Has there ever been "too much democracy"?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Has there ever been "too much democracy"?

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Keep in mind that the American Founding Fathers weren't a monolithic bloc, so they had differing opinions on how the government should be set up. There's a lot of difference between, say, Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton. Like most revolutions the American one went through several distinct phases. Early on there was a lot more space for radical demagogues like Paine, but once the conflict was over guys like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton reversed course and imposed a stronger central government that would be better able to protect property rights. Its important to keep in mind that the United States originally had a different constitution, the so called 'Articles of Confederation'. The modern constitution was adopted roughly a decade after the revolution because a series of populist uprisings was threatening the position of the ruling class. If you want to know more you should look up Shays Rebellion.

So remember that the Constitution as it exists was heavily modified based on experience. The Founders weren't just using history as a guide, they were also specifically looking at the last ten or so years when they decided on a strong central government with only limited democratic participation. They were also looking roughly a century into the past and using the example of the English Civil Wars. During the midst of the Civil Wars there was a huge upsurge of popular and proto-socialist mobilization amongst the masses. Groups such as the Diggers, the Levellers, the Quakers and the Fifth Monarchy Men advocated all sorts of doctrines ranging from religious fundamentalism to something closely approximating early modern communism. If you're interested in that era I'd suggest starting here, as it will give you a sense of the sort of class consciousness that the Founders were afraid of.

When the Founders gathered together to discuss the modern constitution that was going to replace the Articles of Confederation they held a series of secret debates that provide some pretty bald faced explanations of why they didn't trust full democracy. Here, for example, is James Madison explaining why he thought Senators should serve long terms:

James Madison posted:

The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa, or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of the wants or feelings of the day laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe; when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place [NOTE: By agrarian law he means a redistribution of property in favour of the poor]. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability. Various have been the propositions; but my opinion is, the longer they continue in office, the better will these views be answered.

As other posters have pointed out the Founders also paid a lot of attention to the ancient world, especially Greece and Rome. Democratic states like Athens were generally perceived to be unstable and short lived. Others have mentioned the invasion of Syracuse, which came about because a popular demogogue named Alcibiades essentially dazzled the Athenian population into launching a massive invasion of a foreign country even though the Athenians were already locked in a very serious conflict with Sparta (the Athenians ultimately lost both conflicts, and Alcibiades turned traitor, abandoned the invasion of Syracuse and joined the Spartans after some of his political opponents at home tried to put him on trial).

Ultimately their aversion to democracy was a mixture of historical experience and a heavy dose of ruling class anxiety. When the property owning class participates in a revolution they always run a serious risk: how do you mobilize the masses against the sovereign without inadvertently threatening your own position. If the King's property rights over the government are being invalidated, how do you preserve your own property rights? The modern constitution was crafted, in large part, to address those concerns. That having been said I think there was also a genuine concern that a democracy would lead to fractious infighting that might result in political collapse. It wasn't just that they feared that the majority would tyrannize the minority, they also feared that a democracy would be so weak that it would be subject to predations from powerful countries like Britain and France.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2014 18:55

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 22:48

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

It's absolutely not the case that professional politicians are always "capable of quickly getting the necessary information about any subject". This is true for some types of information but it certainly isn't true for all or even most types of information.

Professional politicians (or, more likely, trained civil servants or contractors, since these days most professional politicians have to send most of their time getting and staying elected rather than mastering difficult policy issues) may be better suited for dealing with stuff like managing inflation, dealing with the specific details of regulation or managing public utilities.

On the other hand there's no reason to think politicians are going to automatically know better than local people on stuff like where to locate a new public park or school. Much of the important information in our society is not immediately "legible" to the state and it's officials. To interact with the area over which it governs the state must create a simplify and codify information so that it can be processed bureaucratically. Such a process will inevitably face the danger that it leaves out useful or important information known to locals. Often times the attempts of professionals to make a given area of action 'legible' involves simplifications that end up having serious unforeseen consequences. For instance:

The Trouble with the View From Above, James C. Scott posted:

Legibility and Power

The quest for legibility, when joined to state power, is not merely an �observation.� By a kind of fiscal Heisenberg principle, it has the capacity the change the world it observes. The window and door tax established in France under the Directory and abolished only in 1917 is a striking case in point. Its originator must have reasoned that the number of windows and doors in a dwelling was almost perfectly proportionate to the dwelling�s size. Thus a tax assessor need only walk around the house counting the windows and doors to estimate its size. As a simple expedient, it was a brilliant stroke, but not without consequences. Peasant dwellings were subsequently designed or renovated with the formula in mind so as to have as few apertures as possible! While the fiscal losses could be recouped by raising the tax per opening, the effects on the long term health of the rural population lasted for than a century.

The window and door tax illustrates something else about �state optics�; they achieve their formidable power of resolution by a kind of tunnel vision that brings into sharp focus a single aspect of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control and manipulation.

The Invention of Scientific Forestry

I found this process strikingly evident in the invention of scientific forestry in 18th-century Prussia and Saxony. An abbreviated account of forest �science� can serve both as a model for processes of state-simplification as well as the advantages and disadvantages it entails.[2] The lens, as it were, for this simplification was �cameral science�: the efforts to rationalize the revenue of the princely states. To that end, the forests were reconceptualized as streams of salable commodities, above all so many thousands of board feet of timber and so many cords of wood fetching a certain price. The crown�s interest we resolved through its fiscal lens into a single number representing the revenue yield that might be extracted annually from the domainal forests. The truly heroic simplification involved here is most evident in what was left out of this utilitarian and minimalist conception of the forest. Missing were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for crown revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been of great use to the population but whose value could not easily be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch, fruits and nuts as food for people, domestic animals, and game. Twigs and branches as bedding, fence posts, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots for making medicines and for tanning; sap for resins, and so forth.

From a naturalist�s perspective, nearly everything was missing from the state�s narrow frame of reference. Gone was the vast majority of flora: grasses, flowers, lichens, mosses, mushrooms, shrubs, and vines, Gone too, were reptiles, birds, amphibians, fish, and innumerable species of insects. Gone were most species of fauna, except for the large game integral to the aristocratic hunt.

The utilitarian state could, quite literally, not see the real existing forest for the (commercial) trees. New techniques of measurement were developed. Representative samples of the forest were designated; five classes of tree size (Normalba�me) were specified, the timber yield of each was estimated using the cone-volume principles of solid geometry, and a complete census of a representative section was carried out to determine the distribution of trees by size class. This knowledge, coupled with careful assumptions about rates of growth made possible the tables from which the scientific forester devised a plan of extraction based on what was assumed to be the maximum sustainable yield.

It is, however, the next logical step in German scientific forestry that commands our attention. That step was to attempt to create through careful seeding, planting and cutting, a redesigned forest that was easier to count, manipulate, measure, and assess. Thus was born the modern, �production� forest: a mono-cropped (Norway spruce or Scotch pine), same-age, timber-farm planted in straight rows. The very uniformity of the forest vastly simplified its management and exploitation. Forestry crews could follow a few simple rules for clearing the underbrush, trimming and fertilizing; the mature trees of comparable girth and length could be felled into the alleys and marketed as homogeneous units to logging contractors and timber merchants. For nearly a century, during which German scientific forestry as a codified discipline became the world standard, the �production forest� was a resounding success in terms of steady yields at low cost.

Redesigning the forest as a �one-commodity machine,� however, had, in the long run, catastrophic consequences for forest health and production. The mono-cropped, same-age forest was far more vulnerable to disease, blight, and storm damage. Its simplicity and formal order, together with the elimination of underbrush, deadfalls and litter dramatically reduced the diversity of the flora, insect, mammal, and bird populations so essential to soil building processes. Once the soil capital deposited by the old-growth forest had been depleted, the new forest entered a period of steep decline in growth and production. The term �Waldsterben� entered the vocabulary of modern forestry science and led, in turn, to huge outlays for fertilizers, rodenticides, fungicides and insecticides as well as efforts to artificially reintroduce birds, insects and mammals that had disappeared. By redesigning the complex and poorly understood ecology of the old-growth forest as a veritable wood-fiber farm and bracketing everything else, scientific forestry had destroyed a vernacular forest and a host of ecological processes that came back to haunt it.

Think of some of the grand 'high modernist' projects of the 20th century, such as urban planning. Over the course of the 20th century technocratic politicians in North America redesigned many cities to be more 'efficient' and 'modern'. What that meant in practice was that communities were (re)designed to be centered around cars. Neighborhoods that had previously been dense, walkable and of mixed use were replaced with neighborhoods that served a single function such as residential, commercial or industrial, connected with big super highways that cut existing communities in half and often lead to the creation of low income ghettos. Often these projects were opposed by locals who had a much better grasp of what they wanted from their communities. You might say that this is just an example of politicians being corrupted by vested interests but that wasn't always the case. Many of them really did think that communities would be better off if they were transformed into auto-dependent single use neighborhoods. However, subsequent history has demonstrated that there were massive social and environmental problems with this model.

Any proper constitutional arrangement should balance different perspectives and make some room for local knowledge and input. A larger government can be a useful counter force to excessive NIMBYism but I'm honestly sort of shocked that people would actually think that its some kind of rule that politicians are always going to know better than everyone else. That's a premise so absurd that I'd think even a couple minutes of consideration would cure you of it.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 17:59

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

This is a bit of side note but its also worth pointing out that "democracy" and "voting" are not synonymous. In ancient Athens, generally seen as the originator of democracy, voting was mistrusted for important positions because the wealthiest citizens would consistently win elections. Important political positions were often selected by casting random lots. So while voting and democracy obviously have some connections they can also sometimes be seen as working at cross purposes.

And while we're making side notes, I cannot emphasize this enough: Plato's Republic was not a political document. Repeat: Plato's Republic is not a political document. The city described in the Republic is clearly and explicitly a metaphor for the human soul. Plato repeatedly drops very strong and unsubtle hints that the city he is describing would not be a desirable or functional political system. People who cite the Republic as a document advocating elitist government are utterly failing to understand the purpose of the document, which is a meditation on the individual's soul.

computer parts posted:

Or maybe the same way that a professor of climate change knows more about ways to reduce ecological impact than a random person?

That's an incredibly specific example that you're using. The poster Gantolandon was responding to was specifically saying that professional politicians are always going to know better on all subjects.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 18:37

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Gantolandon posted:

Thanks for clarifying - I tried to write "the perfect government" in a prettier way, but should have used something else in the hindsight.

Regardless of what Plato intended, the Republic is regularly cited as the ur-document advocating elitist government, so your statement made complete sense. I just thought that for the general edification of the thread it'd worthwhile to point out that Plato is widely misunderstood on this point. I don't think it in nay way effects the substance of what you were saying.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 19:12

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

computer parts posted:

That's the point, they let the agency determine what's reasonable.

Yeah, and sometimes that works well and sometimes it doesn't. It completely depends on context. I think the key take away here is that until you investigate the specific context of each situation there is no basis for claiming that there's some kind of universal rule say elite or technocratic decision makers will know better than the man on the street. There are many examples where elites made terrible blunders.

Fetishizing elite decision making as some kind of universally superior system is just intellectual laziness. Without specifying what domain of policy we're talking about its meaningless to claim that elites are better or worse at making decisions.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 19:15

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Xander77 posted:

No. You misunderstood the quote entirely.

I am better than you at doing my job simply by virtue of the fact that it's my job, not yours.

That is an absurd argument. You are better at your job if you're actually better at your job. Simply holding a position in no way makes you automatically more qualified.

quote:

No more, no less. Politics are the job / career of the politician and... etc, you got my point.

You don't need "virtuous" politicians any more than you need "virtuous" plumbers, or firemen. You just need a control mechanism that will allow you to fire politicians that don't do their job correctly - democracy.

Yeah, and a really important control mechanism is recognizing that often times the government doesn't have sufficient information to make decisions unless it rigorously consults the people who will be effected by the decision.

Xander77 posted:

So. For one thing, the notion that politicians won't be making mistakes is obviously a strawman claim.

I never said "politicians make mistakes, ergo they are useless". I honestly don't know where you got the impression I was making an argument like that. Everybody makes mistakes. The point is that in some cases a career politician or bureaucrat will make more mistakes than they otherwise would if they ignore the input of regular people.

quote:

That these mistakes may be paid for in a democratic institution that holds them accountable is a touch more relevant. If you read any of the ~~Holy Writs~~ founding fathers, you'll note that their notions about democracy have far less to do with making sure that the elected representatives pursue the best possible course, and much more to do with stemming the possibilities of abuse of power. Which is exactly what the voting process does when certain elements of the ruling class grow too corrupt - throw them out, not to be replaced with shining examples of genius, but rather with people less blatantly incompetent and greedy.

Yes, I think we're all aware of the basic theory behind checks and balances and representative democracy. That has no bearing on our disagreemnt.

Our disagreement is about whether rich and well educated politicians always make better policy, an argument that you've offered no supporting evidence for.

quote:

As to the forest making example - I hope that's just a pet issue of yours, because I'm not sure how it was relevant to anything.

Because its an example of how top down decision making that ignores local input can easily lead to perverse results.

The example of scientific forestry is also an example of how politicians and other officials of the state must necessarily make information bureaucratically "legible" before they can make use of such information. Since the process of making something legible to a modern state will often end up excluding information that is actually quite important, this should cast doubt on your ridiculous claim that politicians are universally better equipped to make decisions about any and all policy.

quote:

Ah. So, just rubbish understanding of how thing work. Fair enough.

This coming from the guy who just made a universal claim about how rich people who go to university will always make better decisions "by definition", which is a literal misunderstanding of what it means to say something is true "by definition". Go look up the word politician in any dictionary and show me where it says that the word necessarily means the person will be better at decision making. If you're going to lob around insults then maybe you should scrutinize your own very sloppy arguments before hitting the post button.

Helsing fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Jul 31, 2014

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 20:19

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

It seems like the people who are against 'more democracy' are assuming that we'd have basically the same culture and political institutions as we currently do, but with more decisions determined by referendums. The people advocating for 'more democracy' seem to be assuming some kind of big cultural shift that would make people more engaged.

Personally I think there are definitely imaginable scenarios where there would be "too much democracy". I'm a big believer, for instance, in some degree of judicial independence, and I think it's important to have some basic rights that are spelled out in a constitution of some kind and which aren't easily changeable due to popular pressure.

However, I think that more democracy would be a great thing if it was implemented in the right way. I don't think we necessarily want to just have people voting on everything, but I do think that we could open up some of our institutions to greater popular input.

I also think that necessarily any discussion of 'more democracy' needs to touch on workplace democracy, which is something that hasn't really entered the discussion so far. As long as society expects most adult citizens to be working 35+ hours a week I think that giving people a greater say over their economic situations, perhaps through expanded union representation, would be one of the most important democratic reforms we could implement.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 19:06

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

asdf32 posted:

Could you or Helsing talk about the actual policies you think would be different if we had more democracy right now?

I don't consider 'voting' to be synonymous with democracy. Democracy is a system where political power is very widely distributed amongst the population rather than being concentrated in the hands of a small elite. Voting on things is just a tool for achieving that goal, it shouldn't be confused with the objective itself.

Personally I think the most obvious democratic reforms toward that goal would be a guaranteed minimum income, universal union membership for all workers (or some equivalent in situations where workplace or industrial unions don't make sense), guaranteed and generous retirement pensions, a guarantee of dignified and useful work for anyone willing to take the job, universal and comprehensive healthcare including dental and mental health, nationalization of finance and other major utilities. On the other end I think there should be extremely high income taxes, 90% or more on the top brackets, and more broadly speaking, a government genuinely dedicated to tackling and limiting anything but the most superficial economic inequality.

If I had to pick one of those policies I'd probably focus on unions. All workers should be guaranteed some form of collective representation that is actually effective and comprehensive. I'd also be in favour of substantial union reforms: no one in a union should earn substantially more than the actual workers of the union, and union officials should be easy to recall so that the bureaucracy doesn't become disconnected from the rank and file workers.

I think these policies would have the effect of redistributing political power more widely and therefore would be a good place to start. Note most of them have only a limited connection voting. I think the key here is to empower citizens to be better able to take care of themselves and their interests. Once we'd reached that baseline we'd be better positioned to think about whether specific areas of policy like policing, urban planning, economic policy, international affairs, etc. could or should be opened up to more popular participation.

quote:

I think existing democracies do a decent job tracking public will.

Yeah, but you seem to define this in a tautological way. You start out with the assumption that our voting system is good at representing the popular will, ergo you assume any outcome of the system must by definition be representative of the popular will.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2014 20:50

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

asdf32 posted:

No, polls. Polls are the best we have for judging public will and broadly speaking I don't think polls differ from actual policy that much.

Polls tend to show that the wealthy have different policy preferences than the average citizen and that politicians and state policy is more responsive to the desires of the wealthy. Politicians on an individual level also tend to be more responsive to their wealthiest constituents.

Here, for instance, is a study on the responsiveness of US senators to their constituents in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The methodology here is somewhat crude and clearly points to a complicated figure, but the basic take away is that while senators were found to be responsive to the desires of middle and upper income constituents "the views of low-income constituents were utterly irrelevant" (p. 14).

From the abstract:

Economic INequality and Political Representation, Larry M. Bartels posted:

I examine the differential responsiveness of U.S. senators to the preferences of wealthy, middle-class, and poor constituents. My analysis includes broad summary measures of senators' voting behaviour as well as specific votes on the minimum wage, civil rights, government spending, and abortion. In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators' roll call votes. Disparities in representation are especially pronounced for Republican senators, who were more than twice as responsive as Democratic senators to the ideological views of affluent constituents. These income-based disparities in representation appear to be unrelated to disparities in turnout and political knowledge and only weakly related to the disparities in the extent of constituents' contact with senators and their staffs.

Another study, by Martin Gilens (which I have not read) apparently found that "Policies favored by 20 percent of affluent Americans, for example, have about a one-in-five chance of being adopted, while policies favored by 80 percent of affluent Americans are adopted about half the time". You can find an article he wrote for the Boston Review which summarizes his academic work here. He writes:

Under the Influence, Martin Gilens, Boston Review posted:

These patterns play out across numerous policy issues. American trade policy, for example, has become far less protectionist since the 1970s, in line with the positions of the affluent but in opposition to those of the poor. Similarly, income taxes have become less progressive over the past decades and corporate regulations have been loosened in a wide range of industries.

Nor do cross-class alliances work to dent the influence of the well off. When middle-class preferences align with those of the poor, responsiveness to the affluent remains strong while responsiveness to the poor and middle class is still absent. Low- and middle-income Americans have been united, for example, in opposing free trade agreements such as NAFTA and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and in supporting abortion restrictions such as requiring the prior consent of the biological father. But the affluent tend to favor free trade and to reject these kinds of abortion restrictions. And the affluent few have gotten what they want.

What difference would it make if policy more equally reflected the preferences of all Americans? How would it change?

Greater representational equality would have a substantial effect on several important economic policies. We would have a higher minimum wage, more generous unemployment benefits, stricter corporate regulation (on the oil and gas industries in particular), and a more progressive tax regime. Some of these policies are favored by a majority of Americans at the 90th income percentile as well, but not with sufficient enthusiasm to overcome opposition from business and other interests. We would also see a more protectionist trade strategy and less foreign aid.

Jeffrey Winters published a 2011 book simply titled "Oligarchy" which provides a historical perspective on the influence of material wealth over political outcomes. His conclusion, which is roughly in line with the study posted by rudatron, is that money in the contemporary US directly translates into political power and that the contemporary United States qualifies as an oligarchy (much of his foundational work on oligarchy came from studying Indonesia so it'd be hard to dismiss this book as the grumblings of an academic leftist with an axe to grind). His book was also awarded the "Gregory M. Luebbert Award for the Best Book in Comparative Politics" by the American Political Science Association, which belies your claim that there's some kind of contemporary academic consensus that money doesn't buy political influence.

I could go on if you like but I think a basic picture is already emerging. There's a substantial body of research that, on the specific terms you just outlined, demonstrates that policy reflects the preferences of people with money and largely ignores the preferences of people without money.

How exactly the preferences of people with money actually gets translated into policy is, admittedly, a much more complicated question. However, the basic idea that having more money will give you greater political influence is really not in question.

quote:

I see you're talking from the perspective of what you think we'd need to be a more democratic society, but I was intending to ask "If society was perfectly democratic today, what differences do you think there would be". I think it's safe to say that in the U.S. anyway, a perfect implementation of public will today wouldn't result in a move towards the types of reforms you're describing.

I find the idea of a 'public will' to be incredibly nebulous and tangled, to the point that it's not particularly useful. Is the public will just the aggregated desires of every person in the country? Does each separate state or county have its own public will? Do the rich and poor have separate public wills? Do blacks and whites, or men and women? Does such a thing as the public will exist on a contentious topic like abortion? Ultimately the question of how you actually define and then measure the public will is incredibly messy.

Hence I think that the best way to measure how democratic a society is would not be whether policy matches 'the public will' but rather the amount of access people have to political power.

quote:

The conclusion you assume: that power is in the hands of the elite requires some evidence and I'm saying that evidence would show up as differences between what the public actually wants and what it gets.

I know there are a couple common responses. The first is that there are differences and I think Rudatron posted a study above showing that policy follows the wants of the rich more than the poor. It's probably the most interesting study on this topic though I haven't dived all the way into it.

Well do you have a response other than "I haven't dived all the way into it"? As I've demonstrated this study is not some kind of outlier. Other respected academics have reached similar conclusions.

quote:

On the other hand academic consensus on the influence of money on elections and policy has generally been the opposite: very little.

This is totally inaccurate. There is no academic consensus here. It's not even entirely clear how we should define 'influence' since different people measure influence in different ways. However, by the specific criteria that you outlined, the US completely unresposnive to 'the public will' of the bottom third of income earners.

quote:

A second response is that media controls what people want. Even assuming this is true (again, consensus is that it generally isn't), once we reject people's own assessments of their wants we're left with no other objective measures. There may always be better ways to judge what people "actually" want, but at the end of the day it rests on what they tell us. Undermining this puts you at risk of circular reasoning.

The media doesn't precisely control what people want but it does a pretty good job of focusing people's attention on some things while ignoring others. The fact that the media spent significantly more time reporting on Tom Cruise' divorce than it did on the LIBOR scandal presumably does have an influence on people's views. The media cannot tell people what to think but it can play a role in determining what issues the public is paying the most attention to.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2014 18:25

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

The thing about lobbying and marketing more generally is that it's only the tip of the spear. They certainly play a role, sometimes a large role, in determining policy, but corporate influence goes deeper.

The infamous Koch brothers are an instructive example here. Of course they engage in a lot of direct lobbying but they also make longer term investments, like de facto purchasing entire university departments:

quote:

A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university.

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise."

Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they've funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it's not happy with the faculty's choice or if the hires don't meet "objectives" set by Koch during annual evaluations.

David W. Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Sciences, defended the deal, initiated by an FSU graduate working for Koch. During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates. Although the deal was signed in 2008 with little public controversy, the issue revived last week when two FSU professors � one retired, one active � criticized the contract in the Tallahassee Democrat as an affront to academic freedom.

Then, in addition to this, you have the support of a small number of people, such as the Kochs, for most of the major conservative think tanks:

quote:

One 1997 study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy[25] identified twelve American foundations which have had a key influence on US public policy since the 1960s via their support for the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute.[26] Three of these are Koch Family Foundations (the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, and the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation).[27] Others are the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, Carthage Foundation (controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife), Earhart Foundation, Philip M. McKenna Foundation, JM Foundation, Henry Salvatori Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Smith Richardson Foundation.[27]

Then you have the bankrolling of conservative books and TV shows. There's also Fox News, which essentially provides an entire network of conservative programming.

The effect here is much greater than the sum of the individual parts. Each of these individual elements feeds off the others. Fox News can cite economists from these think tanks, the think tanks can cite economists from the bought and paid for economics programs, etc. etc.

Individual advertisements are rarely intended to change people's minds. However a multi-decade campaign that integrates academics, media personalities, politicians, TV show personalities and even regular folks is going to be much more effective at changing people's opinions.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 18:30

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Nintendo Kid posted:

In what way were the "people at large" more powerful in say 1975? 1925?

I wouldn't say the people at large were more powerful in 1925 (though they were probably more militant and class conscious). However in 1975 union density was higher, the government was more committed to economic security for average people and 'free trade' wasn't an automatic justification for cutting benefits and the middle and working class hadn't yet been placed in such direct competition with low wage workers in other regions of the world.

While its a crude measure you can see the effects of these differences by looking at the wage and profit shares of GDP. Wages used to take up a larger share and profits took up a smaller one. Since the neoliberal era began we've seen the wage share decline and profits have risen. Since productivity has continued to increase that implies that the rich got better at squeezing money out of the poor, which in turn suggests a diminution of working class power.

asdf32 posted:

You present this as if it's a new development. It's not.

I never said or implied that the ruling class manufacturing and using ideology to justify its rule was new. However the way this plays out in practice is different in every era and ought to be studied in its specific historical context, not dismissed as some kind of timeless and unchanging truth.

quote:

The rich and upper classes have been pulling the strings forever, it's better today than probably any other time in history.

P.S. I intend to make a longer response to your previous post at some point. But no time now.

Why is it better today? You've presented zero evidence in that regard.

asdf32 posted:

And what does that mean in terms of political power and when do you think things were actually better?

Cash spending on elections isn't that useful and probably hasn't been going up (Source (2003)).

Its hard to definitively say that one historical period was "better" or "worse" than another because it's incredibly hard to come up with a good way to actually compare historical periods except in very broad and general terms. I also think its a bad question since it seems designed to distract us from the much more relevant question of "how could things be better right now?"

That having been said, I think that mid century the government was much more committed to economic security for the majority, and middle and working class people tended to be better organized and more likely to have their views and concerns represented in the media.

quote:

On the other topic (Rudatron/Helsing's studies), if it turns out politicians just don't listen to poor people I can assure you it's not a new development (and much harder to solve too).

Frankly this feels pretty disingenuous. You started out dismissing the idea that politicians were ignoring large parts of the population. Presented with contradictory evidence you say "IF I'm wrong then it's clearly a timeless truth of society", with the obvious implication that we can't fix it and should just resign ourselves to the status quo.

You're trying to have your cake and eat it too, "heads I win, tails you lose".

Your original statement was "Polls are the best we have for judging public will and broadly speaking I don't think polls differ from actual policy that much." Are you now retracting that argument? You now seem to be saying that the government has always ignored the desires of the poor. That is a huge and seemingly unacknowledged reversal of your position.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 20:01

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

computer parts posted:

Though this is because we bombed the world to hell and back 30 years prior.

Historically the US has had a lot of foreign competition for goods.

This makes no sense. Trade regimes are political. The decision to enact "free" trade was clearly biased against working class people in a way that was not inevitably determined. For instance the protection of many professionals such as doctors and lawyers remains basically intact whereas factory workers must now compete with people in China.

If you want a really blatant example of this just look at how free trade has tended to reinforce and extend expensive Intellectual Property "rights". Plenty of countries like India and China could be mass producing very cheap drugs, which would translate into big savings for society. But instead free trade always seems to make this harder and lets pharmaceutical companies extract high rents from their "intellectual property".

If the increase in global trade had been regulated differently then there's no a priori reason to assume that we'd see the same effect on inequality or wages.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 20:34

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

computer parts posted:

The US doesn't have free trade agreements with China. What I'm saying is that the only reason that other countries didn't previously take US manufacturing jobs is that competing infrastructure was demolished in previous conflicts and/or countries were left undeveloped in the first place.

The US was also much more protectionist back then, a fact you're seemingly ignoring. International trade is not going to inevitably raise or lower wages because "international trade" is caught up in a series of political decisions. The effect of trade on wages cannot be separated from the political decisions that a country makes in how to regulate trade.

And saying the US doesn't have a free trade deal with China is immaterial. Since the late 1980s the US has been actively exposing its working class population to international competition with other low wage workers.

Germany is an instructive counter example here. They've been very successful at exporting their manufactured goods without seeing the same kind of massive reductions in wages and benefits that the USA has. There have certainly been changes in the German economy but nothing on the scale of what happened in the US.

quote:

And China routinely violates IP law all the time (just as the US did 150 years ago), they're not beholden to it in the slightest.

You're missing my point. If increased global trade automatically lowers wages then why hasn't this happened to doctors, lawyers, big pharma, etc.? Because those groups are better organized and have more money and can therefore lobby for protection. At one point in the 1990s the American Medical Association complained that foreign doctors practicing in the USA were reducing their wages. The US government responded by making it harder for foreign doctors to practice in America. That's literally the opposite of what was happening to manufacturing workers at that time.

I know its comforting to think you can explain away the reduction in working class wages with a single factor like increased global competition but its really nowhere near that simple.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 21:18

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

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.

In economic theory, the gains from trade stem from getting imported goods or services at lower prices. The gains that economists predict from NAFTA and CAFTA stem from getting less-skilled labor (largely the labor of manufacturing workers) in developing countries at a lower price than would have to be paid in the United States. These agreements are explicitly designed to place manufacturing workers in the United States in direct competition with low wage workers in Mexico, Central America, Malaysia, and China. To ensure this outcome, the executives at U.S. corporations are asked directly what laws and trade restrictions prevent them from investing in developing countries and taking advantage of their low-wage labor.

Whatever obstacles exist to foreign investment are removed through these trade pacts. This means not only the elimination of tariff barriers or quotas that directly restrict imports from developing countries; these trade deals also place restrictions on the types of health and safety regulations that can be imposed in the United States. These restrictions ensure that health and safety regulations do not obstruct imports from developing countries, thereby acting as barriers to trade. The trade deals also restrict the ability of developing countries to tax or control the profits of foreign investors, thereby providing much greater security to corporations planning to build factories in developing countries. In short, these trade deals are designed to make sure that an autoworker in Detroit has to compete head to head with an autoworker in China, and that anything obstructing this competition is removed.

This may look like free trade, but it is only half the picture. The trade pacts have done little or nothing to remove the extensive licensing and professional barriers that prevent foreign doctors, lawyers, economists, and journalists from competing on an equal footing with their counterparts in the United States. While the corporate CEOs are invited into the planning sessions, if not the actual negotiations, to ensure that barriers to competition with Chinese autoworkers are eliminated, there is no comparable effort to ensure that barriers to Indian doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc., are eliminated.

If U.S. trade negotiators approached the highly paid professions in the same way they approached the auto industry, then they would actively be trying to uncover all the factors that prevent direct competition between U.S. professionals and their counterparts in the developing world, and then construct trade agreements that eliminated these barriers. They would be asking hospitals, law firms, and universities what is preventing them from doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the number of doctors, lawyers, and economists from developing countries working in their institutions. They would also be asking the trade negotiators from Mexico, India, or China what obstacles prevent them from sending hundreds of thousands of highly skilled professionals to the United States. (3)

For some reason, the editorial boards, political pundits, and trade economists managed to completely ignore this protectionist measure, even though its impact dwarfed the impact of most of the "free trade" trade agreements that they have promoted so vigorously. If free trade in physicians brought doctors� salaries down to European levels, the savings would be close to $100,000 per doctor, approximately $80 billion a year. This is 10 times as large as standard estimates of the gains from NAFTA.

4 For a partial list of these barriers see Freeman (2003).
Most people probably do not realize that the protectionist barriers that keep out foreign professionals are actually quite extensive. (4) This is in part due to efforts by proponents of the conservative nanny state to conceal the protectionist barriers that benefit professionals like themselves. When confronted on the issue, nanny state conservatives are likely to refer to Indian doctors or Chinese scientists they know as evidence that barriers to foreign professionals working in the United States do not exist.

This argument deserves a good laugh and a healthy dose of ridicule. Anyone who tried to claim that the United States did not have protection on apparel because clothing stores sold blue jeans made in Bangladesh would be laughed out of a discussion. Similarly, anyone who claimed that the United States doesn't protect agriculture because it's possible to buy Mexican avocados in the grocery store would be dismissed as a fool. Yet, the world's leading trade economists think that they have shown that there is no protection for economists in the United States because one of their colleagues is from Brazil, or that there is no protection for doctors because they go to an Indian doctor for their check-ups.

If there were no protection for doctors and other professionals in the United States, then smart kids growing up in Beijing or Bombay would have the same likelihood of working as doctors in the United States as smart kids growing up on Long Island. This is not the case because of a wide variety of barriers deliberately constructed to prevent U.S. professionals from being subject to foreign competition.

The most important set of barriers is state specific licensing, which involves distinct and idiosyncratic rules for working in professions like medicine, dentistry, and law. If the United States were committed to free trade in high-paying professions, it would negotiate trade agreements that established international standards in these professions. These standards would be based on recognized health and quality standards, as is the case for consumer safety regulations on manufacturing goods under the WTO. The U.S. standards could be higher than those in developing countries or other rich countries, if we chose, but they would be fully transparent. For example, there would be standardized tests for being licensed, which could be administered anywhere in the world. Furthermore, anyone who met these standards would be able to practice their profession in the United States, regardless of which country they came from. This means that an Indian doctor could train at a licensed medical school in India, take a licensing test in India, and then apply for a job in the United States, where he or she could work for whatever salary they negotiated with their employer.

These sorts of professional licensing rules would allow students to follow professional tracks in any country in the world, knowing that if they did well they would be able to work in their profession in the United States. Such rules would also provide schools and universities in the developing world with the incentive to set up training programs explicitly designed to educate professionals to work in the United States.

Just as no one will build a factory in China to export steel to the United States until they know that they will not be obstructed by tariff or quota barriers, no one will design a university curriculum around training students to work as professionals in the United States unless they know that their graduates will have this opportunity. While there would undoubtedly be an immediate surge in foreign professionals entering the United States if barriers were removed, the full effect would only be felt through time as universities in other countries oriented their education toward producing professionals for the U.S. market.

The potential gains from this sort of free trade are enormous. Doctors in the United States earn an average of more than $180,000 a year. Their counterparts in Europe earn less than $80,000 a year. (5) Doctors in the developing world earn considerably less. If enough doctors can be brought in from the developing world to bring doctors' pay down to the European level, the savings to consumers would be $80 billion a year, about $700 per family per year. (It is easy to ensure that the developing world benefits as well � this will be discussed below.) This is the gain from allowing free trade in just one profession. The gains could be many times as large if free trade existed in all of the high paying professions and/or the pay of U.S. professionals was brought in line with that of professionals in the developing world.

It is not only licensing barriers that prevent free trade in professional services. Immigration laws also prevent foreign professionals from competing on an equal footing with professionals in the United States. While it is often possible for a university or other institution to hire a foreign professional under current law, that is, by claiming that no qualified U.S. citizens or permanent residents are available, this is still very far from introducing full-fledged free trade. If there were real free trade in the area of university professors, then it should be as easy for Harvard to hire professors from China as it is for Wal-Mart to import shirts from China.

And, if Harvard does not want to import professors from China (because it�s Harvard), then other more entrepreneurial universities would have this opportunity. Since these new Wal-Mart Universities (which could have the same sort of teaching standards and faculty publication requirements as existing universities) could hire faculty of comparable quality to the faculty at existing universities, at a fraction of the price, they could hugely undercut existing universities� tuition. This would force existing universities to either go out of business or adopt similar hiring policies. While university faculty would end up with lower pay (especially their "free trade" economists), the gains to the public in the form of lower college tuition could be enormous.

In the same vein, the Wal-Mart Times and the Wal-Mart Post could quickly displace newspapers that pay high salaries to reporters and columnists. There is certainly no shortage of very smart people in India and elsewhere in the developing world who could do outstanding work as journalists and reporters in the United States. As is the case with university faculty, most will never be given the opportunity because they are not allowed to compete on an equal footing with their U.S. born counterparts. If we really had free trade in news reporting, then newspapers in the United States could hire foreign reporters at a fraction of the wage that they currently pay to U.S.- born reporters. The newspapers that adhered to their old pay scales would likely soon find themselves undercut by the competition. The globalized newspapers would be able to charge lower subscription prices and advertising rates, thereby putting the traditional newspapers at a huge disadvantage.

It is important to recognize that reducing the wages of highly paid professionals is not just a matter of beating up on the people who are on top. This is a source of real gains and greater efficiency for the economy as a whole. The high wages received by professionals end up as part of the cost in a wide range of goods and services. The high pay scale of doctors in the United States is one of the main reasons that U.S. health care costs are so much higher than in the rest of the world. (Not all doctors earn exorbitant salaries. Highly paid specialists earn several times the salary of family practitioners.) High salaries for at least some U.S. academics get translated into soaring college tuition. And the high pay received by lawyers, accountants, reporters, and journalists get passed on as expenses that raise the price of a broad set of goods and services. By using trade to reduce the salaries of these highly paid professionals, we would be allowing large increases in living standards for most of the population, and increasing the efficiency of the economy by making professionals in the United States compete on an even footing with professionals elsewhere in the world.

-citations-

(3) For a discussion of the debate over the impact of foreign doctors on the wages of U.S. physicians, see "Caught in the Middle," Washington Post, March 19, 1996, "A.M.A. and Colleges Assert There is a Surfeit of Doctors," New York Times, March 1, 1997, and "U.S. to Pay Hospitals Not to Train Doctors, Easing Glut," New York Times, February 15, 1997. The success of the 1997 policy changes in restricting the inflow of foreign doctors was noted five years later. See �Fewer Foreign Doctors Seek U.S. Training,� Washington Post, September 4, 2002, and �Test Tied to Slip in Foreign Applicants for Medical Residences,� New York Times, September 4, 2002.

(4)For a partial list of these barriers see Freeman (2003).

(5) he OECD reports that the average annual pre-tax income of doctors in the United States in 1995 was $196,000. By comparison, it reports that doctors in Switzerland earned an average $82,000, in Japan $57,300, and in Denmark $52,600 (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development: Development Center. OECD Health Data, 1998. Paris: OECD, 1998). While these figures are now somewhat dated, there is no reason to believe that the relative wages have changed.

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).

If another country now can make your product (eg, China can now grow corn in large amounts) *and* they're willing to give good deals on trade for the rest of the world, you lose your advantage. It doesn't matter how protectionist you are if no one wants your stuff (or rather, if they can get a better deal for it).

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.

For these strong reasons, therefore, I am inclined to the belief that, after the transition is accomplished, a greater measure of national self-sufficiency and economic isolation among countries than existed in 1914 may tend to serve the cause of peace, rather than otherwise. At any rate, the age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war; and if its friends retort, that the imperfection of its success never gave it a fair chance, it is reasonable to point out that a greater success is scarcely probable in the coming years.

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.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 06:50

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

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.

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).

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.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 16:39

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

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.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 16:50

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

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.

The system itself changed.

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.

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.

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.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 00:02

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

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.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 01:40

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2014 16:50

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

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.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2014 20:13

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

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?

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera America, August, 4, 2014

The media have been full of hand-wringing pieces in recent weeks over Sovaldi, the new Hepatitis C drug. The issue is that Sovaldi is apparently an effective treatment for this debilitating and possibly deadly disease. However Gilead Sciences, the patent holder on Sovaldi, is charging $84,000 for a 3-month course of treatment.

There are 3 million people with Hepatitis C in the United States. This puts the tab at over $250 billion if everyone with the disease got treatment. That would be a major cost to private insurers and public sector programs like Medicaid. This is the basis for hand wringing. Should we require private insurers to pick up the tab for Sovaldi for people with Hepatitis C? Does it have to be everyone or maybe just the very sick? And should already stretched state Medicaid programs have to bear this additional burden?

The answers are much easier for anyone who doesn�t mind bucking the drug companies. Sovaldi is expensive in the United States because we give Gilead Sciences a patent monopoly on the drug. It uses this monopoly to charge a price that is far above the free market price. We know the free market price because a generic version is already available in Egypt for $900 per treatment. Indian generic manufacturers believe that they can produce the drug for less than $200.

This presents a simple and obvious way around the $84,000 question: send people to Egypt or India for a treatment that costs less than one percent as much. We could pay for family members to go as well, and stay a full 3-months, and still come out tens of thousands of dollars ahead. Certainly this can be presented as an option to people, perhaps throwing in a $5,000 or $10,000 incentive to make the trip worth their while.

This should be a simple way for states to save vast amounts of money. They will all have large numbers of people suffering from Hepatitis C, many of whom are covered by the state�s Medicaid program. For example, with a bit less than 12 percent of the country�s population, California would have around 350,000 people with Hepatitis. If one-third are on Medicaid, and the total cost for treating someone in another country is $20,000, the state could save more than $7 billion by offering the option to be treated outside of the United States. For Texas the potential savings by this calculation would be around $4.8 billion, and for New Jersey the savings would be around $1.7 billion.

These huge potential savings should present a great opportunity for governors like Jerry Brown, Rick Perry, or Chris Christie to show themselves as tough guys who are willing to do what it takes to save taxpayers� money. That is, unless they are scared to stand up to the drug industry.

The industry types will of course yell and scream that they won�t be able to finance their research if people could just evade their patent monopolies by going to countries where generics are available. This is true, but it just points to absurdity of using a 16th century mechanism to finance 21st century research. If we didn�t rely on patent monopolies to finance drug research we wouldn�t face difficult questions about paying tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars for drugs that are essential for people�s health or life.

If we just paid for the research upfront, with few exceptions, drugs would be cheap. We wouldn�t have to worry about whether the government or private insurers could pay the vast sums demanded by drug companies with legal monopolies on the sale of a drug.

We do have experience with the government financing research. The bulk of U.S. military research is financed by the government. While there are many tales of inefficiency and corruption, the defense industry does produce highly sophisticated weaponry. There also is a huge advantage of public financing of drug research rather than weapons research; there is no reason for secrecy. Full and prompt disclosure of research findings would be a condition of funding.

There is also a precedent. We spend $30 billion a year on research conducted by the National Institutes of Health, funding that has strong support across the political spectrum. However this is mostly for basic research. It would be necessary to double to triple the level of funding with the explicit expectation that the money would be used for the development and testing of new drugs.

We care about these drugs because peoples� lives and health are involved, but there is also a huge amount of money at stake. We spent more than $380 billion last year on pharmaceuticals, or roughly 2.2 percent of GDP. Given the enormous waste and corruption in the current system, it would be reasonable to expect that economists would be heavily involved in trying to design a better system.

But, you will find almost no economists even giving the issue of drug research any thought. By contrast, they get hysterical about the possibility that the Export-Import bank may not be reauthorized. The Ex-Im Bank may mean a great deal to Boeings profits, but its impact on the economy as a whole is less than one tenth as large as the amount of money at stake with patent monopolies on prescription drugs.

It would be great if a governor or other prominent figure in public life would be willing to put the public�s health and the economy ahead of the drug companies. It might not be as much fun as suing President Obama, but it would make a much bigger difference in people�s lives.

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.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2014 22:25

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 22:48

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Apologies for the long delays here but I've been busy. I've only partially answered your post in the interests of brevity, if I left something out you really wanted addressed then let me know.

I do feel as though we've started to move away from any specific argument and are starting to just bicker in general, so maybe we can think of a way to refocus the discussion. I'm going to try and spend a bit of time thinking about what our fundamental disagreements here really are, you might want to do the same so that we can maybe distil this debate down to some fundamental points.

Also, I feel as though there are some parts of your argument I'm not really clear on. You promised a longer response to my post on how American 'democracy' is totally unresponsive to the bottom third of income earners (and only selectively responsible to the middle third). It's also not really clear to me what your response to the union busting of the 1970s is. It seems as though you've basically just ignored these parts of the argument, but they're pretty significant in my mind.

I mean, sure, you quoted the part of my post that discusses union busting. But you didn't actually have much to say or any new evidence to provide. All you did was repeat your unsupported assertion that the real cause of labour's decline is globalization rather than an aggressive campaign of illegal firings (combined, of course, with outsourcing and the introduction of labour saving technology).

asdf32 posted:

I'm not going to go to bat for drug IP here. That's not my thing.

But my point was that we chose to enforce drug IP domestically, therefore it makes sense to try and extend it globally for similar reasons (whatever they might be). You're over-thinking things by searching for some special motive behind enforcing IP globally when obviously we like it enough to have it domestically.

"We" enforce it because it benefits the same class of people who are the primary beneficiaries of globalization. That's my point: the policies our government has been enacting both domestically and internationally are prejudiced in favour of certain interest groups, at the expense of the rest of us.

quote:

Yes and no. You missed the point in my following paragraphs.

The immediate intent of outsourcing is certainly to cut costs, but that's the intent of deploying technology too.

I think you're still making a mistake of driving a wedge between outsourcing/globalization and technology. They're identical in terms of this debate in regards to their effect on the domestic economy. If society throws X resources at a machine that produces Y, it's the same as trading X resources and getting Y back (don't confuse X as money that "circulates", I'm talking about actual costs/losses).

So outsourcing has the same exact productivity improving potential of technology. One thing that happened though is that outsourcing came later, after waves of technology had hit the same workers, and was something of a final blow. Plus, it feels different because of the foreign workers involved. So this explains part of the negative connotations.

But outsourcing doesn't have special properties here where we can classify the intent of one as being different than the other regarding its impact on "the position of labor". And it's no accident that they effect the same types of workers - jobs that can be outsourced heavily overlap with jobs that can be replaced by machines.

You need out be consistent on how you see these two things fitting together. Like I said, I doubt you'll argue that the database was created by the business class to undermine labor - but it, and other technologies we take for granted have wiped out more jobs than outsourcing.

But under capitalism that is the motivation behind most technological innovation. That is precisely the flaw with capitalism: innovations that would otherwise be beneficial to society as a whole, such as technological advancement or foreign trade, are only allowed to proceed under conditions where they benefit capitalists.

Motivation doesn't really matter here. Whether or not the guy who came up with the database system was intentionally trying to hurt the position of labour that is generally the effect of labour saving technology unless there are countervailing powers like unions or an activist government.

quote:

Bold: No kidding. And the thing that's new in this entire section isn't business's desire to cut costs, or get control, it's the ability to build that factory overseas. That's the difference and that's the root cause of much of the course of the next couple decades in terms of labor power.

Well business did become more motivated to cut costs in the 1970s because the profit rate dropped and that made the generous concessions won by labour in the last few decades harder to tolerate. So while it's true that businesses will generally always be happy to cut costs that doesn't mean that their appetite for cost cutting is the same in all time periods.

But more importantly the point here is that the ability to move factories overseas like that wasn't just dependent on technology, it was dependent on a change in political sensibilities and regulations. It's very hard to imagine in 1950 that this kind of behaviour would have been tolerated in the same way. That's what you seem to be missing - the political change that had to accompany the economic and technological changes to make globalization in its present form a possibility.

quote:

Globally, without question, it's the poor who have benefited the most from globalization (specifically the 10th to 60th global percentile). Literally it's not even close if you factor in the marginal utility of money. Globally poverty has been plummeting and inequality has stayed basically the same.

First of all, please source this image.

Second of all I'd suggest that if we want to look at changes in global poverty then we need to use more specific breakdowns at the level of regions or countries rather than the entire globe. Aggregating statistics at such a high level can be very misleading.

Third, and building on point two, if you look at large swathes of Africa, Eastern Europe or Latin America then the era of Free Trade has been disastrous. A lot - not all, but a lot - of the growth in income on that chart is coming from Asia (or else it's coming from Latin America in the commodity boom period, which doesn't necessarily prove what you want it to prove). In particular, it is coming from countries that consciously ignored free trade doctrine and only used it selectively to develop themselves. China is hardly a conventional free trade success story and citing it as such is highly problematic. China, for instance, has not opened itself up very much to global capital flows and has largely financed its growth through the savings of its own population and through technology that wasn't necessarily acquired legally.

Indeed you're ignoring the extent to which many of these regions of the world were growing rapidly in the 50s and 60s, only to have this progress halted by during the 1970s and 1980s, and then resumed (though more weakly than before) in the 1990s. Just pointing at some single stat, frozen in time, and pretending it tells the whole story is misleading.

Finally, correlation is not causation. Much of the development that you're referring to has nothing to do with trade per se and everything to do with the diffusion of technology and best practices in business.

Even neoclassical economists admit that they mostly don't understand how economic development works. It often has soemthing to do with trade but mostly it comes from that nebulous residual category called "total factory productivity".

In conclusion, your claim that globalization has been good for the global poor needs to be heavily qualified because 1) it's not clear how much it has helped them and 2) it's not clear to what extent this is because of trade vs. general technological diffusion and catch up.

If you take the example of the Soviet Union you'll see that you don't need a capitalist economy to have rapid growth. If you're starting from a low baseline then it is possible to grow rapidly regardless of your economic system.

quote:

Also, again it needs to be pointed out that the rich benefiting from something doesn't mean the rich got together and planned it. And it's less likely when you can see that a decent chunk of them didn't benefit.

You'll have to define 'decent chunk'.

Also keep in mind that I'm not crafting some kind of conspiracy theory here. It's a matter of record that trade deals like NAFTA were crafted based on consultation with businesses and advocated for by think tanks supported by corporate money.

So yes, without question globalization was "planned" by the rich. It was literally developed by politicians and businessmen and diplomats and all those groups clearly qualify as "rich".

quote:

Just as an aside you probably don't appreciate how different my tone would be regarding globalization/capitalism if it weren't for the large broad hill in that graph above. We need to be aware that we exist in that valley. Everyone except us and our first world middle class friends are benefiting economically at rates that have rarely been seen in history, and never for as many people. Personally I doubt that increased GDP or increased technology are going to make the next generation of the first world much better off than us today, and there is a chance that it will make them worse. But such isn't the case for the poor. So I'm somewhat indifferent to the need for capitalism in the first world (though I do think others still want the growth it's supposed to provide, and most alternatives suck), but not for developing countries.

This is simply wrong.

quote:

If you're not willing to apply your definition of "free trade" to U.S. interstate trade then your definition doesn't come close to existing on the global stage. As you know, interstate trade is more open than any actual international trade, where despite the notion of "free trade" we have byzantine protections anyways.

That's because Free Trade is mostly just a buzzword used to mystify the actual way that globalization functions. That's my point. We'll never see Free Trade consistently applied because the main purpose of the theory is to justify the self interested actions of the people who own and run our society. Hence why I'm pointing out the inconsistencies of how we apply Free Trade.

quote:

I'd like you to expand on what you'd actually like to see. I find it utterly implausible to imagine how the first world throwing up protections is expected to benefit poor people. Because it's inevitably the first world whose going to get the better end of these types of negotiations. Developing countries actually depend far more on imports from the first world (irreplaceable medical/industrial/computing equipment) than the other way around.

Economic growth rates were actually higher prior to the 'Free Trade' era of the 1980s and 90s. Here's Latin America's GDP per capita:

The bad old days of import substitution and high trade barriers saw faster growth than the era of globalization.

Obviously these stats call for a deeper analysis, something I'd be happy to get into in more detail. But the point is that the sitaution here is much more complicated than you seem to think. Free Trade hasn't lead to some kind of unprecedented whirlwind of growth. In fact it's coincided with a general slowdown in growth rates for much of the world (and many of the places that are still growing rapidly are either enjoying the one time transfer of rural populations into cities or they are experiencing commodity booms that are unsustainable in the longer term, which, again, further muddies the waters and makes it unclear how real or sustainable some of this growth actually is).

quote:

The weather is linked to wages and profits too, but has no businesses in this discussion. I'm not denying that immigration is linked, but I'm pointing out that it's an utterly distinct issue, with a political landscape entirely its own. Therefore it's not instructive of anything that we push "free trade" without simultaneously pushing to import truckloads of foreign doctors. This isn't a thing that's inconsistent, especially given where immigration currently stands.

Weather isn't controlled by political and legal regimes, immigration is, so your analogy makes no sense.

If you don't think business stakeholders have influenced immigration laws or enforcement then I don't really know what to tell you. And if you don't see the irony of the fact that in the 1990s the US was simultaneously making it easier to import foreign manufactured goods and harder to obtain the services of a foreign doctor then again, I don't really know what else to tell you. That, to me, is a pretty stark illustration of how some groups can lobby the government for protection more successfully than others.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2014 18:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Has there ever been "too much democracy"?