Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 3 of Menzie Chinn’s and Douglas Irwin’s superb 2025 textbook, International Economics [original emphases]:

Or think about your smart phone. Where was it made? The back of an iPhone will tell you that it was designed in California and assembled in China. However, in that process, hundreds of individual parts were sourced from all around the world. The flash memory came from Toshiba in Japan, the application processor was supplied by Samsung in South Korea, the camera module was put together by Infineon in Germany, and the Bluetooth hardware came from Broadcom in the United States. The cost of assembling all of the components sourced from around the globe is a small fraction of the total cost of the phone.

DBx: Indeed so.

And yet Pres. Trump, Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, and their fellow American protectionists would have you believe that we Americans are being “ripped off” by economic forces that, as these forces direct (and pay!) us to do the high-value-added tasks involved in producing smartphones, assign to lower-productivity, lower-wage workers in poorer countries the menial tasks of snapping all of these component parts together.