A lot of the people who frequent this site are against the TPP because of its copyright and intellectual property provisions.
Globalism may indeed be good for 3rd world countries, as their wages and the wages of 1st world countries will tend to converge. This is obviously not good for 1st world workers, who still have 1st world house payments, taxes, etc.
An argument could be made that the 3rd world countries also suffer, as they end up being dictated to by the much stronger 1st world countries, and give up much of their sovereignty. 1st world countries also give up some sovereignty, which doesn't sit well with the general populous, as the beneficiaries of that loss of sovereignty are the multinational corporations, not the man on the street.
[EDIT:] I'm surprised the DNC downvoted this, since McAuliffe is yet another plausible person to blame while diverting attention from their terrible and misguided primary-fixing.
Because globalism is not going anywhere. Trump can't isolate the US without dramatic, negative consequences. Trade war with the China ? Economists predict a worldwide recession. Tariffs on Mexico to pay for the wall ? Good luck to US agriculture.
Edit: Only ~50% of eligible voters voted. Half of those voted for the winner. That's only 25% that actively voted in support of the winner.
There are so many combinations and possibilities that it's hard to say which one is the best.
And all them can be gamed.
You can have more than two candidates without more powerful parties.
Proportional representation leads to parties, something like range voting can keep the primacy of candidates, but lets us escape from the two party system.
Proportional representation in the House of Representatives is possible without increasing party power (or even without parties at all) by using Single Transferable Vote.
Instant Runoff Voting (the single-winner variant of Single Transferable Vote) for presidential (and gubernatorial) elections would help to protect against excessive party power by allowing third party and non-party candidates a fair chance.
Instant Runoff Voting is really only suitable for single winner elections like presidential, gubernatorial and mayoral elections, and not for the multi-winner legislative elections it is used for in Australia.
There are better forms of STV than that used for the Australian Senate, but I'd take any form of STV over FPTP.
Approval Voting or Range Voting are much simpler to explain and to execute, and they have much better properties. (And, yes, I can well believe that the Australian system can be improved up on, and doesn't present the best version of STV. There's lots wrong with Australia, so this aspect probably too. Eg, their STV system requires a valid ballot to rank all parties, making sure that every vote cast will eventually be counted for one of the major parties. The guy who came up with a hack to avoid having to choose a major party got jailed for promoting it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote)
Range Voting is literally the same procedure people know from figure skating competitions in the olympics: the judges (=voters) give the candidates numbers, candidate with the highest average wins.
Approval voting can be explained as: just like FPTP, but ticking multiple candidates (eg everybody but Trump or Hillary) doesn't void your ballot. (Or you can see it as a special case of Range Voting, that only allows the numbers 0 and 1. Approval voting was my favourite system to elect a single winner, until I learned about Range Voting.)
The range voting guys wrote about STV, too, see http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html
I'd be happy to see STV, RRV or both used more widely.
I'll look into it, thanks.
My note was about single-winner systems.
Yes, lots of potential voters don't vote. They made that choice. It's not a new choice. This election is not much different from any other. We'd surely argue that Obama or Reagan had mandates, but they also didn't clear 50% of eligible voters. Indeed, even in Reagan's "landslide" 1980 election, he won only 50.7% of the popular vote, and only 52.6% of voters turned out - numbers not radically different from this time around - 47.2% of the popular vote where 56.9% of voters turned out.
Renewables and natural gas will decimate coal in the coming years. And low end product manufacturing won't be able to compete with the cheaper labour and supply chain superiority of other countries.
US manufacturing if it survives at all will be high end, highly skilled work. And the US is woeful when it comes to investing in technical training.
I was explaining why Clinton lost the election. Someone needs to solve the Rust Belt problem. I have no idea if Trump has a plan but he did not ignore the people in those states so they voted for him.
You don't win votes by telling people their jobs aren't coming back.
I think you can, if you present them with alternatives that make sense. Coming up with such alternatives requires a lot of planning and creative thinking through, which Hillary thought not worth it because polls showed her ahead in those states...
Trump won it. By lying to those people that he will bring their jobs back.
Consider the Obama tire tariffs. Tire manufacturing is up in the US, we created some jobs, but overall we all collectively pay way more in tires.
We all collectively paid $1.1 billion dollars to give up to 1200 people a job in the tire industry.
The person who runs our country depends on those votes. It's really important that people are not forgotten. If Trump makes even a little progress with jobs, he'll be a two term president.
The problem is not globalisation or change, its the idea and related political deception that somehow if there are protectionist barriers the emergence of new suppliers, products, new skills, new ideas will go away.
This is but one of several of similar distorted perceptions of reality that underpins the faulted democratic systems. If Society and government should facilitate something it's increased adaptability and acceptance for change, rather than selling the fraud that they can take it away.
It doesn't matter if those particular jobs aren't coming back, this is something that people do not get.
Guess which region of the country both the republics and democrats will be catering too for the next 4 to 8 years?
Exactly. They got what they wanted, which is to be listened to.
Stop putting this down as them simply being yokels who don't know any better.
Globalization clearly hurts manufacturing in america, but it helps some of our export industries.
It's not entirely zero-sum, but looking at the stock market these past few days (decrease in tech, increase in manufacturing banking and energy) implies that we've picked some new favorite industries.
Personally I don't think government should aim to handout success to those who vote for them, but democracy seems to encourage that. I think ideally the people who work hardest should reap the most success. Reality of course isn't fair, so the government is there to even the playing field.
There's no total fixed sum of `goodness' to go around in the economy.
Obama is smartly trying to move the country closer to Asia because he sees that is where the growth is. Growth in Europe is anemic and doesn't seem to be getting better anytime soon, so why not align your country with the region that is growing and seems to be looking to the future? Plus we already do a lot of business with Asia, so why not improve relations through better trade deals?
That is not free trade.
When it comes to TPP in particular, I am radically opposed to their proposed IP laws. EFF has a short write up on how TPP undermines with digital IP: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
Most importantly, it's not a "free trade deal". It's just a "trade deal". Australia's trade deals in the past with the US have done things like removed tariffs for all US goods coming here, but not removed tariffs the other way around. We're definitely the little brother in this relationship.
> Globalisation is happening regardless of whether people want it or not.
Why? Globalization is a product of human behavior and human choices. Neither sunspots, cosmic rays, hurricanes, or earthquakes make globalization happen. It seems absurd, to me, to pretend that globalization is this Force beyond our control, that we just have to adapt or die.
That isn't so. Globalization has gone on in the world because we, including and especially the United States of America, made it happen. The governing and business elite has chosen time and again to pursue globalization policies because it seemed like the right thing to do economically and often because it benefited them.
We can choose to enact different policies and go in a different direction any time we want, and even pro-free trade economists like Krugman concede that the consequences will not be particularly dire (see his Brexit commentary.)
To be an isolationist is significantly more difficult because you have to do everything yourself. The bigger you are territorial and population wise (note Russia's problem here), the easier it is. But if you are smaller you just don't have access to all the resources and labor that you need to advance. Unless your goal is to stagnate, but I don't think that is in our nature.
Actually the advantage of expansion through economics, as opposed to territory, is that you don't have to rule. Now there are trade agreements that are made, but those are much easier to renegotiate (brexit) than law of the land. Let them hash it out. Territorial expansion has the problem that your population becomes more diverse and a different set of cultures wants to abide by different laws. The purpose of territorial expansion is to gain more power and wealth. But it also generally leads to wars being waged. Now this happens with economics too, but not to the same degree. It is just much simpler to just trade.
There's a lot that goes into this and I'm not going to write a book in a HN post. But I do think that if another country was in power they would be doing the expansion, in place of America. That it is a natural progression if you look over a long period of history. Starting from just taking what we want to developing allies and trade routes. Globalization really is just a natural progression of what we've been doing for thousands of years.
Jamacia is a good example[1].
It's good for "some" people. There also has to be a level playing field, some of the "players" have been caught cheating (currency manipulation for example - excellent analysis here http://www.epi.org/publication/trans-pacific-partnership-cur...), some (like Japanese automotive "politics") are openly hostile without any repercussions.
The US is very much going the way of the UK. Slowly but surely moving towards irrelevancy.
Who is it good for and how?
* Cheaper products for everyone
* Competition drives innovation
* Lower risk of large-scale wars
* Ship high-pollution industries overseas
* Improved price stability
In practice, it falls apart because...
- US has a poor social safety net. Low-income workers often end up jobless or in even lower skilled jobs
- Globalism builds bigger corporations, which actively suppress competition
- Big direct wars are replaced with constantly simmering proxy wars
- We can't control environmental degradation in other countries
Enough aggregate demand and a flexible labour market lead to low unemployment. (And on the flip side, a shortfall of aggregate demand can lead to recession and high unemployment.)
Central banks can with their fiat currencies these days can always print enough money (eg quantitative easing) to prop up aggregate demand, if they choose so.
EDIT: I'm amazed to see all other comments so far are anti-trade.