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Comment by codingslave | Hacker News Reader

"Only if those 40 year olds believe they're entitled to higher pay just because they're older. The number of available jobs in a given career hierarchy shrinks pretty quickly as you ascend, which means that most people won't rise very far. Start at the bottom rung, stay at the bottom rung for the rest of their life."

So your solution is to delegate a 40 year old replaced by trade policies to the bottom of the economic rung. This is the exact situation that the article is saying is a problem. Don't think you read the article.

My point was that we should tilt economic policies so that this situation does not occur. And make no mistakes, this situation is avoidable, and caused by the destruction of that 40 year old's career.

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Unless I misread the article, it's about blue-collar workers losing their manufacturing jobs due to globalization. I don't know what the typical career progression in manufacturing looks like, but if you can be replaced by some freshly hired 22 year old in China, you're probably in the bottom rung. So it's not like that hypothetical 40 year old was suddenly thrown back into the bottom rung after a successful career where their superior experience protected them from competing with 22 year olds. Their well-paying job at the bottom rung disappeared, with the only alternatives being retraining for less well-paying jobs in the bottom rung of other industries or staying unemployed. It appears many stayed unemployed.

I think they should be given sufficient support to bridge the gap while they retrain; potentially even before their jobs disappear. That seems strictly preferable to unemployment.

"I don't know what the typical career progression in manufacturing looks like, but if you can be replaced by some freshly hired 22 year old in China, you're probably in the bottom rung."

The point is that economic policies can make it so that a career in manufacturing in the United States does not need to compete with a career in manufacturing in China. To keep standards of living high in the USA, we need to wall off companies from undercutting and destroying our workers wages. It doesnt matter if it can be done cheaper in China, when we allow that it ruins the quality of life for American citizens. The only people it benefits are the people running the companies here in the USA and the people in China. The rest of the United States slips further towards being a third world country.

You're talking about getting America involved in the worst possible kind of war - a war against reality. As a field of study, economics is a set of advanced physics word problems. There is no law you can pass and no policy you can enforce that will ever make the economy actually function the way you desire it to if the physical economy would produce a different outcome.

"You're talking about getting America involved in the worst possible kind of war - a war against reality."

Literally this article was about how its possible to defend jobs in a country

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