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Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu

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Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#101

Post by Mikeb85 »

rubicon33 wrote: post #63
Mikeb85 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you were lucky (to be smart enough) to out-compete your peers and a bunch of Americans. By definition not everyone can achieve this success (as it's based on competition), so it does nothing to alleviate inequality on a scale that matters.

At what point do we reward human accomplishment instead of throwing it all away to "luck"? I hear this all too often nowadays that any kind of success can always be attributed to luck and therefor you have a moral obligation to those less "lucky" than you. Don't get me wrong - I agree with the moral obligation to help those less lucky than you. I don't always agree with the looseness in which the word "luck" is appli…

> It discounts his hard work to say it all came down to lucky brain genetics.

How many people work hard their entire life only to not be rewarded? It's not like everyone who doesn't see success is lazy or doesn't work hard. Labourers work hard, tradesmen work hard, and yes, programmers work hard too.

I live in Alberta right now, which is in the midst of an economic recession/depression. In my city unemployment is at 10%, despite being probably the youngest, most educated city in the country. All of my peers have degrees (or better), and most don't have jobs in their fields. All have worked hard, all still work hard, most are underemployed.

> At what point do we reward human accomplishment instead of throwing it all away to "luck"? I hear this all too often nowadays that any kind of success can always be attributed to luck and therefor you have a moral obligation to those less "lucky" than you.

I personally hate the idea of a moral obligation to do anything. Shaming people into certain behaviours is shitty.

But we do live in a society amongst other people. Poverty begets crime and social unrest, and it's not in anyone's interest for this to happen. So we attempt to construct the best society we can for all our benefit. Having a highly-stratified society, even if we feel it's 'fair', isn't a good thing.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#102

Post by geodel »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #50
pillowkusis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taleb addresses this too. Of course somebody DID predict it. I don't know if that means the event is, in general, "predictable." If you put 1 million people in a room and told them to randomly guess what events would occur next, someone would predict correctly. The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to…

> The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to that question. Not everyone is an expert in all fields. This is the domain of economists, sociologists and political scientists. Certainly many of them did predict this, there's a ton of data to support their theories and predictions. The problem is that if yo…

> The truth is that it's the media and political class who let us all down, by ignoring the experts and working class.

I'd say they listened to experts who are ideologically like them e.g ivy league elites, the ones mostly benefitted by globalization.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#103

Post by Kurtz79 »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #73
whazor wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news is that outside of countries like USA and UK, there is a lot of improvement. Global average income is rising, more people are going to schools, and people are being connected to the internet. I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a huge rise in the amount of African software developers. They could compete with USA software companies in the global internet industry.

That's not good news for anyone in the USA or UK.

If your plan for ensuring the continued wealth and competitiveness of your country and population relies on other countries not to develop, than possibly it's not a great plan.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#104

Post by basisword »

candiodari wrote: post #6

It is too easy to forget that when a person is employed at $100k-$200k per year in the Bay Area, you want things like stopping climate change, more parks, more air, fair treatment, and above all, peace and prosperity. When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said…

>> When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said to get $10k more per year. Today I would say, getting an extra year at $30k is enough to justify the burnings.

I wouldn't generalise like that. There are a lot of lower earners who can also think big picture and there are also a lot of higher earners who only care about themselves.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#105

Post by keeganmccallum »

refurb wrote: post #56
ferentchak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. If we address poverty it will remove most racism. Most racism is classism in disguise. Heck, most people confuse the two when they are being discussed. //edited to remove an extra 'in'.

Asian Americans have a higher per capita income than whites. Does that mean Asians are no longer discriminated against?

The key word to note in the comment above is MOST. Finding a counter example doesn't invalidate the point

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#106

Post by throwanem »

manyoso wrote: post #94
maxxxxx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the genius of the GOP. They can motivate the working class while pretty much every policy they make is against the working class.

And when the hoi polloi start to catch on they just dangle some more red meat identity politics at them. "No, it isn't us, it is all the other people who are taking your American Dream away!" When you think about it, isn't it remarkable how well this works that a rich billionaire blowhard from New York City convinces the hoi polloi that he is one of them?

This is much easier to accomplish - perhaps only even possible to accomplish - when the hoi polloi don't see any meaningful prospect of worthwhile change from the only other party that can get a candidate elected.

As I find myself reiterating every time the subject arises here - it's not possible accurately to understand Trump's electoral victory without reference to the DNC's own internal politics and their gravely suboptimal effect on the party's 2016 nomination. Sanders vs. Trump would've been a much more interesting election, and its outcome much more in doubt, than what we actually got; as things were, the choice came down to more of the neoliberal, globalist, job-exporting same on the one hand, and a wild card who at least gave lip service to working-class folks' problems on the other. Granted, it's becoming increasingly clear that lip service is about all that candidate was prepared to give - but that still puts him ahead of his erstwhile opponent, who couldn't be bothered even with that much, not even when it became obvious that to do so would be tactically wise.

You can blame people, if you like, for going with the sole candidate who at least pretended to give a shit about their problems. But what do you imagine it helps, to do so? Regardless of whether or not any individual finds it personally satisfying to despise people who voted in a way that individual does not like, those people did so vote, and here we all are as a result. Does recrimination really offer the most realistic prospect of a way forward that doesn't continue to steer our country along a course toward disaster?

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#107

Post by maxxxxx »

manyoso wrote: post #94
maxxxxx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the genius of the GOP. They can motivate the working class while pretty much every policy they make is against the working class.

And when the hoi polloi start to catch on they just dangle some more red meat identity politics at them. "No, it isn't us, it is all the other people who are taking your American Dream away!" When you think about it, isn't it remarkable how well this works that a rich billionaire blowhard from New York City convinces the hoi polloi that he is one of them?

It really is impressive. I remember having a discussion with my neighbor about how Clinton was a rich elitist and Trump is a down to earth regular person. I told him they are probably both rich elitists that would never to talk to either of us but he totally hung on to the idea that Trump is a regular guy. I don't know how they pull this off. It was the same with Bush.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#108

Post by lazerpants »

candiodari wrote: post #6

It is too easy to forget that when a person is employed at $100k-$200k per year in the Bay Area, you want things like stopping climate change, more parks, more air, fair treatment, and above all, peace and prosperity. When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said…

Excellent analysis, but I think you've missed one key point, relative income effect. It isn't just a willingness to burn things down in the face of stagnating wages in order to increase wages at the bottom, but is also latent knowledge that by burning things down that the wealthy need, the income gap may shrink, which would make lower income earners happier [0] due to relative income effect.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041613/

"We can now answer the question posed by the article’s title: Yes, your neighbor’s income does affect your happiness, but the income of your proximate neighbor has a different effect on your happiness than the income of your more distant neighbor does. Americans tend to be happiest when they live in a high-income neighborhood in a low-income region. In other words, the effect of residential income on individual happiness reverses from positive to negative with increasing geographic scale—a phenomenon we might call the geographic scale principle of income effects (Lee et al. [2008] argue, along the same vein, that the effect of residential segregation can vary by geographic scale)."

Edit: a more recent source (https://hbr.org/2016/04/when-economic-growth-doesnt-make-cou...)

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#109

Post by [deleted] »

candiodari wrote: post #23
justicezyx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100% No matter how many ways to justify, the wealth and power enjoyed by a few are simply irrational. Edit: the wording is difficult, but all replies below have the same idea. Or I should rephrase it to: the absurdity of the wealth and power enjoyed by people grows exponentially with their rank in the social ladder. The ideal probably should quadratically.

You do realize that while the 1% doesn't include all IT workers in the bay area, the 2% does (I believe 1.6% is 100k per year before tax). It's easy to complain about the 1%, but most people on this site ... are the 1%. Median household income in the US is $55,775. That means, about half of all US households have less than that. [1] By and large, it's not the wealth enjoyed by the few. It's the comfortable, but proba…

[deleted]

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#110

Post by DINKDINK »

pillowkusis wrote: post #59
DINKDINK wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we should doubt that the populism was predictable. Ex-post many people claim things could have been predictable but I would argue against this political movement as a Black Swan. The main point in Taleb's book is that Black Swans are /critically/ a result of inductive reasoning. Black Swans events are called such because black swans used to be a mythic creature that people would refer to because they had…

Yeah, great point about the inductive reasoning. I haven't thought about that aspect too much, although I guess I would call this line of reasoning inductive: "this globalization sure is impacting people's livelihoods, and causing major economic shifts. Maybe we should slow down." "it will definitely raise GDP. Rising GDP has always led to rising standard of living. We'll be fine."

The incompleteness of inductive reasoning is exemplified with The Turkey Problem: All year, day after day, the farmer feeds the turkey. The turkey concludes that the farmer is benign. The day before Thanksgiving, the farmer kills the turkey.

The event that the turkey cares the most about, his death, is not in the set of evidence that he uses to make his conclusions about the state of the system. Therefore he is unprepared to handle the outcomes of the system he lives in.

The political establishment had the ability to sense the effect of policy. They chose to be ignorant to it or not address it. This is not an example of Turkey Problem or Black Swan, it's more of a Ostrich Problem.

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