The world’s manufacturing epicenter has been slowly migrating around the world; guided by business leaders in search of a cheap labor force and non-existent environmental laws.
We’ve watched the epicenter move from Europe to North America, to Asia. The speed at which the epicenter moves appears to be increasing with each generation.
Epicenters evolve. In the beginning, they export nearly everything they manufacture. Eventually the workers begin earning enough money to buy the products they manufacture. The once poor country becomes prosperous, and the workers begin to live more comfortably.
Eventually, the workers look around and see that their lifestyle is getting better but it’s not nearly as good as that of the business leaders. They demand more pay for less hours. They get it, and with their new free time, they begin traveling within their own country. During their travels, they see some of their once pristine landscapes, are being used as dumping grounds for manufacturing waste and poisonous chemicals.
Over time the once grateful-to-have-a-job labor force begins demanding more and more until they began asking for more than they are worth. Some of the workers jump onto the environmentalist bandwagon and demand that the companies stop polluting and clean-up the messes that they’ve made.
The international manufactures have been playing this game for generations. They compute the increased labor costs, and pollution control and remediation costs, and compare it to the cost of building new manufacturing plants in a different country and voila, a new manufacturing epicenter is born.
The once prosperous exporting-country now finds itself a consumer-nation with a bloated, overpaid, and corrupt government, pension payments that can’t be met, a health care system that can’t be sustained, and under-capitalized and over-taxed industries ill-equipped to compete in a global market.
Just look at the United States, it was once a prosperous manufacturing and exporting epicenter, it is now an in-debt importing consumer nation.
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