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How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

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Re: How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

#61

Post by geezerjay »

perl4ever wrote: post #59
sonnyblarney wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, again, sorry I think this is wrong. Multinationals are almost all in favour of open borders. They want a) cheap labour and some, good companies need b) high end talent. The later is more rare though. Every big company I know is 'pro migration' I can't think of a single one that's against it. Google is more in favour of getting 'highly skilled' people, while most others are in favour of 'bodies' for cheap labour.…

It seems to me that immigration helps raise wages. A multinational company is going to employ people in India regardless of US immigration policy. But if those people can come to the US and make 5x the money, then even if they are making somewhat less than other Americans, they are improving (i.e. raising wages in) the global market for labor that we have to compete in. Given that wages in India and other places are…

> But if those people can come to the US and make 5x the money, then even if they are making somewhat less than other Americans, they are improving (i.e. raising wages in) the global market for labor that we have to compete in.

I would also add that it's wrong to assume that just because an immigrant was hired for a highly skilled job that automatically means there is a native somewhere with an equivalent skillset and able to do the job as well. It boggles the mind how some people assume that somehow every single top expert in the field happens to live in the same city/state/country where a job opening is published.

Re: How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

#62

Post by sonnyblarney »

perl4ever wrote: post #59
sonnyblarney wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, again, sorry I think this is wrong. Multinationals are almost all in favour of open borders. They want a) cheap labour and some, good companies need b) high end talent. The later is more rare though. Every big company I know is 'pro migration' I can't think of a single one that's against it. Google is more in favour of getting 'highly skilled' people, while most others are in favour of 'bodies' for cheap labour.…

It seems to me that immigration helps raise wages. A multinational company is going to employ people in India regardless of US immigration policy. But if those people can come to the US and make 5x the money, then even if they are making somewhat less than other Americans, they are improving (i.e. raising wages in) the global market for labor that we have to compete in. Given that wages in India and other places are…

The vast majority of people migrating are not doing so for spectacular wages relative to the local market they are coming into.

Average wages for immigrants is lower than the non-immigrant average in almost all societies.

Because we are in high-tech, we think about 'Google' bringing in great talent, which is good ...

But for most, it's not remotely that.

In Canada, in the Oil Sands, they push for migration and the term they use is 'high labour input cost'. Literally high wages.

So yes, in the long term migration can be good depending on a nations actual need and ability to make use of people, but it's about wages and Supply and Demand there.

It's a similar story everywhere. I don't think anyone, even hardcore nationalists are pushing to get rid of bringing in talented people, the numbers are small. And the issue with H1B for example is not so much the nature of it, but that it was kind of being abused by Infosys etc. in the eyes of some.

"Given that wages in India and other places are clearly artificially depressed, or people wouldn't want to come to the US"

No, this is not any kind of 'artificial depression'. India has a fundamentally different economy than the US. Those differences are not artificial.

Re: How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

#63

Post by _r5wf »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #5
acd wrote: post #3

The corporation takes away personal responsibility. For a corporation profit is usually number one priority far more than caring for the environmen. I think globalisation under mines union, to some extent labour laws. I you don’t do the job there is often someone cheaper who don’t care about work hours, vacation who will.

And environmental protection laws, and human rights laws, and civil rights laws, you name it, globalization has effectively undermined. The best lie that America ever told the world (best exemplified by the 1939 World’s Fair[1]) was that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand. But when the U.S. blinked after the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre and kept on buying cheap goods from China, it became clear that the Weste…

Sure, China was a bastion of prosperity before even a perverted model of capitalism (please don't call it free market capitalism) was introduced (sarcasm). Beside what makes "democracy" a good thing anyway? Protection of rights has nothing to do with it.

Re: How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

#64

Post by jaggederest »

afterburner wrote: post #40
Felz wrote: post #34

The article's central point seems to be that it's more difficult to track accountability and causality in an increasingly "overheated" and complicated world. True. But the major system for addressing that currently seems to be People Getting Upset, and the article proposes more organizations for People Getting Upset. But this isn't very efficient; sometimes the global economy DOES need to make Gladstone a bit less pr…

Carbon taxes change the profit math for companies, which affects their decisions, that's the biggest change. They have to be high enough to change the decision though.

US$120 / ton of pure carbon, or about $32/ton CO2 should be about right. Ramp it up over 6 years, front loaded a bit, starting with $30/ton C, increasing $15/ton carbon per year.

If that were done in a largely revenue neutral way on a worldwide scale, we could turn carbon emission around in a hurry. I'd actually advocate for putting aside some of the money to reward people actively removing airborne carbon dioxide down to the 290ppm threshold, not just holding at 400ppm.

Re: How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

#65

Post by thaumasiotes »

afterburner wrote: post #40
Felz wrote: post #34

The article's central point seems to be that it's more difficult to track accountability and causality in an increasingly "overheated" and complicated world. True. But the major system for addressing that currently seems to be People Getting Upset, and the article proposes more organizations for People Getting Upset. But this isn't very efficient; sometimes the global economy DOES need to make Gladstone a bit less pr…

Carbon taxes change the profit math for companies, which affects their decisions, that's the biggest change. They have to be high enough to change the decision though.

> They have to be high enough to change the decision though.

This is why I've stopped listening to people attempting to make externality-based policy arguments. If you believe that a carbon tax needs to be high enough to change companies' decisions, you're not actually making an externality argument. You've already decided that the world should change, and how it should change, and you're just trying to find some magic words that you think will get other people to agree with you.

A real externality argument would try to determine the value of the externality, and set the tax to equal that value. It's not relevant at all whether that changes anyone's decision -- if there's no change, and you see just as much pollution as before, that's fine, because the cost of that pollution is now being accounted for correctly, and it's been decided that the pollution was better than the alternative.

Re: How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

#66

Post by AnthonyMouse »

omegaworks wrote: post #25
vowelless wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nationalism feeds into that How?

Nationalism is a shiny, ultimately self-defeating distraction for unions. It allows politicians and union leadership to avoid the hard work of crafting and executing on real pro-labor policies to grapple with the reality of globalized capital. Instead, it pits workers against each other, factionalizes them and creates scapegoats so they never organize as a class. http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/erik-loomis-t…

It competes with unions as the class of people who organize together.

Re: How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

#67

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cryptonector wrote: post #16
jacobolus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the U.S. blinked after the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre and kept on buying cheap goods from China The US did very little trade with China in 1989, though more than a few years earlier. I don’t think Tiananmen Square or its response says much about US internationalism or commitment to whatever abstract principles. You can draw much stronger conclusions from them about internal Chinese politics.

What could the U.S. have done about Tiananmen? Serious question. Military intervention would have been absolutely out of the question. U.S.-China trade back then was very small, so the U.S. had no leverage. The U.S. could not have armed a guerilla either. There was really nothing the U.S. could do about China in 1989.

> What could the U.S. have done about Tiananmen?

Impose Cuba-style sanctions on China until they held free elections. It may not have changed their policy, but it would at least have shown we were serious about it. And knowing what we know now, it would obviously have had significant economic consequences over time.

Re: How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

InfiniteBeing wrote: post #24
glitchc wrote: post #4

Multi-national corporations are counting on the disparity to essentially play arbitrage with labour. Nationalism feeds into that, so it's in their interest to stoke nationalist sentiments.

In what way? Nationalism leads to immigration restrictions and protectionism.

There are shades of nationalism; I assume parent suggests multinational corps aim for a region in this spectrum - a region, in which movement is restricted, so that workers from poor country A don't migrate to richer country B, but where trade isn't restricted, so nothing stops the multinational to sell products made in A to people in B.

Re: How Globalization Has Broken the Chain of Responsibility

#69

Post by xg15 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #65
afterburner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon taxes change the profit math for companies, which affects their decisions, that's the biggest change. They have to be high enough to change the decision though.

> They have to be high enough to change the decision though. This is why I've stopped listening to people attempting to make externality-based policy arguments. If you believe that a carbon tax needs to be high enough to change companies' decisions, you're not actually making an externality argument. You've already decided that the world should change, and how it should change, and you're just trying to find some mag…

Seems like a weird argument in a thread about responsibility.

Decided by whom? By the one party who is externalizing. Their may be able to offset the additional costs, however the ones that bear the consequences of the action in the first place (e.g. the ones who suffer from pollution or climate change) might not. Yet they still wouldn't have a say in the matter.

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