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The Coming Decline of 'Made In China'
retroworks writes: Adam Minter documents the move of Chinese steel mills to Africa, and speculates that China's years of incredible rates of economic growth may already be over. This one steel mill's move to Africa, by itself, increases Africa's production by two-thirds. "The officials in Hebei Province who oversee the company may have felt they had no choice. First, they undoubtedly faced political pressure to reduce their environmental impact in China: reducing production of steel, cement and glass -- all highly polluting industries, especially in developing countries -- will have a direct impact on Xi Jinping’s pollution goals. (Starting in Hebei will have the added benefit of cleaning up polluted, neighboring Beijing.) Second, Hebei may simply be at a loss as to how to scale back businesses that they recognize have become massively bloated. Officials in China’s construction-related industries clearly have too much capacity and too little demand." It's also possible that these moves will be encouraged by China's transition to clean economy, though that could be a bad thing for pollution in Africa.
Robots.
Besides with 7.5 billion humans and growing I doubt "wage slaves" will ever run out.
The answer to every human problem? Population control.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"Population control" makes for great sound bites, but in general governments in first world nations can NEVER promote population control. Why? Because the existing entitlement, social, and wealth-transfer programs depend on tax revenues from the very taxpayers that population control would reduce. Unless you're advocating genocide of existing humans, PC is short for "birth control" which would drop number of tax PAYERS at the low end of the age spectrum while leaving untouched the number of tax CONSUMERS at the high end. No politician will be willing to sacrifice their career for that.
Entitlement / social / wealth-transfer programs are completely dependent upon ever-increasing population. It's baked into the system. You won't get any sort of "population control" until you first unravel the entitlement programs. Can't wait to hear your plans for making THAT happen....
Developed countries don't need to promote population control - it happens by itself. Every developed nation except for the United States (which has large amounts of immigration) has a declining birth rate. And, yes, it is a problem for retirement schemes.
And what will all our fine corporate interests do when they run out of wage slaves?
I think you worry too much - I'm in the best part of Africa, the most progressive, the most modern, and even here the government can't even keep the lights on. Over here we just came out of a economy crippling 8-month strike (which was preceded by a 6 month strike). In December, due to cable-theft which the government does nothing about, our company ran on diesel generators for two full weeks (averaging 18l/hour).
Our workforce is mostly uneducated and they prefer it that way (seriously, they do). Our pass rate for high-school maths is around 10%. Our high school students rank close to last in maths and science. Our minister of education is on a mission to put religion into schools, as if that would alleviate the systemic problems in our educational system. Our populations is incredibly lazy and refuses to work. Their reasoning is mostly vindicated, as they keep voting for a government that takes from the imddle class and gives to their voter base.
We have roughly 5 million income tax payers supporting around 12 million welfare recipients. The aforementioned 5 million also pay for electricity while the 12 million get it for free. This ratio is only getting worse as time goes on. We have the least amount of corruption compared to any other African state, but we still have annual news about shady arms deals that line politicians pockets at the expense of the people, a president who, in his late 60's, is taking a sixth wife (that taxpayers have to support).
Our president has been found guilty by the public prosecutor of taking almost R300million from the public coffer for his private benefit, was the recipient of bribes in which the dodgy court found the other party guilty of giving the bribe to the president but refused to find the president guilty of accepting it, has been tried for rape (acquitted, though: he claimed it was consensual), believes that having a shower after sex will prevent him from getting HIV and is unable to read numbers with more than 5 digits (seriously, check youtube).
Multiple areas have to rely on cellphones, due to cable-theft affecting POTS lines (I'm in such an area), water routinely gets cut off due to not enough power to run pumping stations. The middle class (mentioned above) all pay for private security to guard their homes because the woefully underfunded and under-manned police force simply cannot keep up with the crime rate.
Yeah, I did mention that we are the best that Africa has to offer, right? Good luck to any company trying to set up manufacturing or processing facilities here - the population is so lazy, that even though we have a 25% unemployment rate (in practice it is higher, this low number is due to the way they count "unemployed") the only people who are willing to work as gardeners are from a neighbouring country.
The cherry on top? Your business could easily be nationalised if the president decides that the kickback is not high enough. Seriously, good luck with moving stuff from China to here. China has a well-earned reputation for being a nation of hard and industrious workers. They may steal ideas, but they still work more hours than everyone else. Your manufacturing facility is safe there. Our workers refuse to accept an double-inflation raise and strike for 8 months out of 12. Your manufacturing facility won't survive here - the automakers are now planning on moving out (they were the first to come here for the cheap labour).
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Building a factory in most African countries is far too risky. Even if the wages were zero, you can't make a long term profit if the government nationalizes your factory. It's also not worth building anything in places where the government might decide to tax away or otherwise take the profits. Moving production to Africa won't be a trend until honest government prevails in Africa.
Instead, jobs are defined by work that people want to do. The more things we want done, the more jobs get created. We haven't run out of things to do, we've just taken care of the emergency stuff. There is a lot of new things we could do, so there are a lot of new jobs we can create.
When people automate jobs away, they decide to do more work, creating new jobs.
10,000 years ago the only jobs he had were food related. There was no doctor, nurse, entertainment, or law jobs. We solved the food problems and created new jobs.
Until man has spread throughout the solar system, terraforming what can be terraformed and building habitats where we can, then we will ALWAYS have new jobs.
Consider a simple thing.wine. Five hundred years ago, wine was treated like soda is now. It was everywhere, some was good, most was bad, but it wasn't really a luxury item. Now an entire luxury culture - with a ton of related jobs such as Wine shop owner, wine salesmen, tasting hosts, sommeliers, cellar managers, wine tour guides, wine club owners all exist now. Make no mistake, they had WINE 500 years ago, but none of these jobs existed.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Just requires the obscenely rich to share their wealth.
Haven't you heard? Manufacturing is coming back to America, bigtime. It's just coming back automated. Relatively few jobs are coming back with the manufacturing.
Hate to break it to you but manufacturing never left America. Ever. It's a popular meme to claim that the USA doesn't make anything anymore but it is not and never was ever true. The US manufacturing sector, by itself today if it were a country, would be one of the ten largest economies in the world by GDP. The only country with a manufacturing sector of similar size is China and by dollar value they are roughly the same size to within a percentage point or two. And China has only caught up in the last few years despite having 5X the population. China does a lot of the labor intensive manufacturing and the US does a lot of the capital intensive manufacturing. That proportion will change over time as wages change in both the US and China as well as in other places.
You are correct that the relatively proportion of jobs in certain types of manufacturing is going to fall similar to how it did for farming. But this is not a doomsday scenario. It means that labor pool is now available to do something else that previously was not possible. If we all still had to work on a farm then the internet would probably have never come about. If you use people to do what a robot can do, then you are necessarily wasting resources by not utilizing people to their fullest capability.
Hate to sound like a luddite, but what's a person to do for a job?
The exact same question has been asked at the start of every technology advancement and the answer is the same as it has always been. Something different. Probably something you are having a hard time even imagining right now. As an example you're complaining that we shouldn't have accounting software because it took labor and thus jobs out of accounting. Would you seriously argue that computers have eliminated jobs because we need fewer secretaries now? It's an absurd argument because it presumes that the amount of economically valuable work out there is fixed and not growing or growing too slowly.
Farming is automated, manufacturing is automated, even service industry jobs are becoming automated
Umm, there is PLENTY of valuable work that cannot be economically automated. I run a manufacturing company that does assembly work. There is NO automation that can economically replace what we do and none likely within my working lifetime. Not because the technology doesn't exist but because humans are more flexible and economic in plenty of circumstances. Automation is useful but the limits on it are economic rather than technical in most cases. If you need a small quantity of something produced, it is difficult or even impossible to economically automate that in most cases. Same with creative work. Same with complicated work. For automation to replace all people you will have to develop a robot or other automation that is as capable as a person AND less costly. We are no where close to that occurring.
Wages may not be inflated like they've gotten in the US in the last 50 years but that doesn't mean there won't be any work anymore. It just will be different than it was and some places (like the US) may experience a reversion to the mean on wages. I know that uncertainty is scary but the notion that automation is going to eliminate all jobs is just ridiculous.
All of the wealth in America, including all corporate assets, all retirement plans, and all home equity, is less than $350k per citizen. That won't solve much. Even if you distributed it, most people would be broke in a year - wealth is a habit more than anything else.
In the long run, we benefit far more from wise investment decisions than from redistribution, because economic growth is exponential growth, and redistribution is a one-time constant. 95% of Americans live better than 99% of everyone who has ever lived. The median income in America is far more than the $30k or so that makes you a "1%er" of the world. Exponential growth per capita comes from technological progress, and there's no reason to believe technology will stop progressing.
Are the currently wealthy the best as making investment decisions? No, of course it's not optimal, but it's not terrible either. The entire premise of Capitalism is that you buy wealth, rather than being gifted it for loyalty to the leader or military conquest, so the better you invest your wealth, the more you can accumulate. That's a good thing when it works out that way!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
All of the wealth in America, including all corporate assets, all retirement plans, and all home equity, is less than $350k per citizen. That won't solve much.
Stop letting people sneak it out of the country legally, which you can only do if you have scads of money.
The entire premise of Capitalism is that you buy wealth, rather than being gifted it for loyalty to the leader or military conquest, so the better you invest your wealth, the more you can accumulate. That's a good thing when it works out that way!
Yeah. Only it hasn't worked that way in a long time. Once you get enough money to buy legislation, the game board is tilted.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I expect they don't feel they can ask for more money per hour. They're left with only one option to earn more, which is to labor more.
This is what happens when there are a lot of jobs that don't require a whole lot of skill, or require skills that the employer can teach to nearly anyone, fairly quickly. All workers are replaceable, and there is no benefit to individually trying to make gains because one will just be let go. That's why unions came into being, because if everyone or nearly everyone was involved, then it's a lot harder for the employer to fire that vast a portion of the workforce without putting themselves out of business.
I'm not going to deny that unions have their problems too, but labor strife as business came into direct conflict with organized labor is why we have safer workplaces in the United States and overtime when exceeding forty hours for most physical labor jobs.
China is going through what the United States went through 80-150 years ago, and they're going through what the United States started going through heavily in the late eighties and nineties when outsourcing overseas started becoming commonplace. That's a tough spot.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In that case, we are in a good situation, because human demand is infinite. The more we have, the more we want. There's no end to it. I want my own planet.
No, it's not.
This is a major fallacy of economic thinking that really needs to be put to bed. It isn't true. Thinking like this is the basis for the Trickle Down Theory of economics, which has been soundly falsified. No, we won't always want more. Unbridled all-consuming unsatisfiable greed is a neurosis. It is abnormal and very unusual. Adults who suffer from the condition are considered stunted, little more than children. Children are expected to grow out of it, if they ever go through that phase at all. If you always want more, everybody around you thinks there's something wrong with you, and will usually avoid being around you any more after a while.
Normal people, by definition most people, are satisfiable. And satisfiable without actually all that many resources, in the grand scheme of things. Yes we all want more than a 19th century standard of living, but that's because the ancient Romans had a better standard of living than most of the world in the 19th century. It didn't take much to do better than that. Our needs get satisfied in a hurry. A variety of food, some indoor plumbing, and a roof that doesn't leak covers most of it. Add on some form of personal transportation if you live in a large, mostly empty continent like North America, and you're done. The wants that go on top of that are actually quite minimal. Almost nobody has more than two cell phones, and the vast majority of the world has only one. Practically every type of consumer electronics and appliance follows the same pattern. People have one cell phone, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop (they forgot they had), one blender, one microwave, one toaster oven, one deep fryer. The only people who have six cell phones are neurotic or app developers (but I repeat myself).
Yes, once you have one of everything, you can just go bigger. But again, there are pretty serious upper limits. Most people don't want a 700 room palace on the order of Versailles. Even those who did had a tendency to stuff 3000 permanent residents into that space. Most people don't want their own yacht, let alone their very own cruise ship, or there would be many more yachts in the world. So it goes for every thing you can possess.
So no, most people won't always want more. Most people in developed nations are quite satisfied with what they have. Sure they dream about palaces and fleets of sports cars, but drop unlimited funds on their cringing heads and they still won't buy all that. They'd be uncomfortable trying to live in a palace.
People's needs can be trivially satisfied. People's wants can be easily satisfied. Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?
Your statement just is empirically incorrect. The 20th century was the largest increase in human population AND the greatest increase in overall standard of living. We might someday reach the point where exhausting resources starts to diminish standard of living, but it hasn't happened yet.
Another ignorant Westerner projecting her own values on a foreign society. Being paid "peanuts" in Western currency is actually quite a lot in Chinese yuan. It's certainly more than they could make back on the farm. Maybe we should actually talk to these people instead of assuming that we can hold opinions on their behalf?
Workers are mobile and they know it. Wages are up across the board in China, and not going down anytime soon. The workers will move across the street to a new factory at the drop of a hat. "We are holding a knife to their throats"? WTF? Are we in Bizarro World? Have you even been to China, or talked to a single worker? Who is "we"?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
And there's a problem. People are going to end up unable to participate in the market, because you need money to do that, and you get money from doing jobs, and you can't get a job if there aren't any to get.
This is going to be a problem for us at some point, and we're going to need to deal with it. Which, knowing us, will probably happen way too late.
For education and economics, 1000 years is a long time. At current rates of change, a very long time.
For Human genetic evolution, 1000 years is barely long enough to be noticed.
We will have worked out how to live sustainably on this planet, or how to expand to the stars, or all died off before human genetic changes of the kind you are talking about are a population growth issue.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
there are always jobs where it is cheaper/easier to hire somebody
There have always been. Don't make the assumption that this'll always be true.