6 million Americans out of work for more than 6 months.
Capitalist apologists say that we need to send old-industry jobs like manufacturing overseas so that we can free workers in America to do new things like knowledge-based work.
What this means in reality is that we’ve freed 6 million people from having jobs to sitting around on the unemployment line waiting for benefits extensions while employers tell them they don’t want to hire anyone who is unemployed.
That’s creative destruction in action.
I’m sure y’all don’t have to ask what the debate here is, but I’ll put the obvious question forth… what exactly the sam HILL is being created here, except a permanent class of long term or even permanently unemployed workers, and an endless cycle of ever deepening recessions and slower and slower (in the jobs sense) recoveries?
It’s better than the alternative, because the only alternatives are based around racism, xenophobia and a failure to understand the the United States now exist in a world where they can no longer rely on being the only rich kids on the block. People in the developing world want jobs, and they want them more than you do, as evidenced by their willingness to work longer, harder and for a fraction of your wage. All power to them, since they’re getting them, just as they deserve.
Or are we meant to pull the ladder up after us and keep them poor so we can inefficiently make goods to sell to them at inflated prices?
Am I the only one who sees these graphs and thinks:
People! The economy will be back to normal in a year or two, at most. In the meantime, those who have been laid off have T-I-M-E. You know, time? That thing you never had enough of? That scarce commodity you had so little of to spend with your family, on your interests, exercising, DIY-ing, or just relaxing or musing?
I really wish these graphs would indicate the free time people had as well.
They say so? You appear to be listening to the wrong capitalist apologists. Germany and Sweden, the for the moment two most successful Western capitalist nations, seem to do very well on a backbone of good old fashioned heavy industry. Both are booming at an almost unprecedented level. It doesn’t seem to be capitalism that failed as it was the rather vague idea of a post-industrial society and economy driven by some kind of hip creative class doing hip things in hip cities. And as for knowledge-work. You can’t decouple the knowledge-based work from manufacturing. The two goes hand in hand.
Time is often not so leisurely spend when you have to worry over how you’ll make money to pay the rent, clothe and feed your children, where to move your family when your house is taken by the bank. But I hope a large part of the graph is made up of people just being temporary out of work for a short time.
Normal? Our recently crashed economy was running on borrowing and delusion. It was grossly abnormal. If we can return to some kind of prosperity, it won’t be by going “back” to what we were doing a few years ago. And it will sure as hell take longer than two years.
How about if you back up the graph to -24 months? You’ll see our latest recession was preceded by a massive boom. But of course you knew that. It just doesn’t support your argument, so you didn’t show it.
I am not sure what a “capitalist apologist” is, or when they said that, but my personal observation is that open competition will always beat an artificially-created market over time, whether at the level of a few individuals or an entire nation.
Over time, you cannot create jobs by ignoring the fact that the same goods can be produced less expensively elsewhere. You have to find ways to compete. If it’s true (and I don’t think it is) that our economy is dependent only on manufacturing, and if it’s true that we are no longer able to compete, then perhaps a “capitalism apologist” would say our time has come and gone, and no amount of artificial support by government will be any more successful in preventing that than any socialist country has ever been.
A “capitalism apologist” should be arguing that fundamentally it is the survival (and prospering) of the most competent that drives the creation of wealth, as opposed to the artificial propping up by governments of the incompetent. This leaves an enormous maldistribution of wealth (whether at the level of individuals or of whole nations) but at least there is wealth available to be distributed.
I think his point was that since the graph is relative it could be that the peak for the 2007 recession is articifially high due to the ‘smoke and mirrors’ boom. In that case it would naturally look like an outlier because what looks like a massive slump is actually partly a correction to where the economy should have been to begin with.
Whether or not that is actually true is another question. I would guess not, since the boom was mainly driven by an equity bubble and financial instruments it didn’t really have a massive impact in driving up employment (in fact probably the opposite).
You are right, but the chart itself is misleading, since it tracks unemployment from a strict percentage of loss perspective. So, if you started your recession at 8% unemployment, lost only 5% and recovered back to 8%, that is going to reflect better in that chart than if you started unemployment at 5%, lost 6% and then eventually recovered back to 5%, even though perhaps the first example recovered back to that 8% unemployment faster.
The thing the OP just doesn’t seem to grasp and probably never will is that we are in a very deep recession. This has little or nothing to do with outsourcing, the OP’s big bugaboo. Outsourcing didn’t get us to this recession, didn’t cause it, and isn’t responsible for the majority of the people who are currently unemployed in the US.
Not that you’ll answer, but maybe someone else will ask you…can you name some ‘Capitalist apologists’ that say things like this? What ‘Capitalist apologists’ generally say is that nations should engage in industries where they have competitive advantage. That’s not exactly the same thing as sending ‘old-industry jobs like manufacturing overseas’, since there will be large sectors of ‘manufacturing’ countries like the US still have competitive advantage doing…which is why from the standpoint of productivity in the vertical manufacturing markets US companies still engage in our manufacturing is as strong as it’s ever been…it’s not shrinking, it’s growing (or at least it was before the recession).
The good news is that blind nationalism is on the decline. The bad news is that it is being replaced by an international capitalism, the age of the Corporation Without a Country. The Board of Directors at GreedCo (A wholly owned subsidiary of Mammon Industries) are all loyal, true-blue Americans. But when presented with spreadsheets that demonstrate that a course of action will be hurtful to their fellow Americans, but healthy for GreedCo, they vote where their central loyalty lies.
If selling defective ammunition to Our Heroes will support their bottom line, they will suffer moral qualms and ethical dilemma. They will get over it.
So, what should they do in your view? Should they be willing to sacrifice their business for the short term good of America and Americans? Take a loss in order to keep a business going in the US and protect those US jobs, even though ultimately it will result in loss of market share to countries with businesses who are willing to take advantage of the competitive advantages that can be offered by moving manufacturing to countries with cheap labor? How will that ultimately help Americans? Eventually they will not only lose those jobs anyway as the businesses go tits up, but we’ll lose the tax revenue for those US flagged corporations that have either lost large portions of their revenue or gone out of business.
To be sure, eventually this will have the effect of getting Americans those juicy low wage high volume jobs back, since once we reach to bottom then other countries will be outsourcing their manufacturing back here.
And if using ridiculous strawmen helps your’s, I’m sure you won’t have any qualms about using them, right?
I don’t think it’s a ‘problem’ that the government needs to ‘solve’, so if you were waiting in hopeful anticipation of my words of wisdom, sadly there will be no joy. Perhaps if one so wise as yourself doesn’t have a solution or even an idea of how to fix this dire problem, that should say something.
Well, I’d say that we are both done with your tangent to the thread, yes…you think there is a problem but have no solutions other than your assertions, and I don’t believe it’s a problem that needs to be fixed.
Perhaps we should move on to explore the OP and what looks to be another fine train wreck by one of my favorite posters on the board? Outside of your standard rhetoric, what are your thoughts on the OP? To cut to the chase, here is what the OP seems to want to debate:
Personally, I think that this is yet another example of the OP not understanding the subject that he’s attempting to discuss. Offshoring has little or nothing to do with the current (relatively) high unemployment…the recession is the main cause of that higher unemployment. No one (except the OP…well, I assume most other dopers don’t believe this, but perhaps I’m assuming too much here) thinks the recession will last forever, and once it ends then it’s a good bet that at least some of that unemployment will recede. How much and to what extent is certainly debatable, but I’d be willing to bet that once the economy picks up that the unemployment figures don’t remain around 10%, even if they don’t go back to the very low 4-5% we enjoyed before the recession and bubble pop.
The OP seems to be predicting that this recession will be followed by an ever deepening downward spiral (due presumably to offshoring), longer downturns with jobless recoveries (a buzzword coined by the Dems after the bubble pop in 2001 when unemployment was around 5%, about as low as it’s likely or even healthy for it to go). So, what’s your take 'luci?
Hell, XT, might even be seen as a positive development! Certainly better than the rabid nationalism of the Japanese and Germans of the last century, since we have no evidence that CostCo is sending armored divisions to crush Best Buy. We humans are susceptible to tribalism, it is equally a strength as a weakness, and corporate loyalty is simply a more bloodless and abstract version.
Finally, of course, the Answer is a universal compassionate humanism, that views all people as equally worthy of nourishment, enlightenment and emancipation. Its taking a lot longer than we thought, and we could use your help, if you’ve nothing better to do.
