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

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689 points taubek | 4 comments | 09 Apr 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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rayiner ◴[09 Apr 25 14:52 UTC] No.43632822[source]▶
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.

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lolinder ◴[09 Apr 25 18:02 UTC] No.43635225[source]▶
Be careful extrapolating based on China's current population and demographics. Too much of our armchair assessments of China's velocity is based on their meteoric rise on the backs of a historically large working-age population—a population that is now rapidly aging out of the workforce with nothing to replace it thanks to the one child policy. The US's demographics aren't stellar, but they're a lot better off than most of the developed world.

It remains to be seen how different 2010's China—with 90% of the population being under 60—is from 2050's China—with only 69% of the population being under 60.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2050/

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spaceman_2020 ◴[10 Apr 25 04:58 UTC] No.43640757[source]▶
It’s a little more nuanced than that. Western demographics are largely propped up by immigration, which brings with it its own sociopolitical challenges. What you gain in demographics, you might lose in social cohesion and political stability.
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lolinder ◴[10 Apr 25 05:01 UTC] No.43640773[source]▶
It's a lot more nuanced than that. China's internal diversity is much higher than Westerners typically understand, and their social cohesion and political stability are less well maintained than their external-facing image would lead you to believe.
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spaceman_2020 ◴[10 Apr 25 05:16 UTC] No.43640862[source]▶
Yeah, but that’s not the same level of diversity as an atheist Frenchman and a muslim Algerian and a Christian Ivorian.

The Sichuanese might not get along with the Cantonese, but they’re ethnically the same people with a shared culture

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lolinder ◴[10 Apr 25 05:44 UTC] No.43641018{3}[source]▶
No, they're not. The Chinese have never been especially unified until very recently and they're internally quite diverse on all the key measures of ethnicity: their languages are mutually unintelligible, their religious belief systems span the entire breadth of world religions plus a wide spectrum of home grown ones, and their value systems are very different.

One China is a convenient fiction invented by an authoritarian regime, not a day to day reality on the ground.

Westerners buy into it through some combination of propaganda (coming from the Chinese state and our own, both of which benefit from an exaggerated sense of Chinese unity) and our inability to distinguish the various ethnic groups because we're overly fixated on skin color as the primary physical marker of ethnicity.

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1. anonfordays ◴[10 Apr 25 15:27 UTC] No.43644874{4}[source]▶
China is over 90% ethnically Han Chinese. Compared to the US it is practically a homogeneous country. The language diversity is greater in China, but the racial/ethnic diversity is lesser. China is more comparable to Europe than the US.
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2. ◴[10 Apr 25 16:11 UTC] No.43645360[source]▶
3. lolinder ◴[10 Apr 25 18:09 UTC] No.43646581[source]▶
You're conflating racial and ethnic diversity in ways that are distinctly western or even really US-centric. Europe is extremely ethnically diverse, as is China, they just don't use skin color as the primary ethnic marker the way that is commonly (and still incorrectly) done in the US.

The 90% Han Chinese number isn't especially useful because it's comparable to the way that most of Europe has historically identified itself as the successor of Rome. That they all identify as Han doesn't make Han a truly useful grouping for judging diversity when they all have different ideas of what "Han" means.

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4. anonfordays ◴[11 Apr 25 14:04 UTC] No.43653918[source]▶
>You're conflating racial and ethnic diversity in ways that are distinctly western or even really US-centric.

Not at all, these are pretty universally agreed upon by global sociologist.

>Europe is extremely ethnically diverse, as is China

Indeed, Europe is extremely diverse, much more so than China.

>they just don't use skin color as the primary ethnic marker the way that is commonly (and still incorrectly) done in the US.

Neither does the US. Skin color is not a primary ethnic marker. No one versed in sociology in the US considers a Black American ethnically similar to an Eritrean. Nor do they consider a Ukrainian ethnically similar to a White American.

>The 90% Han Chinese number isn't especially useful because it's comparable to the way that most of Europe has historically identified itself as the successor of Rome.

It is extremely useful because the subgroups specifically make these claims: "Modern Han Chinese subgroups, such as the Cantonese, the Hakka, the Henghua, the Hainanese, the Hoklo peoples, the Gan, the Xiang, the Wu-speaking peoples, all claim Han Chinese ancestry pointing to official histories and their own genealogical records to support such claims."

Germanic people do not make the claim to be of Roman or Mediterranean ethnicity nor origin. The languages are vastly more varied in Europe versus China, where 70%+ speak Mandarin.

Additionally, Han Chinese are much closer genetically than Europeans. Italians, Brits, and Estonians have much more varied genetics compared to Han Chinese.