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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

(www.molsonhart.com)
842 points putzdown | 3 comments | 15 Apr 25 13:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.425s | source
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pjc50 ◴[15 Apr 25 14:12 UTC] No.43692988[source]▶
> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why?

This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.

Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.

> If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last

Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.

> 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's chicken tax trucks all over again.

> This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen

Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen so far. The budget is yet to come.

> If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.

(also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers, crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal migration control of hukou combined with media control?)

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1. looseyesterday ◴[15 Apr 25 14:32 UTC] No.43693319[source]▶
On crime they most centrically do, watch the China Show (not the bloomberg one) on youtube. One example given on the show is that Once you go into northern villages and small towns you start seeing propganda posters on why you shouldn't take drugs. Homelessness is widespread and present too but you just wont see it in city centers more on the outstkirts.
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2. seanmcdirmid ◴[15 Apr 25 14:47 UTC] No.43693543[source]▶
Police in cities will beat homeless people and get them back on buses to where their hukou is, so the homeless that remain are very good at hiding. Hostile architecture is also very common in China. But there is a lot of sub quality housing (eg in sub-basements that lack windows or good ventilation) that allow much of the working poor to at least be technically housed even in expensive cities (many restaurants also provide housing for their staff in the dining area after closing, or did at least 20 years ago). The outskirts used to have more slums than they had today in Beijing, most of the slums have moved into sub-basements as far as I can tell (called the “ant tribe”).

Crime really is much lower than it was a decade ago. People have more money, societal trust is higher. Drug use in clubs has always been a thing, but China differs from the USA in that their is no social support at all for addicts (so they either get clean with help from their family or they die).

3. torginus ◴[16 Apr 25 18:28 UTC] No.43708758[source]▶
Do not watch it please unless you want to consume worldview-distoring propaganda and become more ignorant as a result. It's made by 2 American expats who gotten kicked out of China when visa-requirements were tightened, and no-skill immigrants were no longer welcome.

They've become anti-China youtubers serving the hungry China-hating audience on how China is bad and a paper tiger.

Instead watch this guy (https://www.youtube.com/@Awakening_Richard). I'm not saying he's unbiased, either, but he's thoughtful and I think he brings insight into how the Chinese intelligentsia thinks about how the world works.

But back to your point - it's oft repeated that Chinese population decline will destroy China in the long run and poverty in Chinese society.

He made a video on this exact issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdRH7aPWGGc

The TLDR version is that about half of the Chinese population lives in desperate poverty (and are economically invisible), and just a couple decades ago 90+% of Chinese lived like this. One cannot bring about a transformation into an industrialized wealthy lifestyle overnight, but coming from the experience of the past decades, the Chinese have been remarkably effective in this, and the following decades will see these people lifted up to modern societal standards as well.

By this alone, one can conservatively expect a doubling of Chinese GDP, as there will be twice as many consumers and laborers who consume and work at the level of the current workforce.

This also means that China has a huge and high marginal utility domestic demand for goods, and even if sanctioned, they wont run of people to sell to.