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Comment by tn135 | Hacker News Reader

> Financial interests convinced liberals and conservatives alike that globalism was a good thing (for altruistic or selfish reasons respectively). Instead it just gave Capital access to cheap labor and totally fucked the American worker.

Lump of Labour fallacy.

The way both Liberals and Conservatives speak as if USA is marred with some wide scale unemployment. It is as if Americans would love to have sweatshops where pregnant women will be working 14 hours a day.

USA continues to enjoy very good employment, better than most developed countries with comparable scale and diversity. People all across the world are flocking to take those US jobs and you have to close the gates to prevent them from coming.

I find the constant self loathing pretty disgusting on part of a country that is home to such exceptional economy.

All those jobs are not coming back and it is a good thing.

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Since NAFTA and the opening up of China we in the USA have become far richer, in total GDP and per capita. The problem is that the gains have gone disproportionately to the 1%.

I remember clearly during the 80s and 90s that the pro free trade argument from economists was that there would be winners and losers but since we would be richer overall we could use taxes to help out the losers via unemployment, retraining, relocation help, etc.

But what the economists ignored but is so obvious in hindsight is that this country has a strong anti-tax anti-government strain and we refuse to have any social safety net or government assistance. So what we've ended up with are super-winners and millions of permanent losers. And the super-winners are using their wealth to become more politically powerful, increase their propaganda spending and destabilize democracy.

You always pick between alternatives. Are lower income Americans better off with free trade compared to a closed economy? I think the answer is absolutely yes. An average American saves lot more money today buying cheap stuff from Walmart. Lot more than what he/she would have saved with protectionist regime.

More importantly a lot of services that were unaffordable 20 years ago are not trivial. This includes smartphones, flat screen TVs, better quality and safer cars etc. In closed economy you would have struggled for all these things. Just like my home country India.

Sure TV's and chinese electronics are cheaper. Houses, healthcare, and education are not. Instead of making 55k a year at the GM plant, they're making 22k as a cashier at Dollar General.

The flood of cheap goods destroyed communities that depended on manufacturing work

> The flood of cheap goods destroyed communities that depended on manufacturing work

There is no evidence to that. Cheap goods helped poor people live a better life and build better communities. American houses today are better than they were 30 years ago. American healthcare is more accessible than it was 30 years ago. More Americans are getting better education than 30 years ago.

I have one word for you: Detroit.

They are in such deep doo doo, a charity was started to pay overdue water bills. They have the most $1 properties on auctions sites of any location. They are experiencing horrifying levels of blight.

etc ad nauseum.

There's your evidence.

> They are in such deep doo doo, a charity was started to pay overdue water bills.

That is barely any evidence. It is like pointing to a failed Bakery and claiming Bakery industry has sunk. It is a bit like Trump's logic that because Disney replaced some of their staff with H1Bs all programmers are losing their jobs to H1Bs.

Detroit had peak population in 19050s of 1.8M. Today it is half at around 700K. Most of the people have already left Detroit for better future and more will leave.

But guess what? From California to Texas from Washington to Florida not only cities have grown rapidly they have seen unprecedented increase in quality of life of bottom 20% of people. Any protectionist measure aimed at "fixing" Detroit in the Trump's "Make America Great Again" style would have brought a lot of misery to all those people.

I was not advocating for protectionist measures.

People who had well paid manufacturing jobs were not in the bottom 20%. Increases in quality of life of the bottom 20% is irrelevant to the point that manufacturing jobs have seriously declined and this has hurt a large segment of the population.

I don't know nor care what your agenda is, but putting on blinders to obvious and undeniable facts in no way helps your case. People used to be able to get well paid factory jobs in the US without any special education. It isn't the end of the world -- average education needed for entry level work has been trending up for more than a hundred years -- but it absolutely is a hardship for a certain segment of the population.

I have no agenda and I am genuine in my efforts to understand the counter viewpoint. It is just that I am unable to see the evidence anywhere and I can not understand the love of low end worthless manufacturing jobs.

You are right only if you see things in isolation but society can not be seen that way.

For example my grandpa grew his own organic food and died at the age of 45 by choking on Asthma (no medical care). My father is still alive at 70 despite drinking and eating genetically modified stuff all the time. While in isolation GMO food (might) be horrible, the fact is the lower prices of food have increased human productivity and has ensured my father could afford better health care. I feel things are very interconnected.

Historically, manufacturing jobs paid quite well while generally not requiring expensive education and training beforehand to get hired. I do not understand why you perceive them to be low end and worthless.

Further, you dismissing Detroit as evidence of a large scale trend and comparing it to me saying a single bakery failed while then citing your father and grandfather as evidence for your point of view goes well beyond ironic.

I also see things as interconnected and complicated, yet I am finding you incredibly difficult to engage. Your tactics look an awful lot like bad faith arguments. Maybe you just don't see the conflict inherent in your own maneuvering. Lots of people don't. But you are being incredibly contradictory here.

Best.

I think a lot of us thought that economic indicators would make it hard for the republicans to make the case that things were bad and they could make things good but we forgot unfortunately that perception is all and the actual numbers don't mean anything. Under 5% unemployment doesn't mean anything if you can find enough salt-of-the-earth middle class white people who are struggling, because that is enough to convince people to toss the whole system and start over even if unemployment is low and wages are increasing.

It is truly staggering to have the right now taking on the mantle of income inequality after decades of obstructing any efforts to tackle it, so they can bring back the kinds of jobs that unions helped to define the middle class with after being instrumental in destroying unions all while blaming the left. I know its not quite that cut and dried but I think the left feels like that globalism is OK as long as you are distributing the wealth made from it. It seems like the republicans right now are willing to make us less wealthy and less well off in many ways, as long as the white middle class can benefit (even if the country suffers in general).

But the policies of this administration and the Republican Capitol Hill have been the opposite of what you describe. They've stayed away from a strong protectionist turn so far. And they're definitely not enacting policies to address income inequality... the healthcare bill passed in the House today is quite the opposite.

edit - I agree with your point that voter perception matters a lot. But I think the Republicans just lied to exploit that perception. They're not actually changing their ideology and agenda to do any of it though.

I might not have made my point very clear, I agree with you, its all a big smokescreen and at the end of the day they do what they've always done - cut taxes on the wealthy. The people who felt Trump was a protest vote was really just a vote for the same party and the same results that haven't helped them in decades. Its sad for me because my family (who usually fall for the gun-control fears part of the platform) keep doing the same thing and expecting different results but don't bother to blame the people they've been voting for year after year and instead blame the people that the people they voted for work against year after year.

"All those jobs are not coming back and it is a good thing."

Not if you used one of those jobs to feed your family.

Seriously, I am absolutely sick and tired of people saying that not having these jobs is a good thing, and completely ignoring the large amounts of people who did depend on those jobs to provide for their families. In order for it to really be a good thing for those jobs to not be here, there have to be feasible alternatives for those people. Right now, there aren't. That's why Trump's cry of bringing the jobs back was so successful.

Perhaps you ought to take note of consumer debt, cost of education relative to income, cost of housing relative to income, cost of child care, cost of healthcare?

Yea, the country can chug along while population gets ever impoverished and averages can continue looking just peachy as the income gap grows.

I'll just throw in an anecdotal email from the local school district about how they will no longer permit elementary students to purchase lunch if their lunchroom balance is negative. Think about that next time you strut out the "exceptional country" argument.

Easy for you to say. You sound like you have no idea what life is like for the people affected by this. This is their economy too. If you write them off as collateral damage and provide no alternative, don't be surprised when people like Trump get voted in.

> The way both Liberals and Conservatives speak as if USA is marred with some wide scale unemployment.

Are you unaware of the steadily declining Labor-force Participation Rate? [1] [2]

1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=dBkS

2. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/03/the-disappea...

I think you're correct to highlight the labor force participation rate but there doesn't appear to be an upper age cutoff on these stats, which is going to skew things.

"16 years and older employed or looking for work..."

Shouldn't it be something like 16 years to 66 years old? The boomers are getting older. Or even better, 20 to 70. I'm not really worried if people are delaying entry to work because they're still full time students or stopping work after they become eligible for full Social Security benefits.

Interestingly enough, it's incidental to prime-age men (25-54) and more correlated with marital status than race or age: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/the-mis...

People seem to want people to have jobs that are easy to visualize... people seem worried about the number of factory workers in a way in which they do not worry about number of architects.

It's because American's romanticize manufacturing for some reason. They love the idea of someone doing back-breaking labor on a factory floor line, but hate the idea of someone working retail in air conditioning.

Those romanticized factory jobs were by and large protected by unions and offered better pay and pensions than any other blue collar occupation.

Which is ironic, considering the party claiming to want to bring back manufacturing jobs is also the party that busted the unions.

>people seem worried about the number of factory workers in a way in which they do not worry about number of architects.

That's because millions of people were factory workers living a cozy life back until a few decades ago and now they (and their kids and communities) are struggling to make ends meet.

Millions of people weren't architects.

Not much "glamorizing of factory jobs" is needed to explain their complains. Plain desperation will do.

Is that really true though? Is the unemployment rate higher now than it was in some golden age in cultural memory?

http://cdn.tradingeconomics.com/charts/united-states-unemplo...

You can have a job making 55k and a job making 20k, you're employed but your material condition declined

Is that actually what has happened? Evidence please?

Because there's not enough real world evidence on the matter that one can empirically observe, and we need stats and research?

manufacturing jobs [which] comprise just 10% of all employment in America (in percentage terms, there has been a virtually uninterrupted decline since 1970's 26%) (The economist)

Or: http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/29/news/economy/us-manufacturin...

And even those statistics can be and are manipulated in lots of ways from pundits to make a point that "it has never been better" and that everybody migrated happily to services jobs etc. That people used to be able to buy a house and send kids to college (and put some money aside) in the 50-60s with a manufacturing job, and they don't now is rarely mentioned. Or that tons of tricks are used to reduce the unemployment numbers.

Why, again, are manufacturing jobs the one type of job we're always supposed to be maximize, even relative to the pool of all other jobs? Is there more or less total employment, and does that matter less than manufacturing employment alone?

re: housing and college costs, I don't think that has much to do with manufacturing jobs in particular.

>Why, again, are manufacturing jobs the one type of job we're always supposed to be maximize, even relative to the pool of all other jobs?

Because the other major alternatives are

(a) service jobs that are a zero sum game of people inside the same country of circle-servicing one another,

(b) jobs like scientist, software developer, etc, that by their nature require few people so wont be increasing anytime soon either (and eliminate other jobs)

I am not thoroughly convinced that non-physical labor jobs are zero sum, necessarily shrinking and/or reduce other employment. Why should I believe that? Can you cite any evidence to this effect?

Furthermore, if white collar jobs are "shrinking" means they should be irrelevant, manufacturing jobs are shrinking means they should be lamented?

Lastly, what if increasing automation means that manufacturing jobs will inevitably go away regardless of how anyone feels about it or complains about it? What do you propose to stop that? Manufacturing output of the US has consistently increased despite any variance in the amount of people it employs or the state of the rest of the economy.

>Lastly, what if increasing automation means that manufacturing jobs will inevitably go away regardless of how anyone feels about it or complains about it? What do you propose to stop that?

I propose a society where mankind DECIDES about what kind of jobs it wants to have (or none if they please so), and they are not dictated to it about the mere availability of some technology.

People are not coming from around the world for middle class jobs like auto-manufacturer or steel worker. Jobs like these used to be the heart of the middle class, and they certainly weren't under sweatshop conditions (unions made sure of that).

"USA continues to enjoy very good employment..."

Measured how? Labor participation rate? Average household income? GDP per capita?

"better than most developed countries..."

Better than the 2000s? Better than the 80s? The 60s?

What developed countries have comparable scale and diversity as the US?

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