I want to see a world where there aren't poor countries and rich countries, but rather a global economy where someone born in (e.g.) Africa has opportunity and education similar to someone born in the US. Once this is accomplished (and the challenges in front of us for doing so are enormous!), outsourced jobs won't be a problem.
Rather than being opposed to trade and globalization (which are, frankly, unstoppable) we should be focused on mitigating losses for those affected. Erecting barriers to trade will only make US industry uncompetitive, our economy smaller, and those same workers, ultimately, worse off.
They aren't. But the primary concern of U.S. government policy should be the well-being of U.S. citizens. Otherwise why have a country?
In the same vein: citizens of other countries are just as entitled to health care as U.S. citizens. That doesn't mean the U.S. government should expand Medicaid/Medicare to non-citizens.
Or, alternatively, they have a right-sized vision of what the size of their stewardship is. While I certainly think a state as powerful as the US should consider the impacts of its actions elsewhere carefully, and even act benevolently outside its borders where it can, on principle the idea that societies focus on managing general welfare within seems like a pretty good one.
> I want to see a world where there aren't poor countries and rich countries, but rather a global economy where someone born in (e.g.) Africa has opportunity and education similar to someone born in the US.
I'm interested in that too. Whether barrier-free global-focus trade is the way doesn't seem to me to be a settled question.
https://books.google.com/books?id=xEmKBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA192&lpg=...
> Rather than being opposed to trade and globalization
Almost nobody is "opposed to trade." Some people may be in favor limits on trade (if you don't believe that there should be assassination markets, you're one of them). Similarly, when it comes to globalization, few people want to make any border entirely non-porous (except as a weapon, as the US has with Cuba), but there's arguments such as Schweitzer's that are compelling.
> (which are, frankly, unstoppable)
It's certainly not possible to absolutely ban any activity humans might want to engage in for any reason. It's entirely possible to discourage many things substantially enough that the scope/frequency becomes limited.
> we should be focused on mitigating losses for those affected.
This is a grand idea.
> Erecting barriers to trade will only make US industry uncompetitive, our economy smaller, and those same workers, ultimately, worse off.
Any barrier? Or just some?
There are things you can only do in the presence of inequality because inequality is necessary for specialization. If we require everyone in the world to have the same education then it averages out to something less than a high school education, which means we have no scientists or engineers or doctors.
Once you allow specialization it becomes advantageous to have geographic concentrations. This happens naturally -- Silicon Valley (computers), Detroit (cars), New York (finance), etc.
Exporting jobs increases inefficiency. People working on the same projects have to contend with timezone differences, people waste more time traveling, it's harder for the engineers to talk to the factory workers, etc.
The thing that makes more sense is to give US citizenship to promising engineers in other countries and let them move here, and let other countries specialize in other things (like agriculture or mining).
Your comment gives an extremely weak argument in favor of regulation - paraphrased, it seems like you're saying "companies are stupid and don't know how to make money, so we should regulate them to force them to be more profitable". It's hard to say that sentence with a straight face :-)
Plenty of folks who think competition is the best and that competition brings out the best in everything still believe that you still have to first organize markets and make sure they are competitive, i.e. It is not the natural state of things in each and every realm of life. We do not force companies to be profitable, we force them to play by a set of rules that we agree allows society to extract the most value from the companies rather than the other way around.
Not if China manipulates currency to overcome the effect.
If they get to the point where they can start designing things there then they have the advantage.
What America should be doing is highly promoting domestic automated manufacturing. Even if it created exactly zero manufacturing jobs, having the factory here would provide a local advantage. Local mills would have a cost advantage because the materials wouldn't have to be shipped halfway across the world and back. Product designers could actually see how their products are being made and improve the process without international air travel, etc.
What if USA has more comparative advantage in agriculture and mineral resource extraction than in the industries you favor? Everywhere I go in Asia, restaurants brag about beef from USA, and many commodities are exported. Saudi is more concerned about frackers on the Great Plains than about the state oil ministries of Russia or Venezuela, which is why they crashed the petro market last year rather than e.g. five years ago.
If you imagine everyone in the world has a "quality of life" score and this is distributed normally, then outsourcing jobs tends to help people in the bottom quartile, at the expense of people in the second quartile.
It is like pinching up a little bit of the probability mass living way out in the left tail, and folding it over into the second quartile region. Some of the people in the second quartile have to be displaced (in an ordinal sense) to the left, thus losing status.
We'd like to pretend like material well-being of, say, impoverished third-worlders, matters more than social pecking order status of poor-but-mostly-OK first worlders. Would you like to go first? Would you like to ensure your children have no access to decent education or a college with a social network that could raise their social status? Yeah, sure, you'll have acceptable food and someone will throw you some afterthough scraps in terms of feigned medical care. You'll have a middling life, mostly unpleasant, lots of mental health issues and lots of risk to you and your family of getting caught up in substance abuse or drugs, but you'll live into your 60s or 70s before you die.
Status really impacts health. Status affects your attitude about your own health, your willingness and access to seek help. It's not solely about material resource.
So I certainly sympathize. Why aren't we extracting wealth from the top quartile as a means for delivering aid to third world workers? Why instead are we extracting wealth from the second quartile to pay for the first quartile?
In this sense, your comment comes off as a little bit naive and insensitive. I'm sure down to brass tacks that people living in the second quartile understand what you are saying and feel compassion for people who have it even worse.
But how can you ask them to lay down and agree to be the lowest status group willingly? Yes, please outsource my already-degrading-and-menial job, reducing me into the bottom quartile of a slightly right-translated distribution. We're all slightly better off in absolute material terms, but now I'm worse off in relative status terms (which really, physically, affects my health and opportunity).
It's ... complicated.
Did you read my comment? I said they are in the second quartile, and they foot the bill for a lot of the ways that wealth improvement reaches people in the first quartile.
Although, across the part of the country where I am from, Appalachia, there actually are people in the bottom quartile, especially after you take addiction-related QALY metrics into account. I'd argue your knee-jerk "just cause they are inside America's borders means they don't have it comparably bad" attitude, which sounds like you're just regurgitating some Giving What We Can blog post or something, is more of the small view.
> You also see this as a zero-sum game: a process of extracting wealth from someone and handing it to someone else. Trade increases the overall amount of wealth.
You really did not read my comment. I said that we translate the whole distribution to the right (that is the part about making everyone materially better off) but by doing so we shuffle some people from the second quartile into the first quartile, or at least shuffle them to lowered status within the second quartile.
In terms of ordinal status, it is, by definition, a zero-sum game. If, no matter how much total wealth there is, the thing people care about is where they rank in wealth, then it is zero sum. You can't manufacture more ranks. And, the evidence (which you don't seem interested in) really does suggest that it is the rank that people care about (especially when you are ranked second-to-last), even if preserving your rank means denying yourself better overall conditions from a material point of view.
People might be willing to accept a lessened station in life if the offsetting overall increases in wealth that they get to see are significant in their lives. The fact that at least 50% of the population is more concerned with rank than with overall well-being is, for me, a shameful indictment of how little we actually use societal wealth to improve impoverished lives to any degree, let alone a degree that would justify setting aside primal Last Place Aversion.
Disclaimer: I am very, very far from the top 25%!
"The top 5% paid 57% ..." makes it sound like they are doing more than their fair share, but that's a gross mistake. It doesn't matter what the raw percentage is without also looking at how much of the income the op 5% took. If they take 99% of the total income, but only pay 57% of the tax revenue, it still amounts to a deep unfairness. (I'm not saying that tax revenue paid has to be 1:1 with income, only that taking 99% income while paying for 57% of the tax revenue is deeply unfair in favor of that wealthy 5%).
Then get rid of nation states, allow complete freedom of movement, eliminate all the world's militaries, and use the money saved to improve living and working conditions for everyone on the planet.
>There is no force more powerful for improving the quality of life and well-being of _billions_ of people than economic development
And no force more likely to destroy quality of life and well-being of everyone than predatory nationalist capitalism.
You can't have this one both ways.
Oh - and the US economy is already incredibly uncompetitive, with vast surplus capacity. Why is moving that capacity to China and India better than using the full economic capacities of both China, India, and the US?
Many of my friends look at me as if I just lost my mind - "but, but... low interest rates are good for everybody, right?".
It is an uphill battle, but I keep at it :-)
My impression is that mortgage rates tend to track the 10 year bond rate, given most people refi/sell before then. These and long term rates have been on a multi-decade decline. I'm not sure how much influence recent policy has had.
As far as 'offshoring' -- I can't afford to pay onshore engineers $200+ and hour by hiring a consultancy for a short term project. So that project would never happen. With offshoring, I can afford to pay to get the project built. Once the project is built and actually generating revenue, then I can afford to hire onshore employees for the long term.
Don't be so quick to dismiss offshoring as a 'job killer' because there's a good chance that if it couldn't be done cheaply, it just wouldn't be done at all. Those things that are built by offshore teams-- those are going to result in dozens of eventual salespeople, marketing people as well as money for infrastructure and future development. All the the goes to zero if I can't use a lower cost offshore team at the outset. Most of us building software products don't have the luxury of a VC cousin in the incestuous circle jerk that is Silicon Valley venture capital. Some of us build companies using money we saved.
That concept certainly pisses off the Bernie and Trump voters who think labor protectionism is a good thing, but we don't live in the 1950s where creating a business involved having a factory and 'workers.' Creating a business should be easy and do By things like restricting offshoring is pretty close to the $15 minimum wage in sheer economic stupidity. If I can't offshore, then I will just do nothing. That capital just sits on the sidelines when it could be actually creating wealth. People seem to think jobs are created by huge companies with million dollar CEOs. That isn't the case. It's the small business owner that does most of the job creating -- not the big companies and not the government. It's the man or woman that puts their capital at risk to try to build something. We should be making that process easier. Start fast, fail fast. Yet when people talk about eliminating outsourcing and offshoring, they really don't think about that. They see business as some 'Dr. Evil' entity. The see the economy like fatalist Marxists: finite classes of workers and "the rich." The 'rich' are only looking to exploit people and keep then oppressed. That's bullshit 19th century thinking.
We need to make offshoring even easier! That will spur economic growth.
What a lot of people do not understand, is that when demand for an asset goes down, prices come down and adjust to market (although in real-estate, the process takes a bit longer).
The best way to promote home ownership is to make sure people can get decent paying jobs. Promote economic growth and stop outsourcing jobs.