Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

An important point is that the recent wave of globalization has been very good for poor people in developing countries outside of the US. From the perspective of US workers, outsourcing looks greedy. From the perspective of foreign workers, outsourcing looks altruistic.

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

Even with recent globalization, Americans are still far richer than most people in other countries. I believe those people matter just as much as Americans do.

View on HN

The motivation was greed and the means were treacherous. If someone was helped along the way, great, but don’t be naive enough to think that there is any altruism. Saying that all people matter just as much as any other is an absurd platitude. In some abstract sense, maybe, but your obligations to your family, friends and community obviously supersede any obligations to some hypothetical person with whom you share no relation. Moreover every society of earth maintains this preemption and considers this attitude to be immoral.

Something tells me factory workers in Taiwan do not see their employer as altruistic. :-) That is perhaps a over-extension of the word.

that being said, there are ways this could be beneficial both ways instead of one way.

I’d also argue that it’s perfectly fine for the US and any other nation to think in terms of putting their domestic economy first, regardless of anything else

As I stated elsewhere, America's median income, adjusted for cost of living, is one of the world's highest. Americans benefit from cheap goods from other countries.

It might be socially acceptable to put the domestic economy first, but that doesn't mean it is right. Ultimately, it's basically the same as the "looking out for #1" philosophy that rich people allegedly have, which is being condemned in this thread -- but at the rich country level rather than the rich individual level.

Try this calculator: https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i

To top this all off, our ability to "put the domestic economy first" through policy is non-existent. Any attempt to fix this "problem", that you accurately described as a problem only because it's socially unacceptable, would end up harming us in some way. There is a mountain of evidence over the last century to back this up, we just refuse to listen.

It is beneficial. I generally believe in free trade as long as both sides have agreements in place that follows laws and policies mutual to both parties

However not every situation is like this. For instance, offshoring was used to artificially suppress wages of IT workers. That’s not mutually beneficial in the slightest. It’s abusing one cost advantage over another without a clear benefit to both sides, it only served to enrich shareholders

It's also important to not that China has lost more jobs to automation than the US has lost to China.

An incredibly important point that gets missed very often

That people don’t care about those in developing countries does not mean they missed it.

The other point that’s often forgotten is that labor costs have risen, and shipping has gotten cheaper. This is just how economics plays out. Protectionism can be great for national security and employment, but people would have to stop expecting things to be cheap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com