Tabletop games and tariffs

The Game Room
21

If you apply that same mindset across the board, though, don’t you end up with a gilded society like we have now? There aren’t enough high paying jobs, and in our system that just means many Americans become unemployed or underemployed.

It’s not just coal miners, either; I’m a software developer and myself and many of my colleagues lost jobs recently, both due to the post COVID crash and increasing automation (AI). I was unemployed for months, make 60% of what I did a few years ago, and probably won’t have a career for much longer. Today’s white collar jobs are tomorrow’s automated processes, and in our society we have no good retraining pathways for anyone.

Long before this was a threat to software devs, I was defending coal miners for the same reasons… we have no structural protections for people whose careers were made unnecessary by forces outside their control. Outsourcing and automation have the same effect in that way, making capitalists richer and goods cheaper for consumers, but removing otherwise good jobs from the economy. It’s not always a net win. I wasn’t around for the first waves of globalization, but I mean, the USA today isn’t exactly that shining beacon on the hill anymore. The gutting of our middle class contributed to that.

And environmentally, if that production was going to happen anywhere, our processes and regulations would provide stronger protections (and increased costs) compared to most countries we offshore to. The outsourced factories have way worse pollution, but of course it’s out of sight, out of mind for us and we then get to turn around and blame China for all the waste they’re making… a large part of which is for us.

All of this still isn’t to say I agree with the tariffs, but that it’s not as simple as “we only want the good jobs anyway”. There are fewer and fewer available careers that can sustain a middle class every year. Communities, especially rural ones, are dying. Homelessness and drug abuse are everywhere. By the next generation or two there aren’t going to be many people left who have the time and disposable income to buy board games unless we can do something about those situations structurally.

Now, most of that applies more to existing jobs at risk of disappearing than jobs that have already disappeared. Trying to retrain a new generation of board game factory employees is probably no small task, especially if the factory and industry altogether might disappear again with the next pro-globalization administration.

Just a messy situation all around with no easy fixes…

This is one of those weird areas where the Bernie Left and the MAGA crowd seem to share some of the same concerns. Doesn’t seem to be a big deal to mainstream Republicans or Democrats though, both of which seem much more aligned with the capitalists than the labor force.

22

Now if they used those tariffs to send out COVID-era checks to the working class again… that would for sure drive another board game boom like it did the first time around, give labor bargaining power again, and of course contribute to hyperinflation again like it did last time. In my lifetime I had never seen the working class as strong as during COVID. I wonder how long we could’ve kept that going for. It was a huge experiment in universal basic incomes, with mixed but interesting results, that we don’t really discuss anymore.

23

Decades and decades of rose-tinted nostalgia for the economy of the 1950s.

24

Why would we want to?

The whole point of specialization and competitive advantage is that yes, we could make these products, just like China can; but the opportunity cost for us is higher than it is for them because the alternative jobs the worker can do here are more productive than the alternative jobs a worker could do there.

There are some goods which it’s important to maintain a domestic manufacturing capacity for due to non economic reasons - say, steel, or weaponry, or satellites, or other things related to national security. But I hardly think board game components qualify.

25

But why?

I want American developers who have ideas to be able to make games (and foreign developers to); the more of that that happens, the more cool games we have.

But why would I care where the physical pieces are manufactured?

Aside from the national security case, you could also imagine an industry that’s emerging and that needs to be protected until it grows into a titan. Like Japan’s car industry. But again, board games aren’t going to blow up and become major economic engines like that.

Why do we care about having th capacity to physically make board games here?

We don’t need domestic manufacturing capacity for that; we need the ability for Joe Schmoe who came up with a board game in his garage to be able to reach out to a Chinese manufacturer to get his pieces made.

26

Healthy unemployment rate in an economy is 5%, we are around 4%. What you’re describing is not happening.

Bro. Tech unemployment was even lower than that, at 2% - right up until Trump got elected and threw the economy into chaos. After years of tech unemployment being low, Trump’s chaos has raised it from 2% (January) to 5.7% (today, higher than national average).

Your personal circumstances aside, and I certainly don’t mean to discredit or diminish that, the situation you’re describing is simply not the case for US tech workers, and if anything, Trump’s policies are bringing it closer to reality.

It’s not weird at all. Free Trade is a Liberal principal; mainstream Democrats and the now extinct conservative Republicans both fell under the Liberal spectrum; MAGA definitely does not, and while Bernie himself is right on the edge, much of his base is illiberal to the left. Hence why they agree on this and a few other issues, and why some Bernie Bros became MAGA.

This is the most sensible answer yet.

27

I had read Steve Jackson’s statement in one of the Facebook groups I belong to. It is entirely possible that he is wrong. To know for sure, I would need to do a great deal of research on a whole bunch of things. As I don’t have any reason to believe he actually is wrong, and that I believe he has already done the research, I am accept his statement.

Talisman, Arkham Horror and such were not cheap games when I was a kid. The current editions have better quality art, the pieces are miniatures instead of plastic pawns or cardboard rectangles etc.

Could we make an edition of either game of the same quality as the ones from the 80’s? Possibly. How much would it cost? Would anybody buy it?

Could we make an edition equal to the quality of the current one? Definitely not.

28

Bernie and Trump both speak to populists.

Labor and Capital have different interests. Both the mainstream Democrats and the mainstream Republicans have mostly been courting Capital for many years. Yes, “inflation under Biden” was a big draw for Trump, but in the broader scheme, he appealed to populist labor sentiment. It’s a damn shame he did so in a grossly dishonest way and will screw over labor. Like with these tariffs and economic turmoil. But that’s a large part of how he got elected.

So we’ll have fewer and more expensive board games, and fewer people with the disposable income to buy them. Even if someone starts injection molding the pieces here.

29

Here’s another post by someone in the industry who points out additional complications. The big one that jumps out to me is that the US typically accounts for half the sales of a given game, meaning that reshoring production here just introduces a different problem, which is managing runs in multiple locations, which is more expensive, but likely less expensive than producing them all in one location.

He also talks about downstream consequences, which also increase costs.

The deeper danger of tariffs - The City of Games

30

Doesn’t really measure people who’ve given up looking or are chronically underemployed or part of the gig economy. There are different measures, and depending on who you believe, even the most expansive one may not fully capture the situation. e.g. https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/low-unemployment-statistics-are-misleading-economic-hardship-is-much-worse/

And real wages haven’t kept up with inflation and costs of living for a long time. I think it gets even worse if you modify the market basket to be more typical of a lower income household.

It’s just not me saying that, obviously. It was a common voter sentiment too. Comparing nuanced official stats against the realities on the ground in so many towns, it was difficult to disregard one’s own eyes and ears.

31

I just saw a stunning meme on Facebook. It listed years the stock market crashed and the percentage it crashed. It ended with “Each crash was followed by a stunning boom” The list started with 1929. So, if you ignore the Great Depression then yes- there is a sliver lining. Personally, I feel this is like telling a man he should be happy because now that his two children have died he has so much more disposable income. But, that is just IMHO.

32

I’m well aware of all that, but there are plenty of other measurements we use too - the unemployment rate is the most direct and obvious, but if your article was right and the “true” rate of unemployment was 23%, the economy would be in shambles. Again until Trump came into office, consumer spending has been rising, not falling as we would expect if massive swathes of America were secretly unemployed.

That’s not to say that our economy didn’t have some very real issues. But bringing back the shittiest of the shitt manufacturing jobs is not the solution.

33

Yeah, I don’t think the math really works out even if we could magically make it all happen. The production costs, like many have pointed out, aren’t really a big part of the value chain of a board game lifecycle.

Best case for labor, it creates a tiny handful of stable factory jobs. Maybe a bit more if tooling manufacturing gets reshored too (as in the businesses that supply and support the board game factories). That alone won’t resurrect the middle class. And it’s a net negative for both the capitalists (board game companies) and the consumers (buyers and players).

34

I think that’s an overestimate, myself, but “economy in shambles” seems pretty apt, overall? There’s a lot of wealth being generated but it’s mostly concentrated in the hands of a few elites.

What does it look like if you break it down by income quintile and look at different spending categories? Are they just paying more for housing, for example? (I’m not sure. Genuinely asking.)

Yeah, sadly that’s probably true :frowning:

35

“Common voter sentiment” is important for knowing what issues to address while campaigning. Whether that sentiment is based on facts of any kind is an entirely different subject. Haitians are not actually eating cats and dogs. The Woke movement is not giving six year olds “sex changes” without so much as telling their parents first. But, Trump and Vance ran on those things.

This is a different problem. If nearly everybody in town was employed at a plant and the company has closed the plant and moved manufacturing to another country, then people there will see a very high unemployment rate and have serious problems. However, it can still be true that in the country overall, unemployment is down and the economy is doing well. Coal mining was mentioned in this thread. Unless we bring back the coal mining industry, a lot of towns are simply places with no jobs. I honestly don’t know what the solution to that is. Trump said he would bring back coal mining. I feel that is not actually the solution.

36

Yeah, exactly. Well put.

I don’t know how this whole thing will turn out. Probably disastrously. But it doesn’t really look like the previous “do nothing” approach was working either.

Part of it was marketing… the Dems were trying to put out a bunch of jobs stuff too (like investment in infra and renewables, that maybe would’ve had a trickle down effect to rural economies), but they are terrible at their messaging and Biden couldn’t use the bully pulpit if his life depended on it. They fell for the woke bait hard and the culture wars are all anybody remembers now. Between that and all the Republican stonewalling and of course the gutting of the federal government, I guess we’ll never know how those programs would’ve turned out if they lasted more than a few short years.

By contrast, big scary tariffs immediately and unavoidably command all of the country’s attention and discussion. Maybe that shakeup will at least start conversations about where to go from here. Or maybe it just funnels even more money to Trump golf courses and Elon’s next Diablo character.

37

In any case, I apologize for the hijack. Probably discussion about the economy at large is out of scope in a thread that started about board games.

For all the reasons others have stated above, bringing games manufacturing here won’t work for the budding board game industry, and it would have minimal or zero contribution to the American labor force and economy. That much was made clear. Sorry for the tangents.

38

Well, the tariffs have been bumped to 125% for China and lowered to 10% for everyone else.

Maybe by next week it’ll be 3000%. Who knows?

Someone should make a board game about all this…

39

There is a boardgame called QE (Quantitative Easing) which involves bidding on international production abilities (each of you is a country/region), and in which you can bid any amount you want. Period. A million? A billion? Whatever.

The only catch is, whichever player bids the most out of all players automatically loses. [note that adjudicating the bids passes turns, but the winning bid is only announced when the adjudicator themselves win; otherwise, the winning bid is kept private, which makes information sporadic] So you kind of flail around, and the bidding starts one-upping late in the game.

All the other players are evaluated on getting facilities friendly to their region, plus specializing in their own favorite kind of production. (basically)

That was kinda long-winded, but if you replace “bidding for international production” with “raising tariffs”, it feels very familiar.

40

Maybe higher in quality, but for example, Ticket to Ride has wooden game pieces or maybe plastic in the newer copies. Nothing there is out of line with American game companies.

There are some things that American can not possibly tool up to make in a couple years, but games is not one of them.

We have cardboard, wood and plastic.

This is true. It isnt that American game companies could NOT supply the demand- the question is- is it worth their time to gear up when the tariffs may end tomorrow?

See? There is no rhyme nor reason in the tariffs. You’d have to be insane to start building new factories based upon this. Mind you, sure, there are companies in the USA that can & do make a lot of game components, so they can just up productions- but only to an extent.

Some tariffs are good, even Biden had some tariffs.

Fantasy Flight game is a US company- which does a lot of cheap printing in China, true. . Talisman was made by Games Workshop, whose owner was once iirc quoted as they were soaking the rich Americans, or something like that, and are lawsuit happy, even suing fan artists. So, yeah, you pay extra for their stuff.

True, but there is a large difference between Right Wing Populists- aka “fascist wannabes” and Left wing populists- aka socialists.

True- currently only 4.2%- but rising.