June 23, 2010 | permalink
Over at The Atlantic, James Fallows has begun connecting the dots of recent events at factories in China:
—-> This same Foxconn, scene of the suicides, is where the newly discounted Nooks and Kindles come from—plus iPads, iPhones, and lots of other stuff. <--- A reader in China wrote just now to ask: Do Americans even think about the connection? Relentless price pressure on Chinese suppliers, all the more so now that, largely in response to U.S. government demands, the RMB is rising again? Relentless expectation of falling prices in U.S. stores? The Foxconn-suicide story is ambiguous, with many hypotheses about the cause. But the price pressure on these suppliers is unmistakable.The answer is: no, of course we don’t think about. And of course we expect prices keep falling—through the miracle of Moore’s Law and clever 23-year-olds’ software, not manufacturing economies of scale. We want cheaper iPads and “fair trade” iPads, minus the sweatshops, never mind the fact that it’s impossible to move Apple’s supplier base to the US without doubling or tripling the price. The solution, as I’ve pointed out, is to all but liquidate the worst offenders on the Chinese coast and move the factories inland, where wages are low enough to keep factories competitive even with the rising RMB. Everything is connected.
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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.
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