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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 m

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.
      - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        > It does seem that a lot of the costs have been externalized or have gone otherwise unacknowledged Probably. But if you’re selling a dishwasher to someone in Poland or Peru at 5x your competitor, you’re going to lose market share.
        disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Yeah, but that cost differential was dependent on a political choice to allow imports from poorer countries. There's no law of the universe that required this to be so. To a large extent, it's the removal of capital controls and the signing of trade agreements that facilitated this, and those were 100% political choices.

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.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > It does seem that a lot of the costs have been externalized or have gone otherwise unacknowledged Probably. But if you’re selling a dishwasher to someone in Poland or Peru at 5x your competitor, you’re going to lose market share.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Yeah, but that cost differential was dependent on a political choice to allow imports from poorer countries. There's no law of the universe that required this to be so. To a large extent, it's the removal of capital controls and the signing of trade agreements that facilitated this, and those were 100% political choices.