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Soviet Space Dog posted:The US was a net exporter from 1870 to 1970 though? Net exports did fall to around 1% of GDP in the interwar period as governments became more protectionist. WWII/immediate post war US did have higher exports than the inter war period, but after 1950 exports never reached 2% of GDP. You can be a net exporter and still have competition between local brands and imported ones. It just means your (exported) brands are more likely to compete with other people's.
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Aug 15, 2014 05:36
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VitalSigns posted:Should we just legalize naked bribery then, since laws against bribery don't prevent me from making a perfectly legal campaign donation and making it clear that my future support depends on a vote going my way?
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Aug 15, 2014 05:43
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asdf32 posted:How is a foreign doctor supposed to compete with a local one? This doesn't make any sense. There are real differences between a factory worker and a doctor in terms of the ability of foreign workers to compete. See below. quote:And why would you expect IP laws to not be applied globally? Yes it's possible. But all the reasons that cause IP laws to exist domestically apply to foreign companies as well. Because IP laws are terrible, verging on evil in some cases, and because they are literally the opposite of 'free trade'. They're a very blatant example of how 'free trade' deals expose some segments of society to much harsher global competition while going ridiculous lengths to shield other groups, such as pharmaceutical companies. quote:The possibility that things could have been done differently doesn't mean that there arnt signifiant underlying reasons for why they ended up the way they did. Yeah, one of the primary reasons being that a section of the ruling class launched a multie-decade effort to break the labour movement. Kalman posted:Mostly those groups haven't (yet) experienced wage lowering because their work isn't as portable as traditional working class labor is. (With the exception of big pharma, where it absolutely has happened because that work is eminently portable in the same way as any other form of applied R&D and manufacturing.). My doctor can't be in China because he needs to be in the same room as me. If a Chinese doctor were to come here to do it, they face the same structural constraints (few of which are protectionist in the way you imply - there's not exactly a shortage of foreign-trained doctors) as a US-trained doctor and will expect the same wages as a result. For lawyers, the protectionism doesn't really matter because there's already an oversupply of licensed people - adding in foreign-trained lawyers won't affect the high end wages (clients won't pay for what they perceive as inferior quality) and the low end wages are already being forced towards minimum wage because of the existing oversupply. I strongly disagree. Doctors and lawyers both have elaborate certification systems that reduce their competition and therefore increase their wages. Like I said, we have the specific precedent of doctors successfully lobbying the government to slow the intake of foreign practicioners into the USA during the 1990s, the height of free trade mania. Dean Baker did a pretty good write up on this topic that I'll quote at length. I should note that I don't think the wholesale implementation of every one of Baker's proposals would be desirable from my own perspectives but the point here is that there's been very little effort to place most skilled professionals under more direct global competition, certainly nothing that compares to the efforts put into cutting working class wages: Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State, Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006 posted:While there are many mechanisms through which the nanny state conservatives have increased the supply of less-skilled labor, probably the most visible is trade. Trade agreements that facilitate imports of cars, steel, clothes, and other manufactured goods disproportionately displace less-skilled workers from what had formerly been middle-class jobs with good wages and benefits. Nanny state conservatives usually treat this job loss as an unfortunate byproduct of trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA. In fact, the job loss and downward pressure on wages from these agreements are not unfortunate side effects of these trade deals — they are precisely the point of these trade deals. Regardless of whether these reforms would work as intended or be desirable, the upshot is that under the logic used to justify free trade they would increase economic efficiency. It's very striking that virtually no effort has been put into exposing these professions to international trade. It may be that as the ruling class feels more confident in its power it will allow more of the privileged upper 10% of income earners who constitute the professional classes to be proletarianized, but far these groups have been coddled compared to most workers. computer parts posted:International trade depends on more than just you and [the rest of the world]. If you're heavily protectionist but have a monopoly on a given product (say, corn) you can dictate policies that favor your country and the world can't do anything about it (ignoring military action and the like but that's not really a thing for the US). Hence why a smart trade strategy would be to focus on technologically sophisticated or well branded goods rather than imagining that a first world economy should primarily export grain. Besides which, the US has been a net imported for years and doesn't rely on foreign trade to remain prosperous. While its true that dumb corporate decision making and short sighted management damaged some key industries like steel and automobiles there was nothing inevitable about the way that the corporate sector responded to these setbacks (i.e. by attacking wages and benefits). Improvements in transportation and the opening up of the former communist countries certainly helped the ruling class here to smash the power of the labour movement but that doesn't mean that the reduction of US wages was somehow inevitable. There were a specific series of decisions made here in how to manage world trade, decisions that advantaged some groups and disadvantaged others. Obviously there would have been changes to the US economy, the economy changes every decade, but the idea that the world we live in is the only possible world seems rather silly. quote:That's why the global markets trend towards either free trade for all or some sort of economic block and domination**. The US does dominate an economic bloc, it just doesn't care very much about maximizing the wages of its average worker. For that matter the dichotomy you're setting up between "free trade" and "some sort of economic block" is totally false. In practice free trade and the creation of economic blocs go hand in hand. That's a big part of how the last free trade era, in the 19th century, eventually came to an end. quote:**(though another answer is "open your markets by force" but that hasn't really been relevant since nuclear weapons were invented) Uhhh, the last fifty years of US foreign policy disagree with you. quote:Germany's a pretty bad example because they're using the EU as their own protected market and they're manipulating policy to support their own market. Again, from my above example Germany formed an economic block with them at the center and they profit massively from it. The US has more than 300 people living in it and a vast endowment of natural resources. The US has a GDP of roughly 16.2 trillion as of 2012, the EU's GDP in 2012 was 16.5 in USD. The US could easily be its own internal market, in fact that Hamiltonian strategy was how the USA initially became the pre-eminent industrial power in the early 20th century. Honestly the idea that global trade deals that were largely initiated by the US and heavily lobbied for by many of its top corporations was somehow an inevitability that America was forced to submit to doesn't pass the laugh test. Trade regimes change, but the specific shape of a given trade regime is determined by political interest groups, and the particular interest groups with influence over the US government in the last few decades have chosen to push for a trade regime that depresses the wages of regular workers. quote:As noted, there's a difference between providing a service for money and providing a product. The one example of a product you could probably point to is automobiles, but those are expensive by design (ie, they're big and heavy so shipping costs a lot) and you can sell them for 5 figures of money so it makes sense to keep production local. You're portraying our current trade system as some kind of inescapable law of nature that all nations must either bend to or be destroyed by. Powerful countries like the USA play a greater role in shaping trade regimes than you seem to acknowledge. Here's a statement from one of the architects of the postwar trade regime: quote:I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national. Yet, at the same time, those who seek to disembarrass a country of its entanglements should be very slow and wary. It should not be a matter of tearing up roots but of slowly training a plant to grow in a different direction. If people at the top still felt this way the trade deals of the last few decades would probably look pretty different. About the only argument I can see for the inevitability of globalization is that the ruling classes of the world very extremely spooked by the period between roughly 1968-1976, and genuinely afraid of a mixture of third world insurgencies and domestic strikes and protest movements. So smashing the old order was seen as a good way to escape both the economic malaise and the political danger of that period. Of course we could have escaped it by trying to create a more just world with a more even distribution of wealth, but I guess that's just unthinkable.
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Aug 15, 2014 06:50
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The point you're missing is that trade policy can be determined by factors outside of that specific nation's political policies. Yes, in theory everyone can be protectionist. That's not global trade, though, which is the situation we're discussing.
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Aug 15, 2014 06:58
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computer parts posted:The point you're missing is that trade policy can be determined by factors outside of that specific nation's political policies. I begin to think that the real power this current system has had, is convincing so many yokels that it's a necessary and automatic evolution of events, rather than something which is in significant part the result of things being decided. You see this in the Silicon Valley stuff too, as if it's inevitable, unstoppable.
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Aug 15, 2014 07:09
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Nessus posted:So is global trade some kind of absolute now? Or are you talking about some hypothetical free trade utopia that will never exist? I mean even Nazi Germany, noted for both its autarkic goals and less than friendly diplomatic posture, had to do some swapping for things like rubber and tungsten. If you're in a capitalist system and the rest of the world (or at least enough of them) also is in a capitalist system, there's going to be global trade. If you're starting from some other assumption like "what if the US and Europe had a communist revolution" then obviously this model will not hold true*. quote:I begin to think that the real power this current system has had, is convincing so many yokels that it's a necessary and automatic evolution of events, rather than something which is in significant part the result of things being decided. You see this in the Silicon Valley stuff too, as if it's inevitable, unstoppable. You're misreading my posts. *Though even the Soviets conducted international trade, though it was not as well integrated as modern systems.
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Aug 15, 2014 07:13
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computer parts posted:If you're in a capitalist system and the rest of the world (or at least enough of them) also is in a capitalist system, there's going to be global trade. If you're starting from some other assumption like "what if the US and Europe had a communist revolution" then obviously this model will not hold true*.
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Aug 15, 2014 08:21
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VitalSigns posted:Should we just legalize naked bribery then, since laws against bribery don't prevent me from making a perfectly legal campaign donation and making it clear that my future support depends on a vote going my way? Laws against straight up bribery appear to actually work, so no.
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Aug 15, 2014 12:43
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Nessus posted:Could you elaborate on your point then? And, are you saying that nations engaging in protectionist trade policies are not capitalist? I mean, we had protectionist trade policies in the past. Many other nations usually held to be capitalist or at least capitalist-ish, such as the Asian tigers or England, also had protectionist policies, at least at some points. I'm saying that in an environment where (most of) the parties are capitalist, you're going to trend towards global (free) trade. The only exception is if you're A) Extremely dominant in the global market or if B) you have exclusive control of some resource that allows you to enact favorable trade policies. An example of A) was the US post WW2 - this has not been true since at least the 1980s as the rest of the post War world rebuilds and takes a larger share of the economic pie. An example of B) would be China - though they are a special example. They don't have specific control of a *resource* (like rare earths, corn, etc), they have control over a market. Their item of trade is an equivalent number of people to the continent of Africa, and just due to sheer numbers they're able to justify protectionist policies for their home industries (e.g., banning Facebook).
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Aug 15, 2014 14:52
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computer parts posted:The point you're missing is that trade policy can be determined by factors outside of that specific nation's political policies. I'm well aware that trade policy is partially determined by technology and by historical events like the reversion of the communist world to capitalism. These are factors I specifically mentioned in my last post. quote:Yes, in theory everyone can be protectionist. That's not global trade, though, which is the situation we're discussing. Actually we were discussing whether the decline of the wage share of America's GDP was an inevitable by product of free trade. And "global trade" has existed for millenia under many different trade regimes. A thousand years ago the Vikings once had a trade network that stretched from Newfoundland to Baghdad. The Romans used to prize Chinese silk. There always has been and always will be global trade in some form. The question is what kind of political regime it takes place under. And there's very clearly plenty of potential ways to set it up, contrary to what you seem to be suggesting. Just in the last two hundred years we've had several examples of different trade regimes. You've given zero evidence that our current trade regime is somehow inevitable or unchangeable. computer parts posted:I'm saying that in an environment where (most of) the parties are capitalist, you're going to trend towards global (free) trade. The only exception is if you're A) Extremely dominant in the global market or if B) you have exclusive control of some resource that allows you to enact favorable trade policies. You're saying this while providing zero evidence. Your entire position here seems to be incredible simplistic and teleological. Actual history is much more complicated and contextual than you seem to be suggesting. The idea that there's some grand choice countries make between trade or protectionism is another false dichotomy on your part.
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Aug 15, 2014 16:39
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Helsing posted:
They weren't capitalist. Helsing posted:You're saying this while providing zero evidence. Your entire position here seems to be incredible simplistic and teleological. Actual history is much more complicated and contextual than you seem to be suggesting. The idea that there's some grand choice countries make between trade or protectionism is another false dichotomy on your part. All of your posting has been a bunch of "nuh uh"s. At least I attempt to explain things.
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Aug 15, 2014 16:40
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computer parts posted:They weren't capitalist. The postwar era from the 40s to the 70s was certainly capitalist though. Capitalism is not a monolithic system. In the 18th century we had merchant capitalism, in the 19th century we've had industrial capitalism, in the 20th century we had all sorts of variations on capitalism from the welfare state to fascism. There's German capitalism and Japanese capitalism and American capitalism. The idea that national capitalism requires the sort of trade regime we currently have isn't supported by the evidence. History shows us that capitalism at the national level can co-exist with many different global trade regimes. quote:All of your posting has been a bunch of "nuh uh"s. At least I attempt to explain things. I've offered a number of explanations that you've seemingly ignored. You're the one who seems to be saying "based on my abstract idea of what capitalism is, option x or y must occur" and then failing to elaborate on why.
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Aug 15, 2014 16:50
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Helsing posted:The postwar era from the 40s to the 70s was certainly capitalist though. It's called a transition system. It's like wondering why gas costs so much now when 30 years ago it was peanuts. The system itself changed. quote:Capitalism is not a monolithic system. In the 18th century we had merchant capitalism, in the 19th century we've had industrial capitalism, in the 20th century we had all sorts of variations on capitalism from the welfare state to fascism. There's German capitalism and Japanese capitalism and American capitalism. Again, all of those require different states of the world. The world you wish to return to was defined by the rest of the world getting blown up. quote:I've offered a number of explanations that you've seemingly ignored. You're the one who seems to be saying "based on my abstract idea of what capitalism is, option x or y must occur" and then failing to elaborate on why. I've elaborated quite a few times. computer parts fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 17:36
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Helsing posted:The postwar era from the 40s to the 70s was certainly capitalist though. And technology changed vastly over that time period. It's really hard for me to swallow the idea that politics is the primary driver of events that are so intertwined with rapidly changing technology. As you pointed out we've always had trade. And as you know we have a capitalist system. Combine those things with containerized ships and tellocummincation suddenly allowing far flung manufacturing and supply networks and it's easy to see how momentum, not some deliberate long term class concious planning lands us basically where we are. We have free trade and IP domestically after all, it's really not a leap to apply it globally. Not to mention that it's really hard to accept that people had a clue what the long term consequences of globalization would be in 1968 (it was initially assumed that containerized ships would facilitate domestic trade). Were the planners deliberately trying to wipe out sections of the automotive, electronics and steel industries? Or empower China? Because those things were consequences too. If anything, at the time, increasing trade could easily have been seen as a way to boost demand for superior US manufactured goods, not wipe out manufacturing jobs, and this shows up in the shock and fear that accompanied the success of Japanese cars, steel and electronics in the 80's.
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Aug 15, 2014 18:12
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I suppose I have two objections to this thesis. One is political, or if you like, opinion based, and can easily be dismissed on those grounds, but I think it's fair to say anyway. If we say that the current situation is the automatic result of the prevailing conditions, this can easily be read as 'it is inevitable, and therefore there is no reason to change it.' The other I think is more general, which is the statement that it is somehow the natural and automatic order of things. "There's X now, and Y and Z were contributors to X; therefore, if Y and Z exist, X follows and is inevitable." Or to use another analogy, Hitler's army used motor vehicles and aircraft; therefore, aircraft and motor vehicles will automatically cause world wars.
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Aug 15, 2014 19:40
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Nessus posted:Or to use another analogy, Hitler's army used motor vehicles and aircraft; therefore, aircraft and motor vehicles will automatically cause world wars. That's a pretty logical conclusion if there's no overriding factor (ie, nuclear weapons) because people make war quite often and things that facilitate transportation have been used in war since recorded history began. As to *world* wars in particular it also follows because aircraft and (to a lesser extent) motorized vehicles effectively shrink the world, so you can wage war over a larger area (because you can do things like "cross the English channel quickly").
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Aug 15, 2014 19:46
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Nessus posted:I suppose I have two objections to this thesis. There is nothing about a prediction that implies some broader inevitably. All predictions are: "because a, b and c I predict z". That doesn't mean z is a cosmic inevitability. In this case I'm not arguing that capitalism is inevitable. That's a discussion I don't want to have and it doesn't matter, because we have the capitalism we have. Given that, it makes sense to predict within that context.
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Aug 15, 2014 20:55
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computer parts posted:I've elaborated quite a few times. You've contributed pithy one liners that assume your conclusion, seriously "it's called a transition system"?
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Aug 15, 2014 23:47
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computer parts posted:It's called a transition system. It's like wondering why gas costs so much now when 30 years ago it was peanuts. I don't understand why you think there's something teleological about the system that makes it inevitably end up at a specific place. Why was the postwar era a transition whereas the current free trade era is some kind of natural end state? Keep in mind that we had a previous era of free trade in the 19th century and it broke down quite dramatically. You seem to be saying that the one situation was natural and the other was somehow artifical. Perhaps you could explain why you think that. quote:Again, all of those require different states of the world. The world you wish to return to was defined by the rest of the world getting blown up. Repeating an assertion doesn't make it true. quote:I've elaborated quite a few times. I'm sorry but so far as I can tell you haven't. Maybe we're just talking past each other somehow so in the interest of having a good faith argument can you reiterate your argument (with evidence) or even just quote yourself? Also you still haven't explained why the USA couldn't act as its own internal market given that it has three fifth the population and a larger GDP than the European Union. It seems as though you've vastly exagerated the extent to which the US actually relies on foreign trade. asdf32 posted:And technology changed vastly over that time period. It's really hard for me to swallow the idea that politics is the primary driver of events that are so intertwined with rapidly changing technology. A copy right or patent is literally a government granted monopoly. The only justification for these things is that they are supposed to foster innovation. Current IP law has gone far beyond any reasonable standard and I think it's pretty easy to understand why: the people who benefit from IP are well organized and have very deep pockets. IP is a particularly blatant example of how, in the midsts of the 'free trade' era, the government has actually been creating and extending monopolies for some interest groups. The net result is a huge loss to society. Most of the cultural heritage of the 20th century remains in private hands long after it should be public domain. Billions of dollars spent on drugs that should be free by down (and which were often developed with extensive government assistance). It's an insane and cruel system that is perpetuated because it benefits the right people despite blatantly violating our supposed commitment to free trade. quote:Not to mention that it's really hard to accept that people had a clue what the long term consequences of globalization would be in 1968 (it was initially assumed that containerized ships would facilitate domestic trade). Were the planners deliberately trying to wipe out sections of the automotive, electronics and steel industries? Or empower China? Because those things were consequences too. I don't think that a cabal of rich men gathered together in a smoke filled room in 1968 and precisely planned out the next forty years of global history. I think events were much more reactive and improvisational than that. I do think there was a consciously planned effort to crush the labour movement domestically and free trade ended up being a very important part of that but this doesn't mean everything that has happened over the last four decades was a conscious plan. quote:If anything, at the time, increasing trade could easily have been seen as a way to boost demand for superior US manufactured goods, not wipe out manufacturing jobs, and this shows up in the shock and fear that accompanied the success of Japanese cars, steel and electronics in the 80's. US companies got a reprieve from the government in teh 1970s and 1980s. There was a great deal of government assistance given to those industries to provide them with breathing space so that they could get themselves on a more competitive footing, but for whatever reason these companies decided to focus on reducing labour costs. I can try to make a larger effort post with more specific examples of that at a later date (though ideally I'd like to know before making that kind of effort that I'm speaking with people who are open minded enough to consider changing their positions) but for now I'll just leave you with a hypothetical: why haven't free trade deals been predicated on better labour standards for third world countries? If the motivation behind free trade was to raise living standards rather than depressing domestic wages in the manufacturing sector then why was so little effort put into creating free trade deals that prioritized worker's rights rather than just investor rights? This is what I mean when I point to the highly political factors behind free trade. Obviously technological and social changes created new opportunities for trade but the specific content of trade deals can't just be explained away with appeals to technology. The container revolution didn't somehow make it inevitable that trade deals have tended to contain incredibly stringent protections for investors while ignoring worker rights.
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Aug 16, 2014 00:02
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computer parts posted:Again, all of those require different states of the world. The world you wish to return to was defined by the rest of the world getting blown up. The rest of the world getting blown up and a large bloc of countries with economies geared mostly to trade to a certain other superpower and the 2 largest population countries on the planet both engaging in fairly isolationist economic policies that were separate from the general US trading partners and the soviet-dominated trading community.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:19
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Helsing posted:I don't understand why you think there's something teleological about the system that makes it inevitably end up at a specific place. Why was the postwar era a transition whereas the current free trade era is some kind of natural end state? Because the most developed nations in the 19th century were themselves still developing.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:23
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computer parts posted:Because the most developed nations in the 19th century were themselves still developing. Ok, so there's no substance to your ideas. Thank you for making that clear.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:40
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Helsing posted:Ok, so there's no substance to your ideas. Thank you for making that clear. Do you want a cited article stating the above or are you just going to shitpost now?
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Aug 16, 2014 01:42
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computer parts posted:Because the most developed nations in the 19th century were themselves still developing.
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Aug 16, 2014 03:03
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Nessus posted:Is there a particular point at which you would say a nation has become "developed," then? Arguably America is still "developing," albeit towards what, it is difficult to say. What is the metric? There's a few metrics you can use (life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, etc) that indicate that if the West today is not "fully developed", it's at least at the 80-20 mark (ie, it's where you have severe diminishing returns). The other thing which sort of ties into that is that in the 19th Century you didn't have as many bounds as you do today. Africa was only really opened up in the 1880s, the frontier still existed until the late 19th century in the US, etc. These days the amount of unclaimed land is essentially at zero and the amount of disputed & undeveloped land is extremely minimal. If there was a future expansion phase (like, if widespread space travel is invented) then yeah things will go back to that more chaotic transition era but that's not going to happen in the current world we live in.
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Aug 16, 2014 03:49
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Except that those measures are continuous, not discrete. There's no bifurcation from 'developing' into 'developed', the term used today between countires is relative to the global average. In broad historical terms, you're just drawing lines in the sand and declaring one economy as 'developed' and one as 'undeveloped', in order to hand-wave away helsing's objections.
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Aug 16, 2014 03:57
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This thread is in a transitional state, it is developing into a better one.
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Aug 16, 2014 03:57
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rudatron posted:Except that those measures are continuous, not discrete. There's no bifurcation from 'developing' into 'developed', the term used today between countires is relative to the global average. In broad historical terms, you're just drawing lines in the sand and declaring one economy as 'developed' and one as 'undeveloped', in order to hand-wave away helsing's objections. Yeah, but you could say the same thing about industries and yet people can understand that having a large number of established players in an industry makes monopolization hard.
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Aug 16, 2014 03:59
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rudatron posted:This thread is in a transitional state, it is developing into a better one.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:22
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Helsing posted:A copy right or patent is literally a government granted monopoly. The only justification for these things is that they are supposed to foster innovation. Current IP law has gone far beyond any reasonable standard and I think it's pretty easy to understand why: the people who benefit from IP are well organized and have very deep pockets. IP is a particularly blatant example of how, in the midsts of the 'free trade' era, the government has actually been creating and extending monopolies for some interest groups. Well if I had it my way we'd pick a number and not move it every time Micky Mouse was about to hit the public domain. IP is well entrenched in our notion of domestic free market. You seem to be defining "free trade" in a logically pure way that's basically yours alone. We get it, patents and IP are government creations, the market as we know it didn't spring out of the laws of physics alone. But it remains that extending our own domestic notion inter-state trade globally has obvious logic behind it and the reasons for doing it are the same in both places, even if the outcomes may end up somewhat different. quote:I don't think that a cabal of rich men gathered together in a smoke filled room in 1968 and precisely planned out the next forty years of global history. I think events were much more reactive and improvisational than that. I do think there was a consciously planned effort to crush the labour movement domestically and free trade ended up being a very important part of that but this doesn't mean everything that has happened over the last four decades was a conscious plan. "Ended up" hurting labor or was deliberately intended to hurt labor? The "ended up" part I'm agreeing with. Again, the idea that Japan would be hurting U.S. steel, auto and electronic industries in the 1980's would have been nearly unbelievable to Americans in 1968. U.S. manufacturing dominance was taken for granted and the idea that factories could be outsourced wholesale didn't exist yet. Not to mention the fact that this hurt plenty of rich owners as well as workers. People have been afraid of threats to jobs for centuries but the actual materialization of this problem is recent. At the outset of the 20th century people feared assembly lines but it turned out their fears were premature and technology ushered in what you consider to be the golden age of labor in the 50's and 60's, where standards of living were high because technology has succeeded in wiping out labor intensive and costly jobs, freed up people to work in factories instead of the farms and then increased their productivity there. Eliminating labor intensive jobs and moving people into more productive ones had/has been the story of economic growth in general - economic growth which had created remarkably significant and widespread benefits to the population until then and empowered workers into unions to begin with. Hurting jobs only actually hurts people when they can't just move up the ladder to the next productivity rung, a process which had actually worked reliably until then. Some people, like always, would have feared both technology and foreign competition, but actual evidence backing up their fears wasn't there at the time. So I don't think you've defended a case for intentionality here at all. Plus, remember that computers and automation in general have wiped out similar numbers of jobs as foreign competition. Somehow I don't see you arguing that spreadsheets were deliberate attempts by the elite to undermine labor. They're nearly identical in the way they eventually caused outcomes no one planned or was able to see at the outset yet are easy to understand in hindsight. quote:US companies got a reprieve from the government in teh 1970s and 1980s. There was a great deal of government assistance given to those industries to provide them with breathing space so that they could get themselves on a more competitive footing, but for whatever reason these companies decided to focus on reducing labour costs. Because their competitors had cheaper labor is one reason they did that. Many U.S. brands went down the drain in the 80's, 90's and beyond as a direct result of foreign competition. "Free Trade" wasn't an automatic benefit to U.S. corporations or all rich people by any means. I don't need to speculate much on your hypothetical because I personally don't support the U.S. imposing working standards on other countries. The U.S. isn't in a position to determine when poor single mother in Indonesia should or shouldn't be working. Indonesians and their government can work that out. Western morality as it relates to poor third world workers typically amounts to little more than selfish guilt avoidance - in this case the west can keep its morality to itself. My hypothetical for you: why does every nation have essentially free trade within its borders? The answer applies globally as well. What I've accepted is that trade undermined the relative power of manufacturing workers in the U.S. relative to other workers in the U.S. This isn't the same as accepting that it decreased their standards of living or that it's a net loss for humanity as a whole. Far from it. Ignoring the massive benefits to 3rd world workers for a moment (which isn't a small thing at all), trade probably hasn't decreased U.S. standards of living in absolute terms. Because even the poorer manufacturing workers benefit from cheap appliances and electronics. If the U.S. still had to manufacture essentially all our goods because of protections we'd collectively have much less stuff. Many people, including many you think have been harmed, wouldn't necessarily see this as a good trade-off. Helsing posted:See below. This is problematic on multiple levels. "Importing an iPhone is the same as literally importing foreign workers. The only reason we do one but not the other is favoritism" - this is the basic argument being made. This argument would have a chance only if we were actively recruiting low skilled workers - we're generally not and resistance to immigration exists across the board. Note the complexity of immigration - many pro immigration people try to argue that immigration doesn't drive down wages, while many anti-immigration people argue the opposite. Some companies do succeed at getting imported workers, but this happens on farms as well as the tech industry. The bottom line is that immigration and free trade are distinct issues and it's not inconsistent to broadly peruse one but not the other. Trying to conflate them is dubious at absolute best. Besides that, the reasons why doctors are highly regulated are also obvious - they're dealing with people's lives. U.S. doctors do succeed at using this to hold down their numbers to an extent, but one effect this has had is to boost the hiring of NP's and PA's which can do most of their job with fewer restrictions. Shockingly, they command pretty decent salaries themselves despite their comparative lack of protection, and doctor salaries have held up as this has happened. It's just generally odd that in trying to play up the importance of protections you chose a profession which would have high wages under almost any circumstance. Low supply (because of high education) and high demand are the same ingredients that produce high wages in the tech sector, finance industry and every other type of less organized profession across the entire economy. Doctors have these things. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 16:41
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asdf32 posted:Well if I had it my way we'd pick a number and not move it every time Micky Mouse was about to hit the public domain. First of all I'm far from the only person to raise a stink about the state of IP law. Many economists, not to mention many people in the IT sector, have made similar complaints. Second of all I think its extremely naive to believe that the state of IP law is based on any kind of "obvious logic". IP law reflects the power of special interests who have lobbied to protect their sources of profit, so arguing that it would be 'logical' to extend these regulations globally makes no sense unless you're simply saying that the logic of globalization is to extend and entrench the power of concentrated wealth. quote:"Ended up" hurting labor or was deliberately intended to hurt labor? The "ended up" part I'm agreeing with. Outsourcing is a way of reducing labour costs. That is, almost by definition, going to hurt the position of labour. quote:Again, the idea that Japan would be hurting U.S. steel, auto and electronic industries in the 1980's would have been nearly unbelievable to Americans in 1968. U.S. manufacturing dominance was taken for granted and the idea that factories could be outsourced wholesale didn't exist yet. Not to mention the fact that this hurt plenty of rich owners as well as workers. There was an extended and conscious effort by businesses to retake control of society in the 70s and 80s. You can see that playing out in several ways. For instance, businesses began to pool their funds into Chambers of Commerce and other collective organizations so that they could lobby together and therefore increase their influence. Movement conservatives took control of the Republican party and instituted a hard shift to the right under Reagan. Huge sums of money were made available to fund a constellation of right wing think tanks that began to push right wing policies into the media. Extensive public relations campaigns were conducted - men like Milton Friedman were given prominent public roles as columnists, TV hosts and book writers and then tasked with defending the Free Enterprise system. This is all well documented. Probably the most clear cut example of this offensive to retake control of society (not that they'd ever truly lost control, but the perception was that their influence was being diminished), however, was the extended union busting campaign: Here's an analysis of those efforts Dropping the Ax: Illegal Firings During Union Election Campaigns, 1951-2007 posted:Starting at the end of the 1970s, American employers began to engage in the systematic and widespread use of illegal firings and other aggressive legal and illegal tactics in an attempt to undermine the success of campaigns for union representation. At the peak in the early 1980s, almost three percent of pro-union workers involved in union election campaigns were illegally fired in connection with those campaigns. From that peak in the early 1980s, the rate of illegal firings fell smoothly through the end of the 1990s, though remained high by historical standards. From about 2000 on, however, the rate of illegal firings jumped sharply again. This observed increase in illegal firings holds even after we control for the rise in majority sign-up union organizing campaigns, which were often adopted in direct response to more aggressive anti-union tactics carried out by employers.     There was an extensive, conscious and coordinated effort to break the back of the labour movement in this period. Globalization was a part of this. You can find a number of stories where a company would build a factory in another part of the world and then use this factory to extract concessions from their domestic workforce by threatening to move production overseas if the workers didn't accept wage and benefits cuts. quote:Because their competitors had cheaper labor is one reason they did that. Many U.S. brands went down the drain in the 80's, 90's and beyond as a direct result of foreign competition. "Free Trade" wasn't an automatic benefit to U.S. corporations or all rich people by any means. You can say this but the underlying data doesn't support your argument. The share of GDP going to wages has decreased and the share of GDP going to profits has increased. Economic inequality has also risen substantially. Yeah, there's always going to be some rich person or firm that losses in any major economic shift, but as a group it's very clear who benefited from these changes. quote:I don't need to speculate much on your hypothetical because I personally don't support the U.S. imposing working standards on other countries. The U.S. isn't in a position to determine when poor single mother in Indonesia should or shouldn't be working. Indonesians and their government can work that out. Western morality as it relates to poor third world workers typically amounts to little more than selfish guilt avoidance - in this case the west can keep its morality to itself. Uhh, the entire premise of globalization has been to entrench investor rights, enforce the mobility of capital, and to force other countries to enact specific policies on trade, government size and numerous other areas. It's rich that you'd simultaneously decry setting global standards for labour rights and yet say that it is "logical" to extend IP laws that make basic medicine unaffordable for millions. quote:My hypothetical for you: why does every nation have essentially free trade within its borders? The answer applies globally as well. They don't? Here in Canada there are huge barriers to inter provincial trade. You often can't sell specific items like wine across provincial barriers, quite a lot of our dairy and farming industry is controlled by a system called supply management, there are often different licensing requirements in different provinces, etc. etc. In the US there are also barriers to inter-state trade. Professionals often have their own accreditation systems, for instance. quote:What I've accepted is that trade undermined the relative power of manufacturing workers in the U.S. relative to other workers in the U.S. This isn't the same as accepting that it decreased their standards of living or that it's a net loss for humanity as a whole. Far from it. Ignoring the massive benefits to 3rd world workers for a moment (which isn't a small thing at all), trade probably hasn't decreased U.S. standards of living in absolute terms. Because even the poorer manufacturing workers benefit from cheap appliances and electronics. If the U.S. still had to manufacture essentially all our goods because of protections we'd collectively have much less stuff. Many people, including many you think have been harmed, wouldn't necessarily see this as a good trade-off. Free trade (plus union busting and a number of other factors that can't be taken in isolation) didn't just hurt the power of manufacturing workers, it hurt the power of workers vis-a-vis owners. That's why labour's share of GDP is decreasing. I don't even want to get into the other arguments you make here because we have enough ground to cover already. quote:This is problematic on multiple levels. First of all immigration as it de facto exists in the US obviously drives down wages in many places, especially illegal immigration. I think it should be common sense that when labour intensive activities like fruit picking or janitorial work or meat packing are being conducted by people with no legal rights that this will obviously put downward pressure on wages. Second of all immigration and trade are clearly related because both of them influence wages and profits. quote:Besides that, the reasons why doctors are highly regulated are also obvious - they're dealing with people's lives. U.S. doctors do succeed at using this to hold down their numbers to an extent, but one effect this has had is to boost the hiring of NP's and PA's which can do most of their job with fewer restrictions. Shockingly, they command pretty decent salaries themselves despite their comparative lack of protection, and doctor salaries have held up as this has happened. I don't think you've actually addressed the underlying argument here. If we're better off opening up international competition in the manufacturing sector then why are we simultaneously making it harder to globalize professional services like medicine? Keep in mind that American doctors make substantially more than doctors in other first world countries (i.e. Europe or Canada). Doctor's wages tend to be high but they aren't automatically as high as they are in the USA. The same logic that shows gains from greater trade in manufacturing also shows gains from reducing barriers to the immigration of highly skilled professionals.
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Aug 21, 2014 16:50
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Helsing posted:I don't think you've actually addressed the underlying argument here. If we're better off opening up international competition in the manufacturing sector then why are we simultaneously making it harder to globalize professional services like medicine?
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Aug 21, 2014 17:35
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Helsing posted:First of all I'm far from the only person to raise a stink about the state of IP law. Many economists, not to mention many people in the IT sector, have made similar complaints. Of course, you're applying the complaints from the IT sector to pharmaceuticals, where many economists have said "yes, IP law makes sense and appears to drive innovation." It's almost like you don't understand IP law, how it works, and how different sectors employ it in different ways and have different rewards as a result.
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Aug 21, 2014 18:37
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Kalman posted:Of course, you're applying the complaints from the IT sector to pharmaceuticals, where many economists have said "yes, IP law makes sense and appears to drive innovation." There are plenty of reasons to complain about drug patents. Some economists like the current system, some economists don't. quote:It's almost like you don't understand IP law, how it works, and how different sectors employ it in different ways and have different rewards as a result. Enlighten me and free the thread from my ignorance then.
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Aug 21, 2014 20:13
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Helsing posted:There are plenty of reasons to complain about drug patents. Some economists like the current system, some economists don't. Very briefly: drug patents fit the canonical case for IP (high cost of development, relatively low cost of replication once created, limited follow-on innovation). Software patents are the opposite. Using arguments from IT/economists focusing on software patents is like arguing that London police should be able to speak Russian because the population of Moscow does - you're using evidence from a completely unrelated thing.
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Aug 22, 2014 06:47
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Kalman posted:Very briefly: drug patents fit the canonical case for IP (high cost of development, relatively low cost of replication once created, limited follow-on innovation). Software patents are the opposite. Using arguments from IT/economists focusing on software patents is like arguing that London police should be able to speak Russian because the population of Moscow does - you're using evidence from a completely unrelated thing. Ok, thanks for responding. I have a couple of responses. First of all the economist I've been citing in regards to intellectual property, Dean Baker, has written extensively on drug patents. Whether or not you agree with my arguments I am not conflating an argument developed against software IP with an argument developed against drug patents. Second of all, the problem with the way we currently treat intellectual property in regard to medicine is that there are huge inefficiencies in the system that you're brushing over. A lot of money ends up getting spent trying to copy drugs that are already on the market. If we didn't enforce drug patents then companies wouldn't waste so many resources trying to create copycat versions of drugs that already exist. Also, quite often these drugs are developed using basic research that was publicly funded, or in partnership with publicly funded universities. Here's an article by Baker making basically the same case. As he notes, there's good reason to believe that dispensing with the current system and replacing it with publicly funded research would lead to huge savings for society. Perhaps more importantly it would save a lot of lives and increase the quality of life for millions. The current system prices far too many people out of the market for life saving care. I think any justification for the current regime is more than outweighed by the huge costs it imposes. quote:Expensive Drugs and Medicaid: Who’s Afraid of Trade? The Center for Economic and Policy Research ahs also published a couple of papers trying to calculate the potential savings of a publicly financed drug system, and Baker also discusses these arguments at greater length in his book 'The Conservative Nanny State'. Whether or not you find this article particularly convincing I hope we can continue this debate in a more civil manner. My last big post in this thread was already quite long and I didn't particularly want to make it even longer by talking at length about intellectual property rights when that wasn't the focus of my argument. However, I always try to address any objections that people raise to my arguments. So in the future if you think I'm missing something or if you see a hole in my argument then please call me out on it, but rather than just saying you think I'm an idiot actually spell out your objection (for the benefit of anyone else reading the thread as well as my own) and I'll do my best to provide you with a reply.
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Aug 22, 2014 22:25
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Getting back to the original subject of the thread and away from these "derails", I would say that I have to agree with the people who say that there can be "too much democracy" (fishmech, fishmech jr., etc.) but only partly. I believe that they fail to go far enough. Not only is there such a thing as too much democracy, all democracy is too much. Democracy is a cancer upon humanity. To begin with, let us consider that democracy is built around the idea that "political power should be shared", and then realize that every single word, idea, and clause in that phrase is fraudulent. It relies on a fairly noxious set of assumptions. One of them is the idea of politics. Politics, gentlemen and gentlemen, is nonsense. It is insanity. Since we all share a conception of an objective truth, it follows via some simple logic you should be able to work out for yourselves that there is one set of objective best policies, and politics, which is about what policy to implement, is therefore obsolete. Thus, democracy is revealed at an instant for the sham it is, but let us dig deeper, for the poor lurking souls who might not be able to follow the logic. We have seen it demonstrated through people writing posts that experts are necessary to produce good policies and enact them. (Thus, the idea of "voting", or leaving what are basically managerial decisions up to the untrained, un-expert populace, is dangerous insanity.) But consider that in a parliamentary system, you still require non-experts (because no one can be an expert on all the areas of policy) being asked to judge expert opinions, through voting, consensus, and other Indo-Hellenic-Levantine corruptions of Western civilization. Therefore, even an oligarchical pseudo-democracy is far inferior to a purely technocratic system. Disturbing to even the most brainwashed liberalistic proponent of papistry is this: no one can possibly manage this system, by lack of knowledge, nor is it likely that anything ever could. Poor sainted Pol Pot attempted to fix this via a grand rationalization of the economic system of Kampuchea, but of course we can't turn back the clock and the son of a bitch called his nation "Democratic" in any case. More workable is another method. We take the grand success of the Nazis in producing citizens who largely informed on one another, and expand that to obsolete the boss and cut off the whole of the political party apparatus, producing a truly steady-state, stable "society". This would, of course, necessitate centuries to build to a system that can remain stable indefinitely, snuff out the Christian corruptions of "free will" and "decision-making", but in the end it is inevitable, as are all things.
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Aug 22, 2014 23:22
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Effectronica posted:Getting back to the original subject of the thread and away from these "derails", I would say that I have to agree with the people who say that there can be "too much democracy" (fishmech, fishmech jr., etc.) but only partly. I believe that they fail to go far enough. Not only is there such a thing as too much democracy, all democracy is too much. Democracy is a cancer upon humanity. To begin with, let us consider that democracy is built around the idea that "political power should be shared", and then realize that every single word, idea, and clause in that phrase is fraudulent. It relies on a fairly noxious set of assumptions. One of them is the idea of politics. Politics, gentlemen and gentlemen, is nonsense. It is insanity. Since we all share a conception of an objective truth, it follows via some simple logic you should be able to work out for yourselves that there is one set of objective best policies, and politics, which is about what policy to implement, is therefore obsolete. Thus, democracy is revealed at an instant for the sham it is, but let us dig deeper, for the poor lurking souls who might not be able to follow the logic. When did they bring lf back?
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Aug 23, 2014 00:15
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Strawman posted:When did they bring lf back? I was just assuming eripsa got another name change. Helsing, there's a patent reform thread, take it there if you want (and actually link the article, although I've not been impressed by Baker's work in the past.)
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Aug 23, 2014 02:03
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Kalman posted:Very briefly: drug patents fit the canonical case for IP (high cost of development, relatively low cost of replication once created, limited follow-on innovation). Software patents are the opposite. Using arguments from IT/economists focusing on software patents is like arguing that London police should be able to speak Russian because the population of Moscow does - you're using evidence from a completely unrelated thing. I disagree. The amount of money companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft put into developing easily-reproducible things is immense, and even if I'm against software patents on principle and also due to practical factors, I cannot say this isn't the case. Especially for things like improved A/V compression algorithms, and UX development, I would argue that the ratio of development costs to reproduction costs is phenomenally high.
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Aug 23, 2014 07:24
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