This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's always helpful to remember that Donald Trump a) will never intentionally admit he did anything wrong b) is a fully post-truth individual. I don't think Trump has been all there in a while, but he's also a narcissist and a pathological liar.
On a different note, this interview helpfully provides an illustration of how Trump likes to pretend to be retarded but is also just an idiot. They're quite easy to tell apart. Compare:
to
"Golly shucks, I'm just the president of the United States, what do I know about one of my banner policies?" vs defensive gibberish.
"lost". It honestly is just so extremely stupid. As if it were that we had something of value that was just lit on fire. Or was simply stolen from us without providing anything in return. As if I should say that I "lost" however much money to Walmart last year. Or that my employer "lost" money in employing me. The entire point of those trades is that each and every party to them gained more value than they "lost"; otherwise, they wouldn't have made the trade!
agree. it's like thinking that imports subtract from GDP and should be avoided at all costs
More options
Context Copy link
It is stupid. Trade deficit is basically about buying things on credit. Not good in itself, but it doesn't mean that you are buying bad things. Americans buy that stuff because they really like it. It is a good deal.
Now you could argue that going deeper into debt is problematic. You buy too much cheap staff from Walmart with the credit card? What can you do? Maybe stop buying (austerity policy, increase of taxes) or get a better paying job.
Growth supporters suggest the second but maybe sometimes the first is also needed.
Trump suggest a different way. Put a tax on cheap Walmart stuff, even so much tax, so that you would quit your well paying job and start making all these Walmart things yourself. It will make you poorer because Chinese provide this stuff by paying their workers less. You will lose your salary in your high tech job and instead will get paid much less in some factory. And nobody outside the US will buy the stuff you make because initially it will be of low quality. It takes many years to learn to manufacture quality things. The learning curve is real.
Tariffs were used 100 years ago and abandoned like we abandoned ineffective treatments in medicine. Some poor countries still use them because they are so bad at collected tax that tariffs is the only way they manage to finance government.
More options
Context Copy link
Probably not the examples you want to use for that argument.
Employers do regularly lose money and value in employing bad employees and producing bad value. We know this because employers regularly go out of business. Those bad employees will be ideally fired before that, but their are reasons from corruption to labor protection laws to conflicts of interests why value-losing employees. Trades are made on an expectation of some sort of value gain, trade is not a proof that the value has bee gained. Especially when there are reasons beyond the initial value-premise that trades keep happening (not least because [value] isn't static).
Shoppers do regularly lose- in the sense of waste- money on goods and services. There are entire industries based around the legal and psychological tricks to make people spend more than they 'rationally' should, particularly for luxury non-essentials. 'Value' is not a fully substitutable nature- hence historic prohibitions against gambling and addictive, no matter how much 'value' that fun has, or against recognition that parasitic corruption is bad no matter how much easier it makes the 'buyer's' life to engage in that bit of society-wide prisoner's delimma.
Not all trades are good, any more than all investments are good. There are plenty of bad, corrupt, wasteful, and outright harmful investments. It is not hard to find histories of similar trade dynamics fully open to critiques of being driven by bad decisions and bad value judgements. Treating either 'trade' or 'investment' as axiomatic virtues because the point of the word is the good thing is not going to be convincing to skeptics of judgement.
I think it's still perfectly fine. Absent some significant external reasoning, the continued existence of trade is at least a prima facie reason to think that there is probably value there. For precisely one of the reasons you give; if businesses keep paying lots of people who aren't providing them value, they go out of business.1 As such, they're probably going to try to fire you if you're consistently negative value. As you say, it is obviously not proof that 100% of all employment relationships are positive sum, but if the vast majority of them aren't, then almost everything is thrown out the window (...all of the businesses go bankrupt, etc.). One can acknowledge that some percentage probably aren't perfect, but then we have to get into details of whether/how we can identify them from the outside, whether/how we have any tools to change that, or if it's best to just acknowledge that the employers are in a better position to judge the value of their employment relations. They have the best incentive to make sure that the lion's share of their employment decisions are positive value, and we should observe that they are, indeed, positive value. Normal curves are normal, but the mean is positive, and probably significantly so.
None of this refined conversation means that we can just look at the total wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost".
Again, one must impose some sort of external reasoning to overcome the prima facie case. You point out one of the very very few examples where this external reasoning is the strongest - gambling - for we can simply compute the mathematics and have almost no need to get into the much thornier problems that such external reasoning normally requires.
No refined conversation here would allow us to look at the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost".
Fully granted. Now, overcome the prima facie case that most are good (especially given some conditions on freeness and such) by calling upon some sort of specific external reasoning for the instant case. Not just that there is some tail on the normal distribution, where someone bought some useless gadget from Temu or whatever. Justify that the entire trade (in goods) deficit is "lost".
1 - Note that the fact that businesses go out of business is "probably not the example you want to use for that argument". The vast majority of the time, businesses go out of business for a whole host of other reasons that are significantly more poignant than just making some bad deal with some employee(s).
The prima facie concept itself is what is in doubt / contested. The construct that shapes the [valuation] of trades is what is being challenged.
The question isn't whether there is value in the trade. The question is whether the value-distribution resulting from the structure is desirably structured. Or in other framings, it is a direct questioning of whether the [value] the system delivers is actually valuable compared to other considerations of [value]. The judgements of preferences decades/generations ago are not inherently persuasive.
To bring an extreme historical metaphor- there were a lot of 'good' trades between Britain and India during the British empire. 'Most trades are good' could honestly be made on most trades that were made. However, the macroeconomic structure of the system meant that the [value] that was generated was not mutually beneficial. India economically devolved as these 'good trades' continued. The British Isles certainly benefited from being the seat of empire, but the benefits to the Indians were incidental, not deliberate. This [value] got worse, not better, the more trade occurred, despite the [value] being greater and greater to the British.
So when you say-
The answer is... sure. Similarly, no amount of trade volume can be looked at and say 'this represents [value] gained.'
The only way to make a moral judgement on the nature of the trade is to make a moral judgement on the structure of the trade. Big numbers good if you think the big number implies a good thing. But by a different premise, bad trade structures get worse, not better, with scale.
Now, on a less-extreme historical metaphor, but one more relevant to the United States- the value of the neoliberal model in play starting in the 90s and since.
A lot of neoliberal economists have argued over the decades that this was a Good Deal. Free market liberalization and international trade allowed cheaper imports and increases to the value-added economy. That the [value] to the United States outweighed the [costs]. GDP per capita would go up. And lo and behold, it did.
The issue is that [the United States] is not an individual actor. It is a collective of hundreds of millions of individuals. And the [value] most appreciated gained went to people and actors who did not suffer the [costs]. The system did not produce results in which everyone felt they were gaining [value]. The Rust Belt, once a significant contributor of [value] to the nation, did not become an even larger contributor of [value], except in so much that sacrificing their interests benefited others. The [value] that went into American shipyards was better able to grow in other ways.
Which is fine in and of itself. Winners and losers and all that.
Except that the neoliberals were also wrong on various [cost] estimates. Not only were they wrong about the nature of the [cost] that would be born by people other than themselves. They were also wrong about what future collective values would [value]. The neoliberals did not place much [value] on sovereign supply chains. They placed high [value] on [cheaper supply chains], with things like the just-in-time model reducing [costs] like warehousing and stockpiles and such.
They did not recognize things like, say, global pandemics or cyber-sabotage that could paralyze distribution systems and leave to supply bottlenecks at ports. They did not think profit-minded countries would make deliberate plays at developing global monopolistic power on supply chain inputs, even selling at a loss, and then using economically-irrational cutoffs as a geopolitical weapon. They did not factor in policies intended to result in regulatory capture of global markets beyond sovereign borders. They did not recognize that a military, or paramilitary, could be crippled by attacking the supply chain and replacing cellphones and radios with bombs enmass. They did not think that countries might want an industrial base capable of massive wartime production capacity on short notice.
Or if they did recognize it, they didn't value it very much. But modern governments do. And governments- not just Trump but globally- have begun to hire people who have somewhat different [value] judgements.
So when you say things like-
I'm inclined to agree. I'm also inclined to consider [advocates of neoliberal models] to be equivalent to the [employees] in this metaphor, and that the new waves of [employers] place increasing relevance on characteristics other than process economic efficiency when determining [value]. We'd probably both agree that [employees] who are not delivering the desired [value] to their [employers] quote-unquote 'should' be fired to improve [value].
I'm also fairly sure you'd disagree with their judgements on value. But that in and of itself is the point- the judgement of how to [value] things is a first principle judgement. The [employee's] appeal to a prima facie is not actually relevant if it is not actually the prima facie standard.
Most of this is "refined discussion", which I am generally not opposed to.
But this is really where we are. And I think we can mostly jump to:
I would simply request a description of a single paradigm in which one can simply sum up the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost". A single paradigm in which one can simply sum up the entire amount of wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost". I don't know whether I would recognize or acknowledge it as worthy of respect until I hear at least one. I don't think you've presented one. I think you're in the land of refined discussions of details and percentages and such, where things can be shaded slightly through some other valuations and other external reasoning. Nothing close to, "Yeah, that entire amount is just lost."
(Just so you don't have to guess, I am sympathetic to external reasoning about supply chains for defense/pandemics/etc. That is a far cry from simply saying that just the bulk dollar figure is "lost".)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
yeah, these big companies have the cashflow, pricing power, and market dominance to withstand tariffs, smaller competitors do not. this works to their advantage, especially after trump is gone and tariffs are reversed. Its not so much about tariffs being good economically, but that it hurts their competitors.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link