alt Hacker NewsThe West did a fine job of this themselves. Outsourcing to poorer countries is what has made the West so wealthy for so long - goods whose price is subsidized by cheap labor. Now that China and other countries have caught up, the West doesn't get the same discount, but they also don't have their own manufacturing because they all outsourced. We did this to ourselves.
Very much this. We could have also used that time to advance and perfect on-demand production like 3D-printing, enhance our society by promoting more robust and prone to repair products, but instead we clinched on mass-consumption and profit. Our whole economic system needs recheck.