[ardy42]

> The price advantages of globalised supply chains vs. the relative rarity of an event like this means that, during normal periods, firms using them will enjoy a significant advantage over those doing the "right" thing and market forces will weed out the latter. So I don't expect management to be taking a lead on this.

That's correct. It's a market failure that needs to be remedied through law and regulation.

Hyper-specialist species can amazingly exploit their niche, but they're the first suffer and go extinct when things get disrupted. It's the generalists that survive.

[robocat]

> law and regulation

In industries where innovation matters, how do you regulate for producing a good enough product?

Could you regulate Intel to fix their 10nm process?

Do you want a laptop with the reliability of a Fiat, or the reliability of a Toyota?

Not saying it is impossible, but countries quickly run inito problems when their home produced goods are strictly inferior to the imported goods on price or quality or other metrics.

[ardy42]

A hyper-specialist will be the best at some thing or another, and bad at a lot. A generalist will likely not be as good at those things, but it can be good enough at them, and not nearly as bad at the other things.

The market, as you note, selects for hyper-specialists, but crises aren't kind to them.

Strictly inferior home-produced goods are better than no goods at all, and the capability to produce them may have systemic benefits (in flexibility, resilience, avoiding certain kinds of path dependence and local maxima) that are not visible when looking at the goods in isolation.

What law and regulation can do is keep a nation on a more generalist footing, and keep it from hyper-specializing too much.

[fermienrico]

Would you agree with Trump’s stance on reducing American reliance on Chinese manufactured goods? Trump has been doing that since his election.

[int_19h]

Reducing the reliance is a good idea in principle. The way they actually went about it was not, though.

[jagger27]

Oh, is that what the tariffs are for?

[leereeves]

Even the NY Times agrees with that.

> From tax cuts to relaxed regulations to tariffs, each of President Trump’s economic initiatives is based on a promise: to set off a wave of investment and bring back jobs that the president says the United States has lost to foreign countries.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/business/economy/donald-t...