Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I can’t make much in the way of an economic argument but it’s extremely obvious that Chinese have intentionally been using state support and dumping to strip and move entire industries from western countries to China. This has created a parasitic class of rich people in the west whose entire wealth comes from middle manning either the 1)importation of this production to the west or the 2)sale of western financial assets to China which are needed to sustain western trade deficits.
There is nothing organic and laissez faire about any of this. It’s very intentional and it has been very destructive for almost everyone involved. Western working classes are extremely wage suppressed and largely lost the discipline required for industrial production. Middle classes are corrupted into believing their laptop jobs (which usually simply supervise one of the two legs of this trade I mentioned above, or extract profits from it in some indirect way). Cheap credit due to massive Chinese demand for western financial products has destroyed any integrity and competency left in western political classes. Free money plugs every hole anyway so they just keep making disastrous decisions non-stop with no apparent consequences.
Large sections of the Chinese society seem to have benefited but overall it’s not good for humanity that economic “growth” comes from shifting labour and environment externalities around to world instead of technology. We only get richer if we have more robots. Substitution of one European worker and his advanced machinery earning 20x with 10 third worlders with no machinery earning 1x, is bad for humanity.
So I don’t know if tariffs are the right policy to stop this decay but it’s absurd to oppose them as an obvious wrong policy simply because they don’t fit in with some notion of free trade and markets invisible hand. None of this process is classic economics at all. It’s state policy and distortion all the way.
Western working classes aren’t really wage surprised outside of, to some extent, Germany and the Netherlands (which has much more to do with the euro than with China). Inequality is higher than the 1970s, but real incomes haven’t fallen significantly and productivity, while somewhat higher, has lagged asset price growth. Factory workers in Northern Europe are still paid very well, they’re often still in countries like Germany and Switzerland a kind of Marxian labor aristocracy. The working class suffering are those who work service jobs.
How do you figure that? I would suggest that due to immigration and the exportation of manufacturing to other countries, there’s an extremely hard ceiling on what the productive blue collar workers can hope to make — which is exactly the wages at which it becomes cheaper to either replace them with imported domestic workers (immigrants) or outsource the work to some other country. The ceiling seems to be around $16-18 for work that doesn’t require either apprenticeships or college. And this is despite any changes to COL. even in construction in the USA, you’re going to be seeing a lot of Mexicans putting on roofs and laying floors because they work dirt cheap.
Hahaha. Productive blue collar workers, even without apprenticeships or college, make more than that regularly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link