Great for who's economic growth? As in, when staring at the graph of GDP vs wages plotted over the last 50 years, that big-ass pie slice that everyone's excited about? That appears to have ended up in roughly 800 people's pockets. Meanwhile even mention domestic manufacturing in the country that basically invented consumer electronics and kazoo music starts playing in the background. grits teeth We knew NAFTA was bullshit, we knew it was going to break basically everything, and yet folks just couldn't quite get mad enough to scare the political elite badly enough to back off. I love my country, we have always been at war with Eurasia, I am going the fuck to bed.
For humanity? It is the same reason most of us don't grow our food or make our shoes. Specialization makes a lot of sense. Western tech wouldn't have been able to grow as fast if electronics manufacturing were not concentrated in China. It is (was?) a win-win.
One of those "wins" was based entirely on toxic wealth hoarding by financial elites, which is why we are we are, with the flailing remains of a US government taking a hatchet to science and education while infrastructure crumbles around it, and climate change alternately floods and burns prime real estate.
