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I don't usually comment on here but this article seems poorly written and highly opinionated. While I agree that discussion can be had on the relationship betwe

I don't usually comment on here but this article seems poorly written and highly opinionated. While I agree that discussion can be had on the relationship between the working class of dying industry and the new wave of highly skilled youths, I don't think this article hits the mark.

whatshisface 6y ago
The article isn't talking about highly skilled youths, it's talking about how the standards of living for more than 50% of the population are being cored out by people who disdain them. The author argues that the demographic realizes what's happening, and further points out that this could lead to some very serious trouble.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  Living standards for people doing lower-skilled manufacturing work are decreasing because that work is (in a whole lot of cases) not economic to do in the U.S. any more. That isn't anything to do with "coastal elites" or whoever you're referring to as the disdainful part of the population here. The causes are globalization and automation; and both of those look like utter inevitabilities at this point. Rather than making this into a culture war, perhaps we should be talking about policy alternatives that don't result in a trajectory of helplessness for those affected by those global, secular changes.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > causes are globalization and automation; and both of those look like utter inevitabilities at this point The gains from these trends are accruing to the educated and the urban. That’s a big part of the problem.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      And globalisation of US manufacturing was a political choice. Does nobody remember Ross Perot, who ran for President twice saying that NAFTA would doom the US manufacturing workers? There was some kind of assumption that as long as the West kept the jobs requiring education, everything would be fine. The results, somewhat predictably, were (amongst other things) Brexit and Trump.
      - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        > globalisation of US manufacturing was a political choice Not really. Fundamental economic costs are fundamental. Protectionism would have delayed the inevitable. Instead of a snap, we would have had a slow decline through loss of exports, fall in economies of scale and finally starvation of R&D funds. What was a political choice was abandoning those workers and communities. And pissing away trillions and a decade of political capital on a war.
        disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        For my money, these things are almost always a political choice. Can you explain how the fundamental economic costs necessitated the globalisation of US manufacturing?
        whatshisface 6y ago
        It was cheaper to get stuff made overseas. If you see the economy as a perfect optimizer that can't be stopped, that necessitates it.
        bsanr2 6y ago
        Cheaper how, though? It does seem that a lot of the costs have been externalized or have gone otherwise unacknowledged. Factoring in the losses sustained by unrest, despair, missed opportunity, rent and interest, and so forth, I think you come to see a more accurate model than the "stocks go up" one that outputs a much rosier picture of America's economic wellbeing than is reality. At the very least, the War on Terror blows a $6 trillion hole in whatever the calculations are; a less anxious, more homogeneously affluent America might not have acted so rashly following 9/11, and might not have even conjured the political and economic global paradigm that gave rise to al Qaeda in the first place.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
      No, I don't think so: the benefits are accruing to the entire U.S. population who get cheaper goods - the concentration of the downside is the problem.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - pbourke 6y ago
        It’s hardly a benefit if your goods are 20% cheaper but you no longer have a stable job to pay for them with.
        NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
        No, obviously not. But your small-town tax preparers in Iowa are benefiting, and they're hardly your urban, coastal elites.
      - Qwertious 6y ago
        I'm not convinced that lowering wages actually decreases price of goods enough to compensate for the lower wages - for that to happen, the money needs to cycle all the way through the economy and back to the workers without ever being "leaked". Depending on the entire economy to not break sounds like a way-too-large-scope solution. Things that could ruin the effect: 1. Any sort of natural monopoly 2. The "free market for senators" letting a corporation buy itself an un-natural monopoly through regulatory capture (either unnecessary regulation, or refusal to create necessary regulation) 3. Any sort of repeated irrationality in human nature that can be systematically exploited 4. Workers with lower wages purchasing less in the interim, resulting in fewer purchases and higher prices due to less economy of scale, resulting in fewer purchases and less economy of scale, etc etc 5. This probably overlaps with several of the above, but market distortions as a byproduct of initiatives to "create jobs", which is something everyone (as in both industrialists and working class) wants/needs to keep the economy afloat. IMO this is a result of people refusing to acknowledge that past a certain point, demand for wages is inflexible and will be paid, and if market mechanisms don't deliver then political forces will.
  - coryrc 6y ago
    The "coastal elites" refuse to make their cities affordable for people to live in, so how are people supposed to move there to get better jobs?
    - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
      It's not clear to me why you think I'm suggesting the answer is to have people move to coastal cities. That is almost certainly not the answer.
      - coryrc 6y ago
        Rural areas throughout the world are poor. Rural Indiana is not going to ever again have such a high relative standard of living at it did fifty years ago. Appalachian communities don't have anything highly productive to offer; resource extraction doesn't require much labor anymore. The jobs aren't coming back. If you don't want so many poor, we need to let them move to where the jobs are and will continue to be.
- fatnoah 6y ago
  I don't agree with everything in the article, but I do believe that the non-urban folks are feeling ignored. I think the results of the election highlight this very well. In the critical "mail-in" states, the difference in the Presidential election was made by the large urban populations. In the House and Senate, local preferences were more strongly favored. In the aftermath of the elections, all of the "land doesn't vote" posts serve to amplify the feeling of abandonment and disdain felt by the non-urban populations.
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    >I think the results of the election highlight this very well. In the critical "mail-in" states, the difference in the Presidential election was made by the large urban populations. In the House and Senate, local preferences were more strongly favored. The part about the Senate doesn't make any sense to me: voting for the Senate works exactly the same way as voting for the Presidency in most states - it's a winner-take-all plurality vote on a statewide basis.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - fatnoah 6y ago
      >The part about the Senate doesn't make any sense to me: voting for the Senate works exactly the same way as voting for the Presidency in most states - it's a winner-take-all plurality vote on a statewide basis. Whoops, I wrote one thing while thinking the other. IIRC, the Democrats picked up a seat, which does seem to follow the statewide popular voting vs. regional voting. Good catch!
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    I honestly think this is a case of equality appearing as persecution to those who've lived relatively blessed lives heretofore. For all the rigors of rural, small-town, w/e life, you don't see a mass exodus to the cities. Why not? Because, ultimately, they're getting what they want out of the deal: tight-knit communities, regulatory autonomy, and - the dirty little secret, which we must at least mention lest we make liars of ourselves - clear cultural (and even racial) hierarchy, if not homogeneity, among other things. But, of course, it's not sustainable in an accelerating information and service society. People are getting left behind and they don't like it (just not enough to move). Their desires matter, but not more than anyone else's. So we have to find the balance. No, you can't just do what your dad did. No, you don't, just by nature of being you (whatever that entails), deserve a stable, affluent, modern lifestyle in an inoffensive culture surrounded by people who look just like you - at least, not anymore than urban folk deserve what they want. If we're going to do this thing, it's not going to be make-work pork (that would be your given farming subsidies, federal contracts - including in highly-educated STEM work, and whatever other public-private partnerships that get cast as bootstraps when they're very much not) getting shipped out to your rugged individualist homestead, funding your technically-rigorous but otherwise anti-science and ahistorical curricula, $80k lifted trucks, and mall-scale megachurches, while everyone else has to scrimp and sacrifice and live on the margins. A true national solution will respect regional interests while, at its core, recognizing an equal right to whatever quality of life we deem workable and sustainable, and our collective interest in such. If the goal is a) rural folk get what they want, and b) fuck everyone else, it's not going to work. And what I've seen lately is city-dwellers switch from a patronizing to a hostile regard to these demands, so the decision on what to do is going to have to be made quickly, before the bottom falls out. Most of America's big cities could "secede" economically and be fine; after all, their reliance is on the trade of digital goods and intellectual services. Good luck to our landlocked states who sour their relationship to our ports of entry and exit.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Unskilled Americans had such high quality of life and economic opportunity because for 20 years after ww2 literally every manufactured good in the world was produced in America since every other country had their factories destroyed. Now that other countries produce their own goods unskilled Americans are not worth as much. It's no ones fault, certainly not the "coastal elites" who have continued to make unskilled Americans the wealthiest group of unskilled workers in the world.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    This is a gross oversimplification. In 1920 it took 3 man hours to produce 1 ton of steel in the US. Today 1 man hour produces 300 tons in the US. Similar efficiency improvements have been seen across a wide range of manufacturing sectors. US manufacturing productivity has continued to grow along the same trend it was on throughout the 20th century, though wages sharply stagnated in the early 70s and employment started declining in the 90s. The US trade deficit was reasonably stable except for a sharp decline from 1997 to 2006. Exports as a percentage of GDP for the US have nearly tripled since 1970, in constant 2010 dollars they've 10X'ed in that period. Manufactured goods as a percentage of exports peaked in 1999, and in 2017 were the same as in 1963. Manufacturing value added adjusted for inflation plateaued in 2007. The world didn't simply stop buying american after they recovered from WW2, if anything they bought more. The global economy has evolved over the past 70 years, just as it had prior, but this does not on its own explain the plight of the American working class.
    - colinmhayes 6y ago
      Capital intensive manufacturing stays here longer, labor intensive leaves first as competition allows the goods to be much cheaper.
      - jjk166 6y ago
        Except that's not at all what we see. Big factories representing immense capital investment were shut down first, while smaller factories and job shops remained constant or even increased. Major manufacturing employers like the automotive industry (which is not just the cars themselves but the many vendors making parts) didn't move their operations overseas - but instead consolidated production. The goods that start being produced overseas during this time period (late 90s - early 00s) are primarily things like injection molded plastic which are not very labor intensive but are capital intensive. There were several changes that much better explain the decline of the rust belt than off-shoring. In the first part of this period (70s-80s) you have low cost air conditioning becoming widely available, meaning that manufacturers could move operations out of the relatively cold rust belt and into the sun belt where labor regulations were less strict and real estate generally cheaper. You have the mass entry of women into the workforce as two income households become the norm, increasing wage competition, along with the weakening of unions. Increasing fuel prices mean that transportation is a greater concern in factory placement while the relatively new interstate highway system means that factories can be located anywhere instead of just pre-existing water and rail hubs. As computer technology becomes readily available you have the proliferation of CNC manufacturing, PLC controls, and robotics which dramatically increase productivity. By the time you get to the 90s-00s, wages have been stagnant for 20 years while secondary education has become more common and white collar jobs with higher wages have dramatically increased with the wide adoption of personal computers and the internet. At the same time, digital electronics have emerged as a much larger section of the economy, and they employ different skillsets in different regions. As all these forces both decrease the need for manufacturing labor in general and the desirability of the rust belt in particular, you have a snowball effect of fewer workers -> less skill in circulation -> less economy of scale of concentrating industry together -> less production in the rust belt -> fewer workers. Meanwhile, let's look at what's happening outside the US. Germany and Japan become major industrial powerhouses in the 70s and 80s, mostly specializing in very high value added manufacturing - cars, electronics, machine tools, etc. Growth in Japan stagnates in the 90s however, and Germany is far from a runaway success. The soviet union's collapse destroys the second most industrially powerful nation practically overnight. China obviously has been very successful since 1990 in industrializing, but their results don't actually match up with America's decline: America's trade balance suddenly starts plumetting in 1997 and bottoms out in 2006 before it starts recovering, and with the exception of 2008 and 2020 has since been stable while China's trade balance remains essentially constant until 2005 when it slowly but steadily starts increasing. Chinese steel production started a steep upward growth in 2002 and has since increased by about 4X whereas US steel production has been essentially constant since 1983. There is a sudden spike in manufacturing employment in china from 1989 to 1991, but nothing concurrent with the either the US manufacturing job losses in the 1999-2004 or the 2008-2010 periods. Now I won't argue that off-shoring has had no effect, but clearly the data is not consistent with jobs simply moving overseas.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
Lest anyone be dissuaded from reading the article by the above, I find it to be a rather accurate description of why the working class is disaffected towards both of the major US political parties.
ouid 6y ago
I literally could not disagree with you more. The article is both well written, which I can't give any evidence for except that I also read it, and states testable hypotheses, which are not opinions.

whatshisface 6y ago

The article isn't talking about highly skilled youths, it's talking about how the standards of living for more than 50% of the population are being cored out by people who disdain them. The author argues that the demographic realizes what's happening, and further points out that this could lead to some very serious trouble.

NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
Living standards for people doing lower-skilled manufacturing work are decreasing because that work is (in a whole lot of cases) not economic to do in the U.S. any more. That isn't anything to do with "coastal elites" or whoever you're referring to as the disdainful part of the population here. The causes are globalization and automation; and both of those look like utter inevitabilities at this point. Rather than making this into a culture war, perhaps we should be talking about policy alternatives that don't result in a trajectory of helplessness for those affected by those global, secular changes.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > causes are globalization and automation; and both of those look like utter inevitabilities at this point The gains from these trends are accruing to the educated and the urban. That’s a big part of the problem.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    And globalisation of US manufacturing was a political choice. Does nobody remember Ross Perot, who ran for President twice saying that NAFTA would doom the US manufacturing workers? There was some kind of assumption that as long as the West kept the jobs requiring education, everything would be fine. The results, somewhat predictably, were (amongst other things) Brexit and Trump.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > globalisation of US manufacturing was a political choice Not really. Fundamental economic costs are fundamental. Protectionism would have delayed the inevitable. Instead of a snap, we would have had a slow decline through loss of exports, fall in economies of scale and finally starvation of R&D funds. What was a political choice was abandoning those workers and communities. And pissing away trillions and a decade of political capital on a war.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        For my money, these things are almost always a political choice. Can you explain how the fundamental economic costs necessitated the globalisation of US manufacturing?
        whatshisface 6y ago
        It was cheaper to get stuff made overseas. If you see the economy as a perfect optimizer that can't be stopped, that necessitates it.
        bsanr2 6y ago
        Cheaper how, though? It does seem that a lot of the costs have been externalized or have gone otherwise unacknowledged. Factoring in the losses sustained by unrest, despair, missed opportunity, rent and interest, and so forth, I think you come to see a more accurate model than the "stocks go up" one that outputs a much rosier picture of America's economic wellbeing than is reality. At the very least, the War on Terror blows a $6 trillion hole in whatever the calculations are; a less anxious, more homogeneously affluent America might not have acted so rashly following 9/11, and might not have even conjured the political and economic global paradigm that gave rise to al Qaeda in the first place.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    No, I don't think so: the benefits are accruing to the entire U.S. population who get cheaper goods - the concentration of the downside is the problem.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - pbourke 6y ago
      It’s hardly a benefit if your goods are 20% cheaper but you no longer have a stable job to pay for them with.
      - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
        No, obviously not. But your small-town tax preparers in Iowa are benefiting, and they're hardly your urban, coastal elites.
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      I'm not convinced that lowering wages actually decreases price of goods enough to compensate for the lower wages - for that to happen, the money needs to cycle all the way through the economy and back to the workers without ever being "leaked". Depending on the entire economy to not break sounds like a way-too-large-scope solution. Things that could ruin the effect: 1. Any sort of natural monopoly 2. The "free market for senators" letting a corporation buy itself an un-natural monopoly through regulatory capture (either unnecessary regulation, or refusal to create necessary regulation) 3. Any sort of repeated irrationality in human nature that can be systematically exploited 4. Workers with lower wages purchasing less in the interim, resulting in fewer purchases and higher prices due to less economy of scale, resulting in fewer purchases and less economy of scale, etc etc 5. This probably overlaps with several of the above, but market distortions as a byproduct of initiatives to "create jobs", which is something everyone (as in both industrialists and working class) wants/needs to keep the economy afloat. IMO this is a result of people refusing to acknowledge that past a certain point, demand for wages is inflexible and will be paid, and if market mechanisms don't deliver then political forces will.
- coryrc 6y ago
  The "coastal elites" refuse to make their cities affordable for people to live in, so how are people supposed to move there to get better jobs?
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    It's not clear to me why you think I'm suggesting the answer is to have people move to coastal cities. That is almost certainly not the answer.
    - coryrc 6y ago
      Rural areas throughout the world are poor. Rural Indiana is not going to ever again have such a high relative standard of living at it did fifty years ago. Appalachian communities don't have anything highly productive to offer; resource extraction doesn't require much labor anymore. The jobs aren't coming back. If you don't want so many poor, we need to let them move to where the jobs are and will continue to be.
fatnoah 6y ago
I don't agree with everything in the article, but I do believe that the non-urban folks are feeling ignored. I think the results of the election highlight this very well. In the critical "mail-in" states, the difference in the Presidential election was made by the large urban populations. In the House and Senate, local preferences were more strongly favored. In the aftermath of the elections, all of the "land doesn't vote" posts serve to amplify the feeling of abandonment and disdain felt by the non-urban populations.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  >I think the results of the election highlight this very well. In the critical "mail-in" states, the difference in the Presidential election was made by the large urban populations. In the House and Senate, local preferences were more strongly favored. The part about the Senate doesn't make any sense to me: voting for the Senate works exactly the same way as voting for the Presidency in most states - it's a winner-take-all plurality vote on a statewide basis.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - fatnoah 6y ago
    >The part about the Senate doesn't make any sense to me: voting for the Senate works exactly the same way as voting for the Presidency in most states - it's a winner-take-all plurality vote on a statewide basis. Whoops, I wrote one thing while thinking the other. IIRC, the Democrats picked up a seat, which does seem to follow the statewide popular voting vs. regional voting. Good catch!
- bsanr2 6y ago
  I honestly think this is a case of equality appearing as persecution to those who've lived relatively blessed lives heretofore. For all the rigors of rural, small-town, w/e life, you don't see a mass exodus to the cities. Why not? Because, ultimately, they're getting what they want out of the deal: tight-knit communities, regulatory autonomy, and - the dirty little secret, which we must at least mention lest we make liars of ourselves - clear cultural (and even racial) hierarchy, if not homogeneity, among other things. But, of course, it's not sustainable in an accelerating information and service society. People are getting left behind and they don't like it (just not enough to move). Their desires matter, but not more than anyone else's. So we have to find the balance. No, you can't just do what your dad did. No, you don't, just by nature of being you (whatever that entails), deserve a stable, affluent, modern lifestyle in an inoffensive culture surrounded by people who look just like you - at least, not anymore than urban folk deserve what they want. If we're going to do this thing, it's not going to be make-work pork (that would be your given farming subsidies, federal contracts - including in highly-educated STEM work, and whatever other public-private partnerships that get cast as bootstraps when they're very much not) getting shipped out to your rugged individualist homestead, funding your technically-rigorous but otherwise anti-science and ahistorical curricula, $80k lifted trucks, and mall-scale megachurches, while everyone else has to scrimp and sacrifice and live on the margins. A true national solution will respect regional interests while, at its core, recognizing an equal right to whatever quality of life we deem workable and sustainable, and our collective interest in such. If the goal is a) rural folk get what they want, and b) fuck everyone else, it's not going to work. And what I've seen lately is city-dwellers switch from a patronizing to a hostile regard to these demands, so the decision on what to do is going to have to be made quickly, before the bottom falls out. Most of America's big cities could "secede" economically and be fine; after all, their reliance is on the trade of digital goods and intellectual services. Good luck to our landlocked states who sour their relationship to our ports of entry and exit.
colinmhayes 6y ago
Unskilled Americans had such high quality of life and economic opportunity because for 20 years after ww2 literally every manufactured good in the world was produced in America since every other country had their factories destroyed. Now that other countries produce their own goods unskilled Americans are not worth as much. It's no ones fault, certainly not the "coastal elites" who have continued to make unskilled Americans the wealthiest group of unskilled workers in the world.
- jjk166 6y ago
  This is a gross oversimplification. In 1920 it took 3 man hours to produce 1 ton of steel in the US. Today 1 man hour produces 300 tons in the US. Similar efficiency improvements have been seen across a wide range of manufacturing sectors. US manufacturing productivity has continued to grow along the same trend it was on throughout the 20th century, though wages sharply stagnated in the early 70s and employment started declining in the 90s. The US trade deficit was reasonably stable except for a sharp decline from 1997 to 2006. Exports as a percentage of GDP for the US have nearly tripled since 1970, in constant 2010 dollars they've 10X'ed in that period. Manufactured goods as a percentage of exports peaked in 1999, and in 2017 were the same as in 1963. Manufacturing value added adjusted for inflation plateaued in 2007. The world didn't simply stop buying american after they recovered from WW2, if anything they bought more. The global economy has evolved over the past 70 years, just as it had prior, but this does not on its own explain the plight of the American working class.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    Capital intensive manufacturing stays here longer, labor intensive leaves first as competition allows the goods to be much cheaper.
    - jjk166 6y ago
      Except that's not at all what we see. Big factories representing immense capital investment were shut down first, while smaller factories and job shops remained constant or even increased. Major manufacturing employers like the automotive industry (which is not just the cars themselves but the many vendors making parts) didn't move their operations overseas - but instead consolidated production. The goods that start being produced overseas during this time period (late 90s - early 00s) are primarily things like injection molded plastic which are not very labor intensive but are capital intensive. There were several changes that much better explain the decline of the rust belt than off-shoring. In the first part of this period (70s-80s) you have low cost air conditioning becoming widely available, meaning that manufacturers could move operations out of the relatively cold rust belt and into the sun belt where labor regulations were less strict and real estate generally cheaper. You have the mass entry of women into the workforce as two income households become the norm, increasing wage competition, along with the weakening of unions. Increasing fuel prices mean that transportation is a greater concern in factory placement while the relatively new interstate highway system means that factories can be located anywhere instead of just pre-existing water and rail hubs. As computer technology becomes readily available you have the proliferation of CNC manufacturing, PLC controls, and robotics which dramatically increase productivity. By the time you get to the 90s-00s, wages have been stagnant for 20 years while secondary education has become more common and white collar jobs with higher wages have dramatically increased with the wide adoption of personal computers and the internet. At the same time, digital electronics have emerged as a much larger section of the economy, and they employ different skillsets in different regions. As all these forces both decrease the need for manufacturing labor in general and the desirability of the rust belt in particular, you have a snowball effect of fewer workers -> less skill in circulation -> less economy of scale of concentrating industry together -> less production in the rust belt -> fewer workers. Meanwhile, let's look at what's happening outside the US. Germany and Japan become major industrial powerhouses in the 70s and 80s, mostly specializing in very high value added manufacturing - cars, electronics, machine tools, etc. Growth in Japan stagnates in the 90s however, and Germany is far from a runaway success. The soviet union's collapse destroys the second most industrially powerful nation practically overnight. China obviously has been very successful since 1990 in industrializing, but their results don't actually match up with America's decline: America's trade balance suddenly starts plumetting in 1997 and bottoms out in 2006 before it starts recovering, and with the exception of 2008 and 2020 has since been stable while China's trade balance remains essentially constant until 2005 when it slowly but steadily starts increasing. Chinese steel production started a steep upward growth in 2002 and has since increased by about 4X whereas US steel production has been essentially constant since 1983. There is a sudden spike in manufacturing employment in china from 1989 to 1991, but nothing concurrent with the either the US manufacturing job losses in the 1999-2004 or the 2008-2010 periods. Now I won't argue that off-shoring has had no effect, but clearly the data is not consistent with jobs simply moving overseas.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

Lest anyone be dissuaded from reading the article by the above, I find it to be a rather accurate description of why the working class is disaffected towards both of the major US political parties.

ouid 6y ago

I literally could not disagree with you more. The article is both well written, which I can't give any evidence for except that I also read it, and states testable hypotheses, which are not opinions.