In the 18th century, the Pebb family crossed the sea from Germany to the United States, tossing and turning, and finally a descendant went to the southern state of Texas, which is the territory of the "Red Neck", they began to grow cotton, and the current heir is called Carl.
Carl owns a cotton plantation of 4,800 acres, which is not small in the country, but in Texas, it is a normal size.
In the past, this cotton field made Karl's father live very comfortably, but when Karl inherited, life was not so good.
They used to grow cotton and send it to El Paso, the jeans capital of Texas, where there was a world-class factory: Levi's jeans factory.
At its peak in 1996, the factory employed 37,000 people and produced more than 2 million pairs of jeans a year, a testament to the economics of Arkansas kid Bill Clinton.
Farmers like Carl can manage up to 18,000 acres of non-organic cotton fields alone, and they harvest the cotton, send it to the nearby El Paso factory for processing, and then label it "Made in the USA" and sell it across the United States.
This cycle is enough to make life a comfortable life for a cotton farmer like Carl, who can go to bars every day to pass the time, and have enough profit and time to entertain.
However, the good times did not last long, the United States began a crazy globalization, and many companies closed some less profitable factories in pursuit of higher profits and turned to brand management.
GE is like this, Levi's is also like this, they are gradually moving factories to Asia, Americans only do some brand management, marketing and other work, this kind of work has high added value, the company's earnings look good.
Therefore, American companies hire a large number of non-technical people as CEOs, such as Chipberg, who became CEO of Levi's in 2011, who was specialized in marketing and advertising at Procter & Gamble, and did not work in the textile industry for a day, and became the speaker of the world's largest jeans company.
By now, Levi's doesn't have a single production line in the United States, and naturally, the 37,000 manufacturing jobs at the jeans factory in 1996 no longer exist.
TODAY'S CARR, AFTER HARVESTING THE COTTON, NEEDS TO BE TRANSPORTED BY RAIL TO CALIFORNIA, AND THEN SHIPPED TO ASIA OR MEXICO, AND JEANS SOLD IN THE UNITED STATES ARE GRADUALLY REPLACED BY "MADE IN CHINA" OR OTHER COUNTRIES.
In 2019, the United States accounted for 16.3% of the world's cotton production, but Americans consumed only 2.5% of cotton.
On the contrary, China accounts for 31% of the world's cotton consumption.
This consumption is too large, much higher than the proportion of Chinese in the world, which shows that we are rich, and at the same time, it also shows that our desire to consume is really a bit big.
The problem of overconsumption caused by various advertisements and merchants is really a bit serious.
The United States produces a lot of cotton, after all, the United States is sparsely populated, but the United States cannot process it into final finished products for export, after all, the efficiency of American agriculture is high, and the industrial efficiency is low.
Agricultural output depends on mechanization, but it also depends on the quality of the land, the climate conditions, and the advantages of the Great Plains of the United States. However, there is little land for industrial manufacturing and high requirements for the quality of employees, which is a bit troublesome for silly workers in the United States.
Therefore, exporting cotton in large quantities has become an inevitable choice.
American cotton is cheap, mainly due to good geographical conditions, suitable for large-scale mechanized cultivation, which is crushing for other countries before, even if tariffs are added, it can be guaranteed to be lower than our domestic one.
However, as we became more mechanized, the competitive advantage of U.S. cotton slowly declined.
I used to watch a TV series, there is a plot is that Henan people go to Xinjiang to pick cotton, it is estimated that there are very few now, the work of picking cotton has been replaced by mechanization, and there are various modern operations, resulting in a lot of increase in the unit output of cotton in China, and among the various agricultural products in the same period, no one can match the increase in the yield of cotton.
The Americans say that Xinjiang cotton does not have RQ, and I don't know what RQ the machine picks.
Our cotton production efficiency has increased, and the price has naturally decreased, so in the case of continuous population growth and increased demand for cotton products, cotton imports have begun to decline.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a very striking feature of international commodities: whatever China needed, prices soared, and then hovered high, such as copper.
This is true for other non-ferrous metals, gold, and so on.
However, this is not the case with agricultural products, such as soybeans and cotton, which have not been high.
The difference between the price of agricultural products and the price of non-ferrous metals is mainly China, agricultural products need more, China also increases production more, recently some people questioned that China's grain production increase is fake, in fact, do not question, look at the market price to know, speculation of commodities, the news is definitely better than the professors.
Non-ferrous metals this is to see the mine, there is, there is not, unlike agricultural products can increase production, so the price of non-ferrous metals after the price of non-ferrous to go back to the past, too difficult, crude oil is the same.
The number one export volume of agricultural products in the United States should now be, but the price of agricultural products cannot go high, which makes American farmers also miserable, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, in 2015 the suicide rate of male farmers in 17 US states was twice that of the general population.
American farmers are not enjoying the benefits of globalization at all, but their incomes are declining, so this is why rural areas in the United States are particularly supportive of Trump, who during his term of office, constantly let us buy American agricultural products, and now the Biden period is a different approach.
Biden will only use smears to force Western companies not to use Xinjiang cotton, if they do not use Xinjiang cotton, then naturally they will use Texas cotton, after all, the output is there.
Having said that, there is a question: if the Great Plains and the agriculture of the Great Mechanized Operations of the United States are not competitive enough, then what will the United States rely on to fight us?
Manufacturing is a disciplined industry, without good discipline, there will be no good upstream and downstream cooperation, and there will be no better labor productivity.
Science and technology is an industry that talks about accumulation, there is not enough manufacturing data, it is impossible to rely on a wild idea to create the future, yesterday the American Artemis 1 launch was successful, this rocket launch has been delayed for about half a year, constantly problems, this is actually the representative of the basic manufacturing industry in the United States.
How many rockets have been launched by our space department during this time. For the United States, a successful launch is news, and for us, a failed launch is news.
If even the industry that God rewards can't gain a competitive advantage, then other industries can't do it.
This article is originally created by Thorn Reading, please pay attention to the public number "Thorn Reading".