| Not just cities. Countries. The hard part is the basics - things that get commoditised tend to get manufactured more efficiently, and at massive scale this tends towards centralisation. As a concrete example, in the entire country of New Zealand, no one manufactures window glass. Every window, everywhere in every building, ultimately gets shipped into that country in a container. We'd also miss shoes as there are no "real" factories locally anymore. I think we make nails but I can't tell if we can really make bolts. So I'm not talking about cars, computers or aircraft. No way. Windows. Shoes. Bolts. So OK, we're missing commodities, most industrial chemical processes, feedstocks, experienced manufacturing labour and plant expertise, all of which went south when NZ was one of the first countries to drop its pants and remove import tariffs. OK. I don't have a dog in that fight, there are reasonable arguments to stop subsidising things you'll never be internationally competitive at. That said if all imports stopped tomorrow for, let's say, 2 years, it's surprising what you can do without or improvise. The main thing I think we'd really miss is life sustaining medicine. A loss of exports would actually be more catastrophic since our farmers would a) have no reason to exist and b) not be able to keep the finance wheels turning. We're unbelievably wealthy compared to people in 1918 and we have a lot more slack and fat in our systems than we really know. |
Yes, we need flexible chemistry machines on the style of CNC mills. The good news is that they aren't that far away, at the next pandemics we will probably have them.