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0 pointszaptheimpaler2d ago0 comments

That's why I said long term. This logic might as well argue it would be better for China to have had huge immigration to the US 50 years ago and contribute to the manufacturing or automobile industries there. But they didn't, and now they've built up their own ecosystems instead that are more efficient and ahead of the US' ecosystems. You can create Google in India or BYD in China, it just takes time for the ecosystem to build. It has helped China at least, and maybe the world more than if they had immigrated en masse.

The other line of argument is again the fault-tolerance I mentioned above, maybe see Taleb or distributed systems. Maximizing efficiency has trade-offs in resiliency. Yes it might be less efficient for there to be 3 ecosystems in 3 countries instead of 1, but its more resilient to shocks. We saw the risks of highly efficient but single point of failure supply chains materialize just a few years ago during the pandemic.

It's also pretty obvious that the tech companies being in the US benefits the US more than other countries. The big salaries are in the bay area, the tax revenue goes to the US, all the ex-Googlers founding new companies found them in the US etc.. So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.

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rayiner2d ago

> So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.

Exactly. Obviously it’s better for China that BYD and Huawei were founded in China rather than the US. It’s better for Korea that Samsung and LG were founded there instead of the U.S.

airstrike2d ago

China created those ecosystems because of Western companies who offshored their manufacturing, with the ultimate goal of having cheaper goods and services.

It wouldn't have been able to do it without US companies, and it's not particularly a model that can be replicated that easily, though in general, economic policy that focus on exporting goods indeed tend to be the most successful.

Still doesn't mean the US should be preventing Chinese from immigrating here, so it's just utterly besides the point.

rayiner1d ago

The U.S. built an industrial economy by itself, without any developed country offshoring work to it. Why do you think China couldn’t?

airstrike1d ago

Because context matters, obviously. Global supply chains did not exist yet when the US industrialized.

The United States was a British colony where demand for raw supplies led to an organic development of railroads, coupled with technological transfer from businessmen in the UK hoping to capitalize on this nascent market.

Textile manufacturing was still a thing and we were in the very early innings of the global Industrial Revolution. The two world wars that destroyed Europe were also immensely helpful to the insulated US.

Why are you asking me questions for which there are easily available answers? Honestly, you might as well have asked an LLM.

Stop looking for evidence that only confirms your biases and start trying to disprove your hypothesis. Only when there's nothing left to disprove can you claim your hypothesis _may_ be right, though you can't ever know for sure.

By the way, immigrant labor was a massive force behind US industrialization so you're just totally lost at this point. Industrialization has always depended on interaction with rich economies. From capital flows to technology transfer, export markets, immigration, empire, or trade networks. No major industrial power developed in total isolation.

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