No sea vendepatria, no compre iPods

No se pierdan esta presentación de Reason TV sobre el “buy American”, perfectamente aplicable a las prácticas mercantilistas tan de moda en la Argentina kirchnerista.

No sé cuántas veces me desgañité tratando de explicárselo a algún pajarito convencido de que un refrito de "talking points” mercantilistas, refutados hace 200 años, constituye un nuevo paradigma de desarrollo para la humanidad:

Assembling iPods obviously creates jobs for Chinese workers, jobs that probably pay higher-than-average wages in that country even though they labor in the lowest regions of the smiley curve. But Americans benefit even more from the deal. A team of economists from the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California-Irvine applied the smiley curve to a typical $299 iPod and found just what you might suspect: Americans reap most of the value from its production. Although assembled in China, an American company supplies the processing chips, a Korean company the memory chip, and Japanese companies the hard drive and display screen. According to the authors, “The value added to the product through assembly in China is probably a few dollars at most.”

The biggest winner? Apple and its distributors. Standing atop the value chain, Apple reaps $80 in profit for each unit sold—an amount higher than the cost of any single component. Its distributors, on the opposite high end of the smiley curve, make another $75. And of course, American owners of the more than 100 million iPods sold since 2001—my teen-age sons included—pocket far more enjoyment from the devices than the Chinese workers who assembled them.