Stunning amount of our food is processed in China. Yes, grown here, shipped there, processed and shipped back.
Grown here,shipped to china then sent back? Defenitely not interested in eating that and if I see the word china on anything I try to avoid. Love farmers markets and local produce and meats . But yeah I realize that we have a dependancy problem.
It’s about a tenth that many (it is not a third of the country). But yes it is having some major impacts.
A shit ton of companies are. But when you’ve spent 30 years moving production and jobs overseas you don’t turn that around in 2 years. Especially not because supply chain issues are hurting the “build machines to build the machines to make the thing” part of setting up new factories or refurbing old ones. Plus historic low unemployment is making it hard to find people willing to work the jobs no matter the pay. A lot of what is coming back is highly automated. So production might be coming back, but maybe only with a fifth or a tenth of the jobs.Are we going to learn from this and bring back jobs (at least the "critical ones")?.............
Nope
Unfortunately that job-reducing automation is the only way we stay competitive in the long run, to keep the industries here once we get them back.
Always would be. Unless Americans decide they are okay working 54 hours a week (9/6) for about a third of the pay they make at 40hrs a week…
If the total economic output can grow fast and high enough, you can absorb the productivity increases without losing jobs. The trillion dollar question is how to sustain such an economic perpetual motion machine.
This is why they was probably hoping Covid would wipe out a bigger part of the population. Also the lock downs are conditioning people of being locked away in there home.
It isn't necessarily a perpetual motion machine, but it is difficult to do. Especially with very disruptive productivity increases or total dislocation of labor. Economies always adjust, but the larger the shock, the longer and harder it is to adjust. If in, say, 10 years we have viable self driving trucks what do we do? That's something like 7 million jobs in the US. It would be a massive boon to other areas of the economy. No way we'd replace all trucks overnight, but think companies wouldn't have orders in immediately? You'd probably find 90+% of truckers unemployed within 5 years. Agricultural work, automated pickers and harvesters are becoming more and more common and more and more efficient. That is millions of jobs. Etc. At some point you end up with narrow job categories where people can work. What happens if we figure out a way to make androids that might not be real AI, but are sufficiently programmable and human in physical abilities. Do you need a dozen guys working at your tire shop? Or just 2 or 3 guys who supervise the 3 or 4 androids that can do all of the work to mount and balance tires? Or the auto shop that has 6 androids that can do all of the vehicle repairs? Maybe you just need a few humans as the service managers because people like talking to other people. At some point there are only so many people who can really manage "supervising" automation, even if it doesn't take being some computer programmer to do, or who can manage whatever "thinking" jobs are left in the economy if basically all of the "doing" jobs are automated.
