Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization • Hacker News Board

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#131

Post by methodover » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #112

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that US workers have a lower bound on the fee they can charge for their labor, due to minimum wage laws. Those laws were enacted because we as a country believe there's a moral duty to ensure a minimum quality of life for it's working citizens (and in extension humans in general). Letting industries who would historically underpay US workers to instead just underpay some other countries workers defeats t…

The current US unemployment rate is 3.5% which is near all time historical lows. Virtually no one is unemployed in the US because of the combination of international trade and minimum wage laws.

There are more ways to measure the health of the American worker than the BLS' unemployment rate. What about other statistics? Things like like...

- Wage growth over time - Health outcomes - Savings rate - Credit card debt rate - Feelings about the future (are we on the right track/wrong track?)

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#132

Post by shkkmo » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

cactus2093 wrote: post #38

shkkmo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let me play the devil’s advocate: you buying those products is measurably better for those disadvantaged blue collar workers, than you not buying it (on a 10 year horizon IIRC - There are some UN studies on this, on phone and can’t find them right now). Maybe in some cases. However, you then have labor in those countries trying to struggle for the same protections and advances in wages that workers in the US strugg…

Yes people still have challenges and problems. But at the end of day, there are hundreds of millions fewer people in poverty than there were just a few decades ago. None of what you're saying justifies that the alternative would have been better, where most of these people remained poor subsistance farmers.

> , there are hundreds of millions fewer people in poverty than there were just a few decades ago.

And how much of that is due to globalization and how much of that is due to the growth of local economies? How much faster would those local economies have grown if wealth was not being siphoned out by multi-nationals? (These are not honest inquiries, not rhetorical questions.)

> None of what you're saying justifies that the alternative would have been better, where most of these people remained poor subsistance farmers.

The people who were poor subsistence farm who had their lands given away are generally not those who have been lifted out of poverty.

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#133

Post by tengbretson » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #101

tengbretson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone across the street (or across an ocean) is selling the same product for less money it's perfectly fine to buy it from them instead. The people across the ocean in this instance are working obscene hours under deplorable conditions. When you take your business to these overseas firms you are effectively telling your local workers "these are the conditions I think you ought to be working under." Except it's…

If you don't take your business to them, you're effectively telling local workers that they should work under even worse conditions for less pay. Except that you somehow doublethink yourself into imagining that you're being noble.

I think we got our wires crossed.

"When you take your business to them you are effectively telling your local workers..."

By "them" I meant the overseas workers. My bad.

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#134

Post by harryh » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC

methodover wrote: post #131

harryh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current US unemployment rate is 3.5% which is near all time historical lows. Virtually no one is unemployed in the US because of the combination of international trade and minimum wage laws.

There are more ways to measure the health of the American worker than the BLS' unemployment rate. What about other statistics? Things like like... - Wage growth over time - Health outcomes - Savings rate - Credit card debt rate - Feelings about the future (are we on the right track/wrong track?)

OPs comment asserted that developed world workers were being hurt specifically because of the combination of free trade and a minimum wage caused unemployment. My comment was refuting that specific argument.

The stats you mention are interesting but not relevant to OPs assertion that a wage floor in developed nations was problematic in a free trade world.

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#135

Post by Nasrudith » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #104

It seems to me that the big problem with Globalization is that we're only doing half of it. If we exported work but also exported working conditions then globalization would be a good thing. Bringing all of the people of the world up to the first world standards. But instead we outsource only the work and not the working conditions so there's an enormous gap between what you can expect in the first world vs. third wo…

Well of course - exporting work conditions is non-trivial to impossible. Take a textile factory in a newly industrializing nation.

Okay now add air conditioning to get it up to US standards - oh wait there isn't even a power plant to connect to.

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#136

Post by daodedickinson » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

wahern wrote: post #6

> But after the Cold War ended, the debate over trade (Krugman’s Nobel-winning specialty) became a proxy for a larger intellectual struggle over free markets versus government intervention. This is the crux of it. The notion that economics, as a field, was blindsided by the rapidity and extent of economic dislocation doesn't match the history. Such a narrative is a whitewashing of a particular clique of superstar eco…

I just have to laugh and cry when anyone suggests "re-education" as a solution to this. The truth is that more and more people are in complete shock and utterly dislocated from anything resembling a prior society of culture. Parents have NO IDEA what to tell their children because NOBODY knows what will be economically useful or useless in 10 years, or even 5. The "tech" industry has been an ever more rapacious and annihilating blitzkrieg on the ability of anyone but an ever shrinking few to be attractive to other people, not only economically, but socially, emotionally, educationally, etc..., and on the ability of anyone to anticipate the future and plan out a lifetime.

"Industrial policy" in this environment would merely mean determining what mechanical processes to have human bodies implement while they despair under the specter of realizing their fake-need make-work tasks could be destroyed at any moment by the snap of a ruler's finger.

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#137

Post by joshdick » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

amadeuspagel wrote: post #17

Like most articles referring to economists as a group, now admitting whatever you, dear wise reader, have always known, this one does not contain any kind of survey, but simply quotes a few economists, as if they spoke for the entire economics profession.

When some of the economists mentioned are the president of the International Economic Association, a a chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and a Nobel Prize winner who also happens to be the economics columnist for one of the largest U.S. newspapers -- I think it's fair to say that these are representative of mainstream economic thought.

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#138

Post by rb808 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

ngold wrote: post #44

rb808 wrote: post #35

To be clear this article isn't whether globalization is good or bad but about how it affects "American workers". Its pretty clear it has been on average very good for America and the world, but bad for say factory workers or coal miners. The response should have been to tax the wider benefits and subsidize the people who lost out, but that money got lost somewhere en-route... Most of the world is far better off in ne…

It's been fantastic for the 400 people that own more wealth then the entire country.

Yes it has, that doesn't make it bad though. It has also been fantastic for 90% of the world's population.

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#139

Post by generatorguy » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

repolfx wrote: post #105

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the good people of Miramichi are to blame for this. It's the people in Ottawa who wrote a blank check to Oracle/IBM for attempting to migrate a large part of the government software infrastructure to their incompatible system. Somehow, the contract was that billions would be disbursed to IBM/Oracle whether their system worked or not (it didn't). Also I don't think Oracle should be allowed to hide behind…

The Phoenix failure wasn't really a software failure, if I recall correctly. It was more that when everything moved to Miramichi the people who understood the byzantine government pay systems basically didn't follow and the result was people with no clue of what they wanted or how to do it being heavily involved. No software firm can succeed in those conditions.

Oracle / IBM had an existing working payroll system to copy. All they had to do was reimplement it in modern hardware and software. Some government employee in Miramichi might not have been happy because oracle didn’t listen to what they thought they wanted but if the contract has been to deliver a system that produced the exact same output as the old one oracle/ibm would have no excuse for not having a successful project.

It is astounding nobody was fired for this.

Re: Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

#140

Post by Roboprog » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #127

csense wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is cheap labor a legitimate source of comparative advantage? No, it isn't. Living in the Rust Belt, I find it so obvious that globalization is a race to the bottom that I'm amazed any reasonable person could believe otherwise. All the jobs move to countries with the worst wages, environmental protection, safety, workers' rights, etc. In economists' language, through labor organization and the democratic process, re…

What are Trump’s tariffs a lever for ?

To make domestic products price competitive with sweatshop products