Name: ハーバード大教授だけど「サプライチェーン」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-03-01T09:40:24.000Z
Duration: 30 min 11 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

I'm Harvard Business School Professor Willie Shee.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

An immortal kid asks, how do tariffs work?

Well, tariffs are a surcharge that are applied on top of the cost of your import, right?

So when you buy an import from some company abroad that's selling it to you, the US government, for example, would add what amounts to a tax on top of that value.

So if you bought something that was worth $100 and you have a 25% tariff, then the US government would collect $25 from you in order for you to receive your package.

The people who pay that tax are the people who buy the products, you and me, the consumers.

At Michael Hughes 1, but seriously y'all, what's with egg prices?

First of all, we should recognize there are two different supply chains for chickens and eggs, right?

Chicken meat is one supply chain, eggs are another supply chain.

The hens that lay those eggs have suffered a lot from this avian bird flu.

And that's led to the culling of a lot of those hens.

When we cull all the egg-laying hens, the egg supply has gotten tight.

That's why we've seen a huge increase in the price of eggs.

So what we have to do is we have to rebuild the flock.

There's another interesting aspect about chickens and hens.

If you're an egg-laying hen, you need biotin in your chicken feed.

And that biotin, by and large, comes from China.

So if we get into a trade war with China and China decides that they maybe want to restrict exports of biotin, all of a sudden our hens are not going to be as productive laying eggs.

That guy B. Mills asks, are we in a trade war?

Yes, we're in a trade war and it's getting worse.

The purpose of a trade war is to favor your producers versus those of another country.

The trade war really started with the first Trump administration by applying tariffs to

The Biden administration also maintained a lot of those tariffs and added some tariffs and other trade restrictions.

President Trump is imposing tariffs because he says, I want companies to make things in the United States.

And by making imports more expensive, I'm going to encourage you to make stuff in the

The problem with the tariff argument is the cost of doing things in the United States is very high.

Even today, when you look at the cost of labor in the United States versus the cost of labor in a place like Mexico or China, it's still four or five times more expensive to do something in the United States.

What can you then make in the United States and be competitive?

You can make things in the United States where you don't have a lot of labor content in your products.

An example of that might be a jet engine, where there's significant labor costs, but as a percentage of the total value of the product, it's relatively lower.

If I wanted to assemble an iPhone, the typical labor content would be probably about four hours.

In China today, so say it's $6 an hour times four labor hours, that's $24.

Four hours of labor in the US, that'll probably cost me $40 an hour.

Okay, so that would be maybe $160 versus $24 to assemble that phone.

At Papa Fall asks, Hi, I was now thinking, why the f**k was toilet paper the first thing to go when this COVID s**t hit?

There are two things to understand about toilet paper.

There's not like there's some seasons you use more toilet paper.

The second thing to think about is economists say it's not very tradable, and what that means is it's kind of low value, and it takes up a lot of space.

If you ship a truckload of toilet paper, you're not making a lot of money doing that, and so you don't want to ship it long distances.

It makes no sense, therefore, to import toilet paper from China, right?

If you live in New York City, your toilet paper is going to be made somewhere in the

I'm going to have factories that are loaded to 90% or 95% churning out toilet paper.

So we're going to have a well-organized, very tight supply chain that doesn't have a lot of slack.

Then when consumers go in and buy a lot, you're going to run out because there's not a lot of slack capacity to increase how much you can make when demand suddenly rises.

I'll delay my maintenance, okay, and they'll make more toilet paper.

Basically, people who've been stockpiling all that toilet paper don't have anywhere else they can store it.

Once you get the five-year supply, you know what?

I think we have enough, and I'll stop buying it.

Then sales will fall off a cliff, and you know what?

AtGucon asks, is the supply chain back to normal?

A lot of people would tell you the new normal is one where we constantly have surprises and disruptions.

One example of a shock would be weather that causes port congestion.

We remember during the pandemic where we had over a hundred ships waiting to unload off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

There's been big congestion off the ports of Shanghai and Ningbo in China.

Another great example of the shock was when the Houthis started attacking ships that were going through the Red Sea to try to get across the Suez Canal.

That caused a major shock to supply chains when shipping companies said, huh, I can't use the Suez Canal anymore.

FBS Viagra asks, how fragile is our supply chain when Houthi pirates can upend it and force us into battle?

What the Houthis did is they occupied a strategic position on the strait that connects the Suez

That's the major trade lane from Asia to Europe.

Historically, most of the shipments from China go through the Straits of Malacca, and they would go through the Suez Canal to Europe.

But when the Houthis started attacking container ships in the Red Sea, that made the Suez unpassable for many of them.

So then a lot of them had to sail all the way around Africa.

That added maybe 10 or 12 days to the voyage.

That also removed 12% of the global capacity of container ships just because they were occupied sailing around Africa.

You may remember the movie Captain Phillips, where they looked at piracy off Somalia and the east coast of Africa.

Anytime you have a major trade lane, it is susceptible to disruption just by these incidents like that.

If you look at China, for example, they are paranoid that most of their oil has to flow through the Straits of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia right off of Singapore.

A lot of China's paranoia comes from they only have one coast.

They feel hemmed in by the string of islands from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines.

So when you study geography, you can see these choke points on major global trade lanes, all of which represent important vulnerabilities.

From the AskHistorians subreddit, at what point in history did the global economy start to develop?

Trade really began with the Romans, who were trading salt and other products.

This is Marco Polo bringing back silk and ceramics from China across the Silk Road.

We saw a real expansion of trade in the 1700s.

This is when we had the sailing ships that would go around Africa to the Far East, or they would go to the Americas to bring back gold or trade in rum.

And then we had a pause between World War I and World War II, where there were a lot of tariff barriers and kind of a lot of inward looking.

We saw post-World War II a big expansion in trade, and we saw this huge boom starting in the late 1990s, but really gathering pace in the time from 2001 until 2010.

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ハーバード大教授だけど「サプライチェーン」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan

process

pandemic

infrastructure

capacity