Onshoring is really directed at goods that some other country might use an economic weapon by restricting supply. 99% of stuff doesn't fall into this category. No one cares if coffee mugs and pens are made in China. So you wont see rises there. It's not really the end of globalization for the vast majority of stuff. Of the stuff that remains, you have to consider what fraction of the value chain is actually going to a "problem" country. Often it's the final assembly. On a mobile phone that might be $10 of the store price. So manufactured in a more expensive low wage country at $15, you probably won't notice. Some of the chips in a phone are not made by TSMC but are made in South Korea, so probably no change there. Apple's A16 chip is particularly expensive and maybe costs $100 to make. So based on that TSMC quote, that's an extra $50, but they sell the phone at more than $1000. That article also seems to imply that some of that added cost is insufficient worker availability causing expensive training costs. That may change if there's a steady supply of jobs available. It is possible to make low cost electronics in high wage countries. The Raspberry Pi is made in Wales.

> If everything in your life costs 50% more, then your effective income has fallen by a third. Are people actually going to be ok with that? We'll see.

This already happens with the non-outsourceable stuff that's more expensive (housing, medical, education, etc). So who TF cares if flat panel TVs or Phones cost more? Not me TBH.

Electronic garbage and (some kinds of) entertainment are basically the only things for which "globalization will bring down prices" has really delivered, at least in the US. Turns out it doesn't help with most of the stuff that actually matters, and might even hurt.

So a fry cook can save a little and put together an entertainment center that would have been the envy of the neighborhood—almost unimaginably good—in 1992. So what? They're facing a hopeless financial situation on every other front. I guess it's nice the 65" 4K TV, Switch, and budget surround sound system can provide a distraction from everything else being ruinously expensive and getting worse every year, with seemingly no end in sight.

Its also a red herring. The reason costs went down is that this industry jumped on the same bandwagon as moore's law. Reducing the part count of items (compared to their 1950/60s counterparts) and handling a lot of tasks in a single piece of silicon that itself has been going down to 0 in cost is what really enabled the price of all this electronic stuff to become so cheap.

Lets compare a 1960s TV to a 2022 TV for example. In the 1950s you had the power electronics, the control circuitry for the tube, the tube, the audio circuitry, tuning, and possibly some control stuff (primitive OSD whether visible or not).

Now in 2022 you have the LCD panel which follows moore's law to an extent, a simple switch mode power supply to drive the TV(single chip solution also follows moore's law to an extent) and a single chip solution to handle audio, tuning, OSD and any special value add such as apps(also follows moore's law).

We should really exclude this category from the cost baskets as it is only serving to mislead.

Right, I didn't bring it up in my post but obviously the March of Technology is (we are told) supposed to bring prices on that kind of thing down independently of the effects of offshoring.

I actually wasn't entirely fair—cotton and synthetic casual clothes are so cheap they're basically free, anything that can be made of absolutely terrible steel and stamped is cheap (really bad knives, terrible dining utensils that bend under ordinary use, that kind of thing), and so's any plastic shit without expensive IP/branding attached. I think that's all some mix of efficiency improvements (especially for the plastic shit—we put a lot less material in most plastic goods now, than we did in, say, the 1980s) and, maybe, some actually-beneficially effect of offshoring. Oh, and kitchen appliances guaranteed to break within two years because some nylon gear wears out and it can't be repaired for less than the cost of a new one. Those are cheap. Meanwhile, actually-good stuff is about as expensive as it ever was. Be rad if we could apply this alleged cost-savings effect of offshoring to, like, nice things that function well and last, but mysteriously it only seems to materialize in things that are also a level of quality so low that we didn't used to even have such a category. Or rapidly developing technology (consumer electronics). It's as if consumers aren't seeing the bulk of these supposed benefits from offshoring, and instead what price decreases/stability we do see are mostly from tech improvements and obvious quality decline....

I'd add that I think cost increases of onshoring are overblown. US-made goods in e.g. clothing often command a large premium, but that's because if you're going to use US labor instead of Vietnamese or wherever, you may as well also use better processes [EDIT: and better materials] to produce a higher-quality item, since you can't compete with poorly-made goods on price anyway (though, sure, some places try to cheat and turn out crap at US-premium prices while implying it's better than it is). For extremely price-sensitive goods like bottom-of-the-barrel T-shirts that wholesale at like $1, even a 10% increase in costs would mean you fold even if the absolute increase in costs of the article is pennies, so of course those aren't made in the US when there are other options.

The things that are "ruinously expensive" are also the things we can't outsource - housing, medical, education.

Onshoring doesn't seem to me like it will improve the domestic policies that make each of those unaffordable.

everything is a tradeoff, look at what happened during the Pandemic when we couldn't get ANY chips because of the supply chain issues.

For economics the tradeoff is between efficiency and resiliency. Global supply chains taking advantage of comparative advantage are efficient but can collapse from a single link in the chain failing. In this case the US is sacrificing cost efficiency for reliability.

Following your strategy is how you end up with Europe relying on Russia for energy, huge long term Black Swan potential in return for marginal savings in the short term

> Jobs back in America is great in the abstract, until you have to pay for it. If everything in your life costs 50% more, then your effective income has fallen by a third. Are people actually going to be ok with that? We'll see.

This is a short-sighted, narrow view of what's possible for a superpower.

HN isn't going to like this answer, but this is how the world actually functions and always will.

First, everything isn't going to cost 50% more. Most things can reasonably remain unchanged in terms of globalization, imports/exports.

How about the US strategically breaks most of the world's supply chains re chips after we build up our own production domestically? It provides a new, enormous point of leverage to wantonly undermine other powers that don't have that positioning. What if Taiwan's factories get turned to rubble by an assault from China, while the US factories keep running and then export, at greater cost, to the rest of the world (as with US natural gas recently)?

It's the oil / natural gas / energy scenario now that the US doesn't need the Middle East's energy. There will likely come a time in the near future where it's beneficial to destroy the House of Saud in the style of Syria, to damage China and others (look the other way while a very violent civil war breaks out to topple the kingdom, wiping out the majority of their oil production). The US can afford a global energy shock in a way that most of the rest of the world can't, which has recently been demonstrated in the gap between the prices in the US and the prices in Europe due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

If the US can meet its own chip demand, new options open up strategically on the table for a superpower to damage its enemies. The US can better afford a conflict in and around Asia, the less it depends on Asia for eg chips.

Energy, chips, USD, weapons. Moats for a superpower.

It appears that this is exactly what has been set into motion. It also means that Europeans will at some point have to decide whether to regard the US as an adversary or not. I'm afraid the realisation will come too late, just as with Russia.

I think it'll mean that corporations will need to go back to making electronics, appliances, equipment, tools, etc. that actually last more than 3-5 years.

"Can't go and buy another TV off the shelf since they cost so much, guess I'll have to take my TV to a repair place and have it repaired because I worked so hard to get this one, and it's cheaper than getting a new one."

You'll see consumers want to get more lifespan out of their current devices/appliances/etc. and will be willing to pick brands that allow repairability, locally sourced parts, etc. etc.

Estimates are an M1 processor costs about $50.

The original Intel processor (Core duo?) was somewhere in the $150-200 range, apparently, in 2006 dollars (but let's assume inflation doesn't exist).

So the CPU is already 1/3 the price, a 50% increase doesn't even get it close to what it had been in the past.

The price of things is so weirdly distorted at the moment because somethings can't be outsourced to cheap slave labor.

I can buy a new laptop for the same price as getting a plumber come and clear the roots from my drain.

It's cheaper to throw things out and buy new ones than repair them.