How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries.

We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is that a world where “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” still makes sense? What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?

What seems most likely to me in the future is that the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now. Dominating finance and services won’t mean anything when both the IP and the physical products are being produced somewhere else.

> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now

The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference.

The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing. Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. It's not actually where we want to be. While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored. Or bogged down in extra export red tape thanks to Brexit.

To improve reality, we have to start from reality, not whatever vision of the past propaganda "news" channels are blathering about.

> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer.

There are 3x as many fishermen in the UK than employees of Games Workshop, and much more again if you count the number of related fishery jobs.

At the end of the day, politicians and voters alike respond more to employment than nominal monetary figures. A broader employment base is generally better for social and political stability than explicit wealth redistribution (e.g. tax + entitlements). The latter is what economic theory tends to emphasize--i.e. equivocate incomes based on state wealth redistribution schemes--but such economic theory is how we got Trump, Brexit, and a host of other ills. Economics hasn't figured out, yet, how to price the constituent inputs that produce political and economic stability. GDP, Gini, per capita income, employment rate, etc metrics are gross approximations that work well until they don't (though they're still better than rhetoric and handwaving). But to be fair, social and political theorists haven't solved that problem, either; at least, not with a rigorous quantification model.

Sorry, but I don't think this is the reason. There were vastly more people in financial services calling for us NOT to have brexit than fishermen asking for it, even in number of people. I honestly don't think this was a numbers of people affected vs "% of GDP" affected issue. Not at all.

What good did it do for us? At the time everyone was running around rubbishing and laughing at the "outrageous" claims of 10% GDP loss, and where are we now?