> I never said supply chains should be slower or less dynamic, I said they should be less centralized and thus more robust, and arguably critical goods manufacturing absolutely also need a domestic presence.
If manufacturing supply chains are more geographically dispersed they are automatically slower and less dynamic. They're not necessarily more robust either. As soon as the supply chain involves moving materials farther than a few hour drive by truck it becomes constrained by modes of transport that can't be easily dispersed (rail, air, water) or reprioritized.
> Right, it's building factories in the right places, and ensuring they can tolerate disruptions.
As demonstrated by...all of history since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the right location for a factory today is not necessarily the right location for tomorrow. Relocating factories is expensive and difficult in the best circumstances. Every factory has a logistics train attached to it; not just equipment and trained workers but power requirements, waste disposal, physical siting requirements, and dozens of other factors. Some are easy to uproot and others are not.
Again, I'm not arguing that China should just make everything and all factories should be located next to one another. I am saying that manufacturing is not like AWS. You can't just spin up new instances when you run out of capacity. You can't just move everything to a new factory closer to some resource or retool a factory for a totally different type of production with a deploy script.
> Corporations should have more responsibilities to quantify and manage risks like this.
Some do and several industries are regulated when it comes to sourcing. Defense contractors have all sorts of supply chain requirements. More industries can have supply chain security requirements but then end products will get more expensive. The added cost will get pushed to consumers. So you can optimize for the common case where pandemics are rare but manufacturing tends towards consolidation and low cost or you can optimize for robustness and everything manufactured carries with it the amortized cost of that more robust but expensive supply chain. Unless regulation forces all manufactured items to have a similarly robust supply chain and all manufacturers have the same burden, there's a competitive advantage to having a supply chain more susceptible to rare disruption but far less expensive.
> If manufacturing supply chains are more geographically dispersed they are automatically slower and less dynamic.
You keep hammering on this geographic dispersal, but as far as I can see, no one is suggesting geographically dispersing or relocation supply chains, but are instead suggesting replicating supply chains in different geographical locations. You know, the standard approach to adding resiliency to literally any system.
> Some do and several industries are regulated when it comes to sourcing. [...] there's a competitive advantage to having a supply chain more susceptible to rare disruption but far less expensive.
Yes, and I'm suggesting that a more comprehensive legal approach where corporations providing critical goods or services should have to perform risk assessments and ensure a maximum tolerable risk. Everyone recognizes the competitive advantage of ignoring risk. I described it in my very first post to which you replied, and I then said improved risk management should be legislated.
If manufacturing supply chains are more geographically dispersed they are automatically slower and less dynamic. They're not necessarily more robust either. As soon as the supply chain involves moving materials farther than a few hour drive by truck it becomes constrained by modes of transport that can't be easily dispersed (rail, air, water) or reprioritized.
> Right, it's building factories in the right places, and ensuring they can tolerate disruptions.
As demonstrated by...all of history since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the right location for a factory today is not necessarily the right location for tomorrow. Relocating factories is expensive and difficult in the best circumstances. Every factory has a logistics train attached to it; not just equipment and trained workers but power requirements, waste disposal, physical siting requirements, and dozens of other factors. Some are easy to uproot and others are not.
Again, I'm not arguing that China should just make everything and all factories should be located next to one another. I am saying that manufacturing is not like AWS. You can't just spin up new instances when you run out of capacity. You can't just move everything to a new factory closer to some resource or retool a factory for a totally different type of production with a deploy script.
> Corporations should have more responsibilities to quantify and manage risks like this.
Some do and several industries are regulated when it comes to sourcing. Defense contractors have all sorts of supply chain requirements. More industries can have supply chain security requirements but then end products will get more expensive. The added cost will get pushed to consumers. So you can optimize for the common case where pandemics are rare but manufacturing tends towards consolidation and low cost or you can optimize for robustness and everything manufactured carries with it the amortized cost of that more robust but expensive supply chain. Unless regulation forces all manufactured items to have a similarly robust supply chain and all manufacturers have the same burden, there's a competitive advantage to having a supply chain more susceptible to rare disruption but far less expensive.