alt Hacker NewsThe centralisation is abnormal. Used to have one blacksmith in each village making clone horseshoes and earning a living. Now there's one company in South Korea that makes all the world's horseshoes and earns a million livings while each village has minus one living. And the guy who invented the horseshoe is sleeping under a bridge.
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Well, the guy who invented the horseshoe died thousands of years ago.
And the idea that one location making all the horseshoes means each village is minus one living is ignoring the other effects.
Now, all the villagers can get cheaper horseshoes, so they don’t have to spend as many resources on shoes for their horses, and can now invest more into what their village is best at, and sell those goods to other villages.
Basic Ricardian Economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_economics
Of course, that doesn’t mean the blacksmith isn’t out of a job, but I always hate that so many people think the solution to that problem is to just give up the economic benefits of specialization instead of working to improve the distribution of the gains.
The other side of that is where there was a factory for the villagers to work in, and everybody had a wage, and a community.
The factory is now all robots, and only 3 people have a job there.
I think this is missing the part of the story where the blacksmith in South Korea comes to open a shop in your backyard and yet you delay them for years for inane reasons.
The village grew as the world got smaller. The world has one blacksmith.
sure, but if the blacksmith starting passing off really shitty horseshoes he'd get driven out of town
Centralization offers efficiency gains, else it won't happen. Your imaginary company in South Korea likely makes a million horseshoes employing only 1000 people, and the horseshoes are good quality, and the price is like 5% of the price of a handcrafted horseshoe. Many more people can afford horseshoes as a result.