And here is tomndebb’s first post in this thread. You have yet to answer that question.
And you know what other question you have yet to answer: If Apple can sell 1 million ipods at $300, will they sell more, same, or fewer if they raise the price to $1500?
And I can’t find any mention of you supporting free trade with Canada in your other offshoring rant in GD. I did find:
So considering that NAFTA increased free trade with Canada, and you seem to be condemning it, I’d say that qualifies as you rejecting free trade with Canada.
This is really not fair. It strongly implies that he is smart enough to run a troll for weeks–as opposed to being one more run-of-the-mill True Believer of silliness that he is incapable of distinguishing from actual thought.
emacknight and tomndebb you want to know what really (aside from your lies and the racists who prowl here) makes you look stupid?
This. Just… this.
"Over long periods of time, real wages tend to track average productivity growth. But so far this decade, workers’ real pay in many developed economies has increased more slowly than labour productivity. The real weekly wage of a typical American worker in the middle of the income distribution has fallen by 4% since the start of the recovery in 2001. Over the same period labour productivity has risen by 15%. Even after allowing for health and pension benefits, total compensation has risen by only 1.5% in real terms. Real wages in Germany and Japan have also been flat or falling. Thus the usual argument in favour of globalisation—that it will make most workers better off, with only a few low-skilled ones losing out—has not so far been borne out by the facts. Most workers are being squeezed.
If GDP per person is growing fairly briskly, why are most workers missing out on real pay rises?"
“But now that the majority of workers are losing out, the finger of blame points at globalisation.”
So you guys keep lashing out like angry little children at us anti-offshoring people.
Meanwhile politicians who support you will continue to suffer a heavy price for it when someone decides to expose them and whenever you grow a brain you’ll start to ask yourselves why “I fought anti-offshoring laws” will NEVER be a politician’s selling point.
It’s because society despises you.
The corns in my shit are smarter than you. You can’t name one coherent thought or argument you’ve managed to post in this discussion. Oh, well, wait, you believe they’re coherent but that’s your problem right there.
He posted a question, which you refused to answer. Care to take another swing?
Sure, but they loooooooove cheap shit from Walmart. Just like you, all the products you buy from China. And all the policies you issue to people who buy from China. You have no problem taking their money. Money that came at the cost of an American job. Sleep well.
Feel free to show where I lied. Or where **tomndebb ** lied.
As they say, show us the cat.
Before posting a link to an article, you may wish to read its full contents.
The author recommends not erecting trade barriers with emerging economies, but rather more progressive redistribution and a social safety net, noting
I’m not clear on why the criticisms you’ve made here don’t apply to the author? I suspect, somehow, that he would find little to agree with in the policies you espouse.
Isn’t it funny how fast tomndebb abandoned his bullshit claim that Americans aren’t willing to act on their hatred of offshoring…
Is it even the tiniest priority for you to ensure that your beliefs form coherent whole? Weren’t you advocating, not long ago, the position that firms are so uninsightful, so quarterly statement-driven, that not even the prospect of substantially lower costs could convince them to consider alternatives to offshoring?
You’re wrong, so very wrong.
http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/call-...ack-the-us.htm
See, companies have plenty of long-term planning.
This “debate” is easy, normally it’s a lot of research and fact checking. Now all I have to do is wait for you to post a cite that contradicts your previous statements.
Or read a cite you post and show you it proves the exact opposite. Have you not noticed that in nearly all of your links an expert is quoted as saying, “this is NOT justification for protectionism/tariffs.”
So where are all these people who agree with you? Have you yet produced one cite where someone is calling for tariffs?
**tomndebb ** didn’t make any claims,bullshit or otherwise. He asked you a question, you have yet to answer it. The question was,
Do you see the little squiggly thing at the end of the sentence? It means he asked you a question, we are all now waiting for you to answer it.
God damn, you are a special kind of stupid. I was happily enjoying you flail about, talking about things you clearly know nothing about, but to post that link makes me rethink everything. Is this perhaps Poe’s Law at work?
Paranoid Randroid already linked to one of the best quotes, but here are a few others:
"Most of the fears about emerging economies focus on jobs being lost to low-cost foreign competitors.* But the real threat is to wages, not jobs. In the long run, trade and offshoring should have little effect on total employment** in rich countries; rather, they will change its composition. So long as labour markets are flexible, job losses in manufacturing should eventually be offset by new jobs elsewhere"*
How did you miss that? That is exactly opposite what you have been preaching for the past 8 pages.
What was it I said just a few posts ago? A guy gets laid off from a labour position, and shifts to sales. Damn, I could be writing for the economics.
*"First, offshoring to low-wage countries has **reduced firms’ costs. *Second, employers’ ability to shift production, whether or not they take advantage of it, has curbed the bargaining power of workers in rich countries."
And more to the point, what are you doing citing The Economics? Aren’t they a bunch of retards? Shouldn’t you be linking to Teen People or the Enquirer?
This thread keeps getting better and better.
Oh jeez. I thought you’d at least try to walk AROUND this trap I laid for you.
I used the Economist for a REASON. And not one that benefits your monkey shine dance of an argument.
First trap you fell into: the article conceded my point I’ve been making on wages.
Second trap you fell into: the article qualifies “the real threat is not to jobs” by saying “offshoring SHOULD have little effect on total employment”. Not “it doesn’t have… SHOULDN’T have”. It is raw speculation - which is undone by Europe’s high unemployment rates.
That sprang the third trap you fell into: the inevitable conclusion that high paying jobs are being eliminated by offshoring, in favor of lower paying jobs. Again, exactly what I’ve been saying.
Fourth trap you fell into: the article did say there’s no justification for protectionism. But they also said that Europe’s social programs - quite similar to what some of your friends here suggest - soften the blow inflicted by offshoring. This was, in fact, BEFORE the banking crisis knocked down the entire house of cards and laid bare what Europe is finding out now: the system of social supports is unsustainable when you have so many people out of work for so many years.
The fifth trap you fell into: Europe is well known for its high, HIGH unemployment. Such is the price of their surrender to globalism. Of course, America has always been doing just as badly, they just play funny games with their unemployment numbers while Europe is simply more honest.
And finally you hit your head on the rocks at the bottom by falling through the sixth trap: high unemployment (the enduring state of affairs in Europe - and America, if they were honest enough to admit it) combined with declining wages (admitted by The Economist) equals a very very bad legacy for offshoring.
And he gets paid less. See trap #1 that you fell into.
Nope, they are a trap for you to fall into.
The Economist is expected to do those monkey shine dances to protect offshoring.
What they aren’t expected to do is concede one of the very MAJOR points I’ve been making: that offshoring depresses wages, forcing people to move from high paying jobs to lower paying ones.
“Thus the usual argument in favour of globalisation—that it will make most workers better off, with only a few low-skilled ones losing out—has not so far been borne out by the facts. Most workers are being squeezed.”
Your incessant argument has been that globalization makes most workers better off. The Economist says this is, in fact, not happening.
That they say protectionism isn’t the answer is little more than their way of saying “let’s not go TOO far with being honest here”. Their solutions have already proven to be unsustainable in Europe: look at Europe’s enduring unemployment rate.
You’re so busy trying to get in the last word against me and, as you said before, counter everything I say, that you don’t even know when your own “supporters” in the Economist are being used as a trap for you. With support like this article you don’t need enemies.
Clearly he can’t decide whether he is for or against mainstream economic thought. Here you go, Le Jacquelope – can I tell you “what really makes you look stupid?” Why, it’s a position held by the arguably right-leaning Economist magazine, which settles any argument!
so let’s see if I got this right. You posted a link to an article that disproves everything you’ve bitched about for the past 8 pages, and you call that a trap?
A trap? Seriously? The article you quoted:
Finding the tiniest scrap of something to agree with in an article doesn’t mean the article supports you. If you set a trap, I certainly didn’t hear the mechanism spring.
Chinese President Hu Jintao said: “We should abandon the zero-sum Cold War mentality and respect each other’s choice of development path.”
Chinese tariffs?
China reported a trade surplus of $184 billion for last year, making up 3.8 percent of GDP, compared to around 11 percent three years ago, he said, adding that in 2010, China’s total imports were $1.36 trillion, an increase of $389 billion over the previous year.
"In one year, China imported more than the total value of South Africa, or about a quarter the US dollar value of India. Who says China grows at other’s expense?”cite
Intelligence doesn’t have anything to do with being a troll. This guy has been over the top hostile since day one, especially since there have been a number of posters who have actually tried to engage him (I am not one of them). His response has pretty uniformly been either happy sarcasm (if the person agrees with him in any way), or vicious name calling and baiting. When presented with any sort of cite he generally ignores them by going off on a tangential rant and winding up by claiming victory. When asked to provide a cite demonstrating his bullshit he either provides a link to some blog, a YouTube video, or a cite the has the effect of demonstrating that he either didn’t read the cite, didn’t understand it, or didn’t bother reading the context of the question asked him. Then he declares victory with more taunting and (childish) name calling.
YMMV, but when someone new to the thread comes in and asks him a simple question and his response automatically ratchets up to (to paraphrase) ‘the corn in my crap is smarter than you are’, then I’d say the case for Obvious Troll is pretty clear. One has merely to look at the discussion between Paranoid Randroid and this idiot. PR has been about as restrained as I think is humanly possible with this idiot (I have to wonder sometimes if PR has a pulse!), and look at the reaction he’s gotten from Le Jac. Completely over the top, ignoring the questions, rants that have nothing to do with what is asked, declarations of victory, taunts an name calling.
I agree that he is certainly a True Believer, and he has little or no (hell, possibly negative) knowledge of the subject. But it’s pretty clear (to me) that his tactics are to taunt and keep the threads perking along but coming back just when the things are about to fall off the radar to poke the 'dopers who he is still talking too.
-XT
China labor productivity grew 4.5% last year. Wages grew by over 20%. The working age population (which I define as ages 15-64) in China is believed to have peaked in 2009-2010. Peak for South Korea expected in 2015-2020, ASEAN countries peak in 2020-2025 (peak for Japan: 1990). (Source: China National Bureau of Statistics, Japan Cabinet Office and UN World Population Prospects).
You seem to think that US countries will continue to send jobs to China forever. But sending jobs to China has helped fuel that countries’ growth, and that is helping push wages higher. A peak-out in the working population will only push wages up higher still: China has already seen some labor shortages, particularly in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze Delta in Wenzhou. Hangzhou is seeing shortages of metal surface treatment plants even though wages have risen to over RMB4,000 – in other words, about twice the salary of a new grad hire. (source: my personal research there, on the ground, so feel free to ignore it - but China’s labor shortage has been widely reported).
Go read up on Lewisian turning points if you want to know why all this is important. There are various schools of thought on this - some economists believe that China’s working age population data is unreliable and that current data might not be accurately counting migrant workers that simply stayed home during the global recession the past few years. Either way, China is already facing a shortage of skilled labor (since the majority of migrant workers have barely finished junior high school). Japan’s companies have been offshoring to China and India etc. for decades. The US and others have followed suit. This is filtering down from the BRICs to countries not quite as far along in industrial development such as Vietnam and Thailand. Soon that will shift further to other countries wehre labor is (relatively) cheaper - perhaps Latin America and Africa (I’ve already visited Japanese auto companies’ plants in Brazil, for example).
100 years ago, most US workers were farmers. Over time, farming productivity improved - output more than quadrupled, while total inputs have been unchanged. Total spending by US consumers on foods has steadily declined at the same time: from 22% of disposable income spent on food in the 1950s to under 8% in 2000. Now, less than 10% of workers in the US are in agriculture, and a majority of workers are in manufacturing. We’re seeing a very similiar shift from manufacturing to the service sector: steady increases in productivity, steady decline in real prices, and labor freed up to shift to other sectors over time.
I’m not sure if your tiny little brain can comprehend this, but managers don’t think only of cost savings when doing business. Managers such as myself look both at cost, and on how we can free up scarce in-house high-end talent (analysts and software engineers, for example) from doing routine tasks, so they can do more innovative things. We signed a contract recently to have an entire sales-based network and research library housed offsite, which has freed up my in-house desk to create two new products for three of our front office desks & traders. From the cost savings plus the extra revenue generated from the new products, we now have extra budget to add at least one more person to the inhouse IT team by 2Q. See how that works? Before, my IT team had 3 people stuck doing lots of routine stuff. After offshoring, I have more productivity from the same 3 people, and now I have the resources to add 1 more headcount. All thanks to ‘evil offshoring’.
You want more cites? I got boat loads of 'em:
“An increase in the ease of offshoring does not have an effect on the employment of natives in an industry, whereas an increase in the “ease of immigration” has a small, positive impact on it. This is consistent with the existence of a positive productivity effect that generates an expansion of the manufacturing industries that are most exposed to immigration and offshoring.” (source: VOX)
Wages for workers who remain in manufacturing are generally positively affected by offshoring (National Bureau of Economic Research)
IT offshoring has made IT hardware 30% cheaper, adding a net gain of $300 billion to US GDP in the last 15 years (Institute of International Economics).
For every dollar that a US firm spends in India on IT related work, the US economy benefits by about $1.15: Including about $0.60 from savings for US consumers, $0.05 from other goods bought by companies in India, $0.04 from American service providers with operations in India as well…and, up to $0.50 over a longer time span as US workers are retrained and redeployed (this is based on redeployment rates over the past 20 years). Hence, in sharp contrast to the myth that ‘offshoring’ is going to be the demise of the US economy; the US economy is emerging as the biggest gainer.. Simply put, a country should focus on what it does best. The US is best at innovating and starting new businesses – and outsourcing boosts this efficiency. The US therefore must stay focused on education & training to keep its workers competitive. (McKinsey)
While US manufacturing employment has dropped by one-third over the past decade, it is primarily due to automation, not offshoring. Manufacturers have become more productive and can now produce the same amount of goods with fewer workers. Technology has eliminated many unskilled manufacturing jobs, while creating some new highly skilled positions. We could restore manufacturing employment to pre-2000 levels by prohibiting the use of modern technology - but this would severely hurt the economy. And it makes no more economic sense than prohibiting backhoes from moving dirt on construction sites.
These same factors have eliminated manufacturing jobs in countries around the world, including China. Despite the short-term pain of job losses, automation of rote work benefits workers and consumers. Automation of rote tasks on the assembly line reduces the drudgery of work and improves worker safety. Increased productivity has also made manufactured goods more affordable for American families. (Heritage Foundation)
You’re screaming and foaming at a mouth when you are woefully ignorant of basic economics. In your bizarro world, faced with lots of unemployed workers and higher supply costs because of the tarrifs you’d implement, US companies would raise wages :rolleyes:
Oh, and I can’t quite figure out if you think US companies are smart, because they’re ‘rethinking their initial offshoring decisions because of unrealized cost savings, poor service quality and customer frustration’, or if you think they are really short-sighted and only make crap, out-dated products that nobody wants. Please let us know when you’ve decided, m’kay?
I won’t hold my breath for your inevitable poo-gargling response where you ignore all the above points by putting your hands over your ears and shout ‘blah blah blah I can’t hear you offshoring is eeeevvvvviiillllllll’.
:rolleyes: