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The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

165 points by jszymborski 3y ago

StevePerkins 3y ago
What a truly awful "sign up for my newsletter in order to read my blog post" nag modal. All you have to do is scroll down a bit and then scroll back up, and the modal remains off-screen below the bottom. A determined user can easily get around this wall, while it's JUST annoying enough to make a casual user (such as myself) close the tab after the second paragraph once the modal appears.
- causi 3y ago
  All you have to do is scroll down a bit and then scroll back up, and the modal remains off-screen below the bottom. Or just tap "continue reading" to dismiss it like a normal person.
  - mmcgaha 3y ago
    Yeah like the parent post said a determined user. Seriously though thanks for pointing it out because my eyes skipped right over the continue reading and went right up to the close my tab X.
- robswc 3y ago
  Maybe you're on a different device but on my browser there's a button that says "continue reading" Looks like its just substack with a custom domain. Those can be annoying though, for sure.
- frandroid 3y ago
  Is this the first time you see a substack page buddy
  - IKantRead 3y ago
    I don't think you should criticize others just because you've adapted to what is clearly a dark pattern. I clearly see the "continue reading" now, but I definitely recall the first time I saw this popup not seeing it and closing out of the window because I thought substack was demanding signup. I have no doubt they've a/b tested the hell out of this UX and patted themselves on the back when first time readers started subscribing at record rates... never bother to ask what this meant for the actual UX.
    - causi 3y ago
      It can't be a dark pattern without trying to trick the user. A popup saying "sign up for our blah-blah!" is not a dark pattern.
- madars 3y ago
  No such modal with uBlock Origin and default blocklists :) (Pro-tip: if you use Android, Firefox Mobile also supports uBlock Origin) You can even import anti-paywall filter lists like: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/master/antipaywall.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/m... https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter... Can't imagine browsing web with all the crapware, adds, nags, and trackers.
- dang 3y ago
  "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Jupe 3y ago
> This will take time. Decoupling is not an instantaneous process. China spent two decades becoming the workshop of the world; the rest of the developing world isn’t going to mirror that accomplishment in one or two years. It is all about dependency trees. The US decides to divert imports from China to other countries, which in turn may import from China. This reminds me of my day-to-day work so much; especially w.r.t. transitive dependency management. So: If service A is 100% dependent upon service B which is 100% dependent upon service C, then service A is 100% dependent on service C. At some point you need redundancy to protect against disruptions, outages, supply chain issues, policy changes, wars (either physical or economic), etc. My (probably silly) question is: Does anyone know of "building block" or "core" services (such as authentication, authorization, BLOB storage, data storage, queuing) which are multi-cloud by design? Meaning service X offers SLAs for service endpoints hosted in AWS, GCP and Azure? If/when any of these "go down", consumers can (automatically?) flip a switch to route to another cloud service implementation?
- couchand 3y ago
  This has always been one of the selling points of CockroachDB, the ability to seamlessly run multi-cloud redundancy.
  - Jupe 3y ago
    Awesome - good to know. Thanks! I'll read this later: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/multi-cloud-deployment/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/multi-cloud-deployment/
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  > It is all about dependency trees. The US decides to divert imports from China to other countries, which in turn may import from China. This is already happening with more than ~80% of products that are "Made in Vietnam" and at least ~40% of products that are "Made in Korea." Not only do the raw materials come from China, but most of the work is done in China. The product is shipped overland from a Chinese factory to Vietnam or Korea, then some screws are tightened, some paint is slapped on, or a label is applied, and the product is re-exported. Among other things, this is effective for tariff evasion. And it's usually at least somewhat legitimate. It doesn't take much to make a product that's assembled in China "Made in Vietnam," even in a legal sense. Consider: https://casetext.com/case/ferrostaal-metals-corp-v-us https://casetext.com/case/ferrostaal-metals-corp-v-us Basically, there was a tariff on Japanese steel. US-based plaintiffs -- steel distributors -- sent that steel to New Zealand, had it galvanized, and re-exported it to the USA as a "Made in New Zealand" product. A Judge holds that the galvanization process (which is laughably cheap) is enough to render the steel "Made in New Zealand." When all's said and done, Chinese factories haven't slowed down and Chinese GDP is still rising (by more than American GDP) which tells you that the "decoupling" has to be in some respect illusory.
sdfghswe 3y ago
> Biden’s “friend-shoring” initiatives What's CRAZY to me is why this hasn't always been the case. Who thought it was a good idea to depend on unfriendly countries like China? Right, I know who thought that. Those who also claimed "if we trade with them enough, they'll like us" did. Fuck depending on China, or Russia, for that matter. The West should have all its critical dependencies within it. At most we could get non-critical niceties from the outside, no more than that. Change my mind.
- woooooo 3y ago
  They weren't unfriendly until we decided to make them so about 5 years ago. Policymakers in the late 90s couldn't necessarily predict swings in American opinion 20 years later.
  - throwawaymaths 3y ago
    Sure, but it's not like deciding to make china unfriendly wasn't provoked by china. The US was making legitimate attempt at "bringing china into the fold". Since xi jinping came into power, lots of sketchy stuff has happened on their end that made this strategy less tenable. For example: being invited to rimpac and then sending uninvited ships (2014)
    - woooooo 3y ago
      It's possible to be perfectly cordial without being a US client state. Why should they have to be "in the fold"?
      - nradov 3y ago
        It is impossible to have cordial relations with China while they are threatening to invade our ally Taiwan, and building artificial islands as military outposts in the South China Sea. The unfortunate reality is that China is now our enemy. That situation will persist and probably worsen at least until Xi is replaced.
EGreg 3y ago
If there’s one broad consensus in American policymaking circles today, it’s that global supply chains need to become less dependent on China. I agree, and the other way, in many BRICS and other countries, there is a broad consensus that global economies need to become less dependent on US Dollars. Both efforts at decentralization and lessening concentration of power are probably going to lead to new good results, as hegemons are forced to compete rather than enjoy a near-monopoly worldwide.
- dgb23 3y ago
  What's the rationale behind this? Why specifically China?
  - jpgvm 3y ago
    Because Americans need a bad guy for their political system to function.
  - soligern 3y ago
    Too much dependency on a soft enemy?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - proudeu 3y ago
    Probably old fashioned Anglo-Saxon feeling of superiority and fear that world order where white Anglo Saxons dominate markets and geopolitical landscape goes away forever
- nradov 3y ago
  There is no consensus among the BRICS or other countries. All of them would like to have alternatives to the US Dollar for international trade settlement. None of them can agree on what that alternative should be. For example, there's no way that India will agree to widespread use of the Chinese Yuan.
  - 3y ago
photochemsyn 3y ago
I don't really understand the argument the author makes about Mexico exporting cars to the USA while importing car parts from China, in terms of dollar amounts. Wouldn't it be better to ask what material percentage of a car manufactured in Mexico consists of auto parts made in China?
praptak 3y ago
There is one pro-decoupling argument to be made wrt the Chinese-owned factory outside China. This factory while owned by China is not under Chinese jurisdiction. If China pulls a Putin this factory is much harder for them to switch off as part of sanctions.
diego_moita 3y ago
Funny how things change. In the 90s the U.S., EU and Japan were the champions of free trade for industrial products and services. However, when it would come to agricultural goods they were the champions of tariffs and protectionism. Why? Easy: because 3rd world countries were very competitive on agriculture. Egypt had better cotton, Argentina had beef, Brazil had orange juice, Cuba had sugar, etc, etc. 3rd world countries would complain about the hypocrisy and the rich would reply that they should just shut up and give up on protectionism. Now the whole Southeast Asia is competing with rich countries in industrial goods and protectionism is not protectionism anymore, is "decoupling".
- the_af 3y ago
  Those of us in the 3rd world have always known this. US mandates on removing protectionism were never for them; they are for others. Their recommendations on how to run our economies are always like this; they are never for them, it's always for us. They sometimes use fancy speak like "decoupling" in hopes we won't be able to tell.
- strangescript 3y ago
  Having better beef doesn't translate to building weapons or global communication networks. Spinning up a new cattle ranch if supply is cut off is trivial. They are not on the same level. The movements we are seeing now are matters of national security.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    It takes time and it has cascading effects.
  - TremendousJudge 3y ago
    Having access to food is most definitely a matter of national security. If you get your ports cut off you can't increase local food production before mass starvation.
- brabel 3y ago
  This hypocrisy is why BRICS is so inviting to those countries that have suffered from the status quo for a long time.
ramesh31 3y ago
Well we all know what happens when countries stop trading. Here's hoping cooler heads prevail on both sides.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
My fear is decoupling just sets the stage for a global war. We’ve decoupled Russia, Iran, North Korea. With China we have a legitimate fully integrated axis capable of producing independently with legitimate and perceived global grievances, and the means and will to exercise force.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  This was the thinking in the 1980s when the US invited China into their global trade network. The thinking was they would move away from communism and Russia and towards an open Democracy. That happened in some small ways but has since been completely undone. Such as the Democracy movements in the 80s that were ultimately crushed in Tiananmen square. Or more recently, market reforms undone by Xi. Basically we are back to where we were in the 1980s in many ways.
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    Is democracy the only acceptable endgame? I worry we're mixing up ends and means. Democracy is a means, and "good government" is the end. In the last few decades, the overall Chinese population has seen dramatic upticks on all sorts of quality-of-life measurements. It doesn't look like an obvious kleptocracy. The surveys we have, regardless of how much it can be claimed they're cooked, indicate the public is broadly happy with the government. Maybe a single-party system works for them, at least at this point in time. I'd argue if you have multiple diverse functioning government types, that's worth preserving. Ecosystem diversity is valuable, just from a perspective of "when we get the next big crisis, maybe one has better tools available to solve it." There's nothing wrong with dangling Western style democracy as an option to the Chinese-- "if and when you want to try it, here's a body of experience and we can consult", but treating it as an end-all-be-all for an audience that broadly isn't begging for it is asking for friction. This, of course, assumes a level of good faith which I suspect is delusional. The real narrative was always less about democracy and human rights and more about property rights. Saudi Arabia has a terrible human rights record, but the West feels safe enough that they're not going to nationalize their investments, so it all gets swept under the rug, alongside bits of Jamal Khashoggi's corpse.
nstart 3y ago
From the article, wrt how the economist claims that decoupling is phoney because the underlying export by china in the process remains the same: > Startlingly, however, The Economist provides no actual data to support this claim. Ha! This was a reason I unsubscribed from the economist. A lot of times it makes broad claims and then leaves out the details to support said claim. Almost like it expects the reader to treat the economist like a first hand source and therefore no citation needed. Good on the author for calling this out and then rebutting with details of their own (not necessarily supporting author’s claims though since I haven’t had time to really think about it just yet).
- dekervin 3y ago
  You too can do add data on vaguely ideological articles using datapeek[0] ! I think it's perfectly relevant here. [0] https://datum.alwaysdata.net/ https://datum.alwaysdata.net/
- projectazorian 3y ago
  > This was a reason I unsubscribed from the economist. A lot of times it makes broad claims and then leaves out the details to support said claim. Almost like it expects the reader to treat the economist like a first hand source and therefore no citation needed. This is kind of the point of The Economist; its intended audience is busy executives who are on board with its ideological bias and don’t care much about footnotes and citations. Sounds like it wasn’t the publication for you.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Is that really all the Economist aspires to be?
    - projectazorian 3y ago
      Of course the publication was founded to be an advocate for liberalism, and on a global level it still is - in a lot of countries it's one of the only independent English language publications that has any distribution at all. But as an American, when it comes to anything relevant to my country, I've noticed that in the past few years any remaining social liberal edges have been sanded off and they've become predictably center-right.
throwawsf 3y ago
[flagged]
csomar 3y ago
> The Economist does present one other piece of circumstantial evidence — a working paper by Caroline Freund of the IMF that finds that countries that have been increasing their exports to the U.S. tend to be countries that trade more with China. But this is a very far cry from showing that China’s value-added exports to the U.S. have remained constant. It is not a "very far cry". It's almost a direct link. Industries don't just "spun out" of nothingness. These countries are not re-industrializing as much as they are re-labeling. Which is cheaper and has much better margins. > But there are reasons to think that at least part of the drop in U.S. dependence on Chinese imports is real — at least, the recent drop in the last couple of years. First, Chinese exports overall are down substantially from 2021: This is a really weird timeline to pick given that the pandemic year saw a very high increase in Chinese exports: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports If you look at it from that angle, it looks more like stabilizing to previous growth. I find it interesting that both articles (The Economist) have the same prognosis, yet the came at two different conclusions: The restrictions did affect China, but only marginally. Some Chinese producers found ways around it by funneling their capacities through other countries. One is calling it a success and just a start. The other is calling it a failure. Maybe it's too early?
- couchand 3y ago
  These two articles are fantastic examples of The Economist's journalistic style. We have all the facts, and we use them to come to whatever conclusion is most relevant at the moment.
26fingies 3y ago
China's middle class has become reasonably wealthy. There are poorer countries yet to be exploited so this seems like a natural next step.
- influxmoment 3y ago
  "China's middle class has become reasonably wealthy." I wonder how "There are poorer countries yet to be exploit" exploit is it. The contortions involved in being anti capitalism
  - 26fingies 3y ago
    There's no contortion. A unit of labor in India is as valuable as a unit of labor in the United States, but the capitalist pays less for it.
playday 3y ago
Noah has become a political pundit who tends to straw man the opponents to his preferred political ideology of centrist us democrat. That’s not to say he isn’t worth reading, it’s good to know what kinds of arguments that group is making because they are extremely powerful. But it’s important to keep in mind when reading articles like this where he’s hitting an extremely reputable magazine that isn’t politically aligned to him. It’s worth reading the article he’s attacking, as while it isn’t perfect it goes into much better detail on the facts than he makes it out to be- especially in something like re exporting where by the nature of the business it tends to be disguised from the public and the personal contacts a paper like the Economist has may be close to the truth.
- consilient 3y ago
  > Noah has become a political pundit who tends to straw man the opponents to his preferred political ideology of centrist us democrat ... But it’s important to keep in mind when reading articles like this where he’s hitting an extremely reputable magazine that isn’t politically aligned to him. Huh? The Economist is as liberal-centrist as it gets. Whatever the rift forming here is (and I agree there is one), it's happening within the neoliberal bloc.
  - playday 3y ago
    Economist is undisguisedly neoliberal, which also means it’s anti protectionist. The us centrist democrats haven’t been neoliberal since Obama. They’ve become nationalist and in favor of industrial policy.
emptysongglass 3y ago
For an exercise in how wrong we can be, here's Steve Yegge two years ago telling us to prepare to speak Mandarin because China is going to reign supreme and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Steve deleted the article but the internet remembers. https://archive.vn/bC1Ns https://archive.vn/bC1Ns
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  I went in fully wanting you to be right, but Yegge has 90% good points there, and idk why he removed it. It’s possible there was a bit too much “running of his mouth” like talking about the CEO annual meetup at BillG house. China does have serious issues with its real estate economy and fertility. But the US also got through the grave issues of 2008, and China still has 1.4b people who take rigorous education a lot more seriously than many in America. And they will have far more people than us in the foreseeable future too. Do not count China out, they are a “hurricane,” are dangerously aimed at Taiwan, but with better understanding we can hopefully all defuse the situation amicably.
- elfbargpt 3y ago
  What, you think he's wrong because China had a bad economic quarter two years after he posted that? You realize China has had unprecedented growth over the past 15 years, with pundits predicting its collapse the entire time. They have 1.4B people, a very good education system, and a huge head of steam. China misses GDP targets by 1% for a single quarter, every news outlet reports on it, and in five years everyone is going to wonder how China has gotten to the place it has. That's basically happened repeatedly over the past 15-20 years.
  - anthonypasq 3y ago
    their demographics are catastrophically bad.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      Sort of. Honestly though the demographic collapse could be a good thing for them if they play it right as labor becomes less and less important as we automate. Youth unemployment is sky high in China, it's not unreasonable to say they have too many people right now. The biggest issue will be caring for their bloated retired population, but honestly the CCP has a strong enough hold that they might be able to just say "fuck them" and hang em out to dry. Either way I doubt it will be that much of an economic catastrophe, even if it is a humanitarian one.
seydor 3y ago
So how can one profit from deglobalization ?
picadores 3y ago
With western wages? How should this work? The prices china gave us, is because china is a euphemism for "slavery"..
- kwere 3y ago
  China is no more competitive on labour cost for a few years now, textile sector offshoring began in 2014, since 2018 low value added textile work is virtually dead in China. The network effects (true wealth of chinese manufacturing) in other sector less dependent on labour costs got destroyed by draconian, impulsive and nosensical policies from the government, prompting rational actors (most private companies in a competitive framework) to move out, chinese companies on the first line

165 points by jszymborski 3y ago

What a truly awful "sign up for my newsletter in order to read my blog post" nag modal. All you have to do is scroll down a bit and then scroll back up, and the modal remains off-screen below the bottom. A determined user can easily get around this wall, while it's JUST annoying enough to make a casual user (such as myself) close the tab after the second paragraph once the modal appears.

causi 3y ago
All you have to do is scroll down a bit and then scroll back up, and the modal remains off-screen below the bottom. Or just tap "continue reading" to dismiss it like a normal person.
- mmcgaha 3y ago
  Yeah like the parent post said a determined user. Seriously though thanks for pointing it out because my eyes skipped right over the continue reading and went right up to the close my tab X.
robswc 3y ago
Maybe you're on a different device but on my browser there's a button that says "continue reading" Looks like its just substack with a custom domain. Those can be annoying though, for sure.
frandroid 3y ago
Is this the first time you see a substack page buddy
- IKantRead 3y ago
  I don't think you should criticize others just because you've adapted to what is clearly a dark pattern. I clearly see the "continue reading" now, but I definitely recall the first time I saw this popup not seeing it and closing out of the window because I thought substack was demanding signup. I have no doubt they've a/b tested the hell out of this UX and patted themselves on the back when first time readers started subscribing at record rates... never bother to ask what this meant for the actual UX.
  - causi 3y ago
    It can't be a dark pattern without trying to trick the user. A popup saying "sign up for our blah-blah!" is not a dark pattern.
madars 3y ago
No such modal with uBlock Origin and default blocklists :) (Pro-tip: if you use Android, Firefox Mobile also supports uBlock Origin) You can even import anti-paywall filter lists like: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/master/antipaywall.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/m... https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter... Can't imagine browsing web with all the crapware, adds, nags, and trackers.
dang 3y ago
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Jupe 3y ago

> This will take time. Decoupling is not an instantaneous process. China spent two decades becoming the workshop of the world; the rest of the developing world isn’t going to mirror that accomplishment in one or two years. It is all about dependency trees. The US decides to divert imports from China to other countries, which in turn may import from China. This reminds me of my day-to-day work so much; especially w.r.t. transitive dependency management. So: If service A is 100% dependent upon service B which is 100% dependent upon service C, then service A is 100% dependent on service C. At some point you need redundancy to protect against disruptions, outages, supply chain issues, policy changes, wars (either physical or economic), etc. My (probably silly) question is: Does anyone know of "building block" or "core" services (such as authentication, authorization, BLOB storage, data storage, queuing) which are multi-cloud by design? Meaning service X offers SLAs for service endpoints hosted in AWS, GCP and Azure? If/when any of these "go down", consumers can (automatically?) flip a switch to route to another cloud service implementation?

couchand 3y ago
This has always been one of the selling points of CockroachDB, the ability to seamlessly run multi-cloud redundancy.
- Jupe 3y ago
  Awesome - good to know. Thanks! I'll read this later: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/multi-cloud-deployment/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/multi-cloud-deployment/
A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
> It is all about dependency trees. The US decides to divert imports from China to other countries, which in turn may import from China. This is already happening with more than ~80% of products that are "Made in Vietnam" and at least ~40% of products that are "Made in Korea." Not only do the raw materials come from China, but most of the work is done in China. The product is shipped overland from a Chinese factory to Vietnam or Korea, then some screws are tightened, some paint is slapped on, or a label is applied, and the product is re-exported. Among other things, this is effective for tariff evasion. And it's usually at least somewhat legitimate. It doesn't take much to make a product that's assembled in China "Made in Vietnam," even in a legal sense. Consider: https://casetext.com/case/ferrostaal-metals-corp-v-us https://casetext.com/case/ferrostaal-metals-corp-v-us Basically, there was a tariff on Japanese steel. US-based plaintiffs -- steel distributors -- sent that steel to New Zealand, had it galvanized, and re-exported it to the USA as a "Made in New Zealand" product. A Judge holds that the galvanization process (which is laughably cheap) is enough to render the steel "Made in New Zealand." When all's said and done, Chinese factories haven't slowed down and Chinese GDP is still rising (by more than American GDP) which tells you that the "decoupling" has to be in some respect illusory.

sdfghswe 3y ago

> Biden’s “friend-shoring” initiatives What's CRAZY to me is why this hasn't always been the case. Who thought it was a good idea to depend on unfriendly countries like China? Right, I know who thought that. Those who also claimed "if we trade with them enough, they'll like us" did. Fuck depending on China, or Russia, for that matter. The West should have all its critical dependencies within it. At most we could get non-critical niceties from the outside, no more than that. Change my mind.

woooooo 3y ago
They weren't unfriendly until we decided to make them so about 5 years ago. Policymakers in the late 90s couldn't necessarily predict swings in American opinion 20 years later.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  Sure, but it's not like deciding to make china unfriendly wasn't provoked by china. The US was making legitimate attempt at "bringing china into the fold". Since xi jinping came into power, lots of sketchy stuff has happened on their end that made this strategy less tenable. For example: being invited to rimpac and then sending uninvited ships (2014)
  - woooooo 3y ago
    It's possible to be perfectly cordial without being a US client state. Why should they have to be "in the fold"?
    - nradov 3y ago
      It is impossible to have cordial relations with China while they are threatening to invade our ally Taiwan, and building artificial islands as military outposts in the South China Sea. The unfortunate reality is that China is now our enemy. That situation will persist and probably worsen at least until Xi is replaced.

EGreg 3y ago

If there’s one broad consensus in American policymaking circles today, it’s that global supply chains need to become less dependent on China. I agree, and the other way, in many BRICS and other countries, there is a broad consensus that global economies need to become less dependent on US Dollars. Both efforts at decentralization and lessening concentration of power are probably going to lead to new good results, as hegemons are forced to compete rather than enjoy a near-monopoly worldwide.

dgb23 3y ago
What's the rationale behind this? Why specifically China?
- jpgvm 3y ago
  Because Americans need a bad guy for their political system to function.
- soligern 3y ago
  Too much dependency on a soft enemy?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- proudeu 3y ago
  Probably old fashioned Anglo-Saxon feeling of superiority and fear that world order where white Anglo Saxons dominate markets and geopolitical landscape goes away forever
nradov 3y ago
There is no consensus among the BRICS or other countries. All of them would like to have alternatives to the US Dollar for international trade settlement. None of them can agree on what that alternative should be. For example, there's no way that India will agree to widespread use of the Chinese Yuan.
- 3y ago

photochemsyn 3y ago

I don't really understand the argument the author makes about Mexico exporting cars to the USA while importing car parts from China, in terms of dollar amounts. Wouldn't it be better to ask what material percentage of a car manufactured in Mexico consists of auto parts made in China?

praptak 3y ago

There is one pro-decoupling argument to be made wrt the Chinese-owned factory outside China. This factory while owned by China is not under Chinese jurisdiction. If China pulls a Putin this factory is much harder for them to switch off as part of sanctions.

diego_moita 3y ago

Funny how things change. In the 90s the U.S., EU and Japan were the champions of free trade for industrial products and services. However, when it would come to agricultural goods they were the champions of tariffs and protectionism. Why? Easy: because 3rd world countries were very competitive on agriculture. Egypt had better cotton, Argentina had beef, Brazil had orange juice, Cuba had sugar, etc, etc. 3rd world countries would complain about the hypocrisy and the rich would reply that they should just shut up and give up on protectionism. Now the whole Southeast Asia is competing with rich countries in industrial goods and protectionism is not protectionism anymore, is "decoupling".

the_af 3y ago
Those of us in the 3rd world have always known this. US mandates on removing protectionism were never for them; they are for others. Their recommendations on how to run our economies are always like this; they are never for them, it's always for us. They sometimes use fancy speak like "decoupling" in hopes we won't be able to tell.
strangescript 3y ago
Having better beef doesn't translate to building weapons or global communication networks. Spinning up a new cattle ranch if supply is cut off is trivial. They are not on the same level. The movements we are seeing now are matters of national security.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  It takes time and it has cascading effects.
- TremendousJudge 3y ago
  Having access to food is most definitely a matter of national security. If you get your ports cut off you can't increase local food production before mass starvation.
brabel 3y ago
This hypocrisy is why BRICS is so inviting to those countries that have suffered from the status quo for a long time.

ramesh31 3y ago

Well we all know what happens when countries stop trading. Here's hoping cooler heads prevail on both sides.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

My fear is decoupling just sets the stage for a global war. We’ve decoupled Russia, Iran, North Korea. With China we have a legitimate fully integrated axis capable of producing independently with legitimate and perceived global grievances, and the means and will to exercise force.

nonethewiser 3y ago
This was the thinking in the 1980s when the US invited China into their global trade network. The thinking was they would move away from communism and Russia and towards an open Democracy. That happened in some small ways but has since been completely undone. Such as the Democracy movements in the 80s that were ultimately crushed in Tiananmen square. Or more recently, market reforms undone by Xi. Basically we are back to where we were in the 1980s in many ways.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  Is democracy the only acceptable endgame? I worry we're mixing up ends and means. Democracy is a means, and "good government" is the end. In the last few decades, the overall Chinese population has seen dramatic upticks on all sorts of quality-of-life measurements. It doesn't look like an obvious kleptocracy. The surveys we have, regardless of how much it can be claimed they're cooked, indicate the public is broadly happy with the government. Maybe a single-party system works for them, at least at this point in time. I'd argue if you have multiple diverse functioning government types, that's worth preserving. Ecosystem diversity is valuable, just from a perspective of "when we get the next big crisis, maybe one has better tools available to solve it." There's nothing wrong with dangling Western style democracy as an option to the Chinese-- "if and when you want to try it, here's a body of experience and we can consult", but treating it as an end-all-be-all for an audience that broadly isn't begging for it is asking for friction. This, of course, assumes a level of good faith which I suspect is delusional. The real narrative was always less about democracy and human rights and more about property rights. Saudi Arabia has a terrible human rights record, but the West feels safe enough that they're not going to nationalize their investments, so it all gets swept under the rug, alongside bits of Jamal Khashoggi's corpse.

nstart 3y ago

From the article, wrt how the economist claims that decoupling is phoney because the underlying export by china in the process remains the same: > Startlingly, however, The Economist provides no actual data to support this claim. Ha! This was a reason I unsubscribed from the economist. A lot of times it makes broad claims and then leaves out the details to support said claim. Almost like it expects the reader to treat the economist like a first hand source and therefore no citation needed. Good on the author for calling this out and then rebutting with details of their own (not necessarily supporting author’s claims though since I haven’t had time to really think about it just yet).

dekervin 3y ago
You too can do add data on vaguely ideological articles using datapeek[0] ! I think it's perfectly relevant here. [0] https://datum.alwaysdata.net/ https://datum.alwaysdata.net/
projectazorian 3y ago
> This was a reason I unsubscribed from the economist. A lot of times it makes broad claims and then leaves out the details to support said claim. Almost like it expects the reader to treat the economist like a first hand source and therefore no citation needed. This is kind of the point of The Economist; its intended audience is busy executives who are on board with its ideological bias and don’t care much about footnotes and citations. Sounds like it wasn’t the publication for you.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Is that really all the Economist aspires to be?
  - projectazorian 3y ago
    Of course the publication was founded to be an advocate for liberalism, and on a global level it still is - in a lot of countries it's one of the only independent English language publications that has any distribution at all. But as an American, when it comes to anything relevant to my country, I've noticed that in the past few years any remaining social liberal edges have been sanded off and they've become predictably center-right.

throwawsf 3y ago

[flagged]

csomar 3y ago

> The Economist does present one other piece of circumstantial evidence — a working paper by Caroline Freund of the IMF that finds that countries that have been increasing their exports to the U.S. tend to be countries that trade more with China. But this is a very far cry from showing that China’s value-added exports to the U.S. have remained constant. It is not a "very far cry". It's almost a direct link. Industries don't just "spun out" of nothingness. These countries are not re-industrializing as much as they are re-labeling. Which is cheaper and has much better margins. > But there are reasons to think that at least part of the drop in U.S. dependence on Chinese imports is real — at least, the recent drop in the last couple of years. First, Chinese exports overall are down substantially from 2021: This is a really weird timeline to pick given that the pandemic year saw a very high increase in Chinese exports: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports If you look at it from that angle, it looks more like stabilizing to previous growth. I find it interesting that both articles (The Economist) have the same prognosis, yet the came at two different conclusions: The restrictions did affect China, but only marginally. Some Chinese producers found ways around it by funneling their capacities through other countries. One is calling it a success and just a start. The other is calling it a failure. Maybe it's too early?

couchand 3y ago
These two articles are fantastic examples of The Economist's journalistic style. We have all the facts, and we use them to come to whatever conclusion is most relevant at the moment.

26fingies 3y ago

China's middle class has become reasonably wealthy. There are poorer countries yet to be exploited so this seems like a natural next step.

influxmoment 3y ago
"China's middle class has become reasonably wealthy." I wonder how "There are poorer countries yet to be exploit" exploit is it. The contortions involved in being anti capitalism
- 26fingies 3y ago
  There's no contortion. A unit of labor in India is as valuable as a unit of labor in the United States, but the capitalist pays less for it.

playday 3y ago

Noah has become a political pundit who tends to straw man the opponents to his preferred political ideology of centrist us democrat. That’s not to say he isn’t worth reading, it’s good to know what kinds of arguments that group is making because they are extremely powerful. But it’s important to keep in mind when reading articles like this where he’s hitting an extremely reputable magazine that isn’t politically aligned to him. It’s worth reading the article he’s attacking, as while it isn’t perfect it goes into much better detail on the facts than he makes it out to be- especially in something like re exporting where by the nature of the business it tends to be disguised from the public and the personal contacts a paper like the Economist has may be close to the truth.

consilient 3y ago
> Noah has become a political pundit who tends to straw man the opponents to his preferred political ideology of centrist us democrat ... But it’s important to keep in mind when reading articles like this where he’s hitting an extremely reputable magazine that isn’t politically aligned to him. Huh? The Economist is as liberal-centrist as it gets. Whatever the rift forming here is (and I agree there is one), it's happening within the neoliberal bloc.
- playday 3y ago
  Economist is undisguisedly neoliberal, which also means it’s anti protectionist. The us centrist democrats haven’t been neoliberal since Obama. They’ve become nationalist and in favor of industrial policy.

emptysongglass 3y ago

For an exercise in how wrong we can be, here's Steve Yegge two years ago telling us to prepare to speak Mandarin because China is going to reign supreme and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Steve deleted the article but the internet remembers. https://archive.vn/bC1Ns https://archive.vn/bC1Ns

reducesuffering 3y ago
I went in fully wanting you to be right, but Yegge has 90% good points there, and idk why he removed it. It’s possible there was a bit too much “running of his mouth” like talking about the CEO annual meetup at BillG house. China does have serious issues with its real estate economy and fertility. But the US also got through the grave issues of 2008, and China still has 1.4b people who take rigorous education a lot more seriously than many in America. And they will have far more people than us in the foreseeable future too. Do not count China out, they are a “hurricane,” are dangerously aimed at Taiwan, but with better understanding we can hopefully all defuse the situation amicably.
elfbargpt 3y ago
What, you think he's wrong because China had a bad economic quarter two years after he posted that? You realize China has had unprecedented growth over the past 15 years, with pundits predicting its collapse the entire time. They have 1.4B people, a very good education system, and a huge head of steam. China misses GDP targets by 1% for a single quarter, every news outlet reports on it, and in five years everyone is going to wonder how China has gotten to the place it has. That's basically happened repeatedly over the past 15-20 years.
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  their demographics are catastrophically bad.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Sort of. Honestly though the demographic collapse could be a good thing for them if they play it right as labor becomes less and less important as we automate. Youth unemployment is sky high in China, it's not unreasonable to say they have too many people right now. The biggest issue will be caring for their bloated retired population, but honestly the CCP has a strong enough hold that they might be able to just say "fuck them" and hang em out to dry. Either way I doubt it will be that much of an economic catastrophe, even if it is a humanitarian one.

seydor 3y ago

So how can one profit from deglobalization ?

picadores 3y ago

With western wages? How should this work? The prices china gave us, is because china is a euphemism for "slavery"..

kwere 3y ago
China is no more competitive on labour cost for a few years now, textile sector offshoring began in 2014, since 2018 low value added textile work is virtually dead in China. The network effects (true wealth of chinese manufacturing) in other sector less dependent on labour costs got destroyed by draconian, impulsive and nosensical policies from the government, prompting rational actors (most private companies in a competitive framework) to move out, chinese companies on the first line