Comment by Brockenstein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brockenstein | Hacker News Reader

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>The whole "US Made!" tagline of old stopped becoming possible because we couldn't charge wages low enough to compete with foreign dollars or foreign slave wages.

Not exactly. For starters being able to buy products for cheap is generally good for consumers. They have more money left over to buy other things...

Secondly, the U.S. have actively fought to keep wages low in developing nations. For example: https://www.thenation.com/article/wikileaks-haiti-let-them-l... It's easy to cry about low wages though and how that "hurts" American manufacturers. So here's the thought experiment, all workers on the planet now make at least U.S. federal minimum wage. We can now compete with Haitians for underwear manufacturing. Underwear now costs a lot more than it used to. That's not a win for consumers. And all those minimum wage underwear manufacturing jobs aren't exactly a boon to the U.S. economy, go figure.

Thirdly, no nation is going to be able to produce every sort of product itself efficiently and cheaply. Trade is and always has been important. Other nations can do some things better and cheaper and it's not always labor costs that are the linchpin of being out-competed.

Fourth, people imagine peak manufacturing as some sort of ideal that we should be tripping over ourselves to get back to. It's a fools errand. No matter what a lot of manufacturing jobs are never coming back, ever. It's never going to be like it used to be, automation will have seen to that.

A lot of people don't understand the economy, but they have an idea how the economy should be. It's more terrifying than my mom offering to fix my computer, because moms know best.

You are right the economy is very complicated, but it seems that the only factor anyone discusses is what's good for the "consumer".

I think the "consumer" is a really bad success criteria. I don't really care about what's good for the "consumer", I care about what's good for "the employee", highly skilled jobs, higher wages, and more jobs. These things can't be driven by lowering the cost to consumers, we'll get what we have now, more money flowing to the 1%, and the middle class being eliminated.

(This isn't directed at you, just thought I'd put it here....)

I care about what is good for everyone - employers, employees, the overall country, and the overall world (all these same people in other countries), on a long term sustainable basis.

Whenever one reads these threads, rarely does one encounter someone who's doing anything other than talking their book, or supporting their personal ideology of "how it should be", usually based on reading articles written by others that support their ideology.

I think all of us would be better off if after finishing writing a narrative or explanation that supports our personal ideology, we then turned around and tried to poke holes in it. It's child's play to rationalize why it's a win-win situation to outsource menial labor to 3rd world countries, but what happens when one of those third world countries happens to be a giant, populated by incredibly hard working and historically accomplished people, and a very smart government who remembers mistakes that were made in the past? What happens when this country isn't content being a dumb, low-margin manufacturer, and decides it wants to take over the entirety of the process including the design? Sure, the West currently still holds a lead in much of technology, but where does this bizarre idea come from that it will last forever? Because we're more "creative"? Is there strong evidence for this? And do you also happen to simultaneously hold the belief that the peoples of all nations and cultures are essentially the same (a paradox one commonly sees in liberal leaning technical communities)?

Part B of this rant would be the folly of optimizing for GDP, which is another complicated and potentially very dangerous mistake for what should be fairly obvious reasons. Or the recently popular notion that humanity's highest priority and morally imperative goal should be to normalize GDP and standard of living across all members of humanity on the planet. Different cultures optimize for different things, some things require more work to achieve, but that often means less time for family and leisure. That said, I'm also strongly opposed to certain countries messing things up for entire regions of the world for decades on end with no end in sight.

Life is a hell of a lot more complicated than you'd think it is, if all you had to go on was most people's personal perception of it.

i'm not sure i agree with everything you wrote, but i do share this sense that US policy has tried to optimize for some over-simplified, short-term, dollar-maximizing measurement.

it's not clear that we've been optimizing for something that's actually connected to what makes people happy and satisfied with life.

some people absolutely need to be able to say "We're number one! We're number one!"

but other people would be happier to live in country number 17 if it meant they had a steady job with decent working conditions, reasonable health care, more predictability and a lower crime neighborhood.

> but other people would be happier to live in country number 17 if it meant they had a steady job with decent working conditions, reasonable health care, more predictability and a lower crime neighborhood.

This is pretty much the essence of what I'm getting at, and to me is what post-secondary educated people on both the left and right seem to be very strongly opposed to on an ideological basis (but for completely different reasons I suspect), as seen in comments like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17346684

It worries me that almost no one seems to be thinking about the range of possibilities that might lie at the end of this outsource & optimize for GDP/efficiency/profit, rinse and repeat ad infinitum approach to the economy, and that some of the possible outcomes might actually be negative. It's almost like there's this religious belief in the West that negative consequences aren't even possible. Are people's memories really this short?

Or maybe I'm the one that's wrong. I'm more than willing to listen to anyone explain to me at length how success for everyone is inevitable as long as we have unrestricted free trade, but all anyone seems to have to offer is their own personal take on what "a" path to success would look like, which is typically not much more than a vague theory resting on the assumption that recent history is all that's worth paying attention to.

> It worries me that almost no one seems to be thinking about the range of possibilities that might lie at the end of this outsource & optimize for GDP/efficiency/profit, rinse and repeat ad infinitum approach

good point. and even when they do think about lost jobs the best solutions they come up with are feeble.

too often it's poorly funded government worker training wherein middle-aged washing machine plant workers who live in upstate Michigan are supposed to learn to code (or something equally likely to fail for the majority of retrained workers.)

another dubious aspect of this policy is that government officials are somehow supposed to both accurately predict the industries where the economic growth will be and what sort of training these industries will actually require from job hunters. that's really really hard. wall street investment firms are constantly trying to that sort of thing, and it's very difficult to get right.

this is where the globalization story unravels. the replacement careers don't materialize for the displaced workers. so the defense of the policy becomes a loud repetition of "it's great for consumers!"

but, somehow, it's "absurd and irrational" to ask if Walmart/Target/Amazon's massive quantities of cheap imported throw-away garbage (aka "consumer goods") are actually useful at all.

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