Comments by "Louis Giokas" (@louisgiokas2206) on "Soviet Economist Leads the New u0026 Future Russia" video.
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Very interesting. A completely different take on the guy, and very valuable. Stellar analysis.
Of course, I wonder what he was thinking.
Prior to the influx of western capital, the Chinese economy made the Soviet economy look like a success story.
The term for creating a totally self-dependent economy is "autarky". That was Hitler's idea.
The only thing I disagree with you, and many others, on is an assumption that the current complex global supply chains we have are necessary, or even a good thing. In fact, there are two motivations for the current state of affairs. One is that our product companies are no longer run by engineers, but by MBAs and bean counters. I explain below. This leads to the constant search for labor differentiation. A corollary to that is the move of manufacturing to countries with a large and growing market. This is a way to get around protectionism, plain and simple.
Look at automobile manufacturing. Japanese and Korean companies build cars in the US. Why? Is the labor cheaper? No. They were trying to forestall being kicked out of the most lucrative market in the world. Another example is BMW. All of their SUVs are assembled in the US. I told a German colleague of mine this and he was not happy. To show you the madness of this, my attorney (and friend; good to have one of those) bought one recently. He had to wait for a while because parts and assemblies were flying back and forth across the Atlantic.
In the 1980s the movement in manufacturing was to collocate engineering and manufacturing. This was, in large part, because of the concept called "design for manufacturability". It was driven as much by quality as cost. To go back to automotive, GM wanted to design a "world car" platform they could sell, with local adaptations, anywhere. They could also produce it anywhere. They had fancy graphics of the envisioned assembly plants. All their suppliers would have feeder plants actually abutting the main assembly plant. This was also driven by the idea of "just in time" or JIT manufacturing.
This all falls apart in the current model. I have already written too much, but just a couple more things. One is that I have already seen examples of products that were brought back to the US after moving manufacturing to China. Instead of just making the same thing, the product was reengineered to be more efficient to manufacture. The cost actually came down. In the US! I have consulted with companies and know of the situations of many more (some very large) that contract manufacturing to China. I was involved, of course, because they were having problems. The Chinese manufacturers did not build the product exactly as specified, and they failed. You can't separate engineering for quality (product and production process) and quality control from manufacturing. The result is the low quality of many of the goods we have now. This is a part of what I talk about above.
The other thing is automation. Have you seen the plants in China that produce the iPhone? There are hundreds of thousands of people involved using very little automation. The workers are literally peasants. What we will see as disengagement from China proceeds is much more innovation in automation. That is capital intensive, so it is not likely to work in China, or in Russia.
By the way, I use a lot of examples from the automotive world, but my background is in aerospace. We often studied what was being done in other manufacturing areas to get ideas for our own manufacturing.
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