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So... there will be only a limited degree of reorganization, but... in the long run countries and industries that do it in a more sustainable way, making the network more robust, more dispersed, more resilient, will reap the benefit. But let's not underestimate the... seduction of immediate gains. So... despite all this hullabalu the final reorganization will be rather limited. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done, but my guess is that it will be done in a limited way, because every time there's some disaster... When there was the famous Fukushima earthquake, the problem with the nuclear reactor... there were some sectors that saw... the end of the supply for... intermediate materials because there was one Japanese company that was supplying 70% of the world... Every time that happens, like the earthquake in Taiwan... several years before, everyone says... we have to change the supply chain... make it less concentrated... less complicated, and then... 2 years later we are back to square one. So I'm not too sure about how much change will happen to the global value chains. ...[T]he taste for global free trade will be diminished somewhat, but... on that we should... change the conversation, because... we—especially those who are concerned with the fate of developing countries, like the people that source—we need to talk about intelligent trade in a completely different way. ...[I]t's not just a simple dichotomous problem of free trade versus . ...[T]here are many different ways of organizing . ...There are many ways of regulating trade. Protectionism is only one way. ...[W]e do it with ... with programs... with, in the case of the US, defense policy, so... we need to change the conversation in a more nuanced way...

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[F]inally, linking that into the reorganization of the ... [I]n many cases, unless the crisis really persists for 3, 4, 5 years... as soon as things become okay people will just say "Well, let's forget about it because reorganizing the value chain requires investment, hard work... Let's just go back to the old ways." So it's not certain... that... reorganization will happen, and even if it...[does], it will happen only in limited areas... [E]ven if the US wants to bring all the lost manufacturing production in... key sectors back home, it cannot do it. ...[T]hey don't have the supply network. They don't have the correct infrastructure. They don't have the necessary supply of technicians. ...[E]ven if it wanted, Apple cannot bring factories in China to California to make the s.

Finally we have to rethink the production system, the global supply chain, partly because of this pandemic but... no one thinks that this will be the only disease that is going to hit human society. A lot of us agree that increasing acceleration of will create many other crises... extreme weather events and so on... but who knows what other crises are in store, so we need to rebuild the system to have more... resilience and robustness... Just think about airplanes, oil tankers... they can produce disastrous outcomes if something doesn't work. All these systems, including... electricity... have ways to absorb, isolate shocks and quickly bring backups [etc.]... and the economy will also have to be redesigned in that kind of way.

To a certain extent, what we’ve learned from nearly three years now of the global pandemic is the over reliance that some of us have had on supply chains from China in critical materials, critical for the functioning of our economy or for the industrial enterprises of our most competitive industries. So I think there’s been a major movement to try to make sure that we control our own [supply chains] in certain industries, [so] we have greater access and more reliability about supply chains. This is not just a lesson that we’ve learned; the Europeans [and] Japanese have learned this. You’ve seen movement around the world to make sure that, in a crisis, you control your destiny, and you control your own fate, so your economy can continue to perform at a high level, and you’re not at the mercy of an autocratic power that might deny you critical materials. So, that’s a lesson we’ve learned, and you’ve heard our President, other senior members of our government and many members of the business community talk about that.

There are reasons to believe that the world economy is once again in the throes of a phase change. There are also reasons to believe that this phase change, like the preceding ones, will involve a paradigmatic shift in the organization of people around their work. If this is so, then our perceptions of what has happened in the past decade or more in the world of work may need to be modified; likewise our perceptions of where those changes are leading us

There are very powerful forces in the world who see things in different ways. It always has been like that and that habit of seeing things in a particular way has become institutionalized and the habit, the conditioning is so strong, the glamour goes so deep, that humanity as a whole... is going to take a long time and with much heart searching to find a consensus.
So you should not look for dramatic changes in the immediate future. The changes will take place bit by bit with the minimum of upset, the minimum destruction or conflict in the societies of the world, so that it is acceptable. Whatever is acceptable will be implemented. What is not acceptable... will be held over until it is acceptable and it will only be acceptable when trust is created. That trust will be created by the economic change, the number one change, the answer to all our problems really, the starting part of the answer to all our problems is in the change in the economic redistribution of the world's resources, which... the masters [have] written over and over again is the key to all further changes because it creates trust and when you create trust, all things become possible.Then you get changes in the political field, changes in the political field make changes in the economic field easier and these make easier changes in the purely practical field of looking after the planet.

[I]t's a fantasy ...to reshore or bring back home the bulk of manufacturing that have migrated to China and other developing countries ...[I]t just cannot be done, but... people are already thinking about ways to diversify the sources of and production so that... [when] one part of the system goes wrong, the other part is able to cope.

We're going to see more changes in the next 10 years than we've seen in the last 50 years. … The questions we must answer today are not about how much we trade, but about how we build resilience, lift up working people, reduce carbon emissions, and set up our economies to succeed over the long run. How to deliver growth from the bottom up and the middle out so no one gets left behind.

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Resistance to corporate rule at the policy level will need to be coupled with the generation of alternatives from below, to fill the gaps left by the departing old system. This is not about ending global trade or industrial production, but for most of our needs, we will need to shift towards smaller scale and more localized structures: decentralized, community-controlled renewables for energy, revitalized local food systems to feed us, and robust local business environments to employ more people and keep wealth from draining out of our communities.

There are concerns that the s that have been built in the last few decades of globalization have become too concentrated, so if something goes wrong in one place, the whole chain is affected... It was already happening, but now.... people are saying... we need to do something about it.

Large-scale corporate enterprise has brought humankind much material comfort in two centuries but at the price of fantastic unintended consequences (externalized costs) ranging from the destruction of local communities to climate change. Large-scale corporations will be vulnerable to the collapse of capital formation markets that must accompany the end of the cheap oil fiesta. Corporate enterprise can certainly be reorganized on the small, local community scale, but it will not be the same as . Corporate enterprise in the Long Emergency may revert to being more public in nature and far less sovereign in power. There may be one exception: The most visible… corporate organization that might survive the Long Emergency may be the church. Whether Catholic or Pentecostal or something new we haven't seen yet; the church won't have to rely on oil supplies. Organized religion doesn't have to traffic in awkward material products, only in beliefs, and it can operate at many scales simultaneously. Because American culture is constitutionally allergic to religious governance, we may have problems if churches are the only large organizations left standing—that is, assuming we still have the same constitution.

The entire global economy is tipping away from the material and toward intangible bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks. It is headed for the inevitability of constant, relentless, and increasing remixing. The laws will be slow to follow, but they will follow.

It is impossible to have those convulsions in the labor market without driving thoughtful men to consider the question of new departures, of re-organization, of a change in a system which is palpably breaking down before our eyes. And there is a strange indication, that comes from that American country where our new subrace is arising, of a possibility of an organization of industry, which, though at the moment it be on distinctly anti-social lines, has yet in it the possibility of growing into an organization that would serve society. I mean that flowering of the competitive system into trusts, in which you destroy a large amount of competition, in which one great trade is organized — granted for the benefit of those, a few, who have the control of it... we are beginning to feel the need of a new organization, of a new type of civilization, and that exactly fits in with the coming of a new sub-race, and demands by all the testimony of the past the coming of a World Teacher. p. 140

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