My follow-the-car globalization logic recast for toy cars

Another example of my follow-the-demographic-dividend logic

I started using the auto-industry as a way of capturing globalization’s vectoring about 15 years ago, arguing it first in Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (2009). The slide above is one I used in the early 2010s (this one in a 2010 briefing to the financial firm Morgan Keegan).

For years, I did the slide without referencing the car industry. I added in those examples as a result of crafting a bit at the end of Great Powers called “The Transportation Shift”:

As Iain Carson and Vijay Vaitheeswaran argue in Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, “Oil is the problem; cars are the solution.” Neither Big Auto nor Big Oil has been interested in seeing America pay an honest price for gasoline these past few decades, so our sense of entitlement has ballooned while our apparent — but not real — threshold of economic pain has lowered. The result? We’re suffused right now with all sorts of “Calvin, take me away!” proposals to leapfrog the U.S. car fleet into a post-oil future. The problem is, even with our rising fears about global warming and an unstable Middle East, our vehicle-heavy lifestyle makes it hard for us to muster the political will necessary to force a rapid shift. So where will this shift come first? Asia, partly from its desired to dominate global manufacturing in this industry, but more so in response to its declining air quality as the region’s vehicle fleet skyrockets. Because China will soon become both a global demand center and a global production center for cars and trucks, we’re already seeing the world’s major auto manufacturers scramble to make Asia their future global center of R&D. This might seem like a huge loss to American industry, but you have to remember that automobiles began in Old Core Europe in the nineteenth century, came of age in twentieth-century America, and so logically are transformed by twenty-first century Asia’s rise — an evolution mirroring globalization’s expansion. In the end, the progressive agenda that drives the transformation of transportation in this century will center on cleaning up Asia’s air quality.