3 ms·

I think this is a really fair and balanced way of looking at it. The key political question could perhaps be stated as, how do you balance the median vs. the m

I think this is a really fair and balanced way of looking at it. The key political question could perhaps be stated as, how do you balance the median vs. the mean? A society which focuses on maximum efficiency will almost certainly have higher inequality, but also higher average wealth. I think it's up to each region/nation to navigate this tradeoff. I do worry that the current political climate in the US really underweights the gains from trade, though. We've had 30-40 years of the most open trade regime in human history and it's raised the US standard of living immensely. I hear people all the time saying, well the median income isn't going up, but that ignores (a) how many things are free today (e.g. Gmail) and (b) how much healthcare prices have escalated (which is paid by firms, absorbing cash that might otherwise flow directly to employees as wages). I think people today actually have it quite good. I'm afraid we might take for granted what got us here and shoot ourselves in the foot with all this protectionist sentiment.

opportune 8y ago
I agree that there needs to be a balance. Free trade, consolidation, and competition are of course beneficial in many ways and circumstances. I do wonder if the disconnect between policy and many of the negative effects I outlined in my previous post is due to the fact that decision/policy makers are disproportionately likely to be the ones benefitting from this trend. And for us as developers, especially so in the US, we're the ones directly benefitting from an industry that naturally lends itself to extreme consolidation in certain cases (e.g. a team making software for thousands of people may not need to expand that much to serve millions or even billions of people. See: whatsapp) and living in the countries with a competitive advantage in this industry. And we also mostly live in large cities with multinational corporation headquarters, so we're insulated or even benefitting from what's happening to smaller communities. I grew up in a non-coastal city that is neither doing well nor poorly. It doesn't have a lot of wealthy people to "bootstrap" itself into success by means of capital, nor is it an attractive enough investment opportunity for outside investors (low education with brain-drain chicken/egg problem), but it has a few competitive industries and is somewhat of a local resource and business hub. But once you go into the smaller communities in the region around the city, you really see the phenomenon I'm talking about. A big way money enters most of these communities is through farming or other resource extraction (if they're fortunate enough to have these), but the main way is through social security payments. These places would be perfect for low-medium cost manufacturing because they have large numbers of unemployed, working class people who are down to earth enough to take pride in that kind of work. Those communities are often forgotten when it comes to policy, likely because they are individually small, not culturally important, have some opinions we would consider backwards, and most importantly because they have no wealthy/powerful people to vouch for them. But outside of big cities and regional hubs, where decision makers do reside, this is what a pretty large portion of America consists of.
abalone 8y ago
> We've had 30-40 years of the most open trade regime in human history This is a totally false history. The Reagan administration "granted more import relief to U.S. industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century" (Secretary of the Treasury James Baker), with non-tarrif barriers (NTBs) that were "three times those of other leading countries."[1][2] [1] https://chomsky.info/199705__/ https://chomsky.info/199705__/ [2] See also Chomsky, Noam. "Industrial Policy for the Nineties." World Orders, Old and New. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 106-119. https://www.amazon.com/World-Orders-Old-Noam-Chomsky/dp/0231101562 https://www.amazon.com/World-Orders-Old-Noam-Chomsky/dp/0231...
- eldavido 8y ago
  I'll check this out, thanks for posting.

opportune 8y ago

I agree that there needs to be a balance. Free trade, consolidation, and competition are of course beneficial in many ways and circumstances. I do wonder if the disconnect between policy and many of the negative effects I outlined in my previous post is due to the fact that decision/policy makers are disproportionately likely to be the ones benefitting from this trend. And for us as developers, especially so in the US, we're the ones directly benefitting from an industry that naturally lends itself to extreme consolidation in certain cases (e.g. a team making software for thousands of people may not need to expand that much to serve millions or even billions of people. See: whatsapp) and living in the countries with a competitive advantage in this industry. And we also mostly live in large cities with multinational corporation headquarters, so we're insulated or even benefitting from what's happening to smaller communities. I grew up in a non-coastal city that is neither doing well nor poorly. It doesn't have a lot of wealthy people to "bootstrap" itself into success by means of capital, nor is it an attractive enough investment opportunity for outside investors (low education with brain-drain chicken/egg problem), but it has a few competitive industries and is somewhat of a local resource and business hub. But once you go into the smaller communities in the region around the city, you really see the phenomenon I'm talking about. A big way money enters most of these communities is through farming or other resource extraction (if they're fortunate enough to have these), but the main way is through social security payments. These places would be perfect for low-medium cost manufacturing because they have large numbers of unemployed, working class people who are down to earth enough to take pride in that kind of work. Those communities are often forgotten when it comes to policy, likely because they are individually small, not culturally important, have some opinions we would consider backwards, and most importantly because they have no wealthy/powerful people to vouch for them. But outside of big cities and regional hubs, where decision makers do reside, this is what a pretty large portion of America consists of.

abalone 8y ago

> We've had 30-40 years of the most open trade regime in human history This is a totally false history. The Reagan administration "granted more import relief to U.S. industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century" (Secretary of the Treasury James Baker), with non-tarrif barriers (NTBs) that were "three times those of other leading countries."[1][2] [1] https://chomsky.info/199705__/ https://chomsky.info/199705__/ [2] See also Chomsky, Noam. "Industrial Policy for the Nineties." World Orders, Old and New. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 106-119. https://www.amazon.com/World-Orders-Old-Noam-Chomsky/dp/0231101562 https://www.amazon.com/World-Orders-Old-Noam-Chomsky/dp/0231...

eldavido 8y ago
I'll check this out, thanks for posting.