Thanks for the link to an interesting view on global supply chains. But your note about cost-minimisation suggests that the repatriation of jobs from Asia, for example, to the US would solve one element of the supply chain conundrum by relieving domestic demand from a dependence on foreign production and distribution. Similar arguments have been made in the UK in relation both to Brexit and the supply chain problems exposed by the Pandemic.
But it begs the question -can any repatriation of job from Asia to domestic inudstry in the US and the UK to take these two cases, succeed if the capital costs and wages so reduce the rate of return on capital as to not make it worthwhile -that the moneymen might decide to sit out the Pandemic in the hope that a 'return to normal' re-establishes the supply chains that choked, but with lessons learned? It is an even more potent issue here than in the US because of the 'Levelling Up' 'policy' of the current Government which claims that wages need to rise in order for the Levelling Up process to work. Whether or not this means an increase in the standard of living is the unanswered question, but not a surprising omission as much of what this government does is related to Headlines about stuff, rather than the stuff itself. Too much detail for Boris to worry about.
A revival of interest in Ricardo has thus led people to ponder his argument that attempts to raise the income of workers is doomed because wages will never rise far enough to liberate them from actual or relative subsistence, or poverty. It may be true that managers are having to increase wages at the moment to hire people -around the town where I live almost every retail establishment has signs in the window that say 'Staff Wanted' -I think it is the same in the US. So how this evolves over the next two to three years will lead us to some sort of conclusion.
As a naturally gloomy person, I think Ricardo probably got it right, because I wonder if, after all that has happened since Ricardo's effective war on unproductive landlords, from the various depressions through the 2008 crash, anything has fundamentally changed. The Biden Administration knows where it's money is coming from, hence the auction of drilling licences the other day, and it needs that money to pay for its interventionary policies -but doesn't this also mean that, as with Labour in the UK, there is in the US a bleak denial that Taxation must rise, across the board, and a tax in Assets as well as, if not more important than income- after all, Trump, de Vos, the Koch brother, Buffet, all sit on billions on assets most of which they could give back to the American people and not notice a difference in their life-style.
Is it going to happen? Probably not, hence the gloom...