"Think of the global economy as a fine Swiss timepiece.
Expertly-made gears spinning frictionlessly on jeweled bearings, controlling multiple hands and a variety of complications, all to deliver immediate and easily-viewed results to its wearer.
The smartphone in your pocket is a similar marvel on a larger and even more complicated scale.
- Resources from Africa, South America, and elsewhere get converted into LCD or OLED screens in South Korea,
- accelerometers and gyroscopes in Europe,
- cameras in Japan,
- computer chips in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States,
- specialty glass in North Carolina, and
- milled aluminum cases in China, where the final product is assembled.
- From there the phones are shipped around the world on jet aircraft typically manufactured by Boeing in the United States or Airbus in Europe.
- All of this runs on energy drilled or fracked and then piped or shipped from the Middle East, Russia, and the Americas.
Like a Swiss watch, it's a marvel of efficiency -- right up until it isn't.
The global supply chains got a big dose of sand in the form of the Wuhan coronavirus.
A small example of just that comes from novelist Mike Massa on Facebook last week. Massa took a look at how an easy-to-make (and locally-made) product like yeast nevertheless fell victim to the collapse of the global supply chain.
The Virus Insanity Shut-In Time has a lot more people baking at home, if only to kill time, so much so that Fleischmann's reported a 600% year-over-year increase in yeast demand for February and March.
Massa wrote:
Making yeast is dirt simple (almost.) Therefore, manufacturing the actual yeast, even at 6x normal for this time of year is no problem. Packaging? Yeah, that's a problem. For example (drawn from recent news), Fleischmann's yeast is packaged using jars and paper envelopes sourced from one,
count'em, one factory. In India. Which is closed.
Since Fleishmann's can't easily ramp up an alternative (though I'm sure that they're working hard on that) to this single point of failure in their supply chain, they can't sell us dry yeast...
...there are at least two lessons we need to take to heart -- and make real in policy -- as rapidly as possible.
They are:
• Offshoring manufacturing jobs in exchange for cheap consumer goods was not a good bargain.
• Allowing a bad actor like the mainland People's Republic of China sit at the epicenter of the global supply chains is a deadly risk the world can't afford to take a second time.
Even now, with its infected hand caught in the world's cookie jar, Beijing and their bought-and-paid-for global allies are in full-on Denial Mode.
We did ... when you announced that there was no evidence of community spread, even though Taiwan warned you about it two weeks prior. twitter.com/AFP/status/125…
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