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Comment by PKop | Hacker News Reader

Tell that to the midwestern industrial towns, who for decades have massive job and population declines, and who see year after year of opiate deaths that exceed (in each year!!) the deaths from the Vietnam war in total, as a result of economic hopelessness. [0]

You talk about death rates. The suicide rate of working class white Americans has been sky rocketing [1]

You can ignore these and many many other data points to assume a narrative of unceasing improvement, but millions of people would rightly see that as nonsense. [2]

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opioids-drug-overdose-killed-mo...

[1] https://twitter.com/RonStoeferle/status/877778443210903553

[2] https://twitter.com/LukeGromen/status/969646830744227840

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> Tell that to the midwestern industrial towns

The towns who are relying on cheaper steel and aluminum imports to build air conditioning units for the rest of America?

Or the ones relying upon cheaper steel and aluminum to build cars? Or Airplanes?

Sure, it sucks to be Pittsburgh when steel imports compete against the steel industry. But its great for literally every other industrial town in the USA. There are far more USERS of steel than there are makers of steel.

Tell me: do you think the 25% price increase on imported steel (helping Pittsburgh, and almost no one else) is worth the Chinese tariff on Pork, Nuts, Wine, and other agricultural products (aka: the majority of rural American's exports)?

But China already has far higher tariffs on many goods, so the deal isn't equal already. To extend your point, I think we need to go further.

Higher oil prices in 2008 did what? Increased domestic oil production, massively. We'll see this in steel, and we should take measures to do the same for other industries by equalizing tariffs vs China.

But back to my point about globalization leading to massive outsourcing of jobs to China, then leading to massive economic dissolution to large swaths of the country. We can't all be "coders".. So what's the solution?

We "buy local" by spending a little bit higher prices on food and hipster coffee & craft beer and restaurants etc. Why can't we do the same, at the margins for all sorts of industries. Is that "more expensive" than dealing with epidemic levels of Opioid addictions and corresponding healthcare and other costs? The current situation is not working.. or more specifically, it is not working for a particular group of people in any way whatsoever.

> But back to my point about globalization leading to massive outsourcing of jobs to China

Wrong on this count.

http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/20...

As you can see, the US is increasing manufacturing steadily (with exception of the 2008 recession).

The problem is that we've got fewer jobs that produce MORE than we did before. The issue is that the USA is getting incredibly more efficient at manufacturing.

Consider the relatively labor-intensive job of farming. With innovations like "Plant Tape", what used to be a 10-person job is now the job of ~3 people and one tractor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzHo80bO-sU

And said ~3 people+tractor will work more efficiently and get more work done than 10-people in the "old way". Fewer and fewer people are needed to work anymore. That's the problem.

> We can't all be "coders".. So what's the solution?

Blame someone else for our problems. Apparently: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZnj-jyXkAAP4Od.jpg:large

> Sure, it sucks to be Pittsburgh...

Pittsburgh is a blueprint for the rest of the country in this regard. It sucked to be Pittsburgh in 1970-1990. Today, Pittsburgh is almost unrecognizable from the Steel City, at least in economic terms, and the county's unemployment rate is right around the national average.

> helping Pittsburgh, and almost no one else

The help to Pittsburgh would be pretty marginal; US Steel isn't even a top 5 employer in the region, and a lot of those jobs are suits that scale logarithmically with output. US Steel employs about the same number of people as Carnegie Mellon, which isn't even a particularly large university among R1 institutions.

> Sure, it sucks to be Pittsburgh when steel imports compete against the steel industry.

Pittsburgh is a medicine, education, and robotics powerhouse. It's doing fine whether steel goes up or down.

Its not cities that have troubles (typically) - its the people that are about to be deprecated in terms of their utility to society.

And yet here you are, in one of the richest countries in the world. Maybe the problem is wealth redistribution?

You seem to have confused the current opioid epidemic as being caused by globalism, or economic hopelessness as you put it.

None of your sources link those two, and U.S. unemployment is at a record low so I'm not sure what the point is you're trying to make here is. Yes, the opioid epidemic exists, but nobody was saying here that it doesn't, so why are you introducing it?

Here's an article that attempts to link it. I'm not sure how reliable the publication is, but I've heard it several times over the past few years.

The opioid crisis is just a symptom.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/joblessne...

All that says is that joblessness can be one of many factors in the opioid epidemic - it doesn't make a very strong case for it and still comes off as a fishing trip.

It also doesn't explain why GP is introducing the opioid epidemic as a consequence of globalism.

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