14 ms·

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 t

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 9y 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 9y 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.
- nebabyte 9y ago
  Stop trying to handle env at the domestic level; measures only work at an international level (UN regulations or tariffs/sanctions or whatever). But that's for later society (ones with people with stable livelihoods) to figure out, not currently on the table. If you allow yourself to be paralyzed by one issue tapping into the next, you'll deadlock yourself. One issue at a time. The environment is the least of the american worker's immediate concerns anyways, you might as well save your breath in that context. (Yes, the environment is fucked, "sooner the better" etc - but that's idealism, not pragmatism, and guess which by which one the world actually turns. Bringing up noise just impairs yourself to communicating with the public.)
  - news_to_me 9y ago
    > "sooner the better" etc - but that's idealism, not pragmatism I don't get this mentality at all. The more we put off curbing environmental change, the more expensive it becomes to fix. I feel like it's analogous to credit card debt – what you're saying is, don't worry about that mountain of credit debt, with it's 14% interest rate; pay the minimum and contribute to a mutual fund instead. But the credit interest overruns the fund interest, so you lose money. Similarly, I think the costs of climate change are going to overrun any other economic issue we decide to focus on.
- nickik 9y ago
  The answer is not very hard. People like to attribute everything to regulation but the reality is that most parts of living standards improve when incomes grows. As China becomes richer they will go threw the same stuff that Britain and later the US did. Maybe I don't fit the bill as 'envoirmentalist' but I like to live in a place and country with a clean envoirment. China will have to fix its own problems, and Im sure they eventually will.
  - jackfraser 9y ago
    I hope that you're right, but it's definitely a big assumption on your part that China (and, of course, Chinese culture in general) will naturally head down the path of caring about the environment in the same sense that Western countries and cultures have started to. There are different levels of scale at play that make very different tactics work in Shanghai vs Vancouver; in the former there's enough difficulty ensuring that all the logistics work to ensure the populace is not starving that other considerations will necessarily have to go by the wayside. We also have to consider history and cultural forces, which have inertia, whenever we consider social change over time. The western world is becoming cleaner largely by virtue of each succeeding generation encouraging its children to take stewardship of the environment seriously. Even with this tendency, we still pollute terribly. I'm not convinced that there is much of an environmental shift in Mainland Chinese culture presently, at the very least in the city cores; and if there is, I suspect it will be generations before it's taken as seriously as it is here, which is still insufficient to actually stop bad things - and still undereducated as to what risks are reasonable vs. simply protesting whatever has the right virtue-signalling associations in the current year. When you say: > As China becomes richer ...there's an implicit assumption that "becoming richer" is just a natural, unavoidable, guaranteed outcome of the modern world. This is another assumption, and one I fear would be even harder to justify than Chinese culture becoming environmentally focused in a short enough time to matter. There's no guarantee that resource extraction at the current rate needed for wealth to outgrow population growth is a guarantee. This means there's no reason to assume that the per-capita average GDP or standard of living is going to rise forever, to the point where environmentalism (in the sense that it's often more expensive) is going to become not only feasible, but fashionable. Frugality may overcome the natural human desire to display wealthiness, if the threshold is too high for the average person. Lastly - While your solution may very well become the case in the long term, and again, I hope you're right because it's truly the best outcome, we still have to deal with environmental ramifications today, both of past decisions and of decision being made right now. It's probably better to stem the tide earlier rather than waiting for it to just naturally stem itself. This might mean "environmental protectionism", in the form of heavy tariffs against goods from countries with lower environmental standards and/or poor enforcement.
saimiam 9y ago
> What's the answer? Protectionism? If you have the means, invest with the wealth makers. I'd buy into SPY or FANG and let these CEOs do the work for me while I relocate to a low CoL location. Does it scale? Probably not. I honestly can't think of any other way to make ends meet one my skills become moot.
- rhizome 9y ago
  What skills of yours do you think could become moot?
  - saimiam 9y ago
    Given some oversight and runway, any programming skills I have can be done by someone else in a low cost location. Nothing I do or invent is exceptionally hard. That is probably best reserved for the pure sciences. This makes my creativity/skills moot. My only truly innate talent is my ability to cogently communicate with my local peers better than someone who lives elsewhere. Even that is becoming irrelevant because global companies are homogenizing business communication styles.
    - rhizome 9y ago
      any programming skills I have can be done by someone else in a low cost location How do you figure that 30+ years of outsourcing has not yet proven your point?
colordrops 9y ago
> protectionism Why not? It works for so many other countries. Is it not a fundamental characteristic of government to prioritize its citizens over others? Without that, we've got a de facto world government with dissolved borders but that only benefits the rich and powerful. If we truly want to give equal rights and privileges to everyone on Earth we should make global governance explicit to make sure the poor and disenfranchised get fair representation.
- senorjazz 9y ago
  The cost of things will go as it will be more expensive to make things nationally. Your big export industries will be hit, especially those that run at huge economies of scale and are able to dump the produce on other countries devastating their local industry (think big corp farms). The answer is never as simple as it seems
- atqtion 9y ago
  > It works for so many other countries It even worked for the United States. Protectionism was a major component of our policy approach toward industrialization. Protectionism as a mechanism for supporting the development of domestic capabilities is, historically, a well-justified policy position. And if you look to highly protectionist economies today, you'll find mostly developing economies. > Why not? 1. Most importantly, protectionism as a mechanism for inflating wages and/or spurring job growth in an already developed economy isn't nearly as well-tested an approach as examples of protectionism in America's past. Historic examples of US protectionism had the end goal of boosting domestic labor productivity. Modern protectionism risks doing exactly the opposite. 2. The diffuse benefits of free trade must be weighed against the more localized costs of free trade. It's a difficult calculus, but it shouldn't be ignored. Cheap stuff at Walmart and Amazon benefits a whole ton of people. Perhaps more importantly, access to foreign markets and capital creates a lot of jobs and wealth domstically. A lot of Americans are employed doing high-paying, high-quality work that is exported globally. (Including a lot of software engineers.) 3. The benefits to labor may be short lived if automation wipes out a lot of manufacturing jobs. In which case we've traded access to foreign markets and capital for maybe 10 years of jobs and a false sense of non-urgency in job re-training.
ChemicalWarfare 9y ago
>> That's the thing I don't get, so many people will advocate "fewer regulations", yet are perfectly content with prohibitive tariffs... anything that is completely unregulated or loosely regulated is prone to abuse. tariffs/additional taxation levels the playing field. also - reciprocity. try importing a US-made vehicle in Japan for example...
rhizome 9y ago
I'm sorry, but why is that such a terrible future? What is the goal that is threatened by the alternatives you propose as negatives?
sp332 9y ago
The money is flowing to where labor is cheap, but that is causing middle classes to rise in those places. And that means in the medium term, labor is going to stop being so cheap there. Eventually things will look a lot more even across markets that are connected. I propose taxing companies that are moving to use global labor, based on the difference between "local" and "overseas" wages. The money would go to financially buffer displaced local workers until things become more equal.
SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
There is this false notion that the rich will throw in the towel or that the pot is barely sweet as is and asking to take out a bit of sugar would make it unpalatable. The reality of the situation is they're rich precisely because they're extremely good at leveraging things in their favor. Muting that a bit isn't going to change that base quality in them. I know I'm speaking broadly but it applies broadly.
ashconnor 9y ago
Worked in Argentina...for a few years http://www.npr.org/2017/02/23/516895101/when-argentina-elected-a-populist-president-some-companies-left-the-country http://www.npr.org/2017/02/23/516895101/when-argentina-elect... http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episode-755-the-phone-at-the-end-of-the-world http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episo...
BearGoesChirp 9y ago
>What's the answer? Protectionism? Fairness. If some major corporation can go somewhere where they pay people $.80 a day for their labor, let me hire people for that amount to do what ever I want. Or we enforce our current laws onto the entire supply chain. Every single person whose labor went to making some product had to be treated a certain legal bare minimum standard. At least with automation it does largely become available to more people (granted we have to ensure the legal system isn't used to shut it down, such as with the DMCA or the patent system).
cracell 9y ago
Not sure if it qualifies as protectionism. But I'd love to see us enforce our own safety and environmental regulations for all imports. Something like all manufacturers would be required to be certified and routinely inspected by 3rd party companies that have been approved by the government to do said certifying and inspecting. Would need to have unscheduled inspections and heavy fines against the involved companies to work but we could do it if we wanted.

erichocean 9y ago

> What's the answer? Protectionism? That's literally what China does, and it seems to be working for them. YMMV.

devoply 9y 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 9y 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.

nebabyte 9y ago
Stop trying to handle env at the domestic level; measures only work at an international level (UN regulations or tariffs/sanctions or whatever). But that's for later society (ones with people with stable livelihoods) to figure out, not currently on the table. If you allow yourself to be paralyzed by one issue tapping into the next, you'll deadlock yourself. One issue at a time. The environment is the least of the american worker's immediate concerns anyways, you might as well save your breath in that context. (Yes, the environment is fucked, "sooner the better" etc - but that's idealism, not pragmatism, and guess which by which one the world actually turns. Bringing up noise just impairs yourself to communicating with the public.)
- news_to_me 9y ago
  > "sooner the better" etc - but that's idealism, not pragmatism I don't get this mentality at all. The more we put off curbing environmental change, the more expensive it becomes to fix. I feel like it's analogous to credit card debt – what you're saying is, don't worry about that mountain of credit debt, with it's 14% interest rate; pay the minimum and contribute to a mutual fund instead. But the credit interest overruns the fund interest, so you lose money. Similarly, I think the costs of climate change are going to overrun any other economic issue we decide to focus on.
nickik 9y ago
The answer is not very hard. People like to attribute everything to regulation but the reality is that most parts of living standards improve when incomes grows. As China becomes richer they will go threw the same stuff that Britain and later the US did. Maybe I don't fit the bill as 'envoirmentalist' but I like to live in a place and country with a clean envoirment. China will have to fix its own problems, and Im sure they eventually will.
- jackfraser 9y ago
  I hope that you're right, but it's definitely a big assumption on your part that China (and, of course, Chinese culture in general) will naturally head down the path of caring about the environment in the same sense that Western countries and cultures have started to. There are different levels of scale at play that make very different tactics work in Shanghai vs Vancouver; in the former there's enough difficulty ensuring that all the logistics work to ensure the populace is not starving that other considerations will necessarily have to go by the wayside. We also have to consider history and cultural forces, which have inertia, whenever we consider social change over time. The western world is becoming cleaner largely by virtue of each succeeding generation encouraging its children to take stewardship of the environment seriously. Even with this tendency, we still pollute terribly. I'm not convinced that there is much of an environmental shift in Mainland Chinese culture presently, at the very least in the city cores; and if there is, I suspect it will be generations before it's taken as seriously as it is here, which is still insufficient to actually stop bad things - and still undereducated as to what risks are reasonable vs. simply protesting whatever has the right virtue-signalling associations in the current year. When you say: > As China becomes richer ...there's an implicit assumption that "becoming richer" is just a natural, unavoidable, guaranteed outcome of the modern world. This is another assumption, and one I fear would be even harder to justify than Chinese culture becoming environmentally focused in a short enough time to matter. There's no guarantee that resource extraction at the current rate needed for wealth to outgrow population growth is a guarantee. This means there's no reason to assume that the per-capita average GDP or standard of living is going to rise forever, to the point where environmentalism (in the sense that it's often more expensive) is going to become not only feasible, but fashionable. Frugality may overcome the natural human desire to display wealthiness, if the threshold is too high for the average person. Lastly - While your solution may very well become the case in the long term, and again, I hope you're right because it's truly the best outcome, we still have to deal with environmental ramifications today, both of past decisions and of decision being made right now. It's probably better to stem the tide earlier rather than waiting for it to just naturally stem itself. This might mean "environmental protectionism", in the form of heavy tariffs against goods from countries with lower environmental standards and/or poor enforcement.

saimiam 9y ago

> What's the answer? Protectionism? If you have the means, invest with the wealth makers. I'd buy into SPY or FANG and let these CEOs do the work for me while I relocate to a low CoL location. Does it scale? Probably not. I honestly can't think of any other way to make ends meet one my skills become moot.

rhizome 9y ago
What skills of yours do you think could become moot?
- saimiam 9y ago
  Given some oversight and runway, any programming skills I have can be done by someone else in a low cost location. Nothing I do or invent is exceptionally hard. That is probably best reserved for the pure sciences. This makes my creativity/skills moot. My only truly innate talent is my ability to cogently communicate with my local peers better than someone who lives elsewhere. Even that is becoming irrelevant because global companies are homogenizing business communication styles.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    any programming skills I have can be done by someone else in a low cost location How do you figure that 30+ years of outsourcing has not yet proven your point?

colordrops 9y ago

> protectionism Why not? It works for so many other countries. Is it not a fundamental characteristic of government to prioritize its citizens over others? Without that, we've got a de facto world government with dissolved borders but that only benefits the rich and powerful. If we truly want to give equal rights and privileges to everyone on Earth we should make global governance explicit to make sure the poor and disenfranchised get fair representation.

senorjazz 9y ago
The cost of things will go as it will be more expensive to make things nationally. Your big export industries will be hit, especially those that run at huge economies of scale and are able to dump the produce on other countries devastating their local industry (think big corp farms). The answer is never as simple as it seems
atqtion 9y ago
> It works for so many other countries It even worked for the United States. Protectionism was a major component of our policy approach toward industrialization. Protectionism as a mechanism for supporting the development of domestic capabilities is, historically, a well-justified policy position. And if you look to highly protectionist economies today, you'll find mostly developing economies. > Why not? 1. Most importantly, protectionism as a mechanism for inflating wages and/or spurring job growth in an already developed economy isn't nearly as well-tested an approach as examples of protectionism in America's past. Historic examples of US protectionism had the end goal of boosting domestic labor productivity. Modern protectionism risks doing exactly the opposite. 2. The diffuse benefits of free trade must be weighed against the more localized costs of free trade. It's a difficult calculus, but it shouldn't be ignored. Cheap stuff at Walmart and Amazon benefits a whole ton of people. Perhaps more importantly, access to foreign markets and capital creates a lot of jobs and wealth domstically. A lot of Americans are employed doing high-paying, high-quality work that is exported globally. (Including a lot of software engineers.) 3. The benefits to labor may be short lived if automation wipes out a lot of manufacturing jobs. In which case we've traded access to foreign markets and capital for maybe 10 years of jobs and a false sense of non-urgency in job re-training.

ChemicalWarfare 9y ago

>> That's the thing I don't get, so many people will advocate "fewer regulations", yet are perfectly content with prohibitive tariffs... anything that is completely unregulated or loosely regulated is prone to abuse. tariffs/additional taxation levels the playing field. also - reciprocity. try importing a US-made vehicle in Japan for example...

rhizome 9y ago

I'm sorry, but why is that such a terrible future? What is the goal that is threatened by the alternatives you propose as negatives?

sp332 9y ago

The money is flowing to where labor is cheap, but that is causing middle classes to rise in those places. And that means in the medium term, labor is going to stop being so cheap there. Eventually things will look a lot more even across markets that are connected. I propose taxing companies that are moving to use global labor, based on the difference between "local" and "overseas" wages. The money would go to financially buffer displaced local workers until things become more equal.

SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago

There is this false notion that the rich will throw in the towel or that the pot is barely sweet as is and asking to take out a bit of sugar would make it unpalatable. The reality of the situation is they're rich precisely because they're extremely good at leveraging things in their favor. Muting that a bit isn't going to change that base quality in them. I know I'm speaking broadly but it applies broadly.

ashconnor 9y ago

Worked in Argentina...for a few years http://www.npr.org/2017/02/23/516895101/when-argentina-elected-a-populist-president-some-companies-left-the-country http://www.npr.org/2017/02/23/516895101/when-argentina-elect... http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episode-755-the-phone-at-the-end-of-the-world http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episo...

BearGoesChirp 9y ago

>What's the answer? Protectionism? Fairness. If some major corporation can go somewhere where they pay people $.80 a day for their labor, let me hire people for that amount to do what ever I want. Or we enforce our current laws onto the entire supply chain. Every single person whose labor went to making some product had to be treated a certain legal bare minimum standard. At least with automation it does largely become available to more people (granted we have to ensure the legal system isn't used to shut it down, such as with the DMCA or the patent system).

cracell 9y ago

Not sure if it qualifies as protectionism. But I'd love to see us enforce our own safety and environmental regulations for all imports. Something like all manufacturers would be required to be certified and routinely inspected by 3rd party companies that have been approved by the government to do said certifying and inspecting. Would need to have unscheduled inspections and heavy fines against the involved companies to work but we could do it if we wanted.