"It's sort of like saying that if we want to avoid global extinction we need to acquire space travel and populate distance worlds. Not knowing how to get to space, let alone travel to distance worlds, doesn't change the logic. The alternative is that we accept extinction."
My point, and the point of the economics article, is that this is not the case. We created this situation by shipping jobs over seas and enacting NAFTA/pushing for trade with China. Economic policies as well as other measures can protect and mitigate the devastating effects of offshoring all jobs. As the world becomes more connected wages will converge to an equilibrium, so the point of non free trade is to stop the equilibrium. If you don't, the USA becomes something like a third world country. It's that simple.
The decrease in US wages is offset by the decrease in prices (due to the increased efficiency of the whole global and local economy).
The problem is that individual workers are not strongly incentivized to relocate, retrain, rethink their life.
Just look at Appalachia. There are still villages/towns where people sit around on welfare and do basically nothing plus moan about how that particular mine has run out. This has been going on forever. Humans are not that strategic masterminds when it comes to planning for the future. See also how paradigm shifts coincide with a new group rising in power because the old guard is too wedded to their ideology.
It's sort of like saying that if we want to avoid global extinction we need to acquire space travel and populate distance worlds. Not knowing how to get to space, let alone travel to distance worlds, doesn't change the logic. The alternative is that we accept extinction.
We're exceedingly myopic about what strategies like re-education imply. We associate it with a small number of particular programs and are quick to conclude they're ineffective. But re-education can mean many things, things we haven't even explored yet. We could look to German countries with a stronger history of apprenticeships and union labor programs, though that only scratches the surface. And maybe it does require incentivizing or even mandating age-based affirmative action. And maybe re-education (and education policy more generally) will ultimately prove to be relatively limited and constitute only a small part of a larger constellation of strategies. The point is that we have to stop pushing back and earnestly move forward.
There's simply no choice in the matter; we have to be open-minded. Unless we're comfortable continuing to roll the dice to see how many more generations the United States can go fecklessly chasing fantasies. What someone like Trump and the cast of opportunists across the spectrum he has ushered in have shown is that we're not immune to the political pathologies that have afflicted so many other countries in the Americas and around the world.