Well, quite a lot of it was in IT. The decline of steel and heavy manufacturing was, to a large extent, made up for by a shift to creating computer hardware and software. The jobs lost in Rochester were offset by jobs gained in places like Redmond and Palo Alto.
Of course it matters. I just don’t see how trade barriers will help.
No, but you asked “well, where are the major economic power from 200 years ago?” so I thought I’d answer your question.
I haven’t done a detailed study of it. I’d guess the average Russian in 1980, since so many of them in 1810 were slaves.
I guess we’re now entering Zen Economics.
To be perfectly blunt, if you believe that, then you do not know what science is.
Science is the examination of the nature of reality through the use of experimentation and objective evidence. That’s what economists do. The fact that it’s hard to do doesn’t mean it isn’t science. The fact that we don’t yet have all the answers doesn’t mean it isn’t science - actually, if anything, it’s evidence that it IS science.
There’s incredibly exciting scientific work going on in economics these days - it’s never been a better time, in fact - and you’re saying it’s not a science. Your position is precisely equivalent to someone watching Newton in his lab saying “This isn’t a science.” (Of course, they wouldn’t have used the word “science,” but you get my drift.) “Divinity is a science, not this crap,” they’d have said. After all, at the time people knew very little about physics. Most of what was “known” was nonsense.
What economists say this? Can you show me a peer-reviewed article entitled “Free Trade Is Always Good”? For that matter, can you even defend your claim that people in this thread are “defending China’s trade practices”? Nobody is defending China playing unfair with its currency.
We stop “exporting” jobs to China at a slower rate. Can you demonstrate that we won’t “export” jobs to other countries at a faster rate to make up for that?
I’m not saying that, but it is true that there are few excpetions.
No, it isn’t. Economic theory tells us that free trade, including floating currencies, is best for all parties. It does not tell us that one party pegging its currency to another party is injuring that party.
China, for whatever reason, currently favors a stable currency over a free floating one. That isn’t necessarily a net negative for the US.
Yes, I’ve said that many times in this thread.
The smart money says it isn’t going away. They’ve been right for some time now, and there is no evidence they will be wrong in the future.
Interesting that you bring up the semiconductor industry-the fact is, it has left “Silicon Valley”-almost entirely!
At first, people made chips in SV, and there was a huge market there for engineers, process machinery, chemicals, high purity gases, etc. Then the chips were sent to Asia for packaging and testing-so all the industries that supported that dies off.
then the fabs (where the chips were made) went to Asia-now all that is left is design and testing-and that is moving to Asia too!
By consigning the chip business to Asia, we are guaranteeing that no more engineering jobs will be generated here. Politicians are too stupid to understand this…they think that some “new” industry will come in to take up the slack-but those new industries will open up in Asia.
But, we can all work at McDonalds-or become divorce lawyers.
So, working at McDonald’s or being a Divorce Lawyer are the only choices, ehe? I guess I’ll have to give up my job as a network engineer, then…
Yeah, because all the ‘new’ industries have already been invented and stuff! There won’t be any ‘new’ products or services ever again…it’s a zero sum game I tells you, yes indeed precious!!..so we must hold onto every one because there won’t be anymore.
Fiiissshhhheeessss…give me FFFFIIIIIISSSSHHHHHHHEEESSSSS! Juicy and sweet!
Correct, corporations have no allegiance to any country. The go where ever profits are possible, including communist china or socialist Europe, or supplying dictators pre 1990 like Saddam with weapons and other goods. Now, for the common citizen, they have to abide by the capitalist system, which the big corporations benefit from in this country.
While they don’t have allegiance to the USA and their people, they certainly do have the same and if not more rights, since the corporate entity is considered a “person” They reap the benefits of citizenship in a capitalist platform, preaching it even, while their investments and allegiance goes to other countries regardless of thier political system.
Lets see, we have had stagnant and even declining wages for the lower 2/3 of Americans for quite sometime. Where would have Americans been the past 2 decades were it not for the easy credit cards and equity many pulled from their houses to keep demand high?
Which I guess answers my question.
Also, as India and China get more educated, the same can said that "our people expect to much money to make it a viable option, when it comes to higher degreed jobs.
We see that happening already all over with visas and off shoring of high tech jobs, like GE is doing currently for example in India.
The car industry is a bad example. The Japanese companies were already established in their home markets (and the European ones too) long before 1973. What happened then was a change in market share. Sure they moved some manufacturing here, but companies have been moving manufacturing for foreign markets to the destination country for a long time. Notice they haven’t moved their design centers to the US or China.
As for your second point, because someone, somewhere might succeed someday they need to commit suicide now? That doesn’t seem very smart. The worry about IP leaking from design center walls is hardly new. I’ve never heard a solution. Why do you think US companies are going to keep a piece of anything? Indian CEOs are cheaper than ours.
You must not have noticed the large number of “For Rent” signs all over then. I used to work in a leased building in an industrial park in Sunnyvale. Over half the buildings are empty. More now since we moved to owned buildings, in which there was plenty of room thanks to the layoffs.
Intel alone is it exactly.
LSI Logic, now LSI, has become fabless.
TI is closing down fabs and is moving stuff to TSMC in Taiwan.
I don’t think the IBM fab in Burlington is shut down yet (though it might be) but all the engineers I know who worked there got retired.
Yes, test and packaging got done in low cost regions even 20 years ago. But anyone can do that. The value add stuff used to be done here.
We don’t have to worry about Intel at least. They know their major competitive advantage is in manufacturing, and they aren’t going to outsource it any time soon.
That’s true, but hardly due solely to the evils of offshoring. I realize that many people don’t know this, but New Mexico actually IS one of the 50 US states…and HP and Intel both have plants here that are going strong. Several other companies are also looking into moving to the wild and woolly South West as well because, frankly, we have an environment slightly more friendly to business than in California (there are other reasons such as the fact that our real estate market isn’t so bloated and distorted that it takes a millionaire to buy a 3 bedroom house with a nice backyard)…i.e. we don’t charge them an arm and a leg in taxes.
SV basically priced themselves out of the market, though I happen to know it’s not ‘empty’ by any stretch of the imagination, since I have several friends and fellow colleagues who still work for companies in the area.
But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if, 10 years from now, very little wafer fab was done in the US by Intel. There’s outsourcing and then there’s offshoring. I can see Intel setting up Intel run fabs in China, as they do in Israel.
Actually I’ve been using China as an example. In my thread about trading blocs I said tariff all the low wage nations. Give them nowhere to run.
Times change. They are changing.
You’re not reading what I said, again. I was referring to people who had exhausted their UI benefits. Not people who didn’t have a job and didn’t take the benefits.
Uhm, you’re moving the goalposts now. You said “a lot of those jobs are coming back”. Cites say 75% are not. That means the vast majority are not. What’s your definition of a “lot”? Is it “some”? That’s wishy-washy.
Where? How? How many generations of jobless recoveries do we have to go through where employers squeeze more work out of fewer employees and both research and manufacturing work continues to go overseas?
You want me to give you a date on the economic collapse… fine, after you give me a date on when these jobless recoveries will stop and robust job creation will begin.
They can research things all day long. YOU are the one who told us we’re not competing against China and the third world for manufacturing jobs. Now the same conditions are appearing with innovation jobs. I guess we’re not competing against the third world for innovation jobs either. Are we? Are we not?
Riddle me this, riddle me that - who’s going to get the innovation jobs? The nation with college graduates whose labor costs $80/hour or the one whose college grad research labor costs $10/hour? Do you realize what our standard of living would be if we had to lower our wages to $10 an hour to compete? Oh yes, I get it, we’re not competing with the third world for research jobs… because what again?
7 billion people aren’t doing research. WTF. Where do you come up with arguments like that? Huh?
You don’t see how this has anything to do with manufacturing in China; indeed, you’re not seeing the big picture. We’re losing manufacturing, and now we’re also losing innovation jobs.
Everyone is getting a piece of the new, emerging job markets involved in serving the American market… except Americans. Nothing, absolutely nothing new is going to emerge in America in any appreciable numbers until we lower our standard of living to that of the Chinese. And since you want a date for our economic collapse from me, again, I challenge you to give us a YEAR estimate on when you think the next big job boom will be coming. There are at the very least millions of long term unemployed who’d like to know your answer.*
I’d just like to give the idea makers here a chance. They’re getting out-competed by idea makers in other countries who offer the same ideas for pennies on the dollar.
Think I’m wrong? Try opening a biotech or photovoltaic company here. Also read CalMeacham’s comments - they’re spot on.
Who’s “we”? It’s the people on top who get richer. In case you haven’t noticed the income disparity between the upper class and the working class has been growing. The working class has not shared in this prosperity.
Where are “E, F, G and H”? For the last ten years that has been mostly lower paying jobs than the jobs that they replaced. Under Bush fewer jobs were created than the growth of the working class population. In his last year we LOST 2.6 million jobs.
See, this is where you keep showing that your argument regarding economics is religious: you keep telling us offshoring produces benefits that history has not shown it to produce.
So far you’ve failed to show where any jobs will come from. We’ve been waiting 10 years for that answer.
We don’t need to get to an unemployment rate of 90%. We only need to get to about 25% before this country is certain to tear itself apart.
Adam Smith?
Economics is a social science, not like science in the way that chemistry is. You can always count on H2O being water. Economics is rife with big laughable mistakes like the post-war economics theories that said inflation and recessions were mutually exclusive. Economics, unlike real science, is not reliably capable of predicting the results of all interactions. It’s fairly unreliable to a level that is completely intolerable in a real science like math, physics or even medicine. Economics depends on the behavior of human beings, which are notoriously inconsistent.
Science is closer to a religion. Look at how you hold the free market as practically ‘god’. I would not be surprised if you were to say you believed in laissez-faire economics, which (like Socialism/Communism) is itself a religion because no one has ever actually tried it in its pure form but laissez-faire defenders believe that it is the one true way.
Hmmmm. I even wonder if all economists agree that economics is a “science”.
Of course your answer for why you cannot give a date is similar to what mine would be. Hmmmmm.
This is not true, as RickJay has already pointed out to you. You are misreading him, and then claiming that he’s misreading you.
People who exhaust their unemployment benefits are still counted in the U3. They have always been counted in the U3. There has never been a time, ever, when people who exhausted their unemployment benefits were automatically exluded from the U3. Moreover, the BLS does not use unemployment benefits at all, in any form, to calculate any of its U# measures. New claims for unemployment benefits are used to guesstimate the actual umemployment rate, but it is never an official number. Those benefits, and the exhaustion thereof, are not used in any way to calculate any legitimate unemployment rate, precisely because there is too much bias on both ends, from both people who have never applied for the benefits and for people who have exhausted their benefits.
Unemployment benefits have nothing whatever to do with the unemployment rate as it is officially measured.
The difference between the U3 and the U4 is “discouraged workers”. This is, to say it yet again, completely unrelated to unemployment benefits. Discouraged workers are people who have actually stopped looking for work. If they are still looking for work, even after having exhausted their unemployment benefits, then they’re in the U3 and counted as part of the official unemployment rate.
What bothers me the most about this discussion is how aggressively it misses the point. We have legitimate problems with economic policy right now, problems that could be mitigated to a great extent with the right focus. Frankly, people should be gathered in droves with their pitchforks and torches and badly-spelled posters around the Fed offices. But they’re not.
Instead of paying attention to the legitimate issue, we have to be continually distracted by the old, tired, ignorant trade complaints.
Our economy experienced its most severe recession since the Great Depression at the exact same time that nominal GDP fell at its fastest pace since the Great Depression. This has nothing to do with trade. It’s a massive demand shock caused by a financial crisis, same as it was in the 1930s. This is not a trade problem, it’s a money problem. Offshoring has highly visible costs, but on net, the benefits outweigh the negatives. That doesn’t make the process painless. It sucks, and some workers take it on the nose. And that’s exactly why we should have unemployment benefits and other programs to ease the trasition, and it’s also why we should be fixing our money problems to spur job growth. But instead of people focusing on what’s actually wrong with the economy, we have this tedious whining about trade that distracts from the real issue.
