W in WTO stands for the World. It does not say anything about the US.

I mean, neither do any of the words in 'NATO' but the alliance has been immensely beneficial for the US.

I suspect it has been way more beneficial to Europe than the US. The US could already defend itself, the smaller countries in Europe not as much.

I mean if the US can keep the front lines of the hypothetical Warsaw Pact vs NATO fight in Europe it's really good the US since they won't get bombed.

A lot of American Exceptionalism comes from the fact that EU got absolutely destroyed by world wars while the US got to keep chugging along.

No. NATO is a terrorist organisation that bombed an European country just to show it could do or unpunished.

Reagan launched the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations that led to the creation of the WTO, which itself resulted from the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (pre-cursor to WTO) that were established after WWII. The US had been on that trajectory for a long time before Bill Clinton put it into overdrive!

Reagan also laid out the vision for NAFTA and signed the Canada-US FTA in 1988

I think it is important to separate free trade agreements between highly developed nations and under developed nations. For example, when NAFTA was enacted, Canada was already very rich (like the US), but Mexico was much poorer than both. It was pure labour arbitrage on both parts.

Yeah, so many people don't read history and realize all this WTO and Globalization the US population hates, was created by the US, on purpose.

Why the downvotes? The US totally was the driving force around creating and growing globalization. How is this not known to be true, its history at this point.

I think your comment would be received better if you rewrote it without the part about ‘so many people don’t read history’. For what it’s worth, I upvoted that comment before reading the one I am responding to.

This community can be picky about tone and phrasing (which I believe keeps things mostly civil), don’t take the downvotes personally. Some users may have felt the ‘not reading history’ part was targeted at them, even though you were speaking generally.

Thank You. Yes, No need for me to be pre-emptively snarky.

No problem, you’re welcome :) I’ve made the same mistake and it was dang who told me to calm down, so I understand.

It’s because Americans generally do know this. All the things coming to a head now were brought up as concerns back then. The position of the average America, the entire time deindustrialization was happening, was that Americans were being sold out by the wealthiest class and they were told economics isn’t zero sum as a rebuff.

Boomers saying: "I don't want my kid to go to machineshop in HS, he'll turn out to be a plumber" is what did it too.

Building things has been looked down upon for 40 years because boomers thought it was a step backwards since their parents worked on the assembly line.

> Building things has been looked down upon for 40 years because boomers thought it was a step backwards since their parents worked on the assembly line.

No, it was looked down upon because the pay to quality of life ratio was much better in white collar careers. It probably still is for the most part. Wake me up when the same people are deciding between becoming plumbers or electricians rather than lawyers or doctors or engineers.

Well then wake up because most of those parents didn't send their kids to school for those careers.

But that was the goal. If they didn’t make it to the doctor/lawyer/engineer/financier level, then middle management or consultant or whatever other desk job would have to do.

Either way, a Mon to Fri 8 to 5 salaried gig with benefits requiring little travel and no health risks was a comparably better goal to aim for due to the lack of sufficient price premium for the non desk job labor.

"We'll just design things and have people elsewhere do the building" is one of the dumbest ideas. How do you think you learn how to build things without building things? Who's going to build the next big thing? Oy!

A great litmus test to see if an educational administrator is knowledgeable on STEM is to see if they regard woodshop/metalshop/autoshop as purely "vocational".

Bare in mind, vocational still means "not college bound" == "useless" == "doesn't look good in the US news rankings"

Ive talked to superintendents and they just give me a blank stare when I told them that a great way to get kids to understand the cartesian coordinate system is in machine or woodshop, reading a blueprint, schematic etc. Actually doing the work is better than a word problem. They have no respect for it and this is in the best educated state in the US with supposedly the best school system.

Bottom line, if we are going to build things again, it needs to start in the schools.

I'd argue this attitude is sexist. Boys tend to learn best with hands on instruction[0], like woodshop, and as we see girls are outnumbering boys in college and the trend is increasing. Instead of including activities and topics that engage boys, we push boys into special education classes and feed them drugs to punish them for not being more like the girls.

[0]https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/how-boys-learning-styles-di...

Learning the cartesian coordinate system from shopwork may work for some but my experience is the majority of tradespeople, even very skilled ones dislike STEM and academic subjects and see their trade as a body of facts and hands on skills not something systematic from which to learn abstract mathematical principles. The few who can are well equipped to be actual engineers.

Sounds like a crappy change, because when I was in 8th grade in MA they literally had us take a class learning to use a blueprinting desk and the Cartesian coordinate system.

> NAFTA + China-WTO accession really did not help American manufacturing.

American manufacturing was declining way before NAFTA or China. The anti-japanese/asian period of 70s and 80s existed for a reason. The way we are attacking china today is how we attacked japan in the 80s. The only difference is that china isn't going to back down like japan did. Far easier to bully a nation that you militarily occupy.

The trend isn't going to change. Manufacturing will go to ASEAN and India next. All the propaganda about "factories in the US" exist to distract from that reality.