Does capitalism also work without "cheap countries" like china or india?

>thinks his middle class mommy and daddy would still be able to afford to buy him a smart phone if everyone along the process was payed a developed country wage.

Cute.

it's not even working with the cheap countries

A better question is

"Does Capitalism work without poor people?"

Computers used to cost literally thousandths of dollars back when they were manufactured in America or Europe and yet middle class people were able to afford them. The difference main difference would be that you would buy one and keep it for years instead of changing it every 6 months like a wasteful slob.

It would be less confusing if you used punctuation.

No system works indefinitely. Next question.

Not as we understand it. If China and India nationalised their factories/resources tomorrow, the first world countries would be fucked, perhaps with the exception of America and Germany.

Wow, computers must've been cheap back then! Selling for only thousandths, I wonder how the manufacturers turned any profit.

how so? their existence requires markets full of wealth to buy their trinkets. If everybody else tanks they're coming down too, and they have a lot less practice with absorbing economic shocks than countries who have been at this for a few centuries

yea, gommunist china didn't really trade with the west until the 80's and capitalism worked fine

They weren't cheap, but most of those are still kicking around, so they were very well made.

capitalism ONLY works without "cheap countries"

it's why we're so fucked now.

>The difference main difference would be that you would buy one and keep it for years instead of changing it every 6 months like a wasteful slob.

Yo know that's because the pace of changes in tech was much more frequent? Also the reason shit in the past is more durable is because it uses less power and part to function so it wore down less compare to say products that are much more powerful.

Yes, with a few tweaks and CEOs earning about one figure less.

no one in all positions as consumer and producer wants to though.

MIND == BLOWN

What are you talking about? Computers increased their power multiple orders of magnitude between 1985 and 1999.
The problem with modern technology is that it's made to be disposable. Phones are particularly bad in this regard. You can still use a thinkpad from a decade ago just fine for most casual tasks, which is what the vast majority of people use computers for.

Are you actually retarded or just LARPing?

Well, kind of. There's no simple answer.

Jobs become mechanized when machines become cheap enough to replace human labor, or when human labor becomes expensive enough to be replaced by machines. You can see this in low-wage countries where a job that would be mechanized in the West is instead find by a person, who is paid low enough to not justify a machine replacing him. Furthermore, this is seen in the West where technology that has been available for years, e.g. computers, is finally coming around to replace jobs people always said they would, e.g. cashiers. But it's not because cashiers have become too expensive to employ, it's because computers have become cheap enough to use for that purpose.

Suddenly raising the minimum wage in low-wage countries would result in a fleet of jobs being mechanized, probably causing an unemployment epidemic until better jobs come along. But these better jobs generally require more education, which workers in low-wage countries generally do not have. So the workers in those countries would become just like the rest of us in the West -- they would do useless jobs that only exist because you can't mechanize them yet, or because the business world has not yet recognize that they're useless. For example, I took a couple agriculture classes and learned that something like 95% of the cost of food is after its production. That is, if you took a $3 bag of carrots, the farmer receives like $0.15, and the remaining $2.85 is spent on everything else. Marketing, transportation, regulations, etc. But of these, about $2.50 is spent on marketing.

That's what I would consider a useless job -- anywhere in that chain of unnecessary events that a $0.50 stock bag of carrots turns into a $3.00 bag of name brand carrots, or what have you. Those are the jobs we all have right now, and those are jobs low-wage people would get, until they're either mechanized or considered useless by their employers.

A brief side note to this is that many people ITT are assuming that products are cheaper in the West because they are manufactured in low-wage nations. This is just inconsistent with basic economics. Products are priced based on what people are willing to pay, not on how much they cost to produce, with the exception that price > cost, by at least some amount. We pay the same amount of money for products in the West if they're manufactured here or there. That extra money from importing goes into the pocket of the stockholders as profit. We do not see any benefit from it as consumers. I mean, why would we? Are we supposed to magically just get a price cut due to a cost cut? Why would they even bother making the switch to overseas production, then?

The only exception is the rare case in which price < cost in the West, but due to lowering the cost to manufacture by lowering the employees' wage, price > cost. In such a case, we have a product to purchase where otherwise we would have none. But this may be purely theoretical. I cannot think of a product that's so close to the edge of being unprofitable that the only way it makes money is by using cheap foreign labor.

They would be about 50 to 80 more USD per unit. This may come as a shock but labor is not a large part of its a smart phones cost.

> (OP)
>A better question is
>"Does Capitalism work without poor people?"
...and the answer is still NO

Yes, capitalism has always worked under any circumstance (at least better than the alternatives).

Commies fuck off.

Engineer here. We didn't make electronics disposable, just their chassis.
We use the same solder, better quality SMTs, smaller currents; ASICs are timeless by design.
But most sub $500 computers now have terrible display hinges and thin, dirty ABS plastic for their casing. They bend, they crack, and we definitely overuse screws. For example, a 2010-grade ASUS K54H chassis is infinitely better than the modern Lenovo IdeaPad 320: sturdier, mechanics are isolated from PCBs, lots of air in both parts of the "clamshell". Keyboard sits on a metal shield, what else... You get the idea. Same with phones, embedded cases (warehouse computers, healthcare monitors), you name it.
Electronics themselves (like motherboards), they only just keep getting better.

Game consoles are an example of a product that is sold with very thin profit margins or outright losses. Tho that's because the real money maker is licencing software.

There's a reason the thinkpads by Lenovo, and not IBM, are called chinkpads.

>They would be about 50 to 80 more USD per unit.

No chance. When everyone along the line, from the miners, to the tool makers, local food producers, the truck drivers, chinese factory workers.all getting paid at least $7 an hour, working in developed country standards the increase cost will be massive.

You shouldn't use the US as the gold standard. Cost of living is lower or higher depending on where you are looking at.

But if we are assuming the whole world suddenly turned into burgerstan, You should look at

Just to clarify. I don't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head. But an Iphone costs around 100$-200$ to manufacture in total and is sold for 800$ because you are paying for the privilege of sucking off Steve Job's corpse.

Capitalism always works mr."State Capitalism with wealth distribution is different than Market or Mixed Capitalism"