E82: All-In Summit: Claire Cormier Thielke on China + Q&A with Flexport's Ryan Petersen

It is too early to evaluate this prediction.

The claim is about events unfolding over the remaining lifetimes of the speakers (likely several decades, roughly toward the late 21st century). As of late 2025:

• Extreme/abject poverty still clearly exists in many countries, both democratic and authoritarian, so the prediction has not yet had time to either be fulfilled or definitively fail.
• The timeline specified ("in our lifetime") extends well beyond 2025, so we cannot know yet whether global abject poverty will be eliminated everywhere except in dictatorships.

Because the prediction is explicitly long‑term and its deadline is far in the future, its truth value cannot yet be determined, so the appropriate classification is "inconclusive" rather than right, wrong, or ambiguous.

Evidence since 2022 shows two key things:

1. The condition (“if the delays stay the way they are”) did not hold.

   • Global container schedule reliability improved strongly through 2022–2023, with Sea‑Intelligence estimating a jump from 42.6% to 62.1% and average delays falling from 6.38 to 4.83 days in 2023, i.e., congestion eased compared with the 2021–early‑2022 peak. (sea-intelligence.com) So the specific antecedent of his conditional forecast (2022‑level delays persisting) was not met.

2. However, the main claim—that brands would increasingly shift production/sourcing closer to end markets (nearshoring, especially to Mexico)—did materialize.

   • Mexico surpassed China as the United States’ largest goods import partner by 2023–2024; analyses attribute this shift partly to firms moving production closer to the U.S. (nearshoring) in response to supply‑chain risk, tariffs, and cost pressures. (investopedia.com)
   • Nearshoring to Mexico is widely described as “booming,” with U.S., Canadian and South American companies deliberately bringing supply chains nearer to consumers and Mexico becoming a key manufacturing hub feeding the U.S. market. (supplychainbrain.com)
   • Mexico’s FDI has hit record or near‑record levels since 2022, with a large share in manufacturing; government and industry reports explicitly link this inflow to nearshoring and relocation of production to serve the U.S. more directly. (mexiconewsdaily.com)
   • U.S. data and Federal Reserve analysis show Mexico’s share of U.S. imports rising while China’s falls between 2017 and 2024, consistent with companies shifting sourcing out of China toward Mexico and other nearby locations. (dallasfed.org)

Given that (a) enough time has elapsed since mid‑2022, (b) the condition of unchanged 2022‑level delays failed, but (c) the substantive prediction—more brands shifting production/sourcing closer to home, especially to Mexico—clearly did occur, the fairest overall judgment is that the prediction was right in its core directional claim, albeit for a broader mix of reasons (tariffs, geopolitics, resilience) than just sustained shipping delays.