Its easy to minimize the impact that modern supply chains have had on the world as we know it. Inexpensive transportation has changed so much - the pants that you're wearing, for example, may have been designed in the EU (at an artistic level), planned out in the USA (individual pieces, sizing, etc), had the materials sourced from South America, shipped to China to be cut in bulk, then to Central America to be sewn together, and finally back to the USA to be sold. And yes, its cheaper that way.

It costs only a few hundred dollars to send a container on a semi truck halfway across the country, and you can fit an amazing amount of "stuff" into a space that's around 5,000 cubic feet. Shipping across the ocean on a container barge is damn near free, relatively speaking. And the systems and processes that manage this are getting more advanced and more specialized -- and more efficient -- each and every day.

Companies have learnt that to compete in the USA means, for a lot of people, to compete on price and price alone. An awful lot of products have become "good enough," for most people. This means that if you can cut out a single person, be it a cutter or a shipping clerk, by redirecting product all over the world: well, you do it. Otherwise your competitor will, and you'll lose that all-important price point at Wal*Mart.

What's the solution? I don't know. I don't even know that there's a problem. Nationalists aren't happy, that's for sure, but that may just be a progressive step towards an inevitable global worldview. Or maybe its the worst possible thing that we can be doing, losing control of our manufacturing processes until we're totally dependant on outsiders who want to stay "outsiders." Your guess is probably better than mine.

What I do know is that efficiency is here to stay. And the supply-chain is a huge source of frictional costs, so its a perfect candidate for visibility and optimization. Whatever the cost.

Much of the discussion and debate around Globalization misses the larger context in which Globalization is occuring. Simply put, manufacturing is gradually going away as a source of employment, worldwide.

The "problem" is productivity improvement, driven by a host of changes: robotics and other automation, supply chain efficiency, improved design for manufacturability, new materials, etc, etc - all of which in turn are driven by increased competition and cost pressures. I read recently that we actually manufacture more in the U.S., in constant dollar terms, than ever before, while manufacturing jobs continue to decline over the long run. Most manufacturing jobs are not going away to China - they are going away, period.

One way to understand this is by analogy to agriculture, which employed about half of all Americans at the turn of the last century, but less than 5% at the end of the century. The reasons are obvious: changes in machinery, fertilizer, pesticides, and plant and animal breeds, to name a few. It may not be obvious to most reporters, pundits, and public officials that the same kind of sea change is occuring in global manufacturing today - but then the changes in agriculture were probably not so obvious in 1910, either.

The importance of these changes was brought home to me forcefully, ironically enough, on recent trip to a Shanghai-based computer manufacturing facility. The rows and rows of young Chinese women lined up along the final assembly lines were certainly striking, and plenty of Western observers would see them as "poor human beings doing crappy jobs" (but note - they had 100 applicants for every 4 jobs they filled). Just as remarkable, though, were the number of jobs *not* done by human beings. A supply warehouse larger than a football field was run by two workers. Circuit board assemly lines were manned by a mere handful of employees - all the real work, even inspection and testing, was done by machines. I observed to a colleague that the women on the assembly lines were functioning essentially as cheap, easily configurable, but slow machines. As soon as the wages of these workers start to rise, they'll start being replaced by machines too.

The point of all of this is that the fundamental structure of the global economy is changing, in such a way that we can no longer look to manufacturing as a backbone of middle-class employment and living standards. The kind of meta-level changes happening now are not the kinds of changes that can be reversed by, say, re-unionization or tariffs. We're going to have to find other ways for average Americans to get the kind of prosperity and security they used to get from working at GE or GM. This, I think, is one of the great challenges facing progressive politics moving forward.

E.J. Dionne makes a similar point about the challenge to progressive politics: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061201282.html

As someone who considers himself cosmopolitan, and who wants prosperity to be available generally to all the world, I still find it globalisation very problematic.

>What I do know is that efficiency is here to stay.

One reason is that the precipitate relocation of millions of jobs overseas, in a relative instant, has psychologically devastating effects on those whose lives are ruined, and this is not being managed properly, or at all. Once the local worker is not needed, he or she is gone.

Another reason is that "efficiency" in business has rendered our political system, and indeed our economic system (along with our social and other systems as alluded to above) completely _inefficient._ Our businesses have become so efficient that they can and do destroy the individual workers that support them, and whom the businesses ought rightly to be serving. They are so efficient at lobbying that America's political system, designed to safeguard minority rights, has now become so completely warped as to champion only the conglomerate instead.

What does this "efficiency" serve? If perfectly conscientious workers are not protected from layoffs, how will the unemployed consider their business "efficient?" If the distortion of our political system renders it impossible to protect our own citizens, for want of "efficiency," or indeed impossible to protect emerging industries, for fear of "distorting the free market," and thus making it impossible to build new industries that need protection, for whom is this system "efficient?" Even industry itself is being cannibalized. In the "efficient business," we have created a monster that eats its own young. The funny, and horrible thing: the "young" are comprised of our own people.