taught us: that the least tolerant people end up controlling the discourse. The only way to stop this is to paradoxically be incredibly intolerant to the intolerant. Personally I think we should have free trade with free countries and high “slavery tax” tariffs on authoritarian countries. An argument can be made that all labor in a country that doesn’t meet some minimal human rights threshold is slave labor and should at least be taxed.
  • Tade0 4y ago
    It's not paradoxical if you treat tolerance as a peace treaty instead of a moral position. Because, ultimately, it is the former rather than the latter.
    • diputsmonro 4y ago
      That's an excellent way to put it. The "paradox" branding has always seemed flawed to me, like it's making the concept more complicated than it needs to be and opening up the position to claims of hypocrisy . But tolerance doesn't work that way - if we become tolerant of intolerance, then we've given up our goal. Tolerance should be an active effort to fight against intolerance, not an indifferent armchair theory.
  • dingusdew 4y ago
    For those unfamiliar with the concept of the Paradox of Tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance "Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal." -Karl Popper
• jerf 4y ago
  Nobody is talking about it because it is still politically incorrect in our overall culture [1] to admit that globalization is collapsing. Our elites have banked too much of their reputation on this to change course quickly in public. To say globalization is dead is to say our elites were grotesquely, systematically, and with great consequences to all, wrong. I find it very productive to look at the positions of various large entities and measure them against "what's the fastest these entities can change their official position without ever having to actually admit they were wrong". When you find a government agency or large company moving at that speed on some topic, it is advantageous for you as an individual to look at where they are going, and take appropriate actions without waiting for the official authority to finally get to the more justifiable position. It can be decades for one of these entities to get to a new position at this speed. But there's plenty of actions being taken. This is merely a high profile one. Lots of little adjustments by lots of companies that add up to a lot. All the economies of the world are adjusting to the new realities. [1]: By which I mean, the mainstream media, TV, large magazines, etc. I'm not too worried that I'm going to be hammered on the subculture of HN for this statement. Someone may disagree, but I don't expect anyone to try to shame me over this or something. But don't hold your breath for CNN or someone like that to air a one-hour special on Why Globalization Was A Big Mistake And Everyone Advocating For It Was Obviously Stupid.
  • aeternum 4y ago
    Globalization also isn't really collapsing but it definitely is changing. Is Apple now making their iPhones in the US? Nope, but they are moving production to other countries so it doesn't only take place in China. This will result in higher prices short-term, but will likely result in more globalization and supply-chain resilience in the longer term.
    • jerf 4y ago
      Yeah, I think of it more as a pendulum swing than an absolute. As a deliberate extreme example, shipping your entire industrial base to another country is obviously stupid. (The US did not literally do that. By most measures our industrial output has been flat, rather than necessarily "declining", over the previous couple of decades. It's just our needs grew as our output didn't.) But on the flip side, demanding that everything be sourced from within your "own" economy (however you'd even define such a thing) is going to be stupid on roughly the same time frame too. Any self-contained economy is going to have a hard time competing with one using a larger base. We went too far in one direction. It doesn't take a very deep knowledge of history to expect we will overcompensate too far in the other direction. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
• musha68k 4y ago
  I wonder why Taiwan hasn't vetoed this?
  • jaywalk 4y ago
    I'm sure that wouldn't impact diplomatic relations at all.
• crgi 4y ago
  Maybe its not really dead, but just nears completion/saturation …
• bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Global trade increased from $28.5T in 2021 to $32T in 2022. Doesn't sound dead to me.
  • troon-lover 4y ago
    [dead]
  • bufferoverflow 4y ago
    Pretty sure trade will keep increasing, just because the global population is increasing and many countries are coming out of poverty and starting their local manufacturing revolutions. But the social globalization is dying. People are finally realizing that some cultures aren't compatible.
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      Currently at war: Russia and Ukraine, with a shared cultural history going back (depending on how you count) a thousand years or past recorded history. Currently not at war: The US and China, with little overlap before 1844. I don't think we can draw a broad conclusion concerning cultural compatibility and peaceful relations.
    • svnt 4y ago
      > social globalization is dying By what metric are you reaching this conclusion?
  • bioemerl 4y ago
    You have to account for percent of global GDP, the fact that there was a big covid recovery between 2020 and 2022, and the fact there is inflation in the USD. If you look at the overall trend, trade is a percent of GDP globally peaked in 08 and it's actually been on a slow decline ever since then.
  • DFHippie 4y ago
    > Global trade increased from $28.5T in 2021 to $32T in 2022. Are those numbers normalized for inflation?
• atemerev 4y ago
  Globalization is very much not dead. What we have now is a final roadbump before the ultimately connected, para-governmental world. The governments of countries who feel that they are excluded from globalism (Russia, China etc) are currently rocking the boat, but they will not prevail. We will have the end of history 2.0 in the next 5-7 years.
  • lordfrito 4y ago
    There are many potential futures in front of us, but my gut says this explanation (or something similar) is closer to what's happening here. Not wagering on it, but paying close attention. Globalization isn't going to die, but will for sure contract for a while. Not sure this is the final roadbump in the overall process, but it's a big one. Not even sure it's the end of globalization, it may simply be an economic crossroads between an ambitious China, an opportunistic Russia, and the existing (western liberal) world order. As you said, a few countries are rocking the boat and we either all learn to play well together, or the west will take it's economic "ball" and go home. I don't believe any developed nation is so short sighted as to cut off it's own nose to spite the west's face. The west has resolve on this as the lessons of WWII still resonate with us. There is a potential future in front of us where globalization collapses due to widescale political instability brought about by climate change. But I don't see that happening just yet.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  It's way too premature to say it's dead. More like it stalled out. America's global culture reach is wider than ever, nor has trade slowed much. The US-China trade deficit is still where it was in 2013 or so.
  • kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    It's amusing how nobody is really even trying to level up with US in soft power. China and India's soft power are multitudes less than Korea (k-pop, k-drama, k-beauty), Japan (anime, tech), and Mexico (music).
    • notahacker 4y ago
      I think China and India would probably take "the world relies on us for goods or services" as a source of soft power over Mexican music
    • Der_Einzige 4y ago
      Maybe soft power in the USA. China, for example, wields enormous soft power across all of Asia. I can tell you haven't heard of ip man.
    • inawarminister 4y ago
      Bollywood is crazily popular in Asia. Even in India's enemy like Pakistan. China is investing a lot in Confucius institutes and their own films as well. We'll see more after they wake up from the zero Covid stupor soon.
    • questime 4y ago
      1. This isn't true 2. Korea and Japan are in demographic death spirals so they are forced to appeal to westerners
• gremlinsinc 4y ago
  > The most powerful, and somewhat uncomfortable, part of Chang’s speech is his declaration that: > “Globalization is almost dead. Free trade is almost dead. And a lot of people still wish they would come back, but I really don’t think they will be back for a while.” This is a horrible take, globalization's demise is a blessing not a curse. Globalization has propped up repressive regimes willing to provide child slave labor at the behest of capitalists the world over. At the same time this was taking jobs away from people in the west, and ending good factory jobs with pensions where a single breadwinner could support a family of 4. We might be able to go back to that paradigm which is important so that a child can have at least 1 parent available at all times and such if we end globalization and go back to localized supply chains.
  • iorlrnn 4y ago
    > globalization's demise is a blessing not a curse You'll pay more for less and you'll be happy, right? You'll be poorer just as everyone around you, but at least you'll show those capitalists!
    • gremlinsinc 4y ago
      I'd gladly pay more if it meant everybody in America could be homeowners (if they actually wanted to, and put in effort i.e. 9-5 at a FACTORY job for 40 years, to retire w/ a decent pension, and the works), you know like 90% of baby boomers had, but current generations do not have. We're already at a point where nobody will own anything anymore, everything is rented. Owning a home is out of reach unless you make over 200k.
• uncomputation 4y ago
  > The unfortunate second-order effect of the death of globalization that no one likes to talk about is the rising cost of all kinds of goods and products These aren’t second-order effects or some kind of dirty secret. Anyone with a high school education in econ understands that buying American is more expensive. What is a far more interesting question is why we are now willing to pay that cost, and how we got here. It’s worth noting that this is largely a counter-current movement within the semi conductor industry, since a lot of industries post-Covid are actually more global, more remote, and less local than ever before. Would be interesting to touch on this. This pseudo-conspiratorial thinking, that somehow the increased costs of domestic production are a secret the “elites” are trying to “hide,” is just a convenient way to make a very basic observation seem clever and insightful.
• comte7092 4y ago
  Globalization never applied to national security, what’s changed is how chips are viewed through the lens of national defense. ITAR products were never built in China and never would have been. globalization is dead is an overstatement, which has a shred of truth to it.
  • twobitshifter 4y ago
    I think with IOT, the scope of National security is larger than we have ever seen in the past. Simple Doodads might be globalized, but what happens when everyone’s Chinese made EV unexpectedly stops and can’t be restarted? At this point every smart device can be a security threat.
    • vmladenov 4y ago
      Someone will build a control module and people will install it. They’re motors and batteries, not magic.
      • jjk166 4y ago
        Sure, but how long is it going to take to design, produce, and install a few million such modules? Months? Years? If a security backdoor shutdown a few million cars all at once, there would be immense damage done within minutes as cars start slamming into eachother, hours as people deal with horrific traffic jams, and days as all those people who relied on those vehicles are stuck without their primary mode of transportation. If coordinated with other attacks (cyber or otherwise) it could easily be crippling to a response. Yeah we're not going to be permanently knocked out, but it's nice to avoid getting punched in the face to begin with.
    • mikrotikker 4y ago
      Even scarier is the infrastructure threats. Lots of news about Hikvision cameras at the moment. Most five eyes countries have warded off Huawei, but NZ is full steam ahead with them in backbone infra. Similarly China is trying to loan a lot of money to the Solomon Islands to build way more Huawei towers than they actually need. Then you have those sketchy power transformers in the US that they surprisingly found were dialing home to China. Trump put restrictions on this, but Biden removed them his first day in office only to reintroduce them in the past few months.
• Yhippa 4y ago
  This reminds me of the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention[0]: "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain. I think this has largely proven true, and as certain supply chains look to onshore, this can have geopolitical implications. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat#Dell_Theory_of_Conflict_Prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat#Dell_Theory_...
  • drowsspa 4y ago
    Is this the new "no countries with McDonald's go to war"?
    • Yhippa 4y ago
      It is! I went down the rabbit hole on this one. It was a follow up to Thomas Friedman's "Golden Arches" theory which you just described.
    • LarryMullins 4y ago
      It's the new "The Great Illusion", this idea has been repeatedly recycled and debunked for more than a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
      • kmeisthax 4y ago
        The thing is, The Great Illusion isn't wrong. Economic interdependency is a deterrent to war. It's just that its not a very good one, because the capitalism singularity is not powerful enough to overthrow the nationalism singularity[0]. Cultural ties can provide another deterrent: for example, you wouldn't imagine, say, New York and New Jersey going to war[1]. But even then, Russia and Ukraine were rather close and still are despite the former trying to genocide the latter. The most effective deterrent to war is to put the fear of death in the people who decide whether or not to start wars. MAD theory, while technically wrong, was a good enough story that it averted several catastrophic nuclear attacks. If only because the people with their fingers on the buttons second-guessed themselves long enough for reports to come in that it was actually just the light reflecting off the ocean and not an incoming American ICBM. [0] Yes, I mean this in the same context that one might refer to a technological singularity. Social existence today is a nested hierarchy of supra-individual social structures, of which superhuman AGI will merely be one of its subagents. [1] Though they did come close in the 1800s over Staten Island. They call it the Empire State for a reason.
• dathinab 4y ago
  Not dead at all, just changing. And depending on your definition free trade either always had been dead, or is something you kinda really don't want as a normal citizen or isn't dead but not thriving but also had been that way for most countries since decades.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zenmacro 4y ago
  Two thoughts. 1) > Globalization is Dead and No One is Listening We're talking about it on HN page 1. And I hear a lot of talk among the macro and policy people I follow about friendshoring. 2) The author makes an argument that the fact that TSMC had to send US engineers to Taiwan for training was a sign of a talent shortage. But earlier the author said this: > TSMC is arguably the one company that most epitomizes all the forces of globalization – free trade, hyper specialization... Hyperspecialization to me implies that you need to go to HQ to understand how everything works and it will take a while to understand it all. So the earlier argument about a shortage of talent in the US seems tenuous to me.
  • svnt 4y ago
    The author seems to have missed that TSMC previously failed to transplant TSMC culture into the USA. In nearly thirty years they probably realized they need more than just semiconductor expertise transfer — they need a transfusion of Taiwanese culture. One way to do that is to send an entire employee base from Taiwan, but then how do you maintain or integrate in the US? Splitting the employee base in half seems more likely to succeed, probably with process/engineering roles predominantly Taiwanese and more external-facing roles skewing American.
    • AlbertCory 4y ago
      There are lots of Japanese and Chinese companies with substantial presences in the US. TSMC probably realizes it's a learning process and they need to get on with it.
      • svnt 4y ago
        My experience with those (and German companies) is that it tends to be using the US employees as an innovation hub, which in practice means we get the projects that are more likely to fail, because that is less culturally embarrassing here. This approach can’t work with advanced semiconductor manufacturing for a number of reasons but primarily the same factors that drove Intel’s adoption of “Copy Exactly!”
  • 4y ago
• fear_and_coffee 4y ago
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• newaccount2021 4y ago
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• javierH1988 4y ago
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• svnt 4y ago
  There is a lot more to unpack here than the author addresses in terms of a 91-year-old founder complex process of saying goodbye to his and Taiwan’s semiconductor supremacy in a politically tenable way. From a global perspective, allowing one geopolitically contested island nation be the intellectual and physical home of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing on the planet is not a good outcome. The global progression seems to have been something like: minimal trade -> increasing trade -> increased specialization -> emergence of SPOFs -> redistribution/redundancy (we are here) It seems pretty healthy, but it means the SPOFs will lose their statuses as the center of their respective worlds.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  No-one is listening because this is not a new or especially insightful observation. Nor is it wholly unknown territory, because we have many years of nationalist/protectionist/industrialist economic history to draw upon when trying to make predictions or investment decisions.
• TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  >Globalization is Dead No it's not. We are still horribly dependent on China for the most basic products.
• throwaway4good 4y ago
  We in the west are about to find out just how much of our wealth depends on globalization. Which one of you wants to work in a factory assembling iPhones?
  • chitowneats 4y ago
    Probably not many who regularly hang out in the HN comment section. As for others in the U.S., I imagine some would choose it over picking produce in the hot sun. Or working in an Amazon warehouse. Particularly if the pay is better.
    • throwaway4good 4y ago
      The pay will be worse and the iPhone a lot more expensive.
      • LarryMullins 4y ago
        > the pay will be worse. iPhone factory workers in China get paid more than field workers in China. The same will be true in America. > iPhone a lot more expensive. Yeah, so what? There's plenty of slack in the wasteful consumption habits we've developed generally, and with phones specifically. If an iphone becomes twice as expensive, then simply compensate by buying one half as frequently. Instead of wastefully buying new phone every year because you've just got to have the latest trendy fashion gadget, buy a new one every ten years. As consumer expectations shift, so will the products. Instead of thin and disposable phones to chase fashion trends, we'll get robust and serviceable phones if that is what people come to demand.
        • throwaway4good 4y ago
          The price of an iPhone is about 3x the monthly wage of an iPhone factory worker.
          • LarryMullins 4y ago
• Beaver117 4y ago
  In threads like these you have to remember HNers aren't very good at predicting the future
  • adamrezich 4y ago
    still waiting on acknowledgement and/or crow-eating for the hundreds of posts claiming that Elon Musk will never succeed in buying Twitter (but he might be forced to pay for it anyway)…!
• jasmer 4y ago
  The neoliberals didn't integrate human rights, pollution, climate change, national security, food security etc. into their framework and so well, uhh, yeah, it didn't work out so well did it? I honestly don't think it's a huge surprise to most people - every one of us is interested in at least one of those externalized issues, and so we've pondered the problem. We're going to need a new framework obviously. Pragmatically, since we don't do things very well internationally, I suppose we'll see adjustments: supply chains for national security, collective government pushback on China after a lot of behind the scenes worries it'll now be public, energy realignment forced largely due to Putin, probably some kind of strategic engagement of 'Rest of Asia' by the USA, a tightening of NATO and integration of Japan and Korea and Australia into that extended framework, probably the UN will lead some initiatives on Human Rights but I am sad to say I don't foresee a lot of progress. The situation in E. China is morbid, but China can very effectively keep the noise levels low by allowing very few people there, coercing various media entities and reliably depending on our own complacency.
• verdenti 4y ago
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• taylodl 4y ago
  Globalization is dead? The shelves at Walmart aren't chock-full of goods made in China? No? That's because globalization isn't dead.
• thadk 4y ago
  Here is a poorly mic'd but audible version of the remarks of Morris Chang, the now-91-years-old founder of TSMC several speakers prior to Biden's own remarks: https://youtu.be/urlwF0B9-hw?t=747 https://youtu.be/urlwF0B9-hw?t=747
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Globalization is dead the day the math of specialization and division of labor is no longer relevant. Until then we are just flirting with unsustainable inefficiency.
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• college_physics 4y ago
  Globalization is a big word. It will only die in a meaningful sense if we undergo socioeconomic collapse of unprecedented magnitude (which is certainly within the realm of the possible but hopefully not the likely scenario). What is dead (or at least being hastily patched) is a particular form of aggressive labor cost arbitrage, primarily between the US / Western Europe and East Asia economies. That monetary optimization was premised on the absence of geopolitical risk. Ignoring or socializing all sorts of risks and externalities has been the modus vivendi and key source of "profitability" for the entire system for a very long time. The term permacrisis is simply a reflection of these long-tail risks eventually reasserting themselves. We are likely to see some re-localization which will hopefully increase resilience. But emissions and viruses know no political borders. The destiny of our species is to be globalized (colonize every nook and cranny of the planet) and the sooner we can achieve this in a peaceful, sustainable, equitable manner, the less wasted life, the less damage to ourselves and the planet.
• buf 4y ago
  If you play a game of monopoly it always goes the same: - Everyone wants to scoop up as many resources as possible before everyone else. - People lament the fact that certain players got lucky and have a head start. - The majority of the board stops being salty and plays nice/negotiates to continue accumulating property. - Eventually everything is purchased, the pecking order is firmly established, there is no negotiation because you either already have what you need or you lack resources to barter with, and the slow downward spiral begins until the game is over. We are simply in the endgame now. The “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” phase of capitalism is over until we start a new game.
• abeppu 4y ago
  I think the mistake is to narrowly assume globalization only concerns the flow and sourcing of physical goods. > Globalization ... is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization Ways global forces are ever more present in our lives: - more and more of how we work, socialize, consume media, etc is through software produced by large multinational companies - many of us seem to be emotionally or politically invested in movements in other countries. Americans who could not place Ukraine on a map 15 months ago are using its flag and taking stances on what kind of military aid is appropriate today. People who have never been to Iran are feeling alignment with ongoing protest movements there, etc etc. - media is increasingly global, at all scales: - hollywood movies get tweaked to be viable in China - small-scale content producers regularly reach international audiences or do international collabs - we even become aware of, and beholden to foreign regulations! US-based startups commonly now know and plan for their GDPR obligations. I think globalization may be changing, but it's not dying.
• balr0g 4y ago
  What a great time to start contributing to the CollapseOS project :)
• wkat4242 4y ago
  Complete globalization was always a very bad idea. Journalists like John Pilger have been trying to warn us for decades but were ignored by society because there was so much profit to be gained. Admittedly the China we moved all our production to in the early 2000s wasn't that bad a business partner. However we've always known that countries can change very quickly and since Xi JinPing it's become a major geopolitical threat. Only now we're too invested and it will cost us a lot to pull out again. Still, it has to be done. I hope we never make that mistake again and diversify in countries we can actually trust. Personally I think leaving everything to "the market" is also a very bad idea since all the market cares about is money. Not the environment, not people, not society. Trying to get the market to take these into account makes for very awkward workarounds like carbon taxes/credits. There needs to be a balance between free markets and protecting our own interests, and those of the world as a whole.
  • x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
    > Personally I think leaving everything to "the market" is also a very bad idea since all the market cares about is money. Not the environment, not people, not society. Trying to get the market to take these into account makes for very awkward workarounds like carbon taxes/credits. There needs to be a balance between free markets and protecting our own interests, and those of the world as a whole. This isn't a problem with "the market", but how finance and stock markets are heavily biased with short-term thinking. Money _in the short term_, is the predominant issue.
    • RestlessMind 4y ago
      > Money _in the short term_, is the predominant issue. That's not just about money. Humans in general are bad at thinking long term and want immediate gratification. cf Marshmallow experiment, or how we are (not) tackling climate change.
    • rhaway84773 4y ago
      The problem is that risk increases rapidly with time. Any system whose goal is to optimize the usage of money, which is what finance basically is, will almost always value short term thinking over long term thinking because of the much greater risk involved. The way to counteract this is simple. Regulation and/or adding a monetary cost to the behavior you want to discourage.
• lamontcg 4y ago
  Globalization is a term without any kind of defined meaning and that very old cartoon about the different people trying to describe the part of the elephant that they're holding seems to apply. And even taking something concrete like Brexit, which people might think fits in with the end of Globalization, I'd argue was driven by a flood of propaganda and money from global capital trying to drive a wedge between the UK and EU for their profit ("divide and conquer" strategy). I doubt you're going to get everyone to be able to look at a single policy like that and decide if the result is due to Globalization or anti-Globalization. When Globalist entities exploit anti-Globalist sentiment to promote policies which are beneficial to them, what do you call that?
• Mikeb85 4y ago
  I mean, the article's not wrong. This fab is a hedge against China invading Taiwan. Which will almost certainly happen because of the West's weak response to Russia invading Ukraine. China will invade Taiwan and the US will need semiconductors. Taiwan is a better US ally than the US is a Taiwanese ally and will supply them. That's what this is about. Globalisation is still a thing, ish, but it's doomed. We thought the rest of the world (cough Russia, China and their rag-tag group of dictator allies) cared more about economic well-being than expansionism and petty grievances but guess what, we're the idiots and they don't. They want to dominate the world with their shitty dictatorships and we are too naive to see it.
  • thinking4real 4y ago
    “Globalisation is still a thing, ish, but it's doomed. We thought the rest of the world (cough Russia, China and their rag-tag group of dictator allies) cared more about economic well-being than expansionism and petty grievances” Why should the US all the way on the other side of the world be depriving these two modern superpowers of their neighboring resources? We have military proxy states set up all around Russia and China. The US has been the dominant power in the world for around 100 years. Not that I don’t benefit from it, but it seems willfully ignorant to act like it’s US good guy Russia/China bad guy. We’d do the same expansionist thing, as evidenced by Ukraine and Taiwan themselves…
    • Mikeb85 4y ago
      > depriving these two modern superpowers of their neighboring resources? Wow so people are just resources to be exploited eh? > We’d do the same expansionist thing Mexico is kind of shitty yet the US hasn't invaded. Cuba is straight up hostile, yet there they are, an independent country. The US basically conquered parts of Germany, Italy and Japan and not only let them be independent countries, even helped them rebuild. No, your theory is shit. The US has had all the opportunity to expand yet hasn't. I was in Europe during the Iraq war, sentiment was pretty anti-American. I'm in Europe today, it's more pro-American than I ever could have imagined. More anti-Russian than ever. If Russia and China wanted less hostile neighbours, maybe they should have been less shitty. Ukraine has been very pro-Russian at times, Zelenskiy himself even tried to make peace (he was the "pro-Russian" candidate during his election if you didn't follow Ukrainian elections regularly). Taiwan used to believe in "one country, two systems" but China fucked HK. I'm in Czech Republic right now, used to be part of the Warsaw pact. Yet the frontrunner in the presidential election is a former Chair of the NATO military committee and all the politicians who were previously friendly to Russia have disavowed. There's Ukrainian flags everywhere and Russians are banned from getting visas here. Despite the refugee and energy crisis I've never seen a more anti-Russian sentiment. Even Karlovy Vary, which used to have a ton of Russian tourists, has no sign of Russia anywhere. No tourists, no flags, nothing. Just yellow and blue flags everywhere.
• gumby 4y ago
  This kind of hardcore position really irritates me. Can one really say that globalism is "dead" when the very example, a TSMC factory in Arizona, is a transnational investment? The analogy is autocracy: A "Tyrant" can indeed be useful in a crisis (Churchill was as close to this point as you can find in recent history) but if they steer wrong, or if there is no crisis, history shows they are a disaster. Likewise, nativism in manufacturing can have some limited benefit (consider manufacturing for your military) but in a greater sense leads to disaster. The way to think of this issue is resilience. You want to have a diversity of suppliers and have them have independent failure modes. Likewise you don't want local monocultures (Detroit and cars, West Virgina and coal, the loss of the semi mfg infrastructure by Silicon Valley) because all-eggs-in-one-basket is the opposite of resilience. Also Westfalian boundaries are pretty arbitrary for this issue. Should California have its own solar panel industry instead of buying from China? Or would it be OK to buy from Idaho? Silicon Valley still has quite a diversity of technical domains while SF evolved late and remained more of a monculture (and thus is losing a small amount of share to NYC, which SV is not). Is anyone wringing their hands over this? I don't think so, and nobody should be.
• janalsncm 4y ago
  You have to take the CEO of TSMC with a grain of salt. As CEO of a Taiwanese company, his statements are colored by the fact that his company is ground zero for political maneuvering. Free trade was always secondary to politics. Globalization is not dead. If it was, Apple (mentioned in the article for being interested in American chips) would be manufacturing computers and iPhones in the US. No, this is clearly a pullback from China.
• labrador 4y ago
  I feel like Morris Chang in his retired days has been following the likes of Peter Zeihan who claims globalization is dead because the United States Navy can no longer protect the world's shipping lanes, which is absurd. I could only make it through half this video because he just seems very wrong to me. Peter Zeihan: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSpT0yEtFBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSpT0yEtFBY
• zcw100 4y ago
  Give me a good definition of globalization and then you can declare whatever that is to be dead.
• ambientenv 4y ago
  I see a lot of interesting but fundamentally incorrect comments here, likely reflective of an "intuitive" understanding of globalization, something I, myself, would have shared until quite recently. My two cents on this is, if you really want to understand globalization and its demise now underway, you need to understand the Bretton Woods agreement, the role the US played as the worlds maritime security enforcer, the end of asset-backed currencies and geopolitics in general.
  • spiralx 4y ago
    Yeah, I've been following this guy https://www.youtube.com/@RealLifeLore/videos https://www.youtube.com/@RealLifeLore/videos and one of the points that constantly comes up is the importance of oceanic trade and maritime borders, and how the geopolitics of that is dominated by a small number of vitally important choke points - the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Strait of Malacca, the Bosporus Strait, the Strait of Gibraltar and the Panama and Suez canals. One of the reasons things seem so fucked up is how many countries are entirely dependent upon control - or at least access - to these choke points even - and especially - when they're thousands of miles away from them, and so their geopolitical interest involves meddling in those regions. Geopolitics would be orders of magnitude simpler if we lived on the super-continent Pangea.
• redbar0n 4y ago
  This does not bode well for Taiwanese national security. I’m surprised Taiwan allowed it. Considering that dependence on Taiwan for chip production has got to be one important reason why the US would defend Taiwan in case of an attack by China.
• Only_Spam 4y ago
  Globalization (the definition) comes to borderless states with transparency and intercommunication. Which will not happen because of individualism, nationalism, and war. Democratic, liberal ideals push for globalization for their one world agenda but they fail to understand libertarian views for personal and property rights.