[Discuss] Origin of computer products

[jc at trillian.mit.edu]

Rich Braun wrote:
| ...
| Thanks for the food for thought; here's a challenge for the rest of y'all:
| look for electronic goods made outside China.  Some examples:  I have hard
| drives from Thailand (in the news recently because of flooded factories),
| cameras/camcorders from Japan (surprisingly rare now, most Japanese makers
| have outsourced to China), a plasma TV from Mexico, UPS units from the
| Philippines.  Alas, I can't find PCs or laptops made anywhere but China.  My
| logic is this:  even if those countries don't have better conditions, at least
| the competition among nations will push them toward better conditions.

Nah; probably not.  There's nothing resembling international  regulation,  so
the  main  effect of competition will be a "race to the bottom".  The winners
will be those with the lowest manufacturing costs, which primarily means that
they  can  pay their workers less than anyone else.  If local pressures force
them to increase their pay rates, they'll then lose out to someone else  that
can still pay less.  This will continue until the workers can all be replaced
with machines that don't need to be paid.  Machines do  need  power  in  some
form, which puts a lower limit on their cost. And a few workers are needed to
maintain the machines.  But the nearly worker-free  manufacturing  plants  in
Japan and a few other countries suggest what might be the final, steady-state
development of our manufacturing processes, not too far in the future.

We're already reading reports of manufacturing moving out of  China,  due  to
increasing  labor  costs,  to other countries full of people living in abject
poverty who are (for a while) happy to have the jobs at  wages  barely  above
the starvation level.


--
Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day.
Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime.
   _'
   O
 <:#/>  John Chambers
   +   <jc at trillian.mit.edu>
  /#\  <jc1742 at gmail.com>
  | |