Comment by recursivedoubts
6 hours ago
yeah, i'm familiar with the just so stories told to us by economists, but the reality is that by moving the entire supply chain to asia there are huge knock on effects on our own ability to innovate and produce wealth
the us has papered over it w/credit (no coincidence that the credit card came out right when productive capacity was being shifted to asia) but eventually every country sits down to a banquet of consequences
same story as ever (florence under the medici, england under the whigs, etc) first productivity then usury
What economic "just so" stories have I presented? You accept that economic capacity is not infinite, right? Then you need to tell me from which sector would you reallocate workers to doing the things you listed: producing cheap plastic toys, low-value clothing, inexpensive electronics, TVs, computer assembly, low-value semi-conductors and CPU production.
Could you be more specific about the knock on effects of not making cheap plastic toys, etc. domestically? The US is still the clear global leader in technical innovation in nearly all sectors (and I'm not an American).
economic capacity is effectively infinite at this point, demand and raw inputs are the constraining factors (suggested reading: social credit (canadian not chinese)
Not making cheap plastic toys means you don't have the supply chain and expertise around plastics molding, which means you eventually lose the ability to produce housing for electronics, which means you eventually lose the ability to produce electronic components, etc. And as we see, this is exactly what has happened, just like we saw happen in Florence, England, etc. before when the elites became more interested in financialization/usury than in production.
I'm american and I don't think america is the clear global leader in technical innovation, particularly looking at electrification. We are pretty good at R&D but have lost a large part of our ability to manufacture due to the supply chain shift.
R&D is fine and all, but we've got (or had) a middle class to feed, and for the last fourty years we've been faking that with credit.
> economic capacity is effectively infinite at this point
This is a bizarre claim?
The total ability of an economy to produce goods and services is most certainly finite. For it to be infinite, we'd need infinite workers, infinite factories, infinite raw materials, infinite land, infinite infrastructure, infinite energy, etc.