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0 pointsPKop4y ago0 comments

Look at the working age male labor force participation rate. We have plenty of unemployed, and underemployed workers, especially in specific geographic regions that have proportionally suffered the most through globalization and exporting of domestic production. These places have steadily lost population. Meanwhile, more people have crowded into a subset of metros in US chasing the remaining jobs leading to real estate costs outstripping any potential wage benefit.

>costs to shoot up.

So what? Henry Ford knew you could pay your workers more and they'd have more money to spend. The losers here will be multi-national corporations and wall st. who won't maximize profits by minimizing wages. My local area has lost many people in the last few decades. The people without good paying jobs don't have the income to benefit from supposed cost savings of cheap imports. If more people, and businesses, see increased production, complimentary business and economic gains will be seen in entire regions who have lost out from globalization.

Here's a good article covering the many ways regional economic loss occurs from globalized free trade where domestic production declines, through the lens of German and Chinese economies[0]

Here is quoted Chinese economic scholars describing the CCP policy of rejecting the American economic decline from loss of domestic production, in favor of embracing a German style industrial economy[1]

[0] "The Germany Shock: The largest economy nobody understands"

https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-germany-shock-the-...

[1a] "We have abandoned the American path for the German path."

https://twitter.com/ruima/status/1420109129847214084

[1b] https://twitter.com/ruima/status/1420060835313971200

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2 comments · 1 top-level

simonh4y ago· 1 in thread

The reason the ancestors of these people went to many of these places was to find jobs. Now those industries are dying out either we can start subsidising those jobs with more and more taxes from everyone else, we can take deductions from your wages to pay them to stay where they are, or those people can do what their ancestors did.

Not every country, or every region within a country, has to have the same economy. The Chinese economy is maturing, the global economy has absorbed hundreds of millions of Chinese workers into it's economy over the last few decades. That created huge opportunities, globally, and also caused some reorganisation. It has not been costless. Nevertheless it's happened and wages in china have risen to the point that manufacturers are expanding elsewhere but there isn't another China for the global economy to absorb in the short to medium term. The US economy is doing fine and is well placed to succeed. Throwing that away on massively costly protectionist navel gazing is not going to help.

PKopOP4y ago

The existence of a giant $600+ Billion trade deficit, and supply chain breakdown, all of it built atop underpaying labor that facilitates this supply chain domestically (truckers etc getting paid terrible wages), illustrates that there are "jobs" to be done, to supply this consumption which we do not produce. Meaning it is a collapsing Rube-goldbergian system that shifts demand for workers out of the country, at a diminishing return and increasing cost..economic, political and social.

>navel gazing

You just mean to say it is not in your interest or the costs don't affect you, or you don't care, or you benefit and enjoy the effects of the last few decades of globalization.

That's fine, but it does affect me, my region my state and my interests. We will hash it out in the arena of politics. See: male labor force decline, record opiate death spike especially per-capita in rust belt regions, declining birth rates, declining life expectancy, declining home-ownership, stagnant real wages, increased inequality, and regional economic inequality and population growth (decline) rates.

>is doing fine

This is particular to which region and industry. Ultimately, for the people living in certain places, they have a different opinions and different interests, because "we live here, not there". US is massive, it is not true that all of it benefits the same from the same economic policies. Just as in your example of "the world". Just as I as an American shouldn't feel placated by policy that over the last few decades increased abstract aggregate measures of "global wealth" or "global growth/GDP", so to I am not comforted as a citizen in a rust-belt state to know that the overall, or particular states in the US like and benefit from globalism and outsourcing.

This is politics, and it all comes down to group interests, it's not complicated. We had the best domestic manufacturing economy in the world, and to use your terminology, we "threw that away" on costly financialization and outsourcing to juice capital inflows into wall street and create a giant debt and consumption economy, bailed out by China debt buying and growth as well as various tech booms/bubbles to keep the machine going, that particular regions in US benefited massively from but not all. I guess it is all subjective.

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