John Schinnerer
1 min readJun 20, 2022

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A few other factors - or perhaps other ways to frame what's already said here:

Materially affluent countries are running out of 'cheap' places to outsource/offshore. As more countries move into the current minority world group (materially affluent tech-industrial nations), the number of majority world countries with exploitable ("cheap") conditions is necessarily reduced. It's not just about manufacturing labor & materials, but about the outputs as well. Pollution, trash, industrial waste & toxics. As fewer and fewer other countries are willing to import these, something has to shift. Already happening in the USA since China quit buying mass quantities of our plastic trash (so-called 'recycling', that is).

Transportation will continue to get more expensive, expecially compared to how artificially "cheap" it has been in the last couple decades or so. Lots of factors moving at once - fuel sources & prices, infrastructure deterioation, rising costs of repair and maintenance, increased climate-related risks & losses both at sea and on land (storms, floods, fire...cargo sunk, transport infrastructure damaged or destroyed). Possibly reduced public tolerance for taxpayer subsidies to the transportation sector and consequent cuts to subsidies (which are everywhere, from fuel to roads to ports, both sea and air).

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John Schinnerer
John Schinnerer

Written by John Schinnerer

A generalist in a hyper-specialized society. "How we do what we do is who we are becoming." - Humberto Maturana

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