July 13, 2024

Globalization is as essential to complex technology as the assembly line. Not knowing that should disqualify most politicians and some journalists from influencing human existence.

The globalized economy isn't going to be undone by incompetents who assume they can bring the manufacturing back. It's strange that there are still persons who assume globalization can be reversed or nationalized. That's too much like reverting to horse and buggy days.

There is a common tendency to view globalization as arbitrary and corrupt. That's like viewing the wheel and wedge as a misuse of materials. Globalization was as inevitable of a part of technological evolution as the wheel and wedge.

That means a lot of persons don't have a clue what globalization is. How could they miss it? Apparently, the complexities of technology and how technology is produced is total mystery to a lot of persons.

As the production and applications of technology became complex over time, demands increased. It can't all happen in a small amount of space. You might think the U.S. has a lot of space. It disappears in the needs of globalization.

Then the number of workers required becomes even more of a problem. There are four or five billion persons producing the products of technology now days. The 200 million or so workers in the U.S. are a joke for globalization.

Nokia in Finland was walking away with cell phones, until dumb phones were replaced by smart phones. It put Finland back in the horse and buggy days, until they decided to try some other products. Smart phones have too many complex pieces to be produced in one country.

What gets missed in the complexities of globalization is the scale of cross-border activities. As markets absorb global products, manufactures produce larger quantities of fewer variations. That means highly specialized production. And it means components produced around the world. It's not a process that can be reduced back down to a factory that does everything under one roof.

What then is "bringing the manufacturing back?" Putting what under one roof? Is it acquiring pieces from a thousand different locations and putting them together? Someone already decided where the pieces would be put together with optimization of supply chains. That's organic evolution. It doesn't uproot and move.

Shipping the pieces across oceans for assembly is guaranteed failure for many reasons. Not all of the pieces are going to get there. One missing piece, and nothing moves. Finding a fix in addition to huge shipping expenses will increase the cost of the product by inordinate amounts besides slowing down production processes. Competitiveness will be nonexistent.

The persons who assume they are going to bring the manufacturing back assume the process still works the way it did during the fifties, where you pour the steel and package the result. That misses the electronic components and complex processes that go into technology now days.

Then there are something like ten machinists in the U.S., where there were about fifty thousand. No one is going to train the needed machinists. Then the engineers haven't had anything to do over the past twenty years. Without hands on work, engineers couldn't figure out how to build a doghouse. The needed engineers do not exist anymore.

That's why crazies say electric motors get 96% efficiency. Engineers who used to build electric motors knew 40% efficiency is the maximum allowed by laws of physics for electric motors, while 25% efficiency is typical under operating conditions. Those engineers no longer exist; so someone told the bureaucrats that electric motors get 96% efficiency; and on that basis rests the fakery of electric vehicles supposedly getting 100 to 150 miles per gallon equivalent, while it's 5 to 10 miles per gallon equivalent.

It would have been more than stupidity during the 1950s to assume someone would get complex things done while deciders spend their time golfing and shaping the social structures. The more complex the results, the more demanding the production processes. It takes competence, efficiency, experience and good-of-all to produce complex products. It doesn't happen otherwise.

Steve Jobs was kicked out of the company that he created, until it went bankrupt and let him back in. He had a very complex task to accomplish in inventing the smart phone. He first had to produce the I-Pod as a source of income for the process. Then he had to derive a lot of new process which he had enough experience with to understand.

To assume incompetents mongering power is all it takes to be winners by destroying enemies misses all of that.