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Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

foreignpolicy.com

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

#141

Post by benibela »

dominotw wrote: post #69
deogeo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How nice. First subvert democracy through lobbying so they can offshore production, so the only 'choice' consumers have is go along with it, or live in the stone age. Then when consumers don't all retreat to caves and huts in the woods, claim this means they agree with and 'voted' for this course. Buying is not voting, and deceiving people into believing this has been one of capitalism's greatest successes.

> so the only 'choice' consumers have its not the only choice in USA atleast. ethically made products cost more.

But the opposite direction does not hold. More expensive products are not necessary more ethically. Often the cheap and expensive products are made by the same workers and just sold under different brands.

So the customers cannot know which products are ethically or not.

They would need to vet the entire supply chain of every product. That is a full time job just to check one product

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

#142

Post by Roboprog »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #109
deogeo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How nice. First subvert democracy through lobbying so they can offshore production, so the only 'choice' consumers have is go along with it, or live in the stone age. Then when consumers don't all retreat to caves and huts in the woods, claim this means they agree with and 'voted' for this course. Buying is not voting, and deceiving people into believing this has been one of capitalism's greatest successes.

Unfortunately history would indicate that actual slave labor, or something close to it, (high volume, low unit cost) is required to rapidly scale new technologies to the point that they are ubiquitous. This is invariant on the amount of subversion of democracy there is or not. The choices are 1. Slow down 2. Use bad labor practices 3. Completely automate production. Nobody seems to want to do #1 and we're not advance…

I guess Franco isn’t dead, after all.

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

#143

Post by methodover »

harryh wrote: post #88
methodover wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is another aspect of the debate I find myself challenging: Labor is different. Our human lives are different than a cell phone plan.

What do you think makes up most of the cost of a cell phone plan? Labor.

In regards to swapping cell phone plans, sure: If a cell phone company were to die because too many of their customers switched to a better competitor, that would be difficult for the employees of that company.

But that's an entirely different situation than the matter at hand, where we're talking about the United States government's policies on trade and the impact on our entire labor class and their fate within our own borders.

The entire point of an economy is to serve humanity. We're all participating in this circus to put food on our tables, provide for our children, grow, and enjoy life. We cannot lose sight of that fact. We have an obligation to see labor not as just cogs in a machine, but rather as constituents whose well-being we have an obligation to protect.

(I have to say, and I'm sure you don't mean it, but you comparing a human being to a cell phone plan is among the more callous things I've read on these forums. It might behoove you to sprinkle a bit more empathy in your language, just a tiny bit.)

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

#144

Post by Merrill »

themagician wrote: post #39
eznoonze wrote: post #28

Free market only works when everyone follows the same rules. When you have a player like China who is dead set on taking advantages of the rules but never taking the responsibility, you create an one-sided situation. Trade is not just an economic issue. It's a political issue when you have China in the game.

The “free market”, as it’s often portrayed, is a magical idea that exists only in text books. It’s not real. The real market is a mess of information asymmetry, unpriced negative externalities and govern emend subsidies. Economic theory is great for determining the direction of economic policy but not defining policy itself.

There are only a limited number of markets where large numbers of buyers and sellers transact for commodities of well understood characteristics.

The fundamental transaction of capitalistic societies is the "deal", where sellers vary the benefits of their products and conceal their deficits and where buyers conceal their willingness to pay as well as the exact thing they want to buy. Typically there are no more than two or three sellers (e.g. Airbus and Boeing) or two or three buyers (e.g. the market for very advanced fighter aircraft).

The first thing you learn in business school is that you must have product differentiation and must at all costs avoid being in a commodity business..

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

#145

Post by mips_avatar »

blfr wrote: post #96
mips_avatar wrote: post #47

Can we please get Paul Krugman off the New York Times editorial board? Or at least include a disclaimer that he doesn't know much about most of the things he writes about. He got his Nobel prize from a career working in a pretty specific scope. I am tired of people taking his articles as works of a god.

at least include a disclaimer that he doesn't know much about most of the things he writes about This is true of most journalists.

And I do think Krugman is qualified to write about the economy (less so about other things). I just don't like him (or people quoting him) using his Nobel Prize as some kind of ethos cudgel to hit me over the head with.

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

#146

Post by harryh »

methodover wrote: post #143
harryh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think makes up most of the cost of a cell phone plan? Labor.

In regards to swapping cell phone plans, sure: If a cell phone company were to die because too many of their customers switched to a better competitor, that would be difficult for the employees of that company. But that's an entirely different situation than the matter at hand, where we're talking about the United States government's policies on trade and the impact on our entire labor class and their fate within our…

It's all the same though.

In the vast majority of circumstances you aren't firing an individual American and hiring an individual from China. You're just choosing to buy something from a giant corporation that manufactures goods in China instead of a competing giant corporation that manufactures goods in the US. Switching cell phone providers is just like switching from American Giant (made in America) to some other purveyor of sweaters that manufactures overseas.

Are you saying that you think you have a moral obligation to buy things made by American workers, who are universally wealthier and have access to a much stronger social safety net, than Chinese workers?

If anything it seems like it would be the opposite to me.

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

#147

Post by CharlesColeman »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #40
ep103 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read an article once, that claimed when a Scandinavian country joined the EU, they expected significant job distortion as a result of free trade. So they literally moved government agencies from their current locations, to locations that they expected would be hardest hit. The end result was the shifting of thousands of government jobs from one location to another. Highly trained people in the old government center…

Such a strategy failed utterly in Canada. They moved a government department from Ottawa to Miramichi, New Brunswick for similar reasons. All the skilled bureaucrats used their reputations to get transfers to a different department so they wouldn't have to uproot their family, and the department was rebuilt around a core of incompetents. I'm sure the locals they hired weren't so incompetent, but rot starts from the t…

>> they expected significant job distortion as a result of free trade. So they literally moved government agencies from their current locations, to locations that they expected would be hardest hit.

> Such a strategy failed utterly in Canada.

It's possible the strategy is good, they just utterly failed at executing it for other reasons.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #52

What really made globalization work was containers and faxes. Before containerization, shipping was kind of an iffy business. Sometimes it showed up, sometimes it got lost or stolen, and sometimes it got broken. After containers, if you ordered a container load, it usually showed up intact. The importance of faxes to trade is underestimated. Not only was it faster, faxes work well across language barriers. An invoice…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by CharlesColeman »

distances wrote: post #122
ep103 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All good plans can be executed badly, the devil is always in the details : D I was not proposing the above example as a foolproof plan applicable to every situation, so much as an example of a type of plan that has worked in some scenarios in the past. I should also point out that part of the plan for the Scandinavian plan wasn't the replacement of government workers with locals, as much as the expectation that by mo…

It would be nice if you could name the country and bureaucracy of the success story. I know of one such move; the experts made it known they'd rather resign and find new jobs than move to the periphery with their families. The move was cancelled as it was pointless without the experts.

> It would be nice if you could name the country and bureaucracy of the success story. I know of one such move; the experts made it known they'd rather resign and find new jobs than move to the periphery with their families. The move was cancelled as it was pointless without the experts.

It would be nice if you could name the failure you cite, too.

Government experts will live in a lot of places. NASA has major operations in a metro area in Alabama with only ~500k people, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Space_Flight_Center. That's more periphery than center, in my mind.

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

#150

Post by brazzy »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #90
bryanlarsen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a strategy failed utterly in Canada. They moved a government department from Ottawa to Miramichi, New Brunswick for similar reasons. All the skilled bureaucrats used their reputations to get transfers to a different department so they wouldn't have to uproot their family, and the department was rebuilt around a core of incompetents. I'm sure the locals they hired weren't so incompetent, but rot starts from the t…

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…

> Somehow, the contract was that billions would be disbursed to IBM/Oracle whether their system worked or not (it didn't).

Pretty sure it was simply a time and materials contract, as is standard. No competent software company will accept a fixed price contract without tightly specified and unchanging requirements, which is something very few customers are able to provide (especially not government agencies).

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