3 ms·

Parent here. I want to clarify a few points. The issue here isn't manufacturing jobs. The issue here is that I want to live in a stable and prosperous societ

by csense 10y ago

Parent here. I want to clarify a few points. The issue here isn't manufacturing jobs. The issue here is that I want to live in a stable and prosperous society. Among other things, that means ordinary men and women need to have a narrative template. A basic plan for a reasonably safe and effective strategy to live a life that's productive, materially satisfying, and allows a person to independently support oneself and one's family through their work. If the manufacturing jobs are never coming back, I'm fine with that -- as long as we get some replacement that fulfills the same social function. The function of giving ordinary folks a job they can do that allows them to make enough money to support themselves in a comfortable middle class lifestyle.

WorldMaker 10y ago
History seems to weigh on the sides of global trade deals for maintaining a stable and prosperous society. A lot of the Pax Americana economic experiment (including, but not limited to, the Marshall Plan) can be seen as a sort of "growth hacking" in heavily encouraging deep global trade for overall world prosperity, and maintaining "at home" prosperity by constantly growing/changing (new trade agreements, new places and ways to both buy and sell goods, replacing industries that move with entirely new industries, ...). The interesting thing is that for the most part, that worked. The worrying part is that from that view, the current reactive inclination to shut down global trade deals seems like it will only make things worse. Cutting off trade deals cuts off both potential suppliers and potential customers, cutting off potential growth. The more global trade deals you cut, the more potential growth you cut, the harder to growth hack your way back to prosperity and the more likely you snowball into depression... That's just the prosperity side, the stability side of the argument is much simpler prospect ever since the Marshall Plan: the deeper your economy is entwined with your neighbors the less likely you are to go to war with them. To date, that hypothesis seems to hold. The real questions left are "Why has the growth hacking seemingly slowed or stopped?" or maybe more accurately "Why has the growth hacking stopped benefitting low class/middle class laborers so well as it used to?" because the statistics show that everything has still been growing, on average, in the economy except for low/middle-class wages and job opportunities. The growth continues, but perhaps the hacking has been negligent. We've lost whatever hacked controls were once keeping the growth, or at least we stopped adding new controls, from entirely fueling the classic adage that the rich get richer. I don't know how we fix the growth hacking model, but I sure do feel that a return to the zero-sum morality of "no trade deals with my neighbors, no trade deficits, just good old fashioned local jobs" seems like the very wrong direction from stability and prosperity given the point of view of the last century or so of American economic successes in growth hacking.
- csense 10y ago
  If you want to talk history, from 1850-1950 America was explicitly protectionist and went from a primarily agricultural society to the world's premier industrial superpower. - The Marshall Plan (1950's?) was mostly with Europe where there were/are reasonably strong protections against exploitation, so there wasn't the same "race to the bottom" dynamic as there is with, say, China/Mexico/SE Asia today. - Europe's population is a lot smaller than China and their industrial base had just been destroyed by WW2. An economy that's overall protectionist and otherwise strong can absorb the costs of a little free trade, it's doing a lot of free trade that dials up the pain society-disrupting levels. - Costs of transport have gone way down since the 1950's (more available capital, technology, standardized shipping containers, cheaper/better communications, etc.)
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    1850-1940 America also had terrible income distribution (the Robber Baron age), barely a middle class, and suffered through it's greatest economic depression. If the goal is to preserve middle class American prosperity/stability/existence as people would recognize it today, the suburban dreams of the 1950s/1960s/1970s we're looking at the post-1940s post-Marshall Plan ever increasingly global free trade, not a return to 1850-1940 protectionism and Robber Baron politics. As I tried to note before, the Marshall Plan and free trade with Europe was as much simply the start and the emblem of the era, many free trade deals followed the Marshall Plan. China today, other than red scare reasons, isn't much different from India decades ago, as one example. Mexico today is healthier than when the US first started free trade deals with them decades ago... The "race to the bottom" has always been a part of the post-Marshall Plan expansionist era: find new cheaper supplier countries, complexly wire them into the global economy, slowly encourage smarter regulations and a greater cost of living, use a "rising tide floats all boats" bootstrap to better civilization both at home and abroad. For the most part that strategy seemed to work. Better at least than many economic experiments in the history of human civilization.

by csense 10y ago

WorldMaker 10y ago

History seems to weigh on the sides of global trade deals for maintaining a stable and prosperous society. A lot of the Pax Americana economic experiment (including, but not limited to, the Marshall Plan) can be seen as a sort of "growth hacking" in heavily encouraging deep global trade for overall world prosperity, and maintaining "at home" prosperity by constantly growing/changing (new trade agreements, new places and ways to both buy and sell goods, replacing industries that move with entirely new industries, ...). The interesting thing is that for the most part, that worked. The worrying part is that from that view, the current reactive inclination to shut down global trade deals seems like it will only make things worse. Cutting off trade deals cuts off both potential suppliers and potential customers, cutting off potential growth. The more global trade deals you cut, the more potential growth you cut, the harder to growth hack your way back to prosperity and the more likely you snowball into depression... That's just the prosperity side, the stability side of the argument is much simpler prospect ever since the Marshall Plan: the deeper your economy is entwined with your neighbors the less likely you are to go to war with them. To date, that hypothesis seems to hold. The real questions left are "Why has the growth hacking seemingly slowed or stopped?" or maybe more accurately "Why has the growth hacking stopped benefitting low class/middle class laborers so well as it used to?" because the statistics show that everything has still been growing, on average, in the economy except for low/middle-class wages and job opportunities. The growth continues, but perhaps the hacking has been negligent. We've lost whatever hacked controls were once keeping the growth, or at least we stopped adding new controls, from entirely fueling the classic adage that the rich get richer. I don't know how we fix the growth hacking model, but I sure do feel that a return to the zero-sum morality of "no trade deals with my neighbors, no trade deficits, just good old fashioned local jobs" seems like the very wrong direction from stability and prosperity given the point of view of the last century or so of American economic successes in growth hacking.

csense 10y ago
If you want to talk history, from 1850-1950 America was explicitly protectionist and went from a primarily agricultural society to the world's premier industrial superpower. - The Marshall Plan (1950's?) was mostly with Europe where there were/are reasonably strong protections against exploitation, so there wasn't the same "race to the bottom" dynamic as there is with, say, China/Mexico/SE Asia today. - Europe's population is a lot smaller than China and their industrial base had just been destroyed by WW2. An economy that's overall protectionist and otherwise strong can absorb the costs of a little free trade, it's doing a lot of free trade that dials up the pain society-disrupting levels. - Costs of transport have gone way down since the 1950's (more available capital, technology, standardized shipping containers, cheaper/better communications, etc.)
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  1850-1940 America also had terrible income distribution (the Robber Baron age), barely a middle class, and suffered through it's greatest economic depression. If the goal is to preserve middle class American prosperity/stability/existence as people would recognize it today, the suburban dreams of the 1950s/1960s/1970s we're looking at the post-1940s post-Marshall Plan ever increasingly global free trade, not a return to 1850-1940 protectionism and Robber Baron politics. As I tried to note before, the Marshall Plan and free trade with Europe was as much simply the start and the emblem of the era, many free trade deals followed the Marshall Plan. China today, other than red scare reasons, isn't much different from India decades ago, as one example. Mexico today is healthier than when the US first started free trade deals with them decades ago... The "race to the bottom" has always been a part of the post-Marshall Plan expansionist era: find new cheaper supplier countries, complexly wire them into the global economy, slowly encourage smarter regulations and a greater cost of living, use a "rising tide floats all boats" bootstrap to better civilization both at home and abroad. For the most part that strategy seemed to work. Better at least than many economic experiments in the history of human civilization.