I wake up to temp suspensions like twice a week

I even got the temp for using it a positive light.. IE when some autistic people have certain areas of super high functioning.. I don't think they read the post.. just the word. Aspergers would have probably been the better term.

This assumption is coming under increasing fire. In particular, the increase in overall wealth coming from free trade doesnt have to be equally distributed between both sides. So, for example, if trade between the U.S. and China is producing a net benefit of $6 trillion, it's not guaranteed that $3 tr go to both sides, it's well possible that $5 tr go to China and only $1 tr goes to the U.S. Numbers of course chosen for illustration purposes. Since free trade always has a huge redistributive effect on the domestic economy and society (see the next section for details), free trade is only a net benefit for everyone in the U.S. if huge efforts are made to counteract this. If the upside of free trade is skewed between the trade partners like in the example above, doing so will become difficult even in the face of actual efforts; and it becomes less clear whether all of this is even worth the hassle.


What free trade always does is increase specialization. The theory of comparative cost advantage implies that the more advanced trade partner will specialize in complex and knowledge-based production steps while the less developed trade partner will specialize in the labor-intensive industries.
Therefore, it is perfectly in line with economic theory that what I would call the "professional class" is benefitting from globalization and free trade, while the domestic non-college, blue collar people are the big losers in the long run. In the developing country, the increase in industrial production and foreign investment flowing into the country create a lot of high-education jobs too, which easily offsets any potential losses their professional class might have had, so that virtually everyone there is better off thanks to free trade, leaving only the low productivity workers from the more advanced trade partner as the big losers.




You gotta be fucking kidding?! Free trade and globalization pits workers in an advanced economy with a strong social safety net (""strong"" in the case of the U.S. ...), strong workplace and strong environmental regulations against workers in a developing or emerging country with fuckall workplace and environmental standards. It's a rat race to the bottom and dramatically shifts the power balance between capital and labor in favor of the capital side. Bobb might write a lot of half-baked things, but he was spot on when he said that pitting domestic workers against cheaper foreign ones emasculates unions.



The tldr is relatively simple: free trade/neoliberal globalization = super profitable for the top 0.1%, modestly profitable for college-educated workers in knowledge-based industries, very bad for domestic non-college workers, modestly profitable for the blue collar workers in China/India/etc., very profitable for their emerging middle classes as well as their nomenklatura.




Agreed, but that's not what happened. Jobs got outsourced and all society had to say to those affected was "Lol, tough luck! Stop being such an uneducated hillbillie and learn to program, or go find a job at McDonalds or something like that".
And then they wonder why these people voted for Trump.

The truth is that the groups advocating for free trade were never interested in creating a net profit for society and distributing it equitably, they only cared about the top 0.1% increasing their share of the pie by pitting domestic workers and domestic tax/regulation schemes against weaker foreign ones.




And that's a fundamental flaw in your line of reasoning: "it doesnt matter if we lose most of our low-qualification jobs to China and Mexico as long as we work hard enough to retrain and qualify the displaced workers". The cold hard truth, however, is that there is a bell curve for IQ/talent in every country and that many of the domestic low(er)-qualification workers who lost their job to outsourcing just dont have it in them to obtain a (meaningful) college education, to learn how to program or stuff like that. If we dont want large swaths of our domestic workers to languish on a mix of shitty jobs, welfare and opiods, we need to retain at least some low-qualification, low-productivity jobs which nonetheless pay a living wage and allow intellectually undertalented people to live a life in dignity.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 27 2020 08:32pm

A great article which is talking about all those topics I touched upon in my previous post - free trade, comparative cost advantages - but even more, like the post-war boom, the rise of China and so on, is this one:
https://qz.com/840973/everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-free-trade-is-wrong/

It goes far more into the details than any of us could do here on PaRD, it's really an excellent and highly-recommended read!

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 27 2020 09:16pm

S W A G

Here, I'll do it again

its cute he tries really hard

Trump, the anti free speech president. LMAO! Does anyone still support this asshat?

It's ironic really, when it comes to unions, right to work, outsourcing, and economic troubles, not only have I studied it extensively, I've lived it. There are plenty of insults flung around by people who think they'll never be impacted by economic changes. Yet when the boogeyman of "economic struggle" comes for them, you suddenly see "learn to code" go from a pithy response that gets cheers and jeers from their bubble to becoming the worst slur possible, "the new nigger term" as they put it.

Based on the economics of today, I'd say mid-term, the best "profession" for any adult who doesn't have a specialty degree in a field nearly impossible to outsource, who doesn't work in medicine or oil, would be either your standard trades or delivery driver. As the Amazon model continues to crush all it's retail-based competitors, the survivors such as Walmart will continue to move towards warehousing and shipping, with few retail outlets. If everything'd delivered, then someone has to do the delivering, especially with larger items. Drones can't deliver 50 pound sacks of dog food and 80 pound desks. Long term, if we continue to lose the majority of our production to foreign nations while simultaneously stifling medical competition and advancements with excessively long patents, about the only thing we'll have left that's a true economic driver will be oil refining, of which we're the top in the world. Unfortunately, oil only drives 8% of the economy. So who exactly will end up being the losing 92%?

This post was edited by InsaneBobb on May 28 2020 09:51am

I would edit out a particular word, not because the context is bad, but because people can be pretty petty around here.




Its amazing that people who even consider themselves advocates for the Bill of Rights would vote for him.

The only thing he is leading is an anti mask movement? Wtf

This post was edited by Skinned on May 28 2020 09:54am