Sending Jobs Overseas
Several issues with statements in this article. Example:<p>&quot;In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy.&quot;<p>This statement is not explained, just made as a de facto truth. It&#x27;s a pretty sweeping statement that I find difficult to accept based on what I understand it to mean. So I am thinking I don&#x27;t understand it, but there is no explanation.<p>&quot;Once a complex manufacturing process could be supervised from afar&quot;<p>true one can &#x27;order up&#x27; a production run of a million units, however, many small and mid-sized companies have failed simply because they could not make this work. Pleo being the first example that comes to mind: The CEO flew between the US and their Asian mfr 20 times in a year, couldn&#x27;t get the product built and wound up selling the company to the manufacturer. Apple successfully operates with distributed manufacturing, but still requires many (thousands?) of engineers to shuttle between the US and Asia-based factories in order to ensure that base materials, components, quality, design, lead time, and many other aspects of manufacturing are done per their requirements. It turns out that the dance between design engineers and the manufacturing team is much more involved than companies realized and the challenges of communicating all of that across an ocean has been the death of many products.<p>&quot;A lot of what Americans think of as valuable service-sector know-how is actually mere prestige.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not know-how. It&#x27;s &#x27;know customer&#x27;. Americans are great consumers but to sell to them you have to know what they want and how they want it delivered. The non-US companies that succeed are the ones that tap into US-based design for things like, um, cars. Many foreign products are designed in LA.<p>Moreover, innovation is the true source of value. Nations that are more innovative will ultimately prevail. That is where one should focus in order to understand where the threats and opportunities are.