2/ No, I understand diseconomies of scale, and I'm not arguing flatly in favor of oursourcing absolutely every aspect of our supply chain overseas. ...I'm just saying that I'd rather buy machine parts from MI or Germany than from the one guy in town.https://twitter.com/normonics/status/1326528225057628160 …
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3/ There are declining marginal improvements in cost as you increase the area you purchase from (adding a whole second Earth might decrease cost of wrenches by 3%), but the low hanging fruit is AMAZING. Buying wrenches from MI vs from in state is prob a 70% cost drop. >>>
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4/ Hiring the best relevant software engineer in the US vs the best one in a 30 minute drive is probably a 5x quality improvement. Etc. So restricting even 80% of purchases to w/i 100 or 500 miles would decrease quality of life for people by like 50%.
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5/ If you want to help the common man, you don't do it by keeping his salary flat and doubling the cost of every single thing he wants to buy. That's Wrath-of-Gnon style retardation.
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6/ Same. I raise my own meat. ...but God help people if everyone had to do that, or buy meat raised within 50 or 100 miles.https://twitter.com/axelpopaxel/status/1326534687708250114 …
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7/ I don't claim them as "calculations", but as suggestive numbers. I continue to suggest that they are approximately correct. Economists have fairly well proven that prosperity correlates with size of a trade area, no? Happy to read dissenting datahttps://twitter.com/normonics/status/1326536352209330177 …
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8/ also - and I think that
@normonics gets this - he and I broadly agree that (a) trade is generally good, (b) in the extreme limit, it can cause dislocations, unemployment, and societal problems. We're quibbling about the location of the margin.https://twitter.com/normonics/status/1326537635251200000 …Show this thread
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This is true to a point, but ends up fetishizing efficiency for its own sake, at the expense of a genuine 'economy'. A good chunk of trade today isn't predicated on comparative advantage per se, more like comparative immiseration.
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and we are so far past that point libertarians live in a world of abstractions I mean just look at the half-assed "calculations" above as if those in any way reflect high dimensional reality
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Britain is a good example of what happens when you follow that logic for decades. Years of cozy trade agreements cushioned the loss of domestic industry. Sure, better and cheaper could have been made abroad but nations require a generalist approach. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/rebuilding-british-industry-a-plan-for-the-post-brexit-economy/ …
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