Losing your job because it was outsourced is pretty objectively bad. You can go try to find another job in the same industry but all the competing companies are going to be looking at doing the same thing because they have to compete on margins and their competition just reduced their labor cost by a factor of 2 to 10.

I don't know what evidence for this would look like except for all the goods that are manufactured overseas that used to be manufactured domestically. I'm not making a statistical argument. I'm making an argument based on life experience and inference. Although life expectancy in the US is declining. Wages are stagnant but that's an aggregate over the population. If a 30-year-old worker loses their job and an 18-year-old worker gets hired in a different industry for the same "real wage" then that looks like no change from the perspective of population statistics.

Yes, but that’s talking to the original point I thought you were attempting to refute. I think there’s a lot of case to be made that globalization is a net negative for US workers, but the point being made was that it may also be a net positive for non-US workers. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed your comments about exporting pollution etc. was that it was a net negative in the non-US as well

I think its bad for Earthlings because it pollutes the planet and its bad for the people who lost their jobs because they can maybe afford to replace their consumer goods with crap made overseas but not save for retirement and its bad for the people overseas because they work in factories with no labor protections to make stuff for people in other countries that they cannot themselves afford. I think the whole thing is bad but inevitable.

It makes their lives worse because it puts the workers in competition with workers in those other countries.

Since you asked for metrics, here is a site for working remotely as a freelancer [1]. You'll quickly notice the pay rates are abysmal. $7/hr for a three.js developer. $250 (or lower, possibly as low s $30) to make a fully functional & tested app on android+iphone (would normally take an entire dev team probably well over 1 or 2 weeks).

These are rates below minimum wage for highly technical skills.

This is even more true for hardware too but it's hard to quantify, because e.g. you can't just compare the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Shenzhen with the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Cleveland, because Cleveland doesn't manufacture capacitors.

However, I do have some data (though it's not the most sophisticatedly obtained). Sticking with capacitors as a benchmark, I was expecting there to be 0 US companies manufacturing capacitors, but apparently there are 7 [2]. In contrast, there are apparently 228 Chinese companies manufacturing capacitors [3].

All of this is just to say it's pretty clear that globalization has moved these jobs overseas (and significantly dropped the market rate for those who remain local).

[1] https://www.freelancer.com/jobs/ [2] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_united_states.htm... [3] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_china.html

I agree with this but think it misses the actual point. To paraphrase a popular pundit, “People need to realize that things that are bad for the US may not be bad for the world.”

To clarify the point, the US largely rode a post-WW2 manufacturing boom for a couple generations where the relative quality of life for US citizens disproportionately outpaced other countries. Globalization has started to erase that disparity. So while it’s bad for the US middle and working classes it’s largely benefited pulling people out of poverty for other nations, exemplified by China. The irony is that much of this is driven by the US’s addiction to cheap shit.

I’m only saying the above because I think people are confusing the discussion, not because I think that it’s the best long term strategy

Ah, gotcha. Then I did miss the point.

I do think it's benefited other nations, but -- getting more into personal opinion -- I also think the "help other nations" argument is mostly used to justify cheapening wages. If companies were paying foreign workers the same rates that they would have paid US workers I'd be more empathetic to the argument. But something about the fact that the top 90th percentile of Americans has seen huge gains in the last 40 years, while the middle to bottom percentile has seen neutral or losses [1] raises flags to me that the push towards globalization was selfishly motivated. I know it's a huge inference to say the stagnating wages are caused by globalization, but realistically I would say it's the combination of outsourced labor/manufacturing, immigration, rise of women in the workforce, rise of minorities in the workforce, and automation. Most of these are positive changes, but I still think the average blue collar worker suffered a cost that the hyper-wealthy elite did not, so at the moment I don't see the push for globalization as a very selfless initiative.

[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf

Yes, 100%. I don’t think it was an altruistic motive on either side. The US was acting on behalf of the monied interests and counties like China were acting to become a more dominant economy on the world stage. The fact that it lifted so many out of poverty was a by-product. What I think will be interesting is how China handles a burgeoning middle class that may want a more freedoms as their numbers grow

Agreed, very interested to see how this plays out as well.