Hacker News Reader

Comment by rawgabbit | Hacker News Reader

Nice. It sums up the rage and populism in American politics.

The political elite will ignore it of course and will continue to push a program of platitudes and nonsense.

An excerpt: I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor.

View on HN

There's so much institutional inertia to these things. Globalization didn't just happen. People pushed for it for years.

I find it a bit trite that economists can write these self indulgent essays and don't recognize the outsized impact they have had on society. I appreciate the change or heart. But the impacts on people have been so great it would be more of a gesture if this person took all their wealth, put it in a pile, burned it, and then walked into the ocean.

This is someone who got to have their cake, Whole career built on a fad, and eat it too, ie be fawned upon with esteem due to a regretful essay in their winter years.

We're going to see more of this stuff, and next it'll be Big Oil execs regretting their career and then doing nothing about the problem.

Another facet to it is that most disciplines where you can just about-face all of your established core theses is generally called "pseudoscience".

One thing that absolutely savages my mind is the fact that those on the nominal left-wing have abandoned this obvious truth and focused on an ideology that benefits some sort of global majority versus their own theoretical constituents.

The perfect example is Bernie Sanders going from "immigration is obviously bad because its a tool capitalist's use to undercut American labor" to generic racial grievance "progressive" guy.

I feel like you’re confusing free movement of goods/capital with free movement of people.

The two can have different policies applied to them. It’s a bit silly to use “globalization” to mean both.

I'm not confusing anything, so your comment ended up being useless noise.

Oh ok, maybe I need to spell it out then.

If goods and capital are free to move across borders, it doesn’t matter whether people are coming to your country or staying where they were, because you’re competing against them either way.

And, capital can move way, way faster than populations. We are competing against the entire nation of China. There are over a billion of them. Have a billion people moved to the United States in the last 20 years?

Right wing media is counting on you to not be paying attention.

There a fewer factory jobs now than there were 30 years ago. Did Mexicans come and move into those factories? Or did the factories move to Mexico?

Pay attention.

You're hand-waving the effects of a labor surplus created by immigration on wages.

During covid-19, when immigration was suppressed and the labor surplus was attenuated, something amazing happened -- wages rose across the board in America.

Yes, outsourcing is a huge issue. It is dealt with in various ways, and there are substantial barriers to in sourcing (my company has tried to do this, but decided to hire in America due to substantial costs).

Immigration is also a huge causative factor impacting wages and labor bargaining.

If you're a protectionist, that's good, I also support that. But you should probably apply your ideology across the board rather than selectively, which I suspect you cannot do due to your partisanship.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com