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>people who lost their jobs en masse to competition from free trade. Globalization wasn't really why they lost their jobs. The old jobs left, but they could ha

>people who lost their jobs en masse to competition from free trade. Globalization wasn't really why they lost their jobs. The old jobs left, but they could have had new jobs if we had something resembling an industrial strategy and a progressive monetary policy. We underinvested in literally every job-creating public good from education to infrastructure since the Reagan era. We decided we could make up for it by putting working people in debt and slashing taxes on unearned (investment) income until it asymptotically approaches zero. Any time the economy gets hot enough that wages might rise, the Fed starts screeching about inflation and hits the brakes on the economy. We've gone out of our way to make sure that people who need to work for a living be as desperate as possible.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Right on the money with the 'not globalization'. But the part about conjuring up new jobs out of thin air - that's probably never gonna happen. With advancing automation, there will never again be as much demand for 'labor' as historically. We've been in a bubble where industrialization still had a need for somebody at the switch. But that's ending, and for good. In the easily-forseen future, there will be diminishing use for labor. All those with only labor to bring to the marketplace (i.e. most of us without access to capital or goods), there will be no place in our capitalist system as it stands.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  > Right on the money with the 'not globalization'. You sure? Globalization vs robots is entirely incidental to the fact that jobs regularly disappear en masse and we deal very poorly with that as a society, but I disagree that it was obviously robots and not globalization: https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Globalization is a step in the direction of automation. Robots are expensive; the scale of the operation has to be large to mitigate that. So globalization is a step in the direction of automation - labor is cheaper in India or China. Witness: factories come back to America, but only once scale increases (or automation gets cheaper) to the point robots are even cheaper than India or China. The returned factories have no labor jobs - its all robots. So ok, its all the same effect - nobody is going to pay a living wage for labor any more.
nradov 8y ago
An "industrial strategy" usually amounts to the government picking winners and then subsidizing them using my tax money. Governments in general have a terrible record of predicting which industries and technologies have potential. No thanks. A better approach would be to simply establish a favorable business climate and leave it up to the free market. Help the displaced workers with income redistribution and subsidizing training.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  We've been slashing taxes on businesses and the wealthy since the 80s, when exactly is it going to start trickling down? https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the-gap-between-worker-pay-and-productivity-is-so-problematic/385931/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the...
- lovich 8y ago
  This approach has never answered the question, "What happens to citizens businesses don't value" Do we just let citizens in our society starve because rich people didn't need them?
jjoonathan 8y ago
> Globalization wasn't really why they lost their jobs It's entirely incidental to the subject at hand, but I disagree: https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-... > We underinvested in literally every job-creating public good from education to infrastructure Absolutely true, and there are massive marginal gains to be had by increasing our investments in education and infrastructure at this moment, but it's important to acknowledge that in the limit of appropriately high funding, education does not guarantee the existence of satisfactory jobs for everyone.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Right on the money with the 'not globalization'. But the part about conjuring up new jobs out of thin air - that's probably never gonna happen. With advancing automation, there will never again be as much demand for 'labor' as historically. We've been in a bubble where industrialization still had a need for somebody at the switch. But that's ending, and for good. In the easily-forseen future, there will be diminishing use for labor. All those with only labor to bring to the marketplace (i.e. most of us without access to capital or goods), there will be no place in our capitalist system as it stands.

jjoonathan 8y ago
> Right on the money with the 'not globalization'. You sure? Globalization vs robots is entirely incidental to the fact that jobs regularly disappear en masse and we deal very poorly with that as a society, but I disagree that it was obviously robots and not globalization: https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Globalization is a step in the direction of automation. Robots are expensive; the scale of the operation has to be large to mitigate that. So globalization is a step in the direction of automation - labor is cheaper in India or China. Witness: factories come back to America, but only once scale increases (or automation gets cheaper) to the point robots are even cheaper than India or China. The returned factories have no labor jobs - its all robots. So ok, its all the same effect - nobody is going to pay a living wage for labor any more.

nradov 8y ago

An "industrial strategy" usually amounts to the government picking winners and then subsidizing them using my tax money. Governments in general have a terrible record of predicting which industries and technologies have potential. No thanks. A better approach would be to simply establish a favorable business climate and leave it up to the free market. Help the displaced workers with income redistribution and subsidizing training.

jjoonathan 8y ago
We've been slashing taxes on businesses and the wealthy since the 80s, when exactly is it going to start trickling down? https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the-gap-between-worker-pay-and-productivity-is-so-problematic/385931/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the...
lovich 8y ago
This approach has never answered the question, "What happens to citizens businesses don't value" Do we just let citizens in our society starve because rich people didn't need them?

jjoonathan 8y ago

> Globalization wasn't really why they lost their jobs It's entirely incidental to the subject at hand, but I disagree: https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-... > We underinvested in literally every job-creating public good from education to infrastructure Absolutely true, and there are massive marginal gains to be had by increasing our investments in education and infrastructure at this moment, but it's important to acknowledge that in the limit of appropriately high funding, education does not guarantee the existence of satisfactory jobs for everyone.