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Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

This article is completely non-rigorous and doesn't mean anything, but it shows what "simple" thinking about problems leads to. They would have had to gather enough data points to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way.

This is why it's important to have academic rigor and people who study specific problems deeply in positions of power. This ignores potential economies of scale cost reductions and paying more for home made products is circularly dependent on earning more from selling those higher cost products.

I think the most interesting question by far in this space is what percent of every purchase ends up going to housing, food, or health care. If you buy a burger, what percent of the cost of that burger is going directly into housing via the workers wages?

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> to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way

Not convinced that would be meaningful, but even if it was, it'd be totally useless if you can't actually manufacture items in the US with less overhead than what this company managed.

Saying "people would have bought it if it was only 35% more for the same item" is not helpful if it's not possible to profitably manufacture them at 35% more than in China.

The greater context is tariffs. Tariffs make foreign products more expensive. If everyone is willing to pay 1% more for the benefit of their own economy, then a 1% tariff probably wouldn't be very unpopular, it might even be responsible, especially if that money is then immediately invested in helping the given industry grow.

It's a measurement of the pain of tariffs or a measurement of how many people would "willingly" pay a tariff.

Of course that assumes a low corruption government with informed and forward looking policy, rather than past looking policy. Tariffs as they are frequently exist so that our own companies don't have to compete as hard and are able to spend their money on stock buybacks rather than investing into R&D, or to choose winners and losers allowing a tariff wielding king to reward loyalty or punish dissent.

I am absolutely a layman though, and this is my layman understanding.

But that's tariffs on imported things, not actually manufacturing them in the USA, which is what this article is about.

If I am willing to pay 10% more for a locally made product, then a 10% tariff has no effect on me assuming that the local company has non colluding local competitors, likewise if I am not willing to pay an 85% tariff, then an 85% tariff, which is what it would take to be locally competitive according to this, would make a product I want to buy 85% more expensive or un-purchasable.

These tariffs are somewhat about consent/mandate, nationalism, and economic policy and this story aims to be a data point, although I'm not really clear what the author wants people to conclude.

>If I am willing to pay 10% more for a locally made product, then a 10% tariff has no effect on me assuming that the local company has non colluding local competitors,

That's the unfortunate, greedy part of it all. Even in the purest form, if tarriffs raise prices 10%, the domestic companies will still proceed to do a price hike instead of compete in the newly level playing field. They use the opportunity and raise prices more for hopes of a larger margin. Especially in such an inflationary economy.

The customer loses out in the end because domestic companies (in this pure scenario) can't help themselves.

The impure points are more common and simply show how stupid the policies are. If you have blanket tarriffs and don't have silicon mines to take advantage of, domestic companies don't have much choice in where to get silicon. We simply don't have that resource domestically to begin with. Coffee is another common example.

If the current policymakers are operating on vibes and simplistic reasoning, then it seems reasonable that this business merely refutes those vibes and misguided reasoning with simplistic evidence. They aren't presenting the post as a rigorous academic study.

The comment that users might see the US option as a scam is interesting. It would have been interesting to offer an info modal for the US item or ask for feedback from users who added the US item to their carts. Still not the rigorous study you seem to be expecting, but some extra info.

They didn't care to do a serious microeconomics analysis. They just wanted to go with a specific narrative.

But they can’t make the product for that price so what’s the point?

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