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The Asians perceived Western consumption as their path to stability and wealth, and all reforged their economic and social norms around export-based manufacturing.
Asia after WW2
Chinese workforce has become more skilled, perhaps doubling, or if you interpret the data kindly, tripling in efficiency since 2000. But because of the country’s accelerating demographic collapse, labor costs have gone up by a factor of fifteen.
Expensive Chinese labor.
In China the variation between richest and poorest—between ultra-urban coastal Hong Kong and ultra-rural interior Gansu—is nearly ten-to-one.
Chinese gap of wealth.
China with the multiplicity of options across Asia and it should come as no surprise that this corner of the world is home to fully half of the globe’s manufacturing supply chain steps—as well as the source of some three-quarters of the world’s electronics, cellular, and computing products.
Chnese manufacturing might.
Within North America as a unit, more than 8 in 10 dollars (or pesos) of income is generated within the continent. That’s by far the most insulated system in the world.
NAFTA strength
The entire concept of the Order is that the United States disadvantages itself economically in order to purchase the loyalty of a global alliance. That is what globalization is. The past several decades haven’t been an American Century. They’ve been an American sacrifice.
Pax Americana
The entire concept of the Order is that the United States disadvantages itself economically in order to purchase the loyalty of a global alliance. That is what globalization is. The past several decades haven’t been an American Century. They’ve been an American sacrifice.
Glibalism
So much so that even at the height of hollowed-out globalization, the United States remains responsible for roughly half of all chips by value despite producing only about one-ninth of chips by number.
American Technological Strength
Far more than automotive or computers, electronics are a huge product category and are among the most labor intensive of the manufacturing sectors. It may sound sexy to build semiconductors domestically, but if you want to employ a couple million people, it’s electronics you’re after.
Electtonics consume a lot of varied uses.
Just ask the Chinese, whose efforts to pirate German designs and mimic German output have consistently met with failure.
German machinery often imitated but never duplicated.
The two subsectors that will see the biggest shifts are textiles and wiring. Textiles is a low-skilled, labor-intensive industry while wiring is low-skilled and electricity intensive. Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, these sectors have been go-tos for newly industrializing countries trying to get their foot in the door.
Textiles and wiring.
the U.S. shale revolution has granted the United States the cheapest electricity in the world.
2003 Shale Revolution.
Whether the country in question is Bolivia or Laos or Congo, the risk is not of devolving to a world that predates 1939, but to one that predates 1800.
Third World Super Scary
Food is fleeting, but hunger is forever.
Great saying about hunger.
quick-grow oats need three months from planting to harvest. Corn takes six. Six months is typically also the soonest a hog goes to slaughter. Nine for cattle, although twelve is better—and that assumes feed lots and not free-range. Want to go organic and free-range? You’re now talking twenty-four months. Minimum. Orchards typically don’t produce for the first three years. Some take eight.
Harvest timetables.
Industrialization doesn’t simply increase our output per acre; it also allows us to produce foodstuffs on previously barren lands.
Industrialization's influence on agriculture
“Green Revolution” ultimately proved responsible for nearly quadrupling the agricultural bounty
1980s Green Revolution.
More land, some 11.5 billion acres, is under cultivation than at any other time in human history. More crops—in 2020, total agricultural output was worth about $8 trillion—are in production than any time in human history. That’s roughly 10 percent of global GDP, the largest value of any economic sector. More of those foods, over one-third by value, are internationally traded than at any other time in human history.
Modern agriculture
The Order’s emphasis on efficiencies, economies of scale, and expanding the reach of industrial technologies shapes not simply where certain crops are grown, but how they are grown.
American Order Economic Goals
Roughly two-thirds of the human population lives in the temperate and near-temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere.
World population facts
electrification technology does not yet exist that can manage the high power-to-size requirements for either heavy equipment or long-range oceanic shipping. There simply is neither an existing technology nor an imminent technological revolution that can replace oil and natural gas in the agricultural sector.
EV short comings tractors and ships
pretty much everything at scale, but Chinese soil and water quality is so low that Chinese farmers generally use more fertilizer per calorie produced than any other country—five times the global average in the case of nitrogen fertilizers.
Chinese agricultural deficiencies in soil.quality
empire of broken dreams).
USSR nickname
Western Sahara, which has the world’s largest undeveloped phosphate supplies, most of which are located within a few miles of the coast.
Western Sahara importance in.Phosphate fertilizers
hyperspecialized globalized agriculture has created for itself is that we now grow or raise each plant or animal where it makes the most economic sense within a holistic system. For example, cattle have shifted into the Great Plains, while corn and soy dominate the Midwest. In the pre-Order days, the two would have been more or less colocated.
Agricultural.zeneth of 2019
South America and Australia—the continents that produce and export the greatest volumes of foodstuffs relative to their populations—have almost no potash.
Geogrphy of success in agriculture that can not be sustainable
Seeds for planting sounds simple, but in many cases hybridized, genetically modified, or otherwise specialized seeds are far more expensive than simply holding back some of the previous year’s harvest. Such specialized seeds easily lead to harvests triple of what could be grown the old-fashioned way. In 2021, seeds for a single acre of corn plantings ran about $111.
The expense of Science in large agricultural yields
American-grown rice became the single largest component of the Haitian diet.
American benevolence towards Haiti Rice
After all, a government that cannot feed its population is a government that falls.
Anarchy Rule
Mato Grosso, Brazil’s Soy Central, the world’s densest soy production zone.
Brazilian SOY
Less temperature variation means less intense winds, which means that the century-old and very well documented weakening of the monsoonal winds will continue. This weakening has already reduced rainfall on the subcontinent by 10–20 percent over the last century.
Indian monsoons degradation
The tech behind desalination has steadily improved in recent years, to the point that the power cost is but one-third of what it was as recently as 2005.
Desslination 2023 vs 2005
Roughly 7,500 feet is the ideal elevation, putting it well above most lines of human habitation and making servicing and transport
Coffee elevation
