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> Cook told "60 Minutes” in 2015. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitti

> Cook told "60 Minutes” in 2015. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.” In that interview he also said that the jobs weren't coming back. This is one of the most powerful statements uttered on American labor and employment trends in recent memory. I have shared this quote with every middle/lower-middle class person I know who voted for Trump and their responses have all been the same, horror. Financial interests convinced liberals and conservatives alike that globalism was a good thing (for altruistic or selfish reasons respectively). Instead it just gave Capital access to cheap labor and totally fucked the American worker.

pm90 10y ago
American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow. From a long term perspective, its absolutely amazing that the US has managed to export all the factory level jobs to other countries and yet managed to keep the better paying jobs back here in the states. The current lack of (low skilled) jobs in manufacturing has made it clear to those Americans willing to listen: they (or their children) need to acquire those skills that make them employable in the 21st century, and those do not include low-skilled factory jobs. The next generation will be better prepared and I predict the US will continue as a global technological powerhouse (unless it gets fucked by Trumpism and populism of course).
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  > continue as a global technological powerhouse (unless it gets fucked by Trumpism and populism of course). Capitalism breathes credit, credit is a function of belief in the future. I'm curious how much protectionism is necessary at home to maintain necessary levels of belief in the future. > they (or their children) need to acquire those skills that make them employable in the 21st century How? What skills are necessary and where do they get them? As far as I can tell the education ecosystem in the US is wholly unsuited for this task.
  - xapata 10y ago
    Programming, obviously.
    - zeeveener 10y ago
      Sure, but what kind of programming? Web and Java developers are a dime-a-dozen. Sure there are different levels of skill within those specific fields, but you're never short for developers who know those things. Now Machine Learning or AI or even potentially low-level programming. Those are some areas where knowledge could be _extremely_ lucrative in the near (10-15 years) future.
      - rm999 10y ago
        Short answer: "scripting" Longer answer: programming isn't necessarily a job where you build things. I'd argue it's more generally about communicating with and controlling computers. And computers are increasingly where our lives are spent and/or tracked. I learned to program when I was relatively young, and I've spent my whole life witnessing people doing mundane tasks that a script could have easily automated away. It's everywhere: doctors' secretaries copying forms, grocery clerks scanning through shelves, office workers manually editing excel documents, etc. The reason these tasks remain un-automated is because programmers don't do these jobs; programming is considered a profession rather than a basic skill. I showed my friend's secretary how to easily automate a task she spent hours a week on, but she felt like the solution was foreign and rejected it. That one script could have made freed up 100s of hours a year to do other things, but she didn't get it. In a world where business people are looking to "disrupt" a lot of jobs through automation and consolidation, I think there's room for people to help automate away parts of their own jobs and share in the wealth (with more free or recreational time). I believe this is how a lot of people will keep jobs in the next 20+ years.
  - cubano 10y ago
    Gaining skills is just a matter of effort nowadays as everything anyone needs to learn to do pretty much anything is of course just clicks away. I think that's the real change that needs to be addressed...self directed learning should be the future, and the need for formal education is dying
- dmix 10y ago
  > American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow This is an important and underrated idea that so often gets lost thanks to politics. Much like the drug war, people think that market trends and phenomenons can be controlled somehow, that they are simply choices that people make, and those choices can be controlled - people can simply just choose not to make that choice or face consequences from the state. Rather than a whole new paradigm, something that generates real value that taps into a raw supply/demand, even if it means taking big risks, and that will exist whether or not we ignore it. This is how many ineffective government policies get made. America needs to embrace globalism as an unhappy reality. The problem is that they have been operating for two decades as if it didn't come with a big downside - that globalism is this great new thing that will make everyone richer. Trump and Bernie have been feeding off this ignored reality without addressing the real consequence. Rather globalism being sold as something that is all good, it should have been sold as a tough new evolution of the marketplace, much like a recession correcting an imbalanced investment bubble. It doesn't need to be rejected by an outsider strongman politician but embraced by an outsider who is willing to face the reality that the consequences extend well beyond the influential class in Washington and they aren't all good. You can't force your way back to the old reality as if the market phenomenon didn't exist, but you can minimize the downside as you transition to the new reality and do what you can to stay on top of it. Sadly, hard medicine and politics don't go together. Even if it's the best (and only) medicine. To continue the drug war analogy, the goal should be minimizing the harms of peoples addictions rather than trying to pretend the addictions won't happen. Likewise the economy needs to either a) compete with the globe in manufacturing and/or b) develop new industries. I'm not as convinced as many people are that a) is not possible, Apple clearly thinks there's plenty of potential there and so do I. But I'm quite confident that that US is failing to do b) properly. In my business class they called it a new "service-based economy" but clearly that has been insufficient to keep employment and wages high. To develop new industries in place of manufacturing they need to rekindle entrepreneurship and small businesses to give life to new industries. I get the impression the US government is obsessed with appeasing existing BigCos (just look at TPP or Obama's policies during the financial crisis) rather than developing the next generation of industry that functions well in a global marketplace. Silicon Valley is a big piece of the puzzle, but even then it's treated as a sideshow in Washington (even more so now, which is a big fault of Trump) but in the same vein it can't be the only one moving forward. I really hope Trump's liberal tax and regulatory policy helps boost b). The risk of course is that the usual Washington backroom dealings by legacy BigCos and special interests will guide policy even further towards tired old ideas (like making Wall St even more money) over helping develop new business. At a minimum we know that Trump is motivated to help with a)... so that's something. (I purposefully ignored social policy consequences here as this comment is getting long enough)
- Chaebixi 10y ago
  > American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow. Globalism didn't "accelerate" trends that would have happened anyhow, it created those trends. American labor is fucked because of globalism. You might argue the standard of living might have ended up the same under protectionist policies (e.g. poor because of high prices rather than low wages), but I doubt we'd see the same level of inequality under protectionism.
  - yzmtf2008 10y ago
    Even without globalism, automation will still give them a hard time. Hence globalism accelerated trends.
  - pm90 10y ago
    > You might argue the standard of living might have ended up the same under protectionist policies (e.g. poor because of high prices rather than low wages), but I doubt we'd see the same level of inequality under protectionism. The inequality that you see today wasn't caused by globalism, but by tax cuts on the very rich, which incentivized and legitimized overblown executive pay. All that wealth was then funneled into influencing the govt. to fuck American labor (i.e. ridiculously low minimum wage, further tax cuts for rich, less benefits for the needy etc.). Globalism is an easy straw man to blame for inequality, but its actually allowed people with stagnant incomes to maintain a certain standard of living (or not let it deteriorate too fast) via cheaper goods and services.
    - dmix 10y ago
      > The inequality that you see today wasn't caused by globalism, but by tax cuts on the very rich Source? Only a minority of companies in the US even have executives that get the much maligned high pay and bonuses in the last decade or so. What about the massive percentage of wealth that didn't fall into this category? They may have gain significantly from globalism but that was hardly the result of US tax policy alone. Lets not forget that democrats were in power for the last 8yrs and the state has only grown exponentially since the 1990s under both republican and democrat governments. Just because tax rates weren't the extremes of pre-1980/1970s doesn't make them low. They've been relatively consistent while the middle class income dropped. The complexity of the tax code and lack of competitiveness with international countries may have heavily influenced inequality. But it was hardly the result of explicit tax reduction for the rich... The idea that tax havens are something that were merely a matter of weak policy is naive. Even worse than the drug war hawks. Just because the middle class didn't keep pace with the wealthy doesn't mean only the wealthy were at fault. The fact the middle class lost wealth is hardly singularly the fault of the wealthy. I know this narrative sells well in politics but it's very short sighted. Even if the US adjusted tax policy to redistribute a larger chunk of taxes towards the middle class it would hardly make a dent in the new reality in the fact there is hardly a middle class economy like there used to be. So you must either develop a new middle class economy or you get temporary perks of taking it from the wealthy. This is the big whale in the room that the Bernie bro guys are ignoring. The likely scenario is that the wealthy would become continually less competitive over the years, shift way more money over seas, and the middle class would be in the same situation with a little bit more money for a short period. Gov spending under any administration that enacts those policies would largely offset most of the gains going directly to the people regardless (which is good if it results in universal health care, but little else if it's not sustainable).
- s73ver 10y ago
  "they (or their children) need to acquire those skills that make them employable in the 21st century" Who's going to pay for that? Who's going to pay the mortgage while they go back to school? This is, of course, not even getting into the rampant agism in a lot of industries, and that many of these people are over 40.
sbov 10y ago
It's not just the financial interests. It's also the public as a whole - the pushing of a college education (seemingly regardless of quality) for everyone, and the general social devaluing of any sort of trade-like work. I don't really know where that sentiment originates from though.
no1youknowz 10y ago
Here's something else that should shake US and UK highly skilled workers. Our time will soon come as well. In China, they are racing to match and surpass western standards. I would say, they have already matched in some cases. But unlike the west where companies export out to save costs. Companies in China do everything in-house. There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by 50%. Why? Better coders outside of the US, UK, EUR, etc. Of course, there will be a portion saying that we must keep our skills up to date. But not everyone can do heavy math, statistics, and ML. Just think of the developers who work on drupal, wordpress, javascript. What percentage do you think they can develop AI systems on tensorflow and neural nets? A major shift is coming. As developers, we need to prepare. Cue the cries for UBI.
- deleted 10y ago
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- a-fake-account 10y ago
  Yes an intelligent JavaScript developer. Who could imagine. I would wager the front end developer will continue to be a high paying job longer than the backend developer. You can outsource API creation but any product company can't risk not having a UX friendly and well designed front end.
  - dmitrygr 10y ago
    Design != Implementation. Outsourcing the code-monkey work of converting a complete design into a pile of JS is easy and already being done.
    - wavefunction 10y ago
      Sure, if you're looking for a 'pile of JS' at the end of it.
    - ntsplnkv3 10y ago
      Yes. All this doom and gloom is confusing to me. If a job is as easy to outsource as so many on here are saying, it is already being done or has been done. It's been done in my industry. The low level grunt work and basic administration is all outsourced. Has been for decades.
david-cako 10y ago
What's the answer? Protectionism? That's the thing I don't get, so many people will advocate "fewer regulations", yet are perfectly content with prohibitive tariffs from the place that allows people living in section 8 to afford iPhones. You're 100% right, but i just don't see a good answer other than coming to terms with the fact that cheap labour overseas and automation WILL back us into UBI in the very near future. It's the cost of doing business. No different than the argument that it's more economical to work an extra 30 minutes and pay someone else to cook for you. Why such a large percentage of the middle class thinks that THEIR livelihoods are threatened by having the rich pay up, I don't know.
- erichocean 9y ago
  > What's the answer? Protectionism? That's literally what China does, and it seems to be working for them. YMMV.
- devoply 10y ago
  Well because they were brainwashed through propaganda into thinking that a free lunch is threatening to the economy. And there may be some justification for that. The old rules no longer apply. It will take some time for the masses to catch up. However going forward I do see trouble in that business is ritual warfare. If you can settle distribution of resources problems with business based competition then it breaks out into real warfare. Why should American nonworkers get a bigger paycheck than Chinese nonworkers? Why should they be allowed to consume more?
- sbov 10y ago
  But it's not completely a labor play. Some of it is to skirt environmental protections. I'm not going to assume, but if you consider yourself both a globalist and an environmentalist, how do you personally resolve those two beliefs? Anyone reading this who does, how do you resolve those beliefs? I can vote for all the environmental protections that I want, but what good does that do if it just forces companies to manufacture goods in places that have worse environmental protections than we do? I ask this as someone who believes in both movements, and don't have a great answer to resolve this internal conflict.
kilroy123 10y ago
So what _can_ the US do about getting more hi-tech manufacturing here? I realized that won't employ a ton of people, but it will keep a lot more money in the US.
flubert 10y ago
>> Cook told "60 Minutes” in 2015. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.” The BLS seems to think there are 72,000 tool and die makers in the U.S.. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes514111.htm#(1) https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes514111.htm#(1) >I have shared this quote with every middle/lower-middle class person I know who voted for Trump and their responses have all been the same, horror. ...which quote, the tool-and-die-maker quote, or the jobs-aren't-coming-back quote?
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  I think Cook was more talking about representatives from each company - not everyone employed by them. There are an order of magnitude more people employed as tool and die makers in China anyhow so, even if you do use that as a metric, the broader point still stands.
  - flubert 10y ago
    >There are an order of magnitude more people employed as tool and die makers in China Do you have a recommendation for a source for employment statistics like that for China? In English? A quick search hasn't turned up much, but there must be something out there like that.
    - abritinthebay 10y ago
      Numbers are sparce it's true. I based the order of magnitude comment on a line saying there were "over 100k companies" doing similar work in China on a Business Insider article. It's probably reasonable to assume a decent company size so... seemed ballpark accurate
theptip 10y ago
Trade has certainly fucked _some_ workers. But it helped others; it's just a lot harder to see the ways in which the average American worker is better off, because the benefits of trade are spread across the economy, and the costs are concentrated among a smaller number of individuals. Here's a libertarian making this point: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/does_trade_with.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/does_trade_with.... "Using novel data on firms from the US Census Bureau, I show that the data support this view: US firms expanded manufacturing employment as reorganization toward less exposed industries in response to increased Chinese imports in US output and input markets allowed them to reduce the cost of production." Or Paul Krugman talking about the same, if you prefer that angle: https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/trade-and-jobs-a-note https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/trade-and-jobs-... Sure, there are arguments on each side. But it's not as cut and dried as your last paragraph suggests.
- carsongross 10y ago
  > But it's not as cut and dried as your last paragraph suggests. It was the libertarians and liberal economic establishment who claimed it was cut and dried that unrestricted free trade was better for all Americans. Anyone who objected (Buchanan, Perot, now Trump) was obviously stupid, and probably racist.
  - nickik 10y ago
    No economist makes the argument that free trade is better for all americans. Thats simply not what economic theory says. Economist have studid the problem for a long time and the wastly overwhelming majority still support it. They have actually fought about the problem quite a bit. You would do well to actually understand the argument instead of mischaracterising it.
    - hiram112 10y ago
      While agree with you - it was always noted in the fine print that there would be losers in the globalization game - it just wasn't stated that 95% of us would lose, while .1% would win bigly.
kees99 10y ago
I wonder if there was some subtle context to that assertion about fitting all die makers into some (presumably small) room? Intel make most if its dies in US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites#Fab_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...
nickik 10y ago
The people who make argument like yours simple sound like "ignore problem, everything will be fine". A company that does not move to cheaper labour will go bankroupt and a new all China company will simply take over. So you have unemployed anyway. The typical solution to this is that you start walling of these industries with tarrifs or to subsides. What you eventually have is a huge sector of the US economy that lives of the higher prices and/or taxes of the rest of the population while everybody has lower standards of living. Once China started institutional reforms there were only two possibilites, these jobs were payed for by other americans or they go away. Also, most americans only had these jobs because the US was able to export lots of these manufactures.
- CPLX 10y ago
  Not really. Germany and Switzerland have managed to maintain high wages and high standards of living in a globally competitive manufacturing sector. The idea that all this change is inevitable or impossible to avoid and we can't pay workers properly is just bullshit, it's the messaging of a multi-decade well financed public relations effort by people in the U.S. with a vested interest in making the public believe it.
  - atqtion 10y ago
    German megacorps do just as much manufacturing in developing economies as American megacorps. The Mittelstand doesn't do the sort of manufacturing that the rust belt did 40 years ago. These smaller firms existing today only because of big disparities in quality between their products and cheaper competitors. They benefit enormously from the German government's investment in applied research. https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/manufacturing-processing/how-does-germany-do-it https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/manufacturi...
  - datatan 10y ago
    Worse, they say this while giving them selves multi-million dollar salaries and stock bonuses worth billions. It's outrageous. We're told we're replacable, that theirs third worlders that can do what we do for less but somehow the executive is a unique snowflake worth billions of dollars. I watch VP's get million dollar bonuses while laying off workers. I watch execs outsource whole departments, watch quality tank, and they get millions. The center can not hold. It will come crashing down.
georgeecollins 10y ago
I didn't see the show so I don't know how big the room was. But I think it is an exaggeration to say you can fit all the tool & due makers in the US into one room. If you live in a major city, try googling how many companies around you advertise their machining operations as Tool & Die. This is not including all the engineers and artists who have most of the skills required, if not the experience. That's not saying they want to work in your factory, which is another part of the problem. People who have those skills in the US probably don't want the job. People who want the job don't have the skills, partly because the job that would have trained them wasn't available.
holly2 10y ago
China has used more concrete in the last two year than what the US has used in the last hundred. That was from a Nial Fergusun, Samantha Powers talk recently. Bottom line there is global power rebalancing occurring that is going to take a decade or two. The US middle class had it good for a while now, but it's time they loose some weight, stop buying all the unnecessary garbage they think they need and live a little like the middle class of the rest of the world. In a globalized world you can't have different definitions of middle class depending on where a border gets drawn. The rest of the world is also learning as they mindlessly try to emulate the American middle class, that there is no free lunch. They need their source of exploitable cheap labour too and it's creating all kinds of internal social upheaval across many different country.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
>> Financial interests convinced liberals and conservatives alike that globalism was a good thing (for altruistic or selfish reasons respectively). Instead it just gave Capital access to cheap labor and totally fucked the American worker. This doesn't make sense to me. That one bad aspect of it does not negate all of the good that has also come from it. I would argue that the people affected by this (a lot of the people Trump appealed to - for example coal workers) weren't let down by globalization but by their government. They should have been retrained, for free, by the government. Instead, they were forgotten about.
zzzeek 10y ago
To be fair, the theory of globalism includes that by exposing developing nations to the global economy and working towards treaties and agreements that require their work environments to meet certain standards, the worker populations in those countries would eventually be more wealthy and have wages more comparable to that of a fully developed nation. Clearly it's not that simple, but globalism does attempt to accommodate for this problem at least in theory.
Chaebixi 10y ago
> In that interview [Cook] also said that the jobs weren't coming back. Wasn't "the jobs aren't coming back" a Steve Jobs quote, not a Cook quote? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and...
MisterBastahrd 10y ago
They will either come back when enough of the world reaches US middle class status (and thus it becomes cheaper to produce here than abroad) or disappear entirely when automated out of existence. Either way, it makes no sense to pretend that they're likely to come back. It's like spending every paycheck on lottery tickets.
draw_down 10y ago
Indeed, and with the right perspective this all comes as no surprise. The period during which American laborers made a good wage from a job right out of high school and retired on pensions was not the norm, it was the aberration. Sadly.
jliptzin 10y ago
This is basically what happens when capitalism is allowed to run wild. Massive industries consolidate into a few major players who have immense power over their workers. In this case, manufacturers realized that it's more economical to manufacture in China than in the US so that's what they've been doing. Simple economics. They owe nothing to the workers, only the shareholders. The manufacturing centers of the American rustbelt lost, and when you lose in a purely capitalist system, it's pretty shitty. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Trump certainly won't bring back their jobs in any meaningful way. The only way that will happen is if it becomes economical for companies to manufacture here again vs. China. But good luck with that. I am not anti-capitalism by any means, but I think strong protections against monopolies and protection for workers are probably a good thing for everyone.
- danderino 10y ago
  > In this case, manufacturers realized that it's more economical to manufacture in China than in the US so that's what they've been doing. Simple economics. This is absolutely a good thing. Why would you encourage inefficient trade? Are Americans somehow more deserving of jobs than Chinese ones?
  - jliptzin 10y ago
    No of course not. I don't want to encourage inefficient trade. But what should we do about entire swaths of people completely out of work?
randyrand 10y ago
The answer is of course deregulation. Not only is labour cheaper in China, everything is. The USA is uncompetitive not because we don't have technological prowress, or enough land, or enough resources; it's because our laws have made US manufacturing too expensive. There is no other answer.
blhack 10y ago
>I have shared this quote with every middle/lower-middle class person I know who voted for Trump and their responses have all been the same, horror. Maybe I'm missing some context here. Why would their reaction be horror? That quote sounds like something that Trump would have quoted in a commercial or on a debate stage. That is exactly why middle class people voted for him.
tn135 10y ago
> Financial interests convinced liberals and conservatives alike that globalism was a good thing (for altruistic or selfish reasons respectively). Instead it just gave Capital access to cheap labor and totally fucked the American worker. Lump of Labour fallacy. The way both Liberals and Conservatives speak as if USA is marred with some wide scale unemployment. It is as if Americans would love to have sweatshops where pregnant women will be working 14 hours a day. USA continues to enjoy very good employment, better than most developed countries with comparable scale and diversity. People all across the world are flocking to take those US jobs and you have to close the gates to prevent them from coming. I find the constant self loathing pretty disgusting on part of a country that is home to such exceptional economy. All those jobs are not coming back and it is a good thing.
- nerfhammer 10y ago
  People seem to want people to have jobs that are easy to visualize... people seem worried about the number of factory workers in a way in which they do not worry about number of architects.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    It's because American's romanticize manufacturing for some reason. They love the idea of someone doing back-breaking labor on a factory floor line, but hate the idea of someone working retail in air conditioning.
    - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
      Those romanticized factory jobs were by and large protected by unions and offered better pay and pensions than any other blue collar occupation.
      - bduerst 10y ago
        Which is ironic, considering the party claiming to want to bring back manufacturing jobs is also the party that busted the unions.
cracell 10y ago
But Cook is wrong in saying "the jobs aren't coming back". The situation has been rapidly changing because of automation. Imagine if a clothing company could have new product responding to trends available in a week. Nintendo is currently having difficulty keeping up with the demand for Nintendo Switches, imagine if they could rapidly produce more near their intended markets. Automated small batch production could even make things like ordering the exact same shirt you bought 10 years ago affordable. Doesn't mean the economics work all the way through. But my point is things change and the advantages of manufacturing overseas in the past are not the same as the advantages today. And that will keep changing. The future is hard to predict. Anyone that says something will never change is wrong because on a long enough timespan literally everything changes.
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  > Automated small batch production could even make things like ordering the exact same shirt you bought 10 years ago affordable. Automated production does not imply that setting up the production line is automated. You can't just reconfigure a production line because you don't have machinery on standby (these would be dead assets in the 10 MM range). High precision molds used for Lego, for example, are in the 250000 EUR range. You don't have these laying around and cannot order special tools with a lead time of less that a quarter year.
charlesdm 10y ago
It's not like it wouldn't have happened anyway. That aside, globalism _is_ a good thing (the flipside is that some items are just cheaper), but it's not been as good for everyone. Specific jobs appear and disappear all the time. It's just the natural flow of things in a developing society.
danderino 10y ago
You rather bolster inefficient manufacturing processes and have Chinese workers/whole populace fucked so some more Americans can have better living standards?
yelpisascam 10y ago
I voted for Trump. Cheap labor is what has reached a tipping point and what building the wall represents in some aspects. I don't know a single Trump supporter who would have been surprised by that statement. But, anecdotes being what they are.

pm90 10y ago

American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow. From a long term perspective, its absolutely amazing that the US has managed to export all the factory level jobs to other countries and yet managed to keep the better paying jobs back here in the states. The current lack of (low skilled) jobs in manufacturing has made it clear to those Americans willing to listen: they (or their children) need to acquire those skills that make them employable in the 21st century, and those do not include low-skilled factory jobs. The next generation will be better prepared and I predict the US will continue as a global technological powerhouse (unless it gets fucked by Trumpism and populism of course).

ryanmarsh 10y ago
> continue as a global technological powerhouse (unless it gets fucked by Trumpism and populism of course). Capitalism breathes credit, credit is a function of belief in the future. I'm curious how much protectionism is necessary at home to maintain necessary levels of belief in the future. > they (or their children) need to acquire those skills that make them employable in the 21st century How? What skills are necessary and where do they get them? As far as I can tell the education ecosystem in the US is wholly unsuited for this task.
- xapata 10y ago
  Programming, obviously.
  - zeeveener 10y ago
    Sure, but what kind of programming? Web and Java developers are a dime-a-dozen. Sure there are different levels of skill within those specific fields, but you're never short for developers who know those things. Now Machine Learning or AI or even potentially low-level programming. Those are some areas where knowledge could be _extremely_ lucrative in the near (10-15 years) future.
    - rm999 10y ago
      Short answer: "scripting" Longer answer: programming isn't necessarily a job where you build things. I'd argue it's more generally about communicating with and controlling computers. And computers are increasingly where our lives are spent and/or tracked. I learned to program when I was relatively young, and I've spent my whole life witnessing people doing mundane tasks that a script could have easily automated away. It's everywhere: doctors' secretaries copying forms, grocery clerks scanning through shelves, office workers manually editing excel documents, etc. The reason these tasks remain un-automated is because programmers don't do these jobs; programming is considered a profession rather than a basic skill. I showed my friend's secretary how to easily automate a task she spent hours a week on, but she felt like the solution was foreign and rejected it. That one script could have made freed up 100s of hours a year to do other things, but she didn't get it. In a world where business people are looking to "disrupt" a lot of jobs through automation and consolidation, I think there's room for people to help automate away parts of their own jobs and share in the wealth (with more free or recreational time). I believe this is how a lot of people will keep jobs in the next 20+ years.
- cubano 10y ago
  Gaining skills is just a matter of effort nowadays as everything anyone needs to learn to do pretty much anything is of course just clicks away. I think that's the real change that needs to be addressed...self directed learning should be the future, and the need for formal education is dying
dmix 10y ago
> American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow This is an important and underrated idea that so often gets lost thanks to politics. Much like the drug war, people think that market trends and phenomenons can be controlled somehow, that they are simply choices that people make, and those choices can be controlled - people can simply just choose not to make that choice or face consequences from the state. Rather than a whole new paradigm, something that generates real value that taps into a raw supply/demand, even if it means taking big risks, and that will exist whether or not we ignore it. This is how many ineffective government policies get made. America needs to embrace globalism as an unhappy reality. The problem is that they have been operating for two decades as if it didn't come with a big downside - that globalism is this great new thing that will make everyone richer. Trump and Bernie have been feeding off this ignored reality without addressing the real consequence. Rather globalism being sold as something that is all good, it should have been sold as a tough new evolution of the marketplace, much like a recession correcting an imbalanced investment bubble. It doesn't need to be rejected by an outsider strongman politician but embraced by an outsider who is willing to face the reality that the consequences extend well beyond the influential class in Washington and they aren't all good. You can't force your way back to the old reality as if the market phenomenon didn't exist, but you can minimize the downside as you transition to the new reality and do what you can to stay on top of it. Sadly, hard medicine and politics don't go together. Even if it's the best (and only) medicine. To continue the drug war analogy, the goal should be minimizing the harms of peoples addictions rather than trying to pretend the addictions won't happen. Likewise the economy needs to either a) compete with the globe in manufacturing and/or b) develop new industries. I'm not as convinced as many people are that a) is not possible, Apple clearly thinks there's plenty of potential there and so do I. But I'm quite confident that that US is failing to do b) properly. In my business class they called it a new "service-based economy" but clearly that has been insufficient to keep employment and wages high. To develop new industries in place of manufacturing they need to rekindle entrepreneurship and small businesses to give life to new industries. I get the impression the US government is obsessed with appeasing existing BigCos (just look at TPP or Obama's policies during the financial crisis) rather than developing the next generation of industry that functions well in a global marketplace. Silicon Valley is a big piece of the puzzle, but even then it's treated as a sideshow in Washington (even more so now, which is a big fault of Trump) but in the same vein it can't be the only one moving forward. I really hope Trump's liberal tax and regulatory policy helps boost b). The risk of course is that the usual Washington backroom dealings by legacy BigCos and special interests will guide policy even further towards tired old ideas (like making Wall St even more money) over helping develop new business. At a minimum we know that Trump is motivated to help with a)... so that's something. (I purposefully ignored social policy consequences here as this comment is getting long enough)
Chaebixi 10y ago
> American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow. Globalism didn't "accelerate" trends that would have happened anyhow, it created those trends. American labor is fucked because of globalism. You might argue the standard of living might have ended up the same under protectionist policies (e.g. poor because of high prices rather than low wages), but I doubt we'd see the same level of inequality under protectionism.
- yzmtf2008 10y ago
  Even without globalism, automation will still give them a hard time. Hence globalism accelerated trends.
- pm90 10y ago
  > You might argue the standard of living might have ended up the same under protectionist policies (e.g. poor because of high prices rather than low wages), but I doubt we'd see the same level of inequality under protectionism. The inequality that you see today wasn't caused by globalism, but by tax cuts on the very rich, which incentivized and legitimized overblown executive pay. All that wealth was then funneled into influencing the govt. to fuck American labor (i.e. ridiculously low minimum wage, further tax cuts for rich, less benefits for the needy etc.). Globalism is an easy straw man to blame for inequality, but its actually allowed people with stagnant incomes to maintain a certain standard of living (or not let it deteriorate too fast) via cheaper goods and services.
  - dmix 10y ago
    > The inequality that you see today wasn't caused by globalism, but by tax cuts on the very rich Source? Only a minority of companies in the US even have executives that get the much maligned high pay and bonuses in the last decade or so. What about the massive percentage of wealth that didn't fall into this category? They may have gain significantly from globalism but that was hardly the result of US tax policy alone. Lets not forget that democrats were in power for the last 8yrs and the state has only grown exponentially since the 1990s under both republican and democrat governments. Just because tax rates weren't the extremes of pre-1980/1970s doesn't make them low. They've been relatively consistent while the middle class income dropped. The complexity of the tax code and lack of competitiveness with international countries may have heavily influenced inequality. But it was hardly the result of explicit tax reduction for the rich... The idea that tax havens are something that were merely a matter of weak policy is naive. Even worse than the drug war hawks. Just because the middle class didn't keep pace with the wealthy doesn't mean only the wealthy were at fault. The fact the middle class lost wealth is hardly singularly the fault of the wealthy. I know this narrative sells well in politics but it's very short sighted. Even if the US adjusted tax policy to redistribute a larger chunk of taxes towards the middle class it would hardly make a dent in the new reality in the fact there is hardly a middle class economy like there used to be. So you must either develop a new middle class economy or you get temporary perks of taking it from the wealthy. This is the big whale in the room that the Bernie bro guys are ignoring. The likely scenario is that the wealthy would become continually less competitive over the years, shift way more money over seas, and the middle class would be in the same situation with a little bit more money for a short period. Gov spending under any administration that enacts those policies would largely offset most of the gains going directly to the people regardless (which is good if it results in universal health care, but little else if it's not sustainable).
s73ver 10y ago
"they (or their children) need to acquire those skills that make them employable in the 21st century" Who's going to pay for that? Who's going to pay the mortgage while they go back to school? This is, of course, not even getting into the rampant agism in a lot of industries, and that many of these people are over 40.

sbov 10y ago

It's not just the financial interests. It's also the public as a whole - the pushing of a college education (seemingly regardless of quality) for everyone, and the general social devaluing of any sort of trade-like work. I don't really know where that sentiment originates from though.

no1youknowz 10y ago

Here's something else that should shake US and UK highly skilled workers. Our time will soon come as well. In China, they are racing to match and surpass western standards. I would say, they have already matched in some cases. But unlike the west where companies export out to save costs. Companies in China do everything in-house. There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by 50%. Why? Better coders outside of the US, UK, EUR, etc. Of course, there will be a portion saying that we must keep our skills up to date. But not everyone can do heavy math, statistics, and ML. Just think of the developers who work on drupal, wordpress, javascript. What percentage do you think they can develop AI systems on tensorflow and neural nets? A major shift is coming. As developers, we need to prepare. Cue the cries for UBI.

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a-fake-account 10y ago
Yes an intelligent JavaScript developer. Who could imagine. I would wager the front end developer will continue to be a high paying job longer than the backend developer. You can outsource API creation but any product company can't risk not having a UX friendly and well designed front end.
- dmitrygr 10y ago
  Design != Implementation. Outsourcing the code-monkey work of converting a complete design into a pile of JS is easy and already being done.
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    Sure, if you're looking for a 'pile of JS' at the end of it.
  - ntsplnkv3 10y ago
    Yes. All this doom and gloom is confusing to me. If a job is as easy to outsource as so many on here are saying, it is already being done or has been done. It's been done in my industry. The low level grunt work and basic administration is all outsourced. Has been for decades.

david-cako 10y ago

What's the answer? Protectionism? That's the thing I don't get, so many people will advocate "fewer regulations", yet are perfectly content with prohibitive tariffs from the place that allows people living in section 8 to afford iPhones. You're 100% right, but i just don't see a good answer other than coming to terms with the fact that cheap labour overseas and automation WILL back us into UBI in the very near future. It's the cost of doing business. No different than the argument that it's more economical to work an extra 30 minutes and pay someone else to cook for you. Why such a large percentage of the middle class thinks that THEIR livelihoods are threatened by having the rich pay up, I don't know.

erichocean 9y ago
> What's the answer? Protectionism? That's literally what China does, and it seems to be working for them. YMMV.
devoply 10y ago
Well because they were brainwashed through propaganda into thinking that a free lunch is threatening to the economy. And there may be some justification for that. The old rules no longer apply. It will take some time for the masses to catch up. However going forward I do see trouble in that business is ritual warfare. If you can settle distribution of resources problems with business based competition then it breaks out into real warfare. Why should American nonworkers get a bigger paycheck than Chinese nonworkers? Why should they be allowed to consume more?
sbov 10y ago
But it's not completely a labor play. Some of it is to skirt environmental protections. I'm not going to assume, but if you consider yourself both a globalist and an environmentalist, how do you personally resolve those two beliefs? Anyone reading this who does, how do you resolve those beliefs? I can vote for all the environmental protections that I want, but what good does that do if it just forces companies to manufacture goods in places that have worse environmental protections than we do? I ask this as someone who believes in both movements, and don't have a great answer to resolve this internal conflict.

kilroy123 10y ago

So what _can_ the US do about getting more hi-tech manufacturing here? I realized that won't employ a ton of people, but it will keep a lot more money in the US.

flubert 10y ago

>> Cook told "60 Minutes” in 2015. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.” The BLS seems to think there are 72,000 tool and die makers in the U.S.. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes514111.htm#(1) https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes514111.htm#(1) >I have shared this quote with every middle/lower-middle class person I know who voted for Trump and their responses have all been the same, horror. ...which quote, the tool-and-die-maker quote, or the jobs-aren't-coming-back quote?

abritinthebay 10y ago
I think Cook was more talking about representatives from each company - not everyone employed by them. There are an order of magnitude more people employed as tool and die makers in China anyhow so, even if you do use that as a metric, the broader point still stands.
- flubert 10y ago
  >There are an order of magnitude more people employed as tool and die makers in China Do you have a recommendation for a source for employment statistics like that for China? In English? A quick search hasn't turned up much, but there must be something out there like that.
  - abritinthebay 10y ago
    Numbers are sparce it's true. I based the order of magnitude comment on a line saying there were "over 100k companies" doing similar work in China on a Business Insider article. It's probably reasonable to assume a decent company size so... seemed ballpark accurate

theptip 10y ago

Trade has certainly fucked _some_ workers. But it helped others; it's just a lot harder to see the ways in which the average American worker is better off, because the benefits of trade are spread across the economy, and the costs are concentrated among a smaller number of individuals. Here's a libertarian making this point: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/does_trade_with.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/does_trade_with.... "Using novel data on firms from the US Census Bureau, I show that the data support this view: US firms expanded manufacturing employment as reorganization toward less exposed industries in response to increased Chinese imports in US output and input markets allowed them to reduce the cost of production." Or Paul Krugman talking about the same, if you prefer that angle: https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/trade-and-jobs-a-note https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/trade-and-jobs-... Sure, there are arguments on each side. But it's not as cut and dried as your last paragraph suggests.

carsongross 10y ago
> But it's not as cut and dried as your last paragraph suggests. It was the libertarians and liberal economic establishment who claimed it was cut and dried that unrestricted free trade was better for all Americans. Anyone who objected (Buchanan, Perot, now Trump) was obviously stupid, and probably racist.
- nickik 10y ago
  No economist makes the argument that free trade is better for all americans. Thats simply not what economic theory says. Economist have studid the problem for a long time and the wastly overwhelming majority still support it. They have actually fought about the problem quite a bit. You would do well to actually understand the argument instead of mischaracterising it.
  - hiram112 10y ago
    While agree with you - it was always noted in the fine print that there would be losers in the globalization game - it just wasn't stated that 95% of us would lose, while .1% would win bigly.

kees99 10y ago

I wonder if there was some subtle context to that assertion about fitting all die makers into some (presumably small) room? Intel make most if its dies in US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites#Fab_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

nickik 10y ago

The people who make argument like yours simple sound like "ignore problem, everything will be fine". A company that does not move to cheaper labour will go bankroupt and a new all China company will simply take over. So you have unemployed anyway. The typical solution to this is that you start walling of these industries with tarrifs or to subsides. What you eventually have is a huge sector of the US economy that lives of the higher prices and/or taxes of the rest of the population while everybody has lower standards of living. Once China started institutional reforms there were only two possibilites, these jobs were payed for by other americans or they go away. Also, most americans only had these jobs because the US was able to export lots of these manufactures.

CPLX 10y ago
Not really. Germany and Switzerland have managed to maintain high wages and high standards of living in a globally competitive manufacturing sector. The idea that all this change is inevitable or impossible to avoid and we can't pay workers properly is just bullshit, it's the messaging of a multi-decade well financed public relations effort by people in the U.S. with a vested interest in making the public believe it.
- atqtion 10y ago
  German megacorps do just as much manufacturing in developing economies as American megacorps. The Mittelstand doesn't do the sort of manufacturing that the rust belt did 40 years ago. These smaller firms existing today only because of big disparities in quality between their products and cheaper competitors. They benefit enormously from the German government's investment in applied research. https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/manufacturing-processing/how-does-germany-do-it https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/manufacturi...
- datatan 10y ago
  Worse, they say this while giving them selves multi-million dollar salaries and stock bonuses worth billions. It's outrageous. We're told we're replacable, that theirs third worlders that can do what we do for less but somehow the executive is a unique snowflake worth billions of dollars. I watch VP's get million dollar bonuses while laying off workers. I watch execs outsource whole departments, watch quality tank, and they get millions. The center can not hold. It will come crashing down.

georgeecollins 10y ago

I didn't see the show so I don't know how big the room was. But I think it is an exaggeration to say you can fit all the tool & due makers in the US into one room. If you live in a major city, try googling how many companies around you advertise their machining operations as Tool & Die. This is not including all the engineers and artists who have most of the skills required, if not the experience. That's not saying they want to work in your factory, which is another part of the problem. People who have those skills in the US probably don't want the job. People who want the job don't have the skills, partly because the job that would have trained them wasn't available.

holly2 10y ago

China has used more concrete in the last two year than what the US has used in the last hundred. That was from a Nial Fergusun, Samantha Powers talk recently. Bottom line there is global power rebalancing occurring that is going to take a decade or two. The US middle class had it good for a while now, but it's time they loose some weight, stop buying all the unnecessary garbage they think they need and live a little like the middle class of the rest of the world. In a globalized world you can't have different definitions of middle class depending on where a border gets drawn. The rest of the world is also learning as they mindlessly try to emulate the American middle class, that there is no free lunch. They need their source of exploitable cheap labour too and it's creating all kinds of internal social upheaval across many different country.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

>> Financial interests convinced liberals and conservatives alike that globalism was a good thing (for altruistic or selfish reasons respectively). Instead it just gave Capital access to cheap labor and totally fucked the American worker. This doesn't make sense to me. That one bad aspect of it does not negate all of the good that has also come from it. I would argue that the people affected by this (a lot of the people Trump appealed to - for example coal workers) weren't let down by globalization but by their government. They should have been retrained, for free, by the government. Instead, they were forgotten about.

zzzeek 10y ago

To be fair, the theory of globalism includes that by exposing developing nations to the global economy and working towards treaties and agreements that require their work environments to meet certain standards, the worker populations in those countries would eventually be more wealthy and have wages more comparable to that of a fully developed nation. Clearly it's not that simple, but globalism does attempt to accommodate for this problem at least in theory.

Chaebixi 10y ago

> In that interview [Cook] also said that the jobs weren't coming back. Wasn't "the jobs aren't coming back" a Steve Jobs quote, not a Cook quote? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and...

MisterBastahrd 10y ago

They will either come back when enough of the world reaches US middle class status (and thus it becomes cheaper to produce here than abroad) or disappear entirely when automated out of existence. Either way, it makes no sense to pretend that they're likely to come back. It's like spending every paycheck on lottery tickets.

draw_down 10y ago

Indeed, and with the right perspective this all comes as no surprise. The period during which American laborers made a good wage from a job right out of high school and retired on pensions was not the norm, it was the aberration. Sadly.

jliptzin 10y ago

This is basically what happens when capitalism is allowed to run wild. Massive industries consolidate into a few major players who have immense power over their workers. In this case, manufacturers realized that it's more economical to manufacture in China than in the US so that's what they've been doing. Simple economics. They owe nothing to the workers, only the shareholders. The manufacturing centers of the American rustbelt lost, and when you lose in a purely capitalist system, it's pretty shitty. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Trump certainly won't bring back their jobs in any meaningful way. The only way that will happen is if it becomes economical for companies to manufacture here again vs. China. But good luck with that. I am not anti-capitalism by any means, but I think strong protections against monopolies and protection for workers are probably a good thing for everyone.

danderino 10y ago
> In this case, manufacturers realized that it's more economical to manufacture in China than in the US so that's what they've been doing. Simple economics. This is absolutely a good thing. Why would you encourage inefficient trade? Are Americans somehow more deserving of jobs than Chinese ones?
- jliptzin 10y ago
  No of course not. I don't want to encourage inefficient trade. But what should we do about entire swaths of people completely out of work?

randyrand 10y ago

The answer is of course deregulation. Not only is labour cheaper in China, everything is. The USA is uncompetitive not because we don't have technological prowress, or enough land, or enough resources; it's because our laws have made US manufacturing too expensive. There is no other answer.

blhack 10y ago

>I have shared this quote with every middle/lower-middle class person I know who voted for Trump and their responses have all been the same, horror. Maybe I'm missing some context here. Why would their reaction be horror? That quote sounds like something that Trump would have quoted in a commercial or on a debate stage. That is exactly why middle class people voted for him.

tn135 10y ago

> Financial interests convinced liberals and conservatives alike that globalism was a good thing (for altruistic or selfish reasons respectively). Instead it just gave Capital access to cheap labor and totally fucked the American worker. Lump of Labour fallacy. The way both Liberals and Conservatives speak as if USA is marred with some wide scale unemployment. It is as if Americans would love to have sweatshops where pregnant women will be working 14 hours a day. USA continues to enjoy very good employment, better than most developed countries with comparable scale and diversity. People all across the world are flocking to take those US jobs and you have to close the gates to prevent them from coming. I find the constant self loathing pretty disgusting on part of a country that is home to such exceptional economy. All those jobs are not coming back and it is a good thing.

nerfhammer 10y ago
People seem to want people to have jobs that are easy to visualize... people seem worried about the number of factory workers in a way in which they do not worry about number of architects.
- bduerst 10y ago
  It's because American's romanticize manufacturing for some reason. They love the idea of someone doing back-breaking labor on a factory floor line, but hate the idea of someone working retail in air conditioning.
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    Those romanticized factory jobs were by and large protected by unions and offered better pay and pensions than any other blue collar occupation.
    - bduerst 10y ago
      Which is ironic, considering the party claiming to want to bring back manufacturing jobs is also the party that busted the unions.

cracell 10y ago

But Cook is wrong in saying "the jobs aren't coming back". The situation has been rapidly changing because of automation. Imagine if a clothing company could have new product responding to trends available in a week. Nintendo is currently having difficulty keeping up with the demand for Nintendo Switches, imagine if they could rapidly produce more near their intended markets. Automated small batch production could even make things like ordering the exact same shirt you bought 10 years ago affordable. Doesn't mean the economics work all the way through. But my point is things change and the advantages of manufacturing overseas in the past are not the same as the advantages today. And that will keep changing. The future is hard to predict. Anyone that says something will never change is wrong because on a long enough timespan literally everything changes.

_pmf_ 10y ago
> Automated small batch production could even make things like ordering the exact same shirt you bought 10 years ago affordable. Automated production does not imply that setting up the production line is automated. You can't just reconfigure a production line because you don't have machinery on standby (these would be dead assets in the 10 MM range). High precision molds used for Lego, for example, are in the 250000 EUR range. You don't have these laying around and cannot order special tools with a lead time of less that a quarter year.

charlesdm 10y ago

It's not like it wouldn't have happened anyway. That aside, globalism _is_ a good thing (the flipside is that some items are just cheaper), but it's not been as good for everyone. Specific jobs appear and disappear all the time. It's just the natural flow of things in a developing society.

danderino 10y ago

You rather bolster inefficient manufacturing processes and have Chinese workers/whole populace fucked so some more Americans can have better living standards?

yelpisascam 10y ago

I voted for Trump. Cheap labor is what has reached a tipping point and what building the wall represents in some aspects. I don't know a single Trump supporter who would have been surprised by that statement. But, anecdotes being what they are.