Morgan Housel

Well, certainly.

The reason that garment manufacturing and plastic toy manufacturing was sent to China and Cambodia and wherever else, it's because we don't want to do that in America and we shouldn't because the wages are so low that we would not want to do it.

And no one would be willing to do it.

If we brought garment manufacturing back to the United States and we had a sock factory here, the people would only, there's two options.

You could either pay those people a dollar an hour or socks are going to cost 50 bucks when you cost them or whatever it would be.

Neither of those outcomes would be

would be acceptable to anybody in the United States.

So that's why those factories are shipped to Cambodia.

And what we're really good at in the United States is very advanced manufacturing, building airplanes and rocket ships and things like that, and tech entrepreneurship.

That tends to be what we're very good at in the United States.

And people get, I think, caught up in the idea of a trade deficit as a symbol of unfairness.

And the example I use,

If I had a leak in my sink and I called a plumber, plumber comes over to my house, fixes my sink, I give him a couple hundred bucks, whatever it costs.

The plumber probably didn't buy my book, probably.

Let's say the plumber didn't buy my book.

Let's hope he did though.

I hope he did, but let's say he doesn't.

I have a trade deficit with the plumber.

I gave him $300.

He didn't give me anything in return other than his product that he sold me, his skill that he sold me.