Look on the bright side: if it is American companies who are making these huge profits overseas, then there is some chance of the jobs being created in America, whether forced to by government or voluntarily. Foreign companies making huge profits outside of America are not going to spend money or hire people in the U.S.
Business Is Booming
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Business Is Booming
#12At Apple, the ratio of Foxconn employees at work on Apple products to U.S.-based Apple employees is 10-to-1: 250,000 Foxconn workers to 25,000 Apple workers. The same ratio exists at Dell.
Huh, bullsh*t. I don't know what the average Apple worker gets paid but I'm assuming that most of them are developers (or related), so it's in the $100K/year. What about their Chinese counter part? I don't have any data but based on my country which has better wages in average it should be in the $10K/year ballpark if not less.
And it's quite a lot different, the USA developer buys a nice car in his first year, while the poor Chinese worker may never figure out how to get an old one.
Re: Business Is Booming
#13The author of this article has internalized some Keynesian assumptions so deeply that he doesn't realize the story he is writing directly falsifies one of them. A major assumption of Keynesian economics is that employment scales with production. Thus, if you stimulate aggregate demand, you will increase production, and thereby increase employment. This hasn't happened - aggregate demand and production have recovered,…
Investing in infrastructure isn't silly if it is a large project that only government could afford, addresses a current or near future problem, and has favorable return on investment. Widening highways and filling potholes has been more about giving states a short-term bailout under the name of stimulating the economy.
I'm not saying all infrastructure projects are a bad idea. I'm just pointing out that the thesis of the author is silly. Jobs are being created in India rather than in the US, and better infrastructure won't bring those jobs back.
In the US, a single bridge collapse is a national outrage, and a sign of "crumbling infrastructure". India has had at least one major collapse per year for the past 5 years:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/more-sports/bridge-col... http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/india-bridge-coll... http://articles.cnn.com/2008-10-19/world/india.bridge_1_metr... http://www.rupya.com/archives/2007/09/10/hyderabad-bridge-co... http://www.indiadaily.org/entry/bridge-collapse-contractors-...
The NYC subways are crowded at rush hour. Here are Indian trains:
http://www.google.com/images?q=india+train&um=1&ie=U...
Suffice it to say, jobs are being created in India rather than here in spite of infrastructure. If infrastructure mattered, the jobs would already be here. US infrastructure is top class - roughly the same as in all other first world countries (Japan, France, UK, etc), and is orders of magnitude better than that of India or China (no week-long traffic jams, for instance).
(Not trying to single out India, I just know more about India than China, the Philippines, or other popular outsourcing sites.)
Re: Business Is Booming
#14The author of this article has internalized some Keynesian assumptions so deeply that he doesn't realize the story he is writing directly falsifies one of them. A major assumption of Keynesian economics is that employment scales with production. Thus, if you stimulate aggregate demand, you will increase production, and thereby increase employment. This hasn't happened - aggregate demand and production have recovered,…
"The fact is, our economy is a lot more complicated than it used to be." Or, our economy is actually just not the top of the heap anymore, and probably never will be unless Asia suddenly slides off and sinks into the Pacific. If it weren't for anomalously successful companies like Apple or Wal-Mart, multi-nationals will eventual write-down the US market as dying and move everything overseas. If KFC can make more mone…
unless we just open the immigration floodgates
(even then, that adds 100 million TOTAL
Mexicans, which is a drop in the bucket in
comparison).
Re: Business Is Booming
#15Look on the bright side: if it is American companies who are making these huge profits overseas, then there is some chance of the jobs being created in America, whether forced to by government or voluntarily. Foreign companies making huge profits outside of America are not going to spend money or hire people in the U.S.
"there is some chance of the jobs being created in America"
Wow, so we have to pin our hopes on a chance that American companies will throw us a couple pity jobs in America _maybe_?
We need a term describing the labor equivalent of "regulatory capture"; something that describes our collective misguided hope that corporations will somehow give us back "our jobs".
I think everyone should just try to start a business. Seriously, everyone who is out of work or underutilized in some job they are completely overqualified for should just start any kind of hare-brained scheme or hustle or side-somethingorother. Move if you have to, to some tax-advantaged or microscopic cost-of-living state. Anything has to be better than {un|under}employment or working under the thumb of an employer who not only knows but (perhaps) relishes in the workload they can continue to offload on you because they know you can't leave in this environment.
To heck with getting "our country back", we need our individual (and collective) dignity back.
Re: Business Is Booming
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The fact is, our economy is a lot more complicated than it used to be." Or, our economy is actually just not the top of the heap anymore, and probably never will be unless Asia suddenly slides off and sinks into the Pacific. If it weren't for anomalously successful companies like Apple or Wal-Mart, multi-nationals will eventual write-down the US market as dying and move everything overseas. If KFC can make more mone…
unless we just open the immigration floodgates (even then, that adds 100 million TOTAL Mexicans, which is a drop in the bucket in comparison). Why do you assume immigration would be restricted to Mexicans?
It's the hot-button issue in immigration politics and they would obviously be the biggest beneficiary of an open border policy.
Re: Business Is Booming
#17The amount of logical and economic fail in this article is overwhelming. The Atlantic version was better, probably because it didn't have an axe to grind: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2072200
Disclaimer: I lean socialist but not nationalist which means I'm biased against the basic premises of the article. But it's not the premises that fail, it's the reasoning.
Re: Business Is Booming
#18The author of this article has internalized some Keynesian assumptions so deeply that he doesn't realize the story he is writing directly falsifies one of them. A major assumption of Keynesian economics is that employment scales with production. Thus, if you stimulate aggregate demand, you will increase production, and thereby increase employment. This hasn't happened - aggregate demand and production have recovered,…
aggregate demand has recovered
Wow. Ok, I lean left and you lean right so obviously we're going to differ on some things. But, conceptually, you'd think those things would all be values-related things. In this case what you're saying conflicts with my mental model of the world. The basic "reality" that I live in.
I don't have a point to make, just expressing how weird it is to me to see someone write that.
Re: Business Is Booming
#19The author of this article has internalized some Keynesian assumptions so deeply that he doesn't realize the story he is writing directly falsifies one of them. A major assumption of Keynesian economics is that employment scales with production. Thus, if you stimulate aggregate demand, you will increase production, and thereby increase employment. This hasn't happened - aggregate demand and production have recovered,…
What evidence do you have that demand has recovered?
Re: Business Is Booming
#20The author of this article has internalized some Keynesian assumptions so deeply that he doesn't realize the story he is writing directly falsifies one of them. A major assumption of Keynesian economics is that employment scales with production. Thus, if you stimulate aggregate demand, you will increase production, and thereby increase employment. This hasn't happened - aggregate demand and production have recovered,…
"The fact is, our economy is a lot more complicated than it used to be." Or, our economy is actually just not the top of the heap anymore, and probably never will be unless Asia suddenly slides off and sinks into the Pacific. If it weren't for anomalously successful companies like Apple or Wal-Mart, multi-nationals will eventual write-down the US market as dying and move everything overseas. If KFC can make more mone…
The U.S. may no longer dominate but with 300 million people and tremendous resources we're not heading to the bottom of the heap either. Our standard of living is going to move back closer in line with the rest of the world, which is fine.