Home-Sourcing Trend Could Get You A Green Job: The Upside Of Costly Oil

Two things:

1. The world is still flat: It's not like IKEA ceased to be a Swedish company the moment it started building products in the United States. Toyota is still Japanese even if it builds its cars in Mississippi.

There are, in my mind, two forms of globalization. The first is "hard" globalization, where hard goods travel around the world. This is the kind where cars and whatnot get shipped around the world. The second is "soft" globalization, where soft goods travel instantaneously through the Internet and all other forms of communication. This allows a Japanese company to build a plant in Mississippi and sell its products in North America while teleconferencing and getting all necessary data at a moment's notice.

It's still a globalized, interconnected world, but now we don't use gobs and gobs of fuel to get physical product tot he customer. Same result, really, but more efficient.

So yes, the world is still "flat," but now it's ideas that keep it flat, rather than airplanes and ships.

2. Six sigma is hardly threatened by oil prices, since it's largely a process of maintaining quality at the production site. It's really just a way of assuring that products are within three standard deviation of the mean in either direction, and that those three standard deviations are all still of acceptable quality.

Hence, "six sigma" (sigma refers to a standard deviation.) No, don't worry-- the black belts will all keep their jobs. If anything, quality control will be more important as jobs come back to the US.

"Toyota is still Japanese even if it builds its cars in Mississippi."

Considering Japanese CEO pay is far more in line with the average workers pay than a US CEO's salary is, I have no issue with that, and I imagine a Toyota factory worker in the US is thankful to have a well paying job, and one that offers a 401k, and not a mismanaged pension.

I think there is more to the Tesla battery story than there is room for, and The governator has something to do with it!

JC,

That's true to an extent, though it still is yet to be seen if the Japanese will keep their previously fabulous balance between rich and poor. The GINI coefficient has been growing even in Japan-- this is probably not surprising in a country that has a national debt of 180% of GDP and slow economic growth for almost two decades.

Nonetheless, Toyota is still probably a much better-managed company than anything Detroit has offered in the past, oh, half-century or so. Still, a close inspection of even Toyota will show that the whole "Toyota production system," and the previously fantastic pension, job security, etc., hasn't held up well the past decade. Ulrike Schaede (a fairly well-known Japanologist/Japan business expert) pointed out that temp hires have become far more common even at Toyota and Honda, once known for their lifetime employment. Perhaps things will change in the next decade? Hard to say.

Either way, I think that Sachs was right in that article. It's far too early to be so glib about the "death of globalization." Globalization is not about shipping cheap plastic buttons from Guangzhou to Texas. Globalization is about trade being internationalized and unrestricted. If people stop trading physical goods, then so be it. They'll still trade ideas-- something with just as much value.