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by TremendousJudge·2y ago·view on hn ↗
>Globalization is breaking down quickly

Is it? I don't know if there's a concrete way of measuring "amount of globalization", but I'd guess that right now we're probably the most globalized we've ever been. "More things that you use are made outside your own country" has only been growing, and with the advent of full remote companies that also includes much more software than before -- it used to be that only huge corporations would offshore software development, now everybody can do it.

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Ask me in 20 years. There are a lot of worring signs right now that things will get bad, but nobody really knows.

When the Soviet Union broke down 30 years ago the US decided the biggest worries were small countries (Iran in particular), and things like 9/11 proved they were right. However Russia is now attacking Ukraine and many think that countries like Poland or Latvia (both in NATO) are next. China is setting up so that they could take military action to take Taiwan, and other countries in the area. Nobody knows for sure if either of these predictions will come to pass, but there are signs that should worry you.

Global trade as a percentage of global GDP peaked somewhere around 2011 and has been steadily declining.

If you look at the US in particular the relative value of imports and exports is down about 30% from the peak 10 years ago. That's a big change for such a short duration

Actually, it peeked in 2008 and I wouldn't say 4% over 18 years a steady decline. In fact, it seems to be recovering from Covid to reach a new high. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/wor...

Edit: Nevermind, it did reach a new record of 63% in 2022. Globalization seems to be doing fine. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS

And simultaneously the US has been ploughing massive amounts of capital into domestic manufacturing construction. Money that would have previously been invested into China or elsewhere, is now staying domestic (with a lot of capital also going to eg Mexico).
What do you mean when you say that the money would have previously been invested into China?

Was the US federal government previously funding fab development in China?

That is to say, it seams like this investment is to meet a very specific need, and wouldn't have happened otherwise. Similarly those paying aren't the same either.

You could proxy a measurement of "amount of globalization" by disruptions in global shipping of food, energy, manufactured goods, etc. Covid caused disruptions, Houthi attacks in the Suez Canal disrupted shipping, Panama Canal is facing issues with water due to drought.. US continues to withdraw from Naval security commitments from the Bretton Woods era

Physical goods are much more complicated to move around the globe than code

> US continues to withdraw from Naval security commitments from the Bretton Woods era

Would you mind listing all the naval security commitments - from the Bretton Woods era - that the US has withdrawn from (eg over the past decade or so, anything relevant to "continues to")?

I'm not aware of any meaningful reduction in US naval security commitments. If anything the US is as busy as ever with its global naval security efforts. It's hyper busy everywhere: from Latin America, to Australia, to Europe, to the Middle East, to Asia.

The notion that the US has stepped back at all is entirely unsupported by the actual facts. It's just a weak myth being posted endlessly since Trump began spouting isolationism in 2015-2016. Meanwhile, in actuality, the US just spent another hundred billion dollars on a foreign war in two years.

> The notion that the US has stepped back at all is entirely unsupported by the actual facts.

40 years ago the US Navy was equipped and staffed to patrol the global oceans. Now, the US has a relatively few massively powerful forces of naval power projection but is woefully understaffed and under-equipped to maintain the global order against multiplying chaos. This is unlikely to change at all let alone be fast enough to influence outcomes. Growing sentiment after decades of the war on terror is for the US to be hesitant to intervene internationally, and while that isn’t current policy it’s predictive of future policy. It’s not at all clear that it would be popular in the USA to, for instance, go to Moldova’s defense.

> the US just spent another hundred billion dollars on a foreign war in two years.

The vast majority of this was accountancy fictions about the value of stockpiled obsolete materiel we couldn’t sell but had to pay to maintain or pay to scrap. We have demonstrably not gone all in on supporting Ukraine and Congress is currently strangling any attempt to do so. This is another sign of the US inevitably devolving into an unreliable defense partner.

I think you would measure it by trade deficits and trade surpluses. That is, now much "stuff" is moving around.