Workshop of the world
by Bob on September 9, 2007
The "workshop of the world" has been used now to describe China as the major maker and producer of seemingly almost everything for everyone in the whole world all over.
The term used to apply to many other countries before China emerged.
Britain used to be called the workshop of the world in the 1800s with the Industrial Revolution. Her manufactured goods dominated the world for at last decades in the 1800s, wrote the BBC in recent times.
Japan was a global workshop for a great while, as was Taiwan, Korea, and others. But cheaper labour eventually got all of them.
So now nations have to contend with even cheaper labour opportunities for manufacturing like in Vietnam, Kenya, Indonesia, Malaysia, and many others.
There used to be no "workshop for the world" when I was little. We made things more or less locally. In our region of America, in our state, in our city. Yes, there were huge conglomerates, not like today's, but the little company or shop existed and flourished.
Now, in our day, designs are made here in America and then exported for actual manufacture to China and other such efficient and cost-effective countries.
There is of course a real downside to the making it "faster, better, cheaper" which was all the rage from Ivy League Business schools seemingly a short while ago. Maybe it was the 1980s. The accountant-type spreadsheet-driven bottom-line thinking "bean counters". Dull interpersonally but good at squeezing every penny out of the overhead and into the bottom line profits. So we all went to the cheapest place which could manufacture something. Not necessarily better, either. For the better aspect is jeopardised by sheer volume of production and the contractual commitments of manufacturing plants.
But it's like being the best student in the class or the fastest gun in town in the Old West. There's always someone looking to take you out. That's intense pressure. And almost impossible to sustain, despite Wyatt Earp and Annie Oakley.
Ultimately, certain things should defy trans-nationalism and hyper-national corporations. Like little flags we put on our lapels for our country. They ought to be made in the country itself. As should real cloth country flags. But less and less so, they aren't anymore.
One side effect of seriously hardened high output production is that the quality suffers, by definition. Instead of the old-fashioned way of checking every piece going out, now there are new Operations Research statistically-driven methods to check one in every hundred. Or one batch out of a thousand. It's seemingly just cheaper to let the good slip through and let the end-retailer deal with the problem of a defective item. It doesn't sound like good business, but it is happening.
So, just like the Black Forest in Germany used to make great Cuckoo clocks and that's where everyone used to get them, we have everyone turning to places like China for everything.
Trade protectionism might be a tricky affair say the free-market-enterprise economists. But what happens when only a few nations make things anymore and everyone else is just consuming them ? What would Adam Smith have to say about it, and the worth of a simple pin which he started his "On Wealth" with. Or Keynes, or Galbraith, et al.
This is all a very complicated state of affairs.
I do wish we still had our shoemaker in our neighborhood who could still make shoes and repair them fully and expertly. Not some global shoe store chain who tells me when my shoes are wearing out to get brand new ones when I only bought the old pair about six months ago ! That's classical "Planned Obsolescence".
Or when I ask a clerk in a shoe store, ostensibly a shoe salesman, what advice he can give me about buying a pair of shoes or sneakers and he tells me to go watch the commercials on TV. That's out of control.
But it's come to that. At least for now.
Countries will keep on being the workshops of the world as long as we indulge our penchant for cheaper goods (which they really aren't anymore to the end-consumer: a $300 pair of fancy sneakers will cost dollars to actually make) and our sublimation of the local work ethic.
China is just very good at what it does, too. Manufacturing things is a major selling point.
Japan had done it, Korea had done it, Taiwan had done it, but they all got eclipsed.
It's takes a lot to stay alive as the number on gunslinger in the Old Wild West. Let's not even get into the web and internet, which has all the trappings of the old American Wild West and cowboys.
Balance of trade ? "Who watches the watcher" asked the ancients. Who is making the balance device itself we use to measure with. Then we have the principle of Heisenberg. Uncertainty as a must.
Can't it all be like the movies ? Oops. I think I got that reflection backwards.