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Originally Posted by Marci
I know ultimately it's a good thing for the end-user - they get the goods cheaply manufactured en-masse by China at a very affordable price...
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Well I would argue that point to a degree. Quite often these cheap knock-offs are made to a far lower overall quality and finish because there is no pride and quality control.
The end-users may see what is a cheap bargain that looks somewhat like the real-deal, but they're actually getting inferior goods because these guys don't really understand what they're doing and are not even aware of the little details that gain 10% performance here, and 5% performance there.
So often I see Chinese copies of name-brand goods being sold in various budget shops and the quality is always lacking. This doesn't mean that the Chinese can't make quality goods, but when some plant is just pumping out goods that it doesn't understand all the details as to why it needs to be done a certain way, and also have no quality control being enforced upon them by a contract, then the end consumers ultimately suffer.
They get inferior goods at a cheap price, and the guys who invented it go out of business and the innovation stops, and all the end-users are then left with is a source of inferior goods and no hope of improvement.
This is the innovational malaise that is the result of free-trade that gets passed over in the quest for cheaper prices for the masses. Sadly it seems to be the way of the world. Historically the nations that provided the cheap labour often got wealthy enough as a result of the trade imbalance that over time it sort of balanced itself out. China is a different story though. At 4x the population of the USA, it's going to take a LOT of trade imbalance before China begins to level out on the international scene. One can only hope that the manufacturing industries in the rest of the developed world can survive until that day. It seems unlikely though.