Taiwan is well ahead of Japan and SK in terms of GDP PPP, which takes into account the cost of living in the country. In fact, Taiwan is closing in on the US as well.[0]
If we base it on GDP PPP, then Japan and SK are actually 10-20 years behind Taiwan.
The work moved from Japan to Taiwan simply because TSMC beat the competition out.
PPP and anything Per Capita isn't a convincing metric.
They are productivity metrics (aka how much shit a country can produce)
GDP is just a measurement of how much shit a country produces a year.
GDP per Capita is a measurement of how much shit is produced per entire population - from a 5 month old toddler to a 92 year old geriatric.
GDP PPP is a lossy transformation of GDP into supposed "international dollars" that have varying calculations and are based on the (imo flawed) assumption that goods can be substituted.
GDP PPP Per Capita is dividing that flawed transformation across the entire population.
> because TSMC beat the competition out
Because American and Japanese companies in the 2000s viewed the foundry model as commodified and a race to the bottom, like battery tech (eg. BYD), and as such decided to divest and let much poorer/less well compensated Koreans and Taiwanese work on it in the 2000s.
This is why GlobalFoundries exists. AMD was falling drastically behind Intel in the 2000s because their foundries were a massive operational expense preventing them from investing in R&D.
As such, AMD divested their fabs into a PE funded company called GlobalFoundaries in 2009
Japanese companies did the same thing, creating joint ventures or gaining controlling stakes in Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean conglomerates while transferring commodified IP.
This is how CATL was formed by Japanese TDK, BYD by Samsung's cellphone battery division (yes they're Korean but same story), and others
Using raw median income is pointless when comparing work life quality. GDP PPP is simply a better measure though imperfect.
AMD sold their fabs for a variety of reasons including loss of design leadership to Intel Core designs, huge debt load from overpaying (at the time) for ATI, loss of node leadership, financial strain that almost led to full bankruptcy, trend towards fab cost needing multiple customers to profit, and a focus on chip design.
Further more, your point about chip nodes racing towards the bottom does not support why Intel chose to keep its fabs and won until they got stuck on 14nm.
It’s weird how you describe advanced chip manufacturing as a commodity when there is only one company in the world capable of producing 3nm chips at scale and make a profit. Furthermore, TSMC is worth more than AMD, Intel, and ARM combined. Up until recently, it was the most valuable company in the semiconductor industry before the Nvidia run.
The logical conclusion is that advanced chip design takes a tremendous amount of skill and is not a commodity. Arguably, chip design is more of a commodity in 2024 since many vendors are capable of producing fast CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, SoCs, network chips, etc.
And was why low margins high skill work left for ASEAN, EU, Mexico, China, Japan, South Korea, Israel, India, etc since the 1980s.
You can see references to this even in early Simpsons (eg. Germans buying the nuclear plant or Japanese being viewed as god tier overworked manufacturers).
>GDP is just a measurement of how much shit a country produces a year.
No, it's a measure of much money goes through the economy, regardless if any "shit" is produced there. Look at Ireland, Netherlands and Luxembourg or any other tax heaven.
Generally, goods and services are considered to be products. And their analogy to software wasn't in bad faith, software is a service (hence the term SaaS used for subscription based software, even though non subscription based software is also a service imo) and not a good.
>Generally, goods and services are considered to be products.
False.
Products are products, services are services. Product si a Macbook or video game I just bough which I can return, but I can't return the cleaning service the handyman just offered on site.
You're pointing out that tax heavens produce products which is flawed. They don't produce anything, they're just middlemen and their balooned GDP reflects that.
If we base it on GDP PPP, then Japan and SK are actually 10-20 years behind Taiwan.
The work moved from Japan to Taiwan simply because TSMC beat the competition out.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...