I’ve been saying for years that anyone, from either party, telling voters that manufacturing jobs are coming back because of this or that policy, is committing a heinous act equal to telling a child that their terminally ill parent is gonna pull through.
China can cheaply manufacture goods because they exploit their workers with low wages, not to mention weak or non-existent safety and pollution regulations.
By conceding defeat that manufacturing can't return to the US, we are tacitly acknowledging that the Chinese system is ethically acceptable.
Do you think it is?
I personally am willing to pay slightly more for a US-made product since I value a living wage for workers, a safe workplace, and clean air. But maybe that's just me.
Half the time nativists are complaining China is getting rich off us, half the time they're complaining that the Chinese are impoverished slave labor.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Typical socialist drivel about how poor people shouldn't have jobs they clearly need unless conditions are perfect, adopted for nativist ends. I might as well say the Midwest shouldn't have factory jobs if they can't have the amenities of the Google campus.
If Chinese people valued those things more than they do their factory jobs, they would have them. They have their value system; we have ours.
Also, air quality issues in China are way down since 2010.
The "clean air" point is the only valid one here, since their pollution gets into the atmosphere and affects us. But that's clearly not something Trump and his crew care about.
One answer to that is that values are the product of one's environment: they become the people's values because they're Xi's values. But that's not especially satisfying.
A better one is that the CCP isn't sending soldiers to haul people out of rural China at gunpoint and force them to live in polluted cities and work in the factories there. They, overwhelmingly, choose to do so given the opportunity, to an almost comical extent: I remember reading a viral story a few years ago about a single government job in a major city in China getting about 10,000 applications, whereas an equivalent one in a rural area got literally zero.
Most of what was described here was consolidation of small rural villages into larger rural communities, not forcing people to move to cities.
Also, there's this quote from that article, which proves my point: "...an effort undermined by a recent crackdown on migrants in Beijing which has reportedly seen tens of thousands of poor workers forced from the capital."
Their government isn't forcing people to live in polluted cities: it's forcing them *out* because it thinks too many want to do so!
They don't exploit their workers that much anymore, and I don't want to be an ass but it shows you are not really informed. Haven't you heard they are moving manufacturing to East Africa? That is because they can exploit workers there.
As for whether the Chinese system is unethical - it is, but sadly, that’s now moot. That proverbial train left the station a long time ago. The time to stop it was during the beginning of the neo-liberal era. Now it’s too late.
Even if some progress is made (which for the record, I’m for), it’ll never return to the glory days of the mid twentieth century post-war boom period. So while some manufacturing CAN return, it ain’t enough to save the rust belt to the extent that populists want.
And good luck convincing Americans en masse to pay more for American quality when too few jobs return and wages are kept stagnant.
"One more thing to note here is how crazy it is that we’re so obsessed with this one type of work."
It's because it is perceived as being particularly good for relatively stupid, unsophisticated men. Or "real men" as people who romanticize such men probably consider them. The populist right frets over relatively stupid, unsophisticated men the way the woke left frets over black people.
There's also lingering romanticizing of them on the left because the left still traffics in stupid Marxist ideas, often without even realizing it. In this case, the working class isn't just the people you are trying to save from capitalist exploitation, but they are the demographic possessed of some magical gnostic wisdom that will let them overthrow the capitalist order and then something something utopia. This is the central problem/paradox of Marxism. It's supposed to rally the industrial working class, but the industrial working class largely doesn't care about this, and the radicals you actually get are educated elites and literal peasants who want land redistribution. Communist revolutions happen in peasant quasi feudal societies, not industrialized ones.
Meanwhile, normies are populist in general and picture cliche imaginary assembly line man with a Ford, a picket fence, a housewife, two kids, and a dog as being "someone like me" as opposed to tech bros or finance bros or whatever. I think the reason they fixate on this meme in particular instead of, say, truck drivers or construction workers is literally just advertising. People also romanticize antiquated farming practices for similar reasons. The supermarket has pictures of big red barns and spotted cows grazing in green grass, not CAFOs or vat grown beef. Meanwhile, nobody thinks cottage garment production is romantic. You don't see pictures of happy peasant women in a knitting circle in the clothes department even though such imagery is also nostalgia inducing.
The idealization of the working class is just a re-edition of the noble savage myth. It’s no coincidence it is carried out by people who have never worked in a factory. In reality there is no one who “hate” the working class more than the working class itself, not out of masochism or "self-hatred", but because most people working in a factory did it in order to have enough money to give their children a better future. No working man dream to see their children working to make toasts on assembly line like JD Vance once argued. On the contrary they would like to see their children going to Harvard and get a less wearing but yet more remunerative jobs, like JD Vance achieved…
I am torn about that. I have one daughter, no sons. But for myself... I actually hate doing intellectual work, because it is neither hard nor dangerous. Masculinity is no advantage at making Excel sheets, women and very gay men can do it. I feel my masculinity is unused and atrophied. And lifting weights and boxing and suchlike is so masturbatory in a society in which I never need strength for anything and will never get into bar brawls.
Have you ever played Red Dead Redemption 2? Then you know what is like to romanticize masculinity. To year for an era when it was actually useful, not performative.
I have played it. It's the best hunting sim on the market (except the stupid mechanic that you are supposed to shoot things in the head instead of behind the shoulder). Nothing is stopping you from buying a shotgun (or a recurve bow if you want more challenge) and a public lands permit and going hunting.
Also, ironic, given the whole theme of the game is that Dutch is a con artist selling vapid dreams to his gang and the protag ends up dying slowly of tuberculosis and the smart, introspective boy communally raised by the gang ends up ruined by growing up to become a balls-for-brains thug.
"It's because it is perceived as being particularly good for relatively stupid, unsophisticated men. Or "real men" as people who romanticize such men probably consider them."
This gets deeper than that. I am educated enough, but I do not like spending my life making Excel sheets, because it is unheroic, that is, too easy and too undangerous. It is a work where masculinity is not an advantage, women or very gay men can do it just as well. So I would romanticize the dangerous, hard work of the steel foundry. And I am not right-wing, I am an aging social democrat who still remembers when the left used to have this blue-collar fetish.
You are right about communist revolutions. But social democracy is a pragmatic version of Marxism, that tries to work with markets, not against them, and it happened in very industrialized societies.
I don't like doing Excel spreadsheets either and I'm female. The issue isn't that it's unheroic. It's that's it's boring and I'd rather be doing what I want to do with my own time for my own reasons. Intellectuals tend to dress up this basic boredom with fancy sounding concepts like "alienation."
I posted elsewhere about how I stalk hunt with bows by myself. A dude may be better at this than me, but modern equipment makes it 100% possible for this 5 foot 1 middle-age female to do this with no dude involved and to do it *better* than many of my macho man ancestors. Your upper body strength is increasingly irrelevant because of technology. When and if bioengineering becomes a thing, it's going to become even more so. If your identity is contingent on being physically better at things than women and gays, you are in for a rough future.
Women's work was the first thing that modernity destroyed - namely making clothes. No one is mourning that stupid drudgery. But we are expected to mourn male drudgery for some silly reason.
*Edit* There is an old Rudyard Kipling poem called "The Female of the Species"
It has this extremely badass line about childbirth:
"She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else."
I in no way mourn facing "death by torture for each life beneath my breast" no matter how heroic it was.
This!!! I appreciate that my intellectual work made me very wealthy without having to subject myself to arbitrary danger. Then I can have mildly dangerous hobbies for FUN! Like racing sailboats or flying small airplanes.
As to heroic: my 8yo son is in jr sailing and watching him solo command his own boat in a race is amazing. ⛵️🙌
(Also, to elaborate on your point many gay men spend lots of time in the gym and are pretty ripped. lol fwiw)
Richard, It's weird how much your subjective aesthetics about the lack of beauty and desirability of places like the Midwest and Appalachia you use as a justification for what are arguably sound non subjective arguments for not helping people in areas that have lost in the realm of creative destruction. It degrades and distracts from your argument. You go from solid ground into what feels like personal attacks, the way one might dis someone because of the sports team they like or the way they like their chili.
Personally I'd much rather live in the Midwest or Appalachia than anywhere in the deep south. Give me the change of seasons with glorious fall color, pristine white blankets of snow and the rebirth of spring instead of oppressive 100% humidity, fatiguing heat, annoying bugs and deadly hurricanes. Give me the gorgeous mountains, hills and forests of Appalachia over the flat swamps of Florida.
I've lived in San Diego most of my adult life. 40 years now. We have the best climate in the world, But I still miss the change of seasons I grew up with in Toledo... except for the humid summers and the mosquitos.
Yes, agree. It comes off like a kind of adolescent dunk rather than a reasoned argument.
It's also missing some key factors. The Midwest is populous. Ohio is a major swing state. Michigan is big. If your economic "losers" are all concentrated in those places, they can and will express their anger in substantive ways that affect the whole country, as we've seen with Trump. If the distressed regions are able to control the political discourse, all the libertarian arguments in the world won't get anywhere. So Richard's argument seems to abstract away the feedback inputs from economically and culturally distressed areas into the democratic system. That is to say, it's pretty much anti-democratic — the positive vision actually seems to be something more like Chinese authoritarian corporatist capitalism, where you have free markets but no real avenue for democratic feedback.
Of course the argument about the intrinsic undesirability of the Midwest is also just ignorant — the Midwest has gorgeous scenery, especially the Great Lakes shorelines, the Apostle Islands, the Driftless hill zones of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, the river bluffs along the Mississippi, the rolling farmland in northern Illinois. Yeah, the flat stretch along I-90 is boring, but that's the only part roadtripping coastal dwellers ever see (that and O'Hare), and there's just a lot more to it than that. And of course Appalachia is one of the most beautiful parts of the country. Beats flatland Georgia or Texas any day.
Unless you count Western Pennsylvania and Southern Ohio as Appalachia, I don't really think job outsourcing has been nearly as relevant to the problems in the region in comparison to the Rust Belt. Appalachia has been most harmed by government failures like the opioid epidemic, the overregulation of coal, and state governments in Raleigh, Richmond, Atlanta, Frankfurt, and Nashville neglecting to develop infrastructure in the peripheral Appalachian regions of their states. Long-standing, ignorant cultural stereotypes about Appalachian people, who are some of the friendliest, hardest-working, and community-driven people in the country, don't help either.
The only unavoidable economic advantage coastal cities in the South and Northeast have over Appalachia and the Midwest (which are two very different regions despite overlapping FWIW) is their easier access to global trade through maritime shipping, which people like Peter Zeihan constantly stress the importance of. However, given how extensive America's highway infrastructure, domestic air freight, and railway networks are (or were), I don't think that is a fully sufficient explanation for why these regions fell behind coastal cities. There is a cultural desirability element to this problem that defies economic explanation. Luckily, I think many people and businesses are waking up to the fact that most of Appalachia is beautiful, affordable, and ripe for development, and that is why there is a large in-migration to southern Appalachia.
Most of this deindustrialization happened in the past. A lot of these areas have been mired in economic decline for a generation or more. Pretending we're going to bring it back in any substantive way is a false dream. I'm sympathetic to these people in the same way I am to Palestinians...but the war was lost. If you want to build a Foxconn US it will be in CA or Texas, maybe not in a big city but definitely not the Midwest. If you want to open the mines, they'll be in the Southwest digging up rare earth minerals.
I love San Diego. But I love winter too much to live that far south. And I love the Great Lakes too much to ever leave this region, if I can help it. I love living in Detroit.
I see how this makes economic sense. But I don't see how the politics works at all. People don't like to lose their jobs; if they do, they'll probably vote for someone, however dumb, who promises to bring them back. People don't like to move, so telling them that regions have to decline & they should move will get them to do likewise. And because the American political system gives so much power to land, the people who resent the modern world will always have a lot of power. This is, in many ways, what Trumpism is. There are other variations of it—in some alternate history where the 2016 election was Jeb Bush vs Bernie Sanders, you can imagine the resentful falling-behind places voting Democrat. But in the world we live in, they're now mostly Republicans. Maybe that won't outlast Trump, but it looks like it might.
So say you're right. How do we do we do this? If the Democrats go all-in on free trade (and as an increasingly elite, well-educated party, I think that could happen, especially in reaction to Trump's tariffs) then maybe they'll win in the short term, but in the long term they'll lose. And this is true *even if* the policies are beneficial to everyone, thanks to minority (land) representation, and also to people seeing the harms not the benefits (in the same way that increased wages can outpace inflation, but even if they do people *feel* worse off).
This economics feels like a recipe for its own swift death (as those who promise the impossible and the counterproductive run on resentment)—in short, a brief economic boom followed by a even-stronger Trumpism.
It doesn't make sense to implement this economic program until there is a way to not only sell it to people in one election, but to keep it popular in a longer-term way. And I simply don't know if that's consistent with the Senate and the Electoral College.
One further thought: one might say that the solution to this is redistribution, which I think, again, makes economic sense, but which would psychologically and thus politically backfire: even if the people were better off, they'd feel terrible being helped by government rather than having the jobs they used to have, and instead of moving they—or enough to make the resenters a winning coalition—would stay & vote for whomever promises to reverse this. In short, like the rest, redistribution may be good economics but it's terrible *politics*
I guess a basically agree. This is why democracies vote themselves into sclerosis (Exhibit A is the UK). The longer term solution is probably federalism. With enough states trying different things, at least a few of them won’t screw everything up with populist opium.
Past a certain point, most people care more about prestige than money. This has important effects as far as economic theory goes, and, in particular, I think is the biggest part of _why_ we don't see a decline in available jobs in the metrics as automation and foreign labor step in.
Even if Jeff Bezos himself cares mainly about having more wealth than Elon Musk, all the middle managers who _work for_ Jeff Bezos want to claim they have as many direct and indirect reports as they possibly can get. This leads to hiring people to ostensibly work on one section or another of Amazon, but actually twiddle their thumbs all day, mostly to Amazon's detriment.
Most white collar jobs today are bullshit. They exist to contribute to somebody's prestige, to make that person seem more important, even if it costs them or their business money.
Ask white collar workers themselves whether anything they do matters and you'll get some surprisingly honest takes. This is the premise of David Graeber's book, Bullshit Jobs (He has a very different political/philosophical take that I definitely would not endorse, but it's still a good read, and quite eye-opening).
The cost to the human psyche of engaging in pointless Sisophysian tasks all day is real, and I think is a large part of what contributes to the desire for more manufacturing jobs. People want to know that what they do matters, that they've made a positive impact on the world. By being able to point to some concrete _thing_ and say, "I helped build that", it feels like you've made a tangible difference.
AI is importantly a different kind of technological advance because it doesn't care about prestige. If you are able to run an entire company by yourself, you don't have to worry about all your middle managers hiring people to your detriment. You can _actually_ just focus on scaling and profit. If it weren't likely to kill everyone everywhere, this would be the most important risk from AI and I'd absolutely be championing UBI more (As it stands, I see this as a distant secondary concern to the primary one of "we're all going to die first").
Largely agree that an actual strategic trade policy should focus on protecting key industries vs the worst-of-all-worlds strategery that has been imposed upon us, but one overlooked dynamic in the downsides of trade with the PRC is that it does not hesitate to use its leverage to change the behavior of American companies, even in America itself (the NBA self-censored after the GM of the Houston Rockets tweeted support of the Hong Kong protestors, Hollywood modifies scripts in US movies to please Beijing, and Elon of course will defy the will of every government except that of the PRC).
It’s ironic because we used to fantasize trade with the PRC would be a force to increase freedom in China, but instead it became a lever for the PRC to decrease freedom in America.
The almost Greek tragedy in all this is that Trump would be the first president to identify this asymmetry, proclaim it unacceptable, and fuse American state and commercial power to similar ends - yet the man is so comically subject to manipulation by flattery and corruption that Beijing has nothing to fear.
TPP. Trans Pacific Partnership. It's was a big beautiful trade deal and we wasted it. If you want to revive US manufacturing, sure, go ahead and try. In the meantime, the TPP would have shifted our imports from China to various other Asian countries not strongly aligned with China. We could have kept the economic benefits of trade and addressed at least some of the dependence and general geo-political issues with China. Wouldn't have brought manufacturing back home, but would have kept us fat enough to keep banging our heads against that wall and maybe find a way to make it work. Maybe I'm missing something but it just seems like a huge blunder to have walked away from a deal that was already done and had such obvious upside.
Politicians fetishize 'manufacturing jobs' a stand-in for the more general 'well-paying jobs that can that vault families into a middle-class lifestyle', which is what the 'late capitalist' global economy has really decimated in the US. And we're talking about people,Richard, not just statistics. Creative destruction that shunts masses of people into more abundant but shittier jobs, is that your idea of fertilizing the growth of human capital?
There are really two options, economically. Allow the creative destruction and see economic growth as people and resources move to where they are needed. Or resist change and die as jobs and progress move elsewhere. Kind of like Europe.
And this talk about service, retail and office jobs being worse than factory jobs doesn’t match up very well with reality.
You've got to be kidding. Go read about how 'work' has changed in the US since the 1970s, how the middle class has hollowed out, how inequality has increased, and how those things are connected, then tell me again about those great service and retail and office jobs just waiting for workers. Or just ask young people today about them, people who sense theyll never be able to buy that first house, support a nuclear family, send their kids to college -- all things that typical workers used to be able to do. People like you, preening 'realists' adamantly sure that 'there are *only two options*, so suck it up' and 'eww, Europe, it's a moribund horror' (have you ever even *been* there?) strike me as having something fundamentally wrong and anti-human about them.
The middle class shrank primarily because so many people moved up to the upper class.
Inequality in outcomes is not a problem when people differ drastically in equality of contributions. In a properly functioning economy higher and lower wages and profits act as signals and incentives to do something different. If the rewards for entrepreneurial success or skilled education go up compared to sitting on your ass doing nothing, then that is the market working.
Unemployment has been lower in the (creative destruction) US compared to most developed nations for quite some time now. And I would much rather work in an office or retail than in a dirty old factory. Feel free to put on your overalls and hard hat and disagree.
The reason young adults can’t afford to buy a house is due to insufficient building of homes in desired areas which has nothing to do with China or creative destruction.
Just got back from Europe a few weeks ago, actually. Found it charming.
I have spent the last twenty years studying human progress and flourishing. So maybe I’m not the one whose views are anti-human. If you have an open mind I can share some more…
Manufacturing jobs paid (relatively) well because they sucked.
The maximum wage a worker can/will be paid is determined by their productivity (the firm can't pay you more than you bring in), but their actual wage is determined by market mechanisms. The supply of unskilled labor is the same whether the job is cleaning or working in a factory - the only reason you would (consistently) pay a house cleaner $40k and a factory worker $80k, is that you have to pay people $40k more to get them to work in a factory, because it sucks that bad.
Your faith in 'the market' is adorable. What world have you lived in? And what makes you think factory work is necessarily 'unskilled'? And have you ever heard of....unions? Regardless of all that, your definition of 'sucks' seems to ignore the benefits associated with doing the 'sucky' job. If a job sucks *and* lacks benefits, it sucks much harder.
The job sucks, so you pay people more. If the job sucked but you didn't get paid more, then why would you work there? If I can pay you $40k instead of $80k, why wouldn't I? I don't require any special faith in the market to do this.
"Unskilled" labor is the type of labor that propels people up the socioeconomic ladder, because it requires no expensive formal training like becoming a doctor. If you're doing work at the factory that DOES require expensive formal training (i.e. a degree), then it can't propel you into a middle class lifestyle because you already paid tens of thousands of dollars for a degree.
Another factor, traditionally, is that a lot of factory work involved a lot of brute physical labor. Even when I was a boy, it was noted that electronics assembly was unusual in the number of women it employed. It was also noted that in electronics assembly, the weight of the objects being assembled was much less than in most manufacturing. Indeed, such work had the defined term "heavy lifting". Cleaning work, though grueling, has a much lower limit to the amount of weight you have to lift routinely. So a lot of factory work was male-only, whereas cleaning could hire both sexes. (Of course, sexism amplified this inherent disparity.)
"ADH support targeted assistance to those left behind."
They always say that, but it is has never happened. If it is politically impossible, then it isn't a useful suggestion.
"this would only justify narrow restrictions*
You are really understating the national security considerations. It takes a strong industrial base to fight a war. Already, among other things, we can't make anywhere near the amount of munitions we need.
"It made the US better off overall "
It's widely agreed that nearly all of the income and wealth gains of recent decades have gone to the very wealthiest Americans. So that "overall" is doing a lot of work.
Your assertion is a piece of socialist propaganda meant to inspire self-pity in the masses to hide the fact that they’re much better off due to freedom and to try to get them to adopt a form of nativism that would make them worse off.
The fact--not propaganda, fact--that nearly all of the income and wealth gains of recent decades have gone to the very wealthiest Americans is a serious problem with very broad implications. Telling people nevermind, you're better off because freedom is a ridiculous refusal to even engage the issue.
You can tell people that they should base their judgment on relative gains rather than absolute gains, and that they should be upset their lives got better because some people gained even more. I think it’s evil and will make everyone worse off. But some people do have preferences I consider evil.
Unset, your argument just restates the populist propaganda that both parties use.
In reality, median incomes are up more in the US over the past generation than in any other large developed nation (those that resisted creative destruction and are now decaying)
Your “gains have gone to the wealthiest” ignores that the wealthiest change over a 30 year period as people marry and gain experience and skills. Most people move through all 5 income deciles over their life. Your argument is as empty as complaining that most of the gains to education efforts in elementary school are taken by the 6th graders. (Think about it…)
The degree to which the median income is up is debatable. But your assertion "most people move through all 5 income deciles over their life" is just completely wrong.
You, and the economists, are making the case that the fact our trading partner is China is irrelevant. That is wrong. China being our trading partner is relevant. China is our adversary. The world will be worse off if China is the global superpower.
If a company (China) were to engage in predatory pricing to eliminate the competition, consumers would benefit from lower prices. However, long term it would be bad from consumers as the lack of competition would result in higher prices.
You are understating the national defense component. Manufacturing capacity...is...national defense capacity.
Well sure, and the US could become an autocracy 'in the future'. Predictions are a dime a dozen. Many thought introducing capitalism to Russia and China would bring them around to 'our side', remember?
I am not making a prediction. China is CCP focused. They have harmed their future prospects because they thought it would strengthen the CCP.
Yes, the same people who thought free trade would lead to democratization are the same people who think changing our trading policies with China is wrong. I am disagreeing with them.
The only thing I am certain of is out lack of industrial base is military liability. If I was certain China's prospects were dimming or they weren't going to try to rule the world, then I would be fine with continuing as is. After all, as Richard points out trade with China makes us richer. I am not certain of that so we need to act accordingly.
If we eliminated our defense spending and spent it on R&D or some other more economically beneficial way it make us richer. If you believe an industrial base is necessary for war, then that is essentially what Richard is arguing for.
The situation is a bit more grim than this. Yes, the geographic distribution of the economy will change. But much, much harsher is that the distribution of the economy between different classes of people (defined by the job skills) will also change.
> "When I grew up in Pocatello, you could not read or write and still get a job at the railroad making $50,000 or $60,000 a year." -- Pocatello mayor Roger Chase
There used to be a lot of work for people who were (1) male, (2) willing to obey orders, and (3) had a strong back. I've read that circa 1950 about 1/3 of all factory jobs were officially unskilled, in that anybody meeting those criteria could walk in off the street and be productive on the first day. That no longer applies even for our bottom-end job, working for McDonald's.
So the political problem is not just how the work is being redistributed between states but also how it is being redistributed across classes. And there doesn't seem to be any good solution to "You aren't smart enough to ever get a well-paying job."
There's a case to be made that welfare dependency has a pacifying effect, and without welfare, we would see much more political violence. I call to mind the Bonus Army in 1932.
In addition to the normal YIMBY policies, I would be interested to see the effect of a cash-payout for movers. Just pay people for moving. I'm biased in this respect but I think it would be a net positive investment.
In the case of the midwest and Appalachia, the only way those places will ever grow is by having immigrants move there. I think it would be good to give preferential treatment to high-skilled immigrants if they're willing to move to places that have seen better days. The problem is many of those places don't like immigrants and won't want them there. That's their choice, they shouldn't have to take them, but if they want to grow and prosper again they'll have to.
How do we increase the prosperity of our people is a different question than how do we increase the prosperity of this land. I would start by understanding what question you are trying to answer.
That's the idea. People with high skills are more likely to be entrepreneurial and start businesses that boost growth. Ideally, you would create lots of Bentonvilles in places that are struggling. It's not going to happen everywhere, but I don't see how else those places are going to thrive again. There is no domestic demand for living there and I don't see that changing any time soon.
I think there would be domestic demand if there were jobs and industry, especially some of the more picturesque parts of Appalachia. Move one Fortune 500 company HQ or assembly plant and you can employ a fair-sized region, directly and indirectly.
Getting immigrants to live there would probably be easier, though.
Another tour de force. I guess Trump et al. probably believe in tariffs and saving manufacturing jobs. But probably they’re also trying to. Maintain a winning political coalition.
Most manufacturing jobs in America are done by women. Manufacturing has also become high tech in America with most requiring a college degree. It was rhetoric all along. The Economist had a header on it titled manufacturing delusion.
I’ve been saying for years that anyone, from either party, telling voters that manufacturing jobs are coming back because of this or that policy, is committing a heinous act equal to telling a child that their terminally ill parent is gonna pull through.
China can cheaply manufacture goods because they exploit their workers with low wages, not to mention weak or non-existent safety and pollution regulations.
By conceding defeat that manufacturing can't return to the US, we are tacitly acknowledging that the Chinese system is ethically acceptable.
Do you think it is?
I personally am willing to pay slightly more for a US-made product since I value a living wage for workers, a safe workplace, and clean air. But maybe that's just me.
Half the time nativists are complaining China is getting rich off us, half the time they're complaining that the Chinese are impoverished slave labor.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Typical socialist drivel about how poor people shouldn't have jobs they clearly need unless conditions are perfect, adopted for nativist ends. I might as well say the Midwest shouldn't have factory jobs if they can't have the amenities of the Google campus.
Tariffs on China are a really ineffective means to get "a living wage for workers, a safe workplace, and clean air."
If Chinese people valued those things more than they do their factory jobs, they would have them. They have their value system; we have ours.
Also, air quality issues in China are way down since 2010.
The "clean air" point is the only valid one here, since their pollution gets into the atmosphere and affects us. But that's clearly not something Trump and his crew care about.
Isn't it inaccurate to ascribe values to people living in a dictatorship? How do you know if it's the people values or Xi's values?
Nonsense. The 20% of adult Chinese who are party members have voting rights.
One answer to that is that values are the product of one's environment: they become the people's values because they're Xi's values. But that's not especially satisfying.
A better one is that the CCP isn't sending soldiers to haul people out of rural China at gunpoint and force them to live in polluted cities and work in the factories there. They, overwhelmingly, choose to do so given the opportunity, to an almost comical extent: I remember reading a viral story a few years ago about a single government job in a major city in China getting about 10,000 applications, whereas an equivalent one in a rural area got literally zero.
China did and does tell people where to live, with the implicit backing of force.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/07/china-move-millions-people-homes-anti-poverty-drive?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Most of what was described here was consolidation of small rural villages into larger rural communities, not forcing people to move to cities.
Also, there's this quote from that article, which proves my point: "...an effort undermined by a recent crackdown on migrants in Beijing which has reportedly seen tens of thousands of poor workers forced from the capital."
Their government isn't forcing people to live in polluted cities: it's forcing them *out* because it thinks too many want to do so!
They don't exploit their workers that much anymore, and I don't want to be an ass but it shows you are not really informed. Haven't you heard they are moving manufacturing to East Africa? That is because they can exploit workers there.
As for whether the Chinese system is unethical - it is, but sadly, that’s now moot. That proverbial train left the station a long time ago. The time to stop it was during the beginning of the neo-liberal era. Now it’s too late.
Even if some progress is made (which for the record, I’m for), it’ll never return to the glory days of the mid twentieth century post-war boom period. So while some manufacturing CAN return, it ain’t enough to save the rust belt to the extent that populists want.
And good luck convincing Americans en masse to pay more for American quality when too few jobs return and wages are kept stagnant.
"One more thing to note here is how crazy it is that we’re so obsessed with this one type of work."
It's because it is perceived as being particularly good for relatively stupid, unsophisticated men. Or "real men" as people who romanticize such men probably consider them. The populist right frets over relatively stupid, unsophisticated men the way the woke left frets over black people.
There's also lingering romanticizing of them on the left because the left still traffics in stupid Marxist ideas, often without even realizing it. In this case, the working class isn't just the people you are trying to save from capitalist exploitation, but they are the demographic possessed of some magical gnostic wisdom that will let them overthrow the capitalist order and then something something utopia. This is the central problem/paradox of Marxism. It's supposed to rally the industrial working class, but the industrial working class largely doesn't care about this, and the radicals you actually get are educated elites and literal peasants who want land redistribution. Communist revolutions happen in peasant quasi feudal societies, not industrialized ones.
Meanwhile, normies are populist in general and picture cliche imaginary assembly line man with a Ford, a picket fence, a housewife, two kids, and a dog as being "someone like me" as opposed to tech bros or finance bros or whatever. I think the reason they fixate on this meme in particular instead of, say, truck drivers or construction workers is literally just advertising. People also romanticize antiquated farming practices for similar reasons. The supermarket has pictures of big red barns and spotted cows grazing in green grass, not CAFOs or vat grown beef. Meanwhile, nobody thinks cottage garment production is romantic. You don't see pictures of happy peasant women in a knitting circle in the clothes department even though such imagery is also nostalgia inducing.
The idealization of the working class is just a re-edition of the noble savage myth. It’s no coincidence it is carried out by people who have never worked in a factory. In reality there is no one who “hate” the working class more than the working class itself, not out of masochism or "self-hatred", but because most people working in a factory did it in order to have enough money to give their children a better future. No working man dream to see their children working to make toasts on assembly line like JD Vance once argued. On the contrary they would like to see their children going to Harvard and get a less wearing but yet more remunerative jobs, like JD Vance achieved…
I am torn about that. I have one daughter, no sons. But for myself... I actually hate doing intellectual work, because it is neither hard nor dangerous. Masculinity is no advantage at making Excel sheets, women and very gay men can do it. I feel my masculinity is unused and atrophied. And lifting weights and boxing and suchlike is so masturbatory in a society in which I never need strength for anything and will never get into bar brawls.
Have you ever played Red Dead Redemption 2? Then you know what is like to romanticize masculinity. To year for an era when it was actually useful, not performative.
I have played it. It's the best hunting sim on the market (except the stupid mechanic that you are supposed to shoot things in the head instead of behind the shoulder). Nothing is stopping you from buying a shotgun (or a recurve bow if you want more challenge) and a public lands permit and going hunting.
Also, ironic, given the whole theme of the game is that Dutch is a con artist selling vapid dreams to his gang and the protag ends up dying slowly of tuberculosis and the smart, introspective boy communally raised by the gang ends up ruined by growing up to become a balls-for-brains thug.
"It's because it is perceived as being particularly good for relatively stupid, unsophisticated men. Or "real men" as people who romanticize such men probably consider them."
This gets deeper than that. I am educated enough, but I do not like spending my life making Excel sheets, because it is unheroic, that is, too easy and too undangerous. It is a work where masculinity is not an advantage, women or very gay men can do it just as well. So I would romanticize the dangerous, hard work of the steel foundry. And I am not right-wing, I am an aging social democrat who still remembers when the left used to have this blue-collar fetish.
You are right about communist revolutions. But social democracy is a pragmatic version of Marxism, that tries to work with markets, not against them, and it happened in very industrialized societies.
I don't like doing Excel spreadsheets either and I'm female. The issue isn't that it's unheroic. It's that's it's boring and I'd rather be doing what I want to do with my own time for my own reasons. Intellectuals tend to dress up this basic boredom with fancy sounding concepts like "alienation."
I posted elsewhere about how I stalk hunt with bows by myself. A dude may be better at this than me, but modern equipment makes it 100% possible for this 5 foot 1 middle-age female to do this with no dude involved and to do it *better* than many of my macho man ancestors. Your upper body strength is increasingly irrelevant because of technology. When and if bioengineering becomes a thing, it's going to become even more so. If your identity is contingent on being physically better at things than women and gays, you are in for a rough future.
Women's work was the first thing that modernity destroyed - namely making clothes. No one is mourning that stupid drudgery. But we are expected to mourn male drudgery for some silly reason.
*Edit* There is an old Rudyard Kipling poem called "The Female of the Species"
It has this extremely badass line about childbirth:
"She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else."
I in no way mourn facing "death by torture for each life beneath my breast" no matter how heroic it was.
I would be an utter fool if I did.
This!!! I appreciate that my intellectual work made me very wealthy without having to subject myself to arbitrary danger. Then I can have mildly dangerous hobbies for FUN! Like racing sailboats or flying small airplanes.
As to heroic: my 8yo son is in jr sailing and watching him solo command his own boat in a race is amazing. ⛵️🙌
(Also, to elaborate on your point many gay men spend lots of time in the gym and are pretty ripped. lol fwiw)
Richard, It's weird how much your subjective aesthetics about the lack of beauty and desirability of places like the Midwest and Appalachia you use as a justification for what are arguably sound non subjective arguments for not helping people in areas that have lost in the realm of creative destruction. It degrades and distracts from your argument. You go from solid ground into what feels like personal attacks, the way one might dis someone because of the sports team they like or the way they like their chili.
Personally I'd much rather live in the Midwest or Appalachia than anywhere in the deep south. Give me the change of seasons with glorious fall color, pristine white blankets of snow and the rebirth of spring instead of oppressive 100% humidity, fatiguing heat, annoying bugs and deadly hurricanes. Give me the gorgeous mountains, hills and forests of Appalachia over the flat swamps of Florida.
I've lived in San Diego most of my adult life. 40 years now. We have the best climate in the world, But I still miss the change of seasons I grew up with in Toledo... except for the humid summers and the mosquitos.
Yes, agree. It comes off like a kind of adolescent dunk rather than a reasoned argument.
It's also missing some key factors. The Midwest is populous. Ohio is a major swing state. Michigan is big. If your economic "losers" are all concentrated in those places, they can and will express their anger in substantive ways that affect the whole country, as we've seen with Trump. If the distressed regions are able to control the political discourse, all the libertarian arguments in the world won't get anywhere. So Richard's argument seems to abstract away the feedback inputs from economically and culturally distressed areas into the democratic system. That is to say, it's pretty much anti-democratic — the positive vision actually seems to be something more like Chinese authoritarian corporatist capitalism, where you have free markets but no real avenue for democratic feedback.
Of course the argument about the intrinsic undesirability of the Midwest is also just ignorant — the Midwest has gorgeous scenery, especially the Great Lakes shorelines, the Apostle Islands, the Driftless hill zones of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, the river bluffs along the Mississippi, the rolling farmland in northern Illinois. Yeah, the flat stretch along I-90 is boring, but that's the only part roadtripping coastal dwellers ever see (that and O'Hare), and there's just a lot more to it than that. And of course Appalachia is one of the most beautiful parts of the country. Beats flatland Georgia or Texas any day.
Unless you count Western Pennsylvania and Southern Ohio as Appalachia, I don't really think job outsourcing has been nearly as relevant to the problems in the region in comparison to the Rust Belt. Appalachia has been most harmed by government failures like the opioid epidemic, the overregulation of coal, and state governments in Raleigh, Richmond, Atlanta, Frankfurt, and Nashville neglecting to develop infrastructure in the peripheral Appalachian regions of their states. Long-standing, ignorant cultural stereotypes about Appalachian people, who are some of the friendliest, hardest-working, and community-driven people in the country, don't help either.
The only unavoidable economic advantage coastal cities in the South and Northeast have over Appalachia and the Midwest (which are two very different regions despite overlapping FWIW) is their easier access to global trade through maritime shipping, which people like Peter Zeihan constantly stress the importance of. However, given how extensive America's highway infrastructure, domestic air freight, and railway networks are (or were), I don't think that is a fully sufficient explanation for why these regions fell behind coastal cities. There is a cultural desirability element to this problem that defies economic explanation. Luckily, I think many people and businesses are waking up to the fact that most of Appalachia is beautiful, affordable, and ripe for development, and that is why there is a large in-migration to southern Appalachia.
https://www.movebuddha.com/blog/moving-trends/
Most of this deindustrialization happened in the past. A lot of these areas have been mired in economic decline for a generation or more. Pretending we're going to bring it back in any substantive way is a false dream. I'm sympathetic to these people in the same way I am to Palestinians...but the war was lost. If you want to build a Foxconn US it will be in CA or Texas, maybe not in a big city but definitely not the Midwest. If you want to open the mines, they'll be in the Southwest digging up rare earth minerals.
I love San Diego. But I love winter too much to live that far south. And I love the Great Lakes too much to ever leave this region, if I can help it. I love living in Detroit.
I see how this makes economic sense. But I don't see how the politics works at all. People don't like to lose their jobs; if they do, they'll probably vote for someone, however dumb, who promises to bring them back. People don't like to move, so telling them that regions have to decline & they should move will get them to do likewise. And because the American political system gives so much power to land, the people who resent the modern world will always have a lot of power. This is, in many ways, what Trumpism is. There are other variations of it—in some alternate history where the 2016 election was Jeb Bush vs Bernie Sanders, you can imagine the resentful falling-behind places voting Democrat. But in the world we live in, they're now mostly Republicans. Maybe that won't outlast Trump, but it looks like it might.
So say you're right. How do we do we do this? If the Democrats go all-in on free trade (and as an increasingly elite, well-educated party, I think that could happen, especially in reaction to Trump's tariffs) then maybe they'll win in the short term, but in the long term they'll lose. And this is true *even if* the policies are beneficial to everyone, thanks to minority (land) representation, and also to people seeing the harms not the benefits (in the same way that increased wages can outpace inflation, but even if they do people *feel* worse off).
This economics feels like a recipe for its own swift death (as those who promise the impossible and the counterproductive run on resentment)—in short, a brief economic boom followed by a even-stronger Trumpism.
It doesn't make sense to implement this economic program until there is a way to not only sell it to people in one election, but to keep it popular in a longer-term way. And I simply don't know if that's consistent with the Senate and the Electoral College.
One further thought: one might say that the solution to this is redistribution, which I think, again, makes economic sense, but which would psychologically and thus politically backfire: even if the people were better off, they'd feel terrible being helped by government rather than having the jobs they used to have, and instead of moving they—or enough to make the resenters a winning coalition—would stay & vote for whomever promises to reverse this. In short, like the rest, redistribution may be good economics but it's terrible *politics*
I guess a basically agree. This is why democracies vote themselves into sclerosis (Exhibit A is the UK). The longer term solution is probably federalism. With enough states trying different things, at least a few of them won’t screw everything up with populist opium.
Maybe it's time to give left-populism a second thought?
Past a certain point, most people care more about prestige than money. This has important effects as far as economic theory goes, and, in particular, I think is the biggest part of _why_ we don't see a decline in available jobs in the metrics as automation and foreign labor step in.
Even if Jeff Bezos himself cares mainly about having more wealth than Elon Musk, all the middle managers who _work for_ Jeff Bezos want to claim they have as many direct and indirect reports as they possibly can get. This leads to hiring people to ostensibly work on one section or another of Amazon, but actually twiddle their thumbs all day, mostly to Amazon's detriment.
Most white collar jobs today are bullshit. They exist to contribute to somebody's prestige, to make that person seem more important, even if it costs them or their business money.
Ask white collar workers themselves whether anything they do matters and you'll get some surprisingly honest takes. This is the premise of David Graeber's book, Bullshit Jobs (He has a very different political/philosophical take that I definitely would not endorse, but it's still a good read, and quite eye-opening).
The cost to the human psyche of engaging in pointless Sisophysian tasks all day is real, and I think is a large part of what contributes to the desire for more manufacturing jobs. People want to know that what they do matters, that they've made a positive impact on the world. By being able to point to some concrete _thing_ and say, "I helped build that", it feels like you've made a tangible difference.
AI is importantly a different kind of technological advance because it doesn't care about prestige. If you are able to run an entire company by yourself, you don't have to worry about all your middle managers hiring people to your detriment. You can _actually_ just focus on scaling and profit. If it weren't likely to kill everyone everywhere, this would be the most important risk from AI and I'd absolutely be championing UBI more (As it stands, I see this as a distant secondary concern to the primary one of "we're all going to die first").
Largely agree that an actual strategic trade policy should focus on protecting key industries vs the worst-of-all-worlds strategery that has been imposed upon us, but one overlooked dynamic in the downsides of trade with the PRC is that it does not hesitate to use its leverage to change the behavior of American companies, even in America itself (the NBA self-censored after the GM of the Houston Rockets tweeted support of the Hong Kong protestors, Hollywood modifies scripts in US movies to please Beijing, and Elon of course will defy the will of every government except that of the PRC).
It’s ironic because we used to fantasize trade with the PRC would be a force to increase freedom in China, but instead it became a lever for the PRC to decrease freedom in America.
The almost Greek tragedy in all this is that Trump would be the first president to identify this asymmetry, proclaim it unacceptable, and fuse American state and commercial power to similar ends - yet the man is so comically subject to manipulation by flattery and corruption that Beijing has nothing to fear.
Kind of seems like protectionism is just trade Ludditism. Same instinct as smashing machines, just aimed at imports instead of tech.
TPP. Trans Pacific Partnership. It's was a big beautiful trade deal and we wasted it. If you want to revive US manufacturing, sure, go ahead and try. In the meantime, the TPP would have shifted our imports from China to various other Asian countries not strongly aligned with China. We could have kept the economic benefits of trade and addressed at least some of the dependence and general geo-political issues with China. Wouldn't have brought manufacturing back home, but would have kept us fat enough to keep banging our heads against that wall and maybe find a way to make it work. Maybe I'm missing something but it just seems like a huge blunder to have walked away from a deal that was already done and had such obvious upside.
Politicians fetishize 'manufacturing jobs' a stand-in for the more general 'well-paying jobs that can that vault families into a middle-class lifestyle', which is what the 'late capitalist' global economy has really decimated in the US. And we're talking about people,Richard, not just statistics. Creative destruction that shunts masses of people into more abundant but shittier jobs, is that your idea of fertilizing the growth of human capital?
There are really two options, economically. Allow the creative destruction and see economic growth as people and resources move to where they are needed. Or resist change and die as jobs and progress move elsewhere. Kind of like Europe.
And this talk about service, retail and office jobs being worse than factory jobs doesn’t match up very well with reality.
You've got to be kidding. Go read about how 'work' has changed in the US since the 1970s, how the middle class has hollowed out, how inequality has increased, and how those things are connected, then tell me again about those great service and retail and office jobs just waiting for workers. Or just ask young people today about them, people who sense theyll never be able to buy that first house, support a nuclear family, send their kids to college -- all things that typical workers used to be able to do. People like you, preening 'realists' adamantly sure that 'there are *only two options*, so suck it up' and 'eww, Europe, it's a moribund horror' (have you ever even *been* there?) strike me as having something fundamentally wrong and anti-human about them.
The middle class shrank primarily because so many people moved up to the upper class.
Inequality in outcomes is not a problem when people differ drastically in equality of contributions. In a properly functioning economy higher and lower wages and profits act as signals and incentives to do something different. If the rewards for entrepreneurial success or skilled education go up compared to sitting on your ass doing nothing, then that is the market working.
Unemployment has been lower in the (creative destruction) US compared to most developed nations for quite some time now. And I would much rather work in an office or retail than in a dirty old factory. Feel free to put on your overalls and hard hat and disagree.
The reason young adults can’t afford to buy a house is due to insufficient building of homes in desired areas which has nothing to do with China or creative destruction.
Just got back from Europe a few weeks ago, actually. Found it charming.
I have spent the last twenty years studying human progress and flourishing. So maybe I’m not the one whose views are anti-human. If you have an open mind I can share some more…
Manufacturing jobs paid (relatively) well because they sucked.
The maximum wage a worker can/will be paid is determined by their productivity (the firm can't pay you more than you bring in), but their actual wage is determined by market mechanisms. The supply of unskilled labor is the same whether the job is cleaning or working in a factory - the only reason you would (consistently) pay a house cleaner $40k and a factory worker $80k, is that you have to pay people $40k more to get them to work in a factory, because it sucks that bad.
Your faith in 'the market' is adorable. What world have you lived in? And what makes you think factory work is necessarily 'unskilled'? And have you ever heard of....unions? Regardless of all that, your definition of 'sucks' seems to ignore the benefits associated with doing the 'sucky' job. If a job sucks *and* lacks benefits, it sucks much harder.
The job sucks, so you pay people more. If the job sucked but you didn't get paid more, then why would you work there? If I can pay you $40k instead of $80k, why wouldn't I? I don't require any special faith in the market to do this.
"Unskilled" labor is the type of labor that propels people up the socioeconomic ladder, because it requires no expensive formal training like becoming a doctor. If you're doing work at the factory that DOES require expensive formal training (i.e. a degree), then it can't propel you into a middle class lifestyle because you already paid tens of thousands of dollars for a degree.
Another factor, traditionally, is that a lot of factory work involved a lot of brute physical labor. Even when I was a boy, it was noted that electronics assembly was unusual in the number of women it employed. It was also noted that in electronics assembly, the weight of the objects being assembled was much less than in most manufacturing. Indeed, such work had the defined term "heavy lifting". Cleaning work, though grueling, has a much lower limit to the amount of weight you have to lift routinely. So a lot of factory work was male-only, whereas cleaning could hire both sexes. (Of course, sexism amplified this inherent disparity.)
"ADH support targeted assistance to those left behind."
They always say that, but it is has never happened. If it is politically impossible, then it isn't a useful suggestion.
"this would only justify narrow restrictions*
You are really understating the national security considerations. It takes a strong industrial base to fight a war. Already, among other things, we can't make anywhere near the amount of munitions we need.
"It made the US better off overall "
It's widely agreed that nearly all of the income and wealth gains of recent decades have gone to the very wealthiest Americans. So that "overall" is doing a lot of work.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68f62cb7-3538-8009-aeb8-885f5ba683a1
So my assertion is broadly true, with some hedging about what "nearly all" means.
Your assertion is a piece of socialist propaganda meant to inspire self-pity in the masses to hide the fact that they’re much better off due to freedom and to try to get them to adopt a form of nativism that would make them worse off.
The fact--not propaganda, fact--that nearly all of the income and wealth gains of recent decades have gone to the very wealthiest Americans is a serious problem with very broad implications. Telling people nevermind, you're better off because freedom is a ridiculous refusal to even engage the issue.
You can tell people that they should base their judgment on relative gains rather than absolute gains, and that they should be upset their lives got better because some people gained even more. I think it’s evil and will make everyone worse off. But some people do have preferences I consider evil.
The point is the absolute gains are negligible. So for most people telling them "the country as a whole is better off" is insulting.
Why? Rich people are by definition those who know how to allocate capital well. Give them more to allocate, it also gets allocated well.
Unset, your argument just restates the populist propaganda that both parties use.
In reality, median incomes are up more in the US over the past generation than in any other large developed nation (those that resisted creative destruction and are now decaying)
Your “gains have gone to the wealthiest” ignores that the wealthiest change over a 30 year period as people marry and gain experience and skills. Most people move through all 5 income deciles over their life. Your argument is as empty as complaining that most of the gains to education efforts in elementary school are taken by the 6th graders. (Think about it…)
The degree to which the median income is up is debatable. But your assertion "most people move through all 5 income deciles over their life" is just completely wrong.
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/income-data-poor-measure-inequality/
Quintiles is of course the proper term. My bad.
There is movement, yes, but this does not support your assertion
You, and the economists, are making the case that the fact our trading partner is China is irrelevant. That is wrong. China being our trading partner is relevant. China is our adversary. The world will be worse off if China is the global superpower.
If a company (China) were to engage in predatory pricing to eliminate the competition, consumers would benefit from lower prices. However, long term it would be bad from consumers as the lack of competition would result in higher prices.
You are understating the national defense component. Manufacturing capacity...is...national defense capacity.
China is already a global superpower. And it is already more future-focused than the US is.
Yes, and to an extent, it's America's fault this happened. You shouldn't make your enemies powerful.
I meant if China is the only global superpower. China is CCP focused, not future focused. Those have been aligned, but they may not in the future.
Well sure, and the US could become an autocracy 'in the future'. Predictions are a dime a dozen. Many thought introducing capitalism to Russia and China would bring them around to 'our side', remember?
I am not making a prediction. China is CCP focused. They have harmed their future prospects because they thought it would strengthen the CCP.
Yes, the same people who thought free trade would lead to democratization are the same people who think changing our trading policies with China is wrong. I am disagreeing with them.
Well, again, I hope you're right. I hope the CCP's 'prospects' dim. You seem certain of things that aren't certain.
The only thing I am certain of is out lack of industrial base is military liability. If I was certain China's prospects were dimming or they weren't going to try to rule the world, then I would be fine with continuing as is. After all, as Richard points out trade with China makes us richer. I am not certain of that so we need to act accordingly.
If we eliminated our defense spending and spent it on R&D or some other more economically beneficial way it make us richer. If you believe an industrial base is necessary for war, then that is essentially what Richard is arguing for.
The situation is a bit more grim than this. Yes, the geographic distribution of the economy will change. But much, much harsher is that the distribution of the economy between different classes of people (defined by the job skills) will also change.
> "When I grew up in Pocatello, you could not read or write and still get a job at the railroad making $50,000 or $60,000 a year." -- Pocatello mayor Roger Chase
There used to be a lot of work for people who were (1) male, (2) willing to obey orders, and (3) had a strong back. I've read that circa 1950 about 1/3 of all factory jobs were officially unskilled, in that anybody meeting those criteria could walk in off the street and be productive on the first day. That no longer applies even for our bottom-end job, working for McDonald's.
So the political problem is not just how the work is being redistributed between states but also how it is being redistributed across classes. And there doesn't seem to be any good solution to "You aren't smart enough to ever get a well-paying job."
I believe that the Denmark model aligns incentives in such a way that you could still get the productivity/dynamism/growth in a more sustainable way.
1. Low Corporate Taxes
2. Low Employee protections (compared to other European Countries)
3. High Personal Income Tax
4. Robust Welfare State - Retraining and basic safety net so people are not left behind when creative destruction occurs
Ultimately its the W2 people who are worse off, but i feel that it’s worth it for the social positive externalities that could stem from this
There's a case to be made that welfare dependency has a pacifying effect, and without welfare, we would see much more political violence. I call to mind the Bonus Army in 1932.
In addition to the normal YIMBY policies, I would be interested to see the effect of a cash-payout for movers. Just pay people for moving. I'm biased in this respect but I think it would be a net positive investment.
In the case of the midwest and Appalachia, the only way those places will ever grow is by having immigrants move there. I think it would be good to give preferential treatment to high-skilled immigrants if they're willing to move to places that have seen better days. The problem is many of those places don't like immigrants and won't want them there. That's their choice, they shouldn't have to take them, but if they want to grow and prosper again they'll have to.
"How do we stop the population loss of Korea? Bring in more Chinese." Isn't the solution you think it is.
Do you have a better idea?
How do we increase the prosperity of our people is a different question than how do we increase the prosperity of this land. I would start by understanding what question you are trying to answer.
I don't see how those are different. If a place is doing well its people likely are, too.
Gentrification improves the land but not the people.
But what industry would follow? The main issue seems to be lack of jobs, not people.
They'd have to be more than merely highly-skilled immigrants. They'd need to be entrepreneurial and willing to invest in these respective regions.
That's the idea. People with high skills are more likely to be entrepreneurial and start businesses that boost growth. Ideally, you would create lots of Bentonvilles in places that are struggling. It's not going to happen everywhere, but I don't see how else those places are going to thrive again. There is no domestic demand for living there and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Fair enough.
I think there would be domestic demand if there were jobs and industry, especially some of the more picturesque parts of Appalachia. Move one Fortune 500 company HQ or assembly plant and you can employ a fair-sized region, directly and indirectly.
Getting immigrants to live there would probably be easier, though.
Another tour de force. I guess Trump et al. probably believe in tariffs and saving manufacturing jobs. But probably they’re also trying to. Maintain a winning political coalition.
Most manufacturing jobs in America are done by women. Manufacturing has also become high tech in America with most requiring a college degree. It was rhetoric all along. The Economist had a header on it titled manufacturing delusion.
That is false. Women are 30% of manufacturing jobs and men are 70%.