Not withstanding other diplomatic problems it could cause, what would the American economy be like if nobody traded with us? What if we bought no foreign products, and allowed no foreign companies into the country?
Other than oil and some exotic foods, what do we get from other countries that we can’t make for ourselves?
If all those items that are made in China and sold at Walmart had to be made in the United States, what would our unemployment rate be? How would this affect the price of products and the cost of labor? What if a company had no option of shipping jobs over seas. What if I called tech support and the voice on the other end spoke clear mid-west U.S. English? Include a scenario that includes tourism (but no Souvenirs brought back or taken out) and one that does not allow tourism.
I think we’d be just fine. And the rest of the world would change their economic policies to get us back in the loop. We don’t need them, they need us. I’d prefer common sense protectionism, like the rest of the world practices, but what would be missing? Except for Godzilla movies. We haven’t been able to do that right, but I can’t think of any other serious problem. We have oil, and can make oil, or just not use oil. IIRC we are a little short on some other mineral resources, platinum I think, but there is plenty of that on the moon, and we own that. We put our flag there first, and I assume we don’t recognize international treaties under isolationism. Sounds fine to me. Let’s do it.
We would have to relearn how to make our own clothes, at the very least. Those first few winters of isolation, when we have to wear last year’s fashions, will be a real bitch. After that we will probably get along pretty well until our oil reserves run out. Then we will have to make some hard choices or reopen our doors.
To paraphrase from Ghostbusters…Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria and financial chaos!
Can you say ‘Great Depression’? Can you say ‘Devaluation’? Can you say ‘Praise JEEEESSSUUSSS!!’? (that last one was really unrelated, I just to ask). Can you say ‘Financial Collapse’?
A more reasonable question would be: “What sort of state would the US be in now if they had always practiced economic isolation?”
Given the enormous complications of sorting out IP rights and mutual co ownership of virtually all of the worlds largest companies it would be an almost impossible task to try and accomplish now.
Ignoring the complications, however, I suspect that the most noticeable effect would be a rocketing of the cost of most goods as all the sources using cheap labour would be shut off and it would take the domestic manufacturers many years to gear up for production and even then it would be at a considerably higher cost. Plus there would be a sudden shortage of labour which would push costs up even further.
At least, though, for the US it would be vaguely possible. For the UK it would be absolutely impossible to support the population we have without trade with at least a part of the rest of the world.
I’m flashing back to the vanishing cell phone thread - do we have to account for the transition period after the borders slam shut? You know, the period in which society obviously, inevitably, collapses, due to us simply not being prepared to make our own oil and clothes and junk in quantity at the moment?
Or can we assume that we’re magically transported into a world where the borders were never open, and we never let the factories close and in which we’ve been had all the infrastructure in place for decades now? Because if we can, we’d be fine. There isn’t anything about the united states that makes it incapable of manufacturing the essentials of society.
As for details, I expect that wages would be growing a bit more here, gas would cost somewhat more, and…that’s all I got.
You don’t think that just maybe the cost of a lot of consumer goods would be vastly higher than they are at the moment on account of the fact that they all have to be made by Americans on American minimum wage (or more :eek:) rather than by Chinese or Indians on $2 a week*?
I think a lot of people don’t realise just how much our western lifestyles rely on good being produced in ultra low wage countries.
OK, that may be an exaggeration, but not by much in terms of actual labour cost increment!
In the immediate aftermath there would be painful, with shortages of lots of goods. Longer term, we would be much, much poorer than if we continued trading. It’s likely that technology would regress, as we would have less access to necessary expertise. The US would fare better than most other countries in a no-trade situation than most other countries, on account of our greater population.
This isn’t why we trade.
These are hard to answer. The majority of job losses that people worry about (e.g., in manufacturing) are lost to increasing automation, not to outsourcing. However, as a consequence of the populace becoming significantly poorer, some types of automation may lose ground to humans.
I don’t know that tourism would make that much difference. The much more important question is whether a trade in ideas is still allowed.
I’m sure we’d tool up in a hurry. It isn’t like we haven’t done it before - for example, after Pearl Harbor we started turning out war material at breakneck speed. If there’s a need, we can do it. It isn’t like we have no textile mills and such - we have them, they just don’t produce enough to clothe the whole country.
I don’t understand the fear of economic disaster. I assume we made sufficient plans for a changeover. We have been running a trade deficit for a long time, so we will not get poorer as a country, we will actually stop bleeding money. Prices will change, but those things where we have a trade surplus will drop in price, and wages will increase as the supply of cheap labor disappears. We will need to build a lot of equipment and employ lots of people just to make enough clothes. That sounds like economic boom.
I doubt it will happen, or could happen, but I’m not seeing the big downside. The downside of our current system should be obvious.
Let’s imagine that this view of the world comes true. Absolutely no goods (Or people? Or idea? Choose which one you like best) ever cross the US border. In this world, surely some of the states will net importers. Would it be better if they severed relations with the outside world?
Yes…I recall it. We don’t seem to have any definition of the time frame that this ‘economic isolationism’ is supposed to occur in, no. I assumed that it would be rapid, obviously…some sort of political movement similar to how we slammed the door shut on trade and brought us all the prosperity, joy and jobs made right here in the US that the Great Depression brought us. Obviously if we are talking about a period of a hundred years then much of the gloom and doom aspects of my own post will be alleviated. If we are talking about a short period of time, then the Great Depression might seem like a period of economic expansion.
Nope…we COULD make everything we need with our own resources (well, I’m sure there are some materials that we can’t get in the quantities we need…oil springs to mind). It would just cost more, and there would be less available for everyone. But if we are talking about some sort of long economic plan that slowly weens us off of the dirty furriners goods and services, then I suppose we’d survive. If we are talking about some sudden event, however, then I’d say the survivors could always go back to hunting and gathering.
I know, I know…I’m over reacting again. I’m sure we’d be fine in a week or so, and that everything would be peachy.
Maybe two weeks then? A…I hesitate to say really, but just a thought…an entire month??
If all you can think of is that gas would go up a bit and wages would be higher then I definitely AM having flash backs to the cell phone thread…assuming you mean this seriously, and assuming we aren’t talking about a really ridiculously large time frame, but instead are talking about weeks, months or a year or two.
You seem to be harboring the peculiar notion that people eat cell phones and burn cell phones in their cars as fuel. Abruptly cutting off all trade would result in a much greater loss than the loss of the almighty cell phone, and these would be losses that would escalate over the span of weeks, as storage tanks and warehouses ran out.
Without food, or without the gasoline to ship the food, I figure we’d start seeing mass starvation in some areas within three weeks of the last shipments, which could stop arriving within the first month after the cutoff (as a guess). Large cities would probably be hardest hit, resulting in a literal end to urban civilization.
Um, this was specifically in response to the “alternate world” scenario, where there is no changeover. Much less a time two weeks later than the non-existent changeover.
Given an extremely gradual rampup, you would see prices rising - and wages rising. The result being inflation of a comparatively harmless variety, if not exactly fun for people living on a fixed income or off of savings. Unemployment would probably drop, at least for a while.
Eventually, things would level off, with things stabilizing at levels that reflected their new cost-to-produce, with people’s wages stabilizing at their new wages-required-to-get-us-to-produce them levels. Some things would rise in price more than others; fuel being an obvious one as we were forced to access less readily available sources of it. In other cases the prices relative to wages will be a little higher due to the more stringent quality controls required in the states. But in general the prices aren’t going to have skyrocketed above people’s ability to pay; that’s not the way the market works. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if there was on average a shift in favor of the american consumer, since we would no longer be sending money out of the country.
This wouldn’t be a pancea of all our problems, mind you; automation would continue to take jobs that workers might once have had, and it’s not like we ever had 100% employment anyway. But I think we’d do okay overall - presuming we pretend there’s no painful (fatally painful) transition period.
Of course, that’s the states. Countries that net-import their food and haven’t the resources or space to do it themselves for their current populations (the UK? Japan?) would be screwed.
Well, leaving aside the ridiculous eating cell phones bit, I agree completely…if it happened suddenly then the economy would collapse and the country would go tits up.
Yup.
I find myself strangely in agreement with you, though not sure if unemployment would drop or not. It would depend on how things played out, though it might work out that way.
I think it would screw everyone, even if we did it gradually over a long period of time. Countries would adjust eventually, and a new level would be found (as you say), but I think the world would be poorer. Of course, if it happened suddenly, the world would be fucked, just like we would be.
Well, there’s screwed, and then there’s “discovering that in their country food is one of the things that becomes impossible to produce in quantities (and, thus, prices) sufficient to make it available in adequate quantity to the bulk of their current population.” I think that the US is at least theoretically capable of feeding, clothing, and fueling its current populace, from a sheer available-space-and-resources perspective. I am not sure that all other countries are in the same boat.
It’s hard to say. I suppose that given enough time, countries like Russia could, theoretically at least, step up. There are a couple other countries that might be able to step up as well, especially since it would mean that there would be more oil available for everyone as well.
Not sure what you’re asking, but I don’t contend this will benefit everybody. I’m not even a proponent. But when I started entering a sarcastic response, aside from the lack of new Godzilla films worth watching, I couldn’t find an overall downside. If we saturate our own economy, and need to export to grow, at that point we will be stuck. But in fact, we import far more than we export right now, and we’ve been doing it for years.
We don’t seem to have any definition of the time frame that this ‘economic isolationism’ is supposed to occur in, no. I assumed that it would be rapid, obviously…some sort of political movement similar to how we slammed the door shut on trade and brought us all the prosperity, joy and jobs made right here in the US that the Great Depression brought us. Obviously if we are talking about a period of a hundred years then much of the gloom and doom aspects of my own post will be alleviated. If we are talking about a short period of time, then the Great Depression might seem like a period of economic expansion.