There's no doubt that Tim Cook will go down as one of the better business leaders of the past 20 years. Maybe one of the greatest in Silicon Valley history.
The biggest knock on his legacy, in the long run, will not be his pandering to Trump. I think that'll mostly get excused as an embarrassing mistake that many CEOs of his era did (and therefore probably not all that well remembered at all).
The biggest knock on his legacy will be the way Apple, under his leadership, drove the upskilling and expansion of China's impressive manufacturing ecosystem. Tesla was a big participant there too. But just look at the amount of money Apple invested in its Chinese supply chain.
$275 billion over 5 years was the pledge, and they exceeded it.
Just think about what would happen if someone invested that kind of money in American manufacturing.
American manufacturing left for a very simple reason. Your annual health insurance premiums,
just your premiums is the same as a Vietnamese factory worker's
entire salary for a year. The average American sets on fire about 150% of the annual pay of that same Vietnamese factory worker's
on direct car ownership expenses (insurance, inarguably artificially cheap US gasoline, licensing, parking, maintenance). Even a single person's apartment rent is 200% of that Vietnamese factory worker's annual wages. I can keep going regarding 401K matching and student loans and so on.
Is an American more or less productive than an overseas worker? Maybe. But "
maybe" is only a
little bit....not 5-10X more productive. Americans engineered an extremely expensive society to live where government doesn't socialize the social-service costs via taxes; it instead was "privatized"--which IRL means it falls on
employers to subsidize
employee's private for-profit market purchase of those same goods/services
via inflated prices which eats into profit margin.
Or... 5000 IQ idea...they just don't play that game and offshore everything they can.
And the heck of it is...Americans who did this to ourselves (or ancestors, you get the drift), blame corporations for doing the economically rational (albeit for us citizens undesirable) thing; and foreign states for not self-inflicting this kind of neoliberal policy on themselves. The USA doesn't blame their own self-inflicted policies whose effects they loudly complain about (cost of college loans, cost of cars, cost of medical care, and so on)
