Coming from me, a guy who has done a modest amount of construction with inmigrantes: the most skilled, most hardworking guy on the site is probably an old Mexican wizard. There’s a tile guy near me who is here illegally but does all the tile work for mansions because general contractors know he’s the best.
Also, Mexican wood product manufacturing (think furniture, toys, wood items) is extremely good, among the best in the world. My thought is that if the Mexican government got their act together, Mexico would be very advanced in something like semiconductor manufacturing right now.
SK and TW seem good at semiconductors due to a convergence of government interests and a handful ultra dedicated entrepreneurs. I feel like if only Mexico had had that mix the country would look very different now. Also cartels suck.
I think this is a really good point for why Zeihan’s claim could potentially be true. Maybe I have been underrating manufacturing skills and overemphasizing measured math ability (which is quite low in Mexico IIRC). There’s probably also a lot of selection bias in the people I meet from China, I’m not confident in my sense of what the home population is like in terms of overall labor skill.
Also Zeihan actually does talk about cartels at one point! It starts as a tangent maybe 45 minutes to an hour into the podcast.
Coming from me, a guy who has done a modest amount of construction with inmigrantes: the most skilled, most hardworking guy on the site is probably an old Mexican wizard. There’s a tile guy near me who is here illegally but does all the tile work for mansions because general contractors know he’s the best.
Also, Mexican wood product manufacturing (think furniture, toys, wood items) is extremely good, among the best in the world. My thought is that if the Mexican government got their act together, Mexico would be very advanced in something like semiconductor manufacturing right now.
SK and TW seem good at semiconductors due to a convergence of government interests and a handful ultra dedicated entrepreneurs. I feel like if only Mexico had had that mix the country would look very different now. Also cartels suck.
I think this is a really good point for why Zeihan’s claim could potentially be true. Maybe I have been underrating manufacturing skills and overemphasizing measured math ability (which is quite low in Mexico IIRC). There’s probably also a lot of selection bias in the people I meet from China, I’m not confident in my sense of what the home population is like in terms of overall labor skill.
Also Zeihan actually does talk about cartels at one point! It starts as a tangent maybe 45 minutes to an hour into the podcast.
The YouTube algo gave me the Tom Cruise run video a while back!
Social media algorithms... my fiercest competition haha.
[Good] content is that which is scarce.