Self sufficiency is usually a goal for those who want to avoid a systems collapse. When everyone is highly specialized and dependent on one another, failure in one part (especially if that part is logistical) cascades throughout the whole. For example, if the town’s petroleum distributor burns down, how long will residents be able to convey food home or products to market? If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon? If China destroyed the chip fabs in Taiwan by accident during an invasion, how long does it take the rest of the world to recover? During the pandemic we saw how vulnerable economic systems are to supply chain shocks, so it’s not unreasonable for people in the wake of that experience to seek a world with less exposure to that risk.
I would argue that mutual reliance actually makes the system as a whole more resilient.
If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?
Oops, but I forgot that even though I’m self sufficient in energy (maybe I have solar panels and batteries) it turns out I still need plastic! I guess I did need that distributor after all. Shame I didn’t realize that before it burned down.
> If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon?
I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.” There isn’t a plausible scenario where global shipping—and nothing else—fails. You might as well start making contingency plans for if the sun gets turned into green cheese.
To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.
It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia. American settlers on the Great Plains needed iron nails and barbed wire from back east. Native Americans traded furs for guns with Europeans because it was mutually beneficial. All over the world people lived in groups because specialization and trading (even if they didn’t call it that) enabled a higher quality of living than gathering berries all alone.
Every line of argument in this comment is very bad.
> If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?
Your argument exclusively rests on the assertion that the converse is true - that if individuals and organizations will invest substantial amounts of effort into making sure that their upstream suppliers will continue to exist if they are dependent on them.
Not only is there no empirical evidence to support this claim, but there is ample evidence to support the fact that it's false - such as COVID, which you literally mention later in your comment, where despite the fact that we live in a highly interdependent global economy, there's very little effort invested into making sure that your suppliers continue to exist, and the devastating supply chain issues prove that conclusively.
In addition to the empirical evidence, this is just false based on human nature. If confronted with the fact that "oh, something might happen to an entity that supplies me with things", humans and organizations overwhelmingly choose to increase their internal resilience, not the system resilience. As a trivial example of this - in response to supply chain shocks that hit lean manufacturers like car manufacturers particularly hard, those manufacturers overwhelmingly chose to stock up on parts - internal resiliency - and not to invest in the upstream supply chain, which is what you're claiming they would do.
Your claim is just rooted in an false anthropology that has massive amounts of evidence refuting it.
> I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.”
That's an irrelevant strawman. Nothing in their comment was specifically predicated on exactly that scenario happening - they were arguing for general resiliency, which is effective even in more realistic and broad scenarios.
> To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.
First of all, that claim about the experiment is false. All labor in all sectors did not turn off at once.
Second, that's yet another strawman, because individuals overwhelmingly prefer to engage in tasks for the sake of self-preservation than the preservation of others. If the economy and individuals have resilient practices, they will invest substantially more effort in those practices that directly lead to their survival than if the system is not resilient and they're highly interdependent, because again, of human nature, which prioritizes the immediate.
> It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia.
Yet another strawman. Self-sufficiency is not binary. You can decrease your reliance on others without eliminating it entirely, and history's plentiful examples of system distruptions show that it is an extremely good idea to do so.
It's telling that you have to repeatedly make fallacies, false statements, and misunderstand human nature in an attempt to defend such an absurd point like "making individuals less resilient makes the system more resilient". Factually, it is exactly the opposite - systems with resilient components are objectively less fragile.
> and the devastating supply chain issues prove that conclusively.
Did we go through the same covid? No country on earth had food shortages while majority of people were stuck at home. COVID was a perfect demonstration of resiliency of trade and JIT systems. But you ate up the news the media put out that were basically china-boogeymen, to force government to create the huge CHIPs act.
The bogeyman exists - there were factually shortages in hundreds of different kinds of goods. You're just stupid because you can't do a 5-second Google search.
So what was devastating then? Maybe you mean it was devastating that toilet paper was missing for 3 days or bread baking flour for hipsters that started sourdough. Devastating shortages in my book are what you see im the history books, people dying because of the shortages themselves.
