Pretending to not understand how game theory works is a choice -- more of a choice than customers have.
Companies are also constrained to do labor arbitrage once the rules allow it, but they were the ones who lobbied the rules into place and they were the ones to profit from the rules, so they have far more culpability here.
It would be a virtuous cycle, though, right? If we had the right incentives for keeping manufacturing here, then sure, prices would be somewhat higher [0], but so would income for the very people who would be buying.
[0] But how much higher, really? On a mass production line, what is the actual contribution of wages to the cost to produce?
Assuming the local versus offshore good is a perfect substitute, that means that the value has not changed.
Paying more for the local good means your money is worth less, as it buys less value.
Your question on the production line doesn't account for all of the precursors also being local, plus the local energy rates, local taxes, local rents, and so on. Everything tends to be more expensive, otherwise the cost of managing offshore production wouldn't be worth the effort.
Total isolation only works when there's still room to grow by way of some underutilized resource- cheap labor, land, or something extractable from the environment like wood or minerals.
From purely a price perspective, sure. But there are other advantages to maintaining production capacity within our own country.
Plus, doesn't offshoring effectively push the whole world towards a common cost-of-living/income ratio? Great if you're labor in a struggling country, bad if you are labor in the richest country in the world.
That's why I do blame corporations for outsourcing. The companies outsource every time they select for more profit for their owners and not for sharing among the workers.
And if corporate officers don't select for more profit then their stock goes down, shareholders become unhappy, officers could lose their jobs and the corporation could even fail b/c they have competitors and their competitors will likely select for more profit.
I'm not aware of that many times where I've had a choice. I could get a nice, expensive dress shirt made in the US but for general clothing it's extremely difficult to buy domestic.
Frankly, a lot of the corporations are still to blame because they're the ones actively concentrating wealth at the top. If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made in the US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.
But you wouldn't. You, and everybody else, would see several shirts that looked basically the same and not pick the expensive one without giving it any more thought. If you think I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
Even expensive brands are usually made overseas. I looked at a couple of random pieces of expensive Patagonia outerwear in my closet. One was made in Vietnam. The other in Bangladesh.
Sure, you can get custom/semi-custom dress clothing made in the US. Probably other things (at an eye-watering premium). Which may be OK if you buy very little clothing. But mostly forget about going into a store and picking things off the rack.
IIRC the last company that manufactured men's dress shirts in the US closed not too long ago. They really were dedicated to making stuff here. The economics just simply did not support it. Which is another way of saying people would not pay the necessary price premium.
Right, because there is virtually no difference in quality so companies go with the lower labor costs (as does basically everyone else on earth who is looking to have a task completed).
The expertise to do that isn't here anymore on a scale to satisfy the majority of the market.
However that is likely exactly what happened when it was finally pretty much killed of in the 90s. At some point clothes were made largely domestically. Some manufacturers started offshoring while others didn't. At that point consumers had a choice, the choice they made was to drive the onshore industries out of business or offshore.
There might be some argument people have more surplus wealth now though, and they'd rather en masse buy those domestic products than healthcare, healthy food for their children, education, housing, and the other stuff that absorbs all the income we can muster. Of course I think there is always a market for people with money for luxury goods, some of them buy USA because it is USA.
This is true, but let's not pretend that "healthcare, healthy food for their children, education, housing" is what's absorbing all the money. Average car payment is around 700 bucks a month now.
~75% of cars are bought used and according to Experian only 33.5% of those are financed. When adding 80% new cars financed you're already under 50%. Then consider already paid off vehicles.
I recently came to a tangential realization (obviously I'm not the first to notice) regarding "cheap Chinese knockoffs":
The US company outsources the manufacturing to China because "they have to" (I don't necessarily agree with that), Chinese company keeps the assembly line running a few extra hours and resells the units back in the US under a slightly different name.
This equation is so comical to me:
The greed-driven US company screams that it's "fake", yet they didn't do anything illegal by outsourcing, just put Americans out of jobs. But if they don't build in China, a competitor will.
The Chinese company is driven by the same "profit over everything" motive and doesn't infringe on the US companys trade mark, but competes with the US company with essentially an identical product minus the R&D costs.
US company cries foul, "they're stealing our trade secrets!" Creates FUD about China but has no legal standing to do anything about it. Reeks of the same "immoral but completely legal" argument the former/would-be employees make
That's what tariffs are for. These are macroeconomic decisions, not decisions that should flow down to individuals, to be thought of as their responsibility and their moral failing.
Individuals shouldn't be expected to choose to buy American. It's a cost with an at best extremely distant (in time and space) benefit for an individual, and a non-existent benefit unless everyone does it. Instead, when goods are produced by foreign slavers and polluters, they should either be barred from import (if they're morally impossible to support) or taxed arbitrarily in order to optimize the local market, for which discriminatory taxes are not a factor.
But all if this is bad faith reasoning in general. What is produced is shit clothing, with shit treatment of the workers producing it, and intentionally outmoded by planned fashion cycles. If it were quality clothing being imported, labor costs would be a much smaller part of the costs, and therefore of the potential lost margins if owners failed to maximize the exploitation of labor. Tariffs wouldn't even effect quality imported clothing. What they would do is kill the shit imported clothing market, and allow us to redevelop a shit domestic clothing market if the minimum wage were low (i.e. sweatshops), or if we raise the local minimum wage, force a quality local clothing market.
> I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
The belief that macroeconomic problems should be solved by spontaneous generation is a form of religious capitalism. The fact that it doesn't ever happen is pointed to as the evidence that we are always at an eternal maxima. It's a practiced, self-serving denial that our economy is always actively managed by a very few people.
You seem to think I'm trying to make some moral point but nothing I said has the slightest thing to do with morality. It is simple fact of incentives and human behavior.
It isn't. I'm saying that people select for cost because corporations are actively engaged in pooling resources for the rich. If they didn't people wouldn't need to select for cost as much as they do.
>I'm saying that people select for cost because corporations are actively engaged in pooling resources for the rich.
People select for cost when resources are finite. This is going to be the case until we reach a post-scarcity economy, rich people or not. It's not like under communism everyone was driving around in lambos on gold paved streets.
When do you intentionally overpay for goods or services?
Are you haggling with your mechanic, landlord/mortgage lender, or grocery store to pay them more money than they're asking for, or do you purposely seek out suppliers that do not provide the offering with the best value?
Clothing is one of the hardest things to automate production of. We have had the "women at a sewing machine" since about 1850. Bring that 1850 women to 2026 with the latest computerized sewing machine and she would be equally productive as she was back then in an hour, and even after working that machine for a decade would not be much faster than she was. We can do a few fancy stitches today that she would have had to do by hand with the machine - but mostly we do them less know even though the machines are faster.
Nonsense, it's just cheaper to pay someone without any rights 50c/h then to automate it
If that industry was still in the area, they'd be automating the shit outta it. It's just not worth it right now considering there are always literal wage slaves in some place they can ship in for their sweatshops
Also, even locally produced premium clothing uses materials sourced from literal slave labour. There is no consumer decision anywhere, because the immorally sourced materials are just too cheap... And if you're willing to pay a premium for your morals, someone in the middle will just take it and fulfill the order with the cheap stuff.
They have been trying. Clothing is hard to automate. It needs to stretch and flex which is a problem for machines. We need many different sizes which makes things harder
What’s worse, the list of tasks/apps in Task Manager for some reason populates gradually over a couple of seconds, so when you right-click on some task to perform an action, it might switch to a different task under the mouse cursor while you’re clicking because it’s still populating.
For me at least "details" tab populates in one step (there is a slight delay and then all processes appear). You can set it as the default tab as it's the most useful anyway.
I actually need the Processes tab more frequently, which shows the process hierarchy and relates to the visible windows. For example to restart Explorer.
That's not extreme. They destroyed a piece of expensive critical infrastructure. Prison and seizure should be the bare minimum. I just mean it's not enough to prevent it in the future.
Liability is the answer to a lot of problems or lack of liability is the cause. Online BS can be solved if platforms were liable. Corporate BS can be solved if the humans at the top are liable.
My issue is you have to do it correctly, there's an insane amount of nuance involved, but the world could be fixed heavily by making more people liable, and big hedge fund investors just as liable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_paragraph_order
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