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Globalization is not the enemy. Centralised globalization with a handful of megacorps dominating the global economy is fucking awful however. Protectionism is

• AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > Globalization is not the enemy. The problem is there are two kinds. The classic one, and the one you can easily defend, was just eliminating tariffs. Don't discriminate against foreign businesses; treat them the same as local businesses. But there is another one that generally gets called "harmonization", and that's the one that kills everything. Because what it means in practice is the undemocratic international enforcement of regulations created via regulatory capture. You enforce the same rules everywhere, those rules are created by megacorps to give them an advantage and the predictable result obtains.
  • mantas 10y ago
    The classical one does quite a bit harm too. Western/1st/etc world (used to?) treat workers well. The rest of the world didn't. Once tariffs are eliminated, all countries join the rat race to the bottom. How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? Naturally the conditions equalise. The good ones get worse, while bad ones adopt a thing or two.
    • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? In theory the idea is that they're not supposed to -- if you have unskilled work with no geographical restrictions, you do it where there is the lowest labor cost, and then everyone benefits by paying lower prices. Meanwhile western countries do the higher paying jobs that require a skilled workforce and the unskilled workers in western countries either do service jobs that do have geographical requirements or go to school and become skilled workers. One of the things that's been killing us on that front is the broken welfare system that puts high marginal rates on lower income people through benefits phase outs, which makes it so that middle class people can't afford to hire lower income people to do service jobs, because 80% of the money goes to the government in benefits phase outs. Which means those people become unemployed, and the higher unemployment rate pushes down unskilled wages, erodes the tax base and increases the total cost government is paying out in benefits to the unemployed.
      • mantas 10y ago
        And it turns out that those cheap countries can produce skilled work too, without becoming expensive and as caring about the workers. Yet bigger than expected portion of western countries' population does not perform well in skilled work market..
• nercht12 10y ago
  >> I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species. What do you mean by "ability"? Opportunity? I don't see how any particular economic status of anyone can be guaranteed with regards to what you're saying. How I see it: The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Once the rich have all the wealth, they go elsewhere with it. Corporations move to Singapore to save money. Automation will only benefit those who own it. Once things are automated, most people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford even the things that are produced by automation. The rich aren't going to share, and if they do, they do it with strings attached so they can manipulate the spending and promote their own agendas (which is what they do now anyways). The biggest problem is simply human selfishness. Because of it, there will never be peace. There will always be people seeking more than they need, always seeking their own survival over that of others, always seeking to crush others to give themselves a boost physically/economically/egotistically/etc. There will never be world peace as long as people are selfish, which basically makes world peace a pipe dream. Sorry to step on toes, but that's life.
  • simonh 10y ago
    > The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. How do you explain the massive transformation of China from a backward rural basket case, to a dynamic modern manufacturing led economy in which industrial employment and industrial labour wages have both rocketed in the last 20 years? That has come at a cost. Manufacturing really has transferred from the West to the East. Yet the West doesn't have mass unemployment and job vacancies for skilled workers are at an all-time high in the West. The problem is that low skilled jobs have gone East and the West is moving up into high value services jobs, but our training and education systems have adapted too slowly to bring our worker pools along for the ride. The answer is not to turn back the clock, it's to ride the economic wave and up-skill our labor pool because too many people in the west are being left behind in unskilled jobs, when actually there are plenty of skilled job vacancies available compared the the actual number of unemployed.
    • nercht12 10y ago