China has been dumping rare earth metals and magnets at ridiculously low prices for decades (and polluting their country). This had the effect of making mining and refining these metals unprofitable in the west (why pay the huge price of pollution when the Chinese will contaminate their ground water below costs?).
This doesn't mean the west can't scale up prospection and innovation to have cleaner ways to make these magnets. There's little to no tech gap the Chinese have over the west.
The fact that the US Govt didn't see this as a national security issue and act accordingly (consequently doing something to prop up local industry) is the real problem.
China is playing chess while we're playing checkers.
Despite how it sounds, the chief difficulty with rare earths is 1) how much of a pain in the ass isolation is, and 2) how much you're willing to tolerate water pollution in the process (or how much $ you're willing to pay to clean up the effluvium).
In the short term a Chinese ban on rare earths just means a hit to the pocketbooks,not a regression to the industrial age. In the long term, it's just accelerating science -> engineering, as there are very good rare earth alternatives in the "late research" phases and even if none of them pan out the methodology to scale up extraction is publically known, and solvable.
the difference between having engineers as government leaders versus lawyers. The West is ran by smooth talking lawyers rather than a general sample of the population or subject matter experts
here's a visualization of the change over time, career government employees and lawyers took over and things went downhill in the US at least
not sure how much you can blame Hoover for the great depression, guy just had bad luck in being president when the entire world economy imploded. The US didn't pull out of it until WWII
The crash of 1919 was way worse in terms of relative drop compared to the total economy. But the US bounced back quickly. Coolidge warned before hoover was president that hoover was meddlesome: "for six years that man has given me unsolicited advice – all of it bad". Despite how people seem to misremember, hoover was very interventionist, outright declaring that he thought that society was something with knobs and levers that you could engineer your way around.
Believe it or not, FDR ran on a platform declaring that hoover was dicking around too much, though when he became president he obviously doubled down on what hoover was doing.
"Although Roosevelt would oversee a dramatic expansion of the federal government himself, he attacked Hoover during the 1932 presidential campaign for engaging in “reckless and extravagant” spending and ran on a Democratic platform calling for “an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures” by at least 25 percent. Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, went so far as to accuse Hoover of “leading the country down the path of socialism.”
I am not entirely sure how history got rewritten to be the exact opposite of what it actually was.
China has been dumping rare earth metals and magnets at ridiculously low prices for decades (and polluting their country). This had the effect of making mining and refining these metals unprofitable in the west (why pay the huge price of pollution when the Chinese will contaminate their ground water below costs?).
This doesn't mean the west can't scale up prospection and innovation to have cleaner ways to make these magnets. There's little to no tech gap the Chinese have over the west.