I’m gradually growing more suspicious and wary of globalisation, we’re fed the immediate impact of hundreds of millions being brought out of poverty and cheap goods for all. At first they seemed to be a nice thing. It turns out the cheap goods are depleting our world and most are of no absolute return, and those who are benefiting in the Far East are either growing up in cancer villages, wanting to throw themselves off of their balcony, or have become filthy rich because they’re connected.
Also the middle classes are being reduced into obscurity, and if they want an education they have to take out a huge loan. This has two benefits for those in power; firstly the inevitable reduction in the number of students who feel free to comment, the best and most productive protests have been from student populations. And those who are educated will be more inclined to toe the line, rather than question why the line is as it is.
Secondly the middle classes have often been where social and cultural change has come from; the Beatles, Stones, Monty Python, Jon Stewart, the Young Ones, Aristotle, Zuckerberg, Einstein, Muse, many Dopers, Tony Hart, Tony Hancock. We lose the middle classes and we lose a lot of entrepreneurial, original and innovative peoples, there are many papers online which detail how middle classes dominate the arts.
The bogeymen being fed currently and since 2007 has been nationalism and protectionism are harbingers or doom which were thus back in the Great Depression, with very little attention on being on the Gold Standard along with the confiscation of gold (and, so, wealth) in America back then, along with Europe coming off the gold standard much sooner and also emerging from the GD much sooner. Protectionism has been tied with the GD and Trump - both a big negative today and both I’d rather avoid, conveniently. Rather than just accept them unquestionably, I’d rather ask why I should and also question if the alternative(s) is worthy of a debate.
In reading your OP, my mind kept going: Cite? Cite? Cite? Cite? And it’s not at all clear what your complaint is. What goods are not available to you that you think should be?
John, before I produce a cite for the reduction in those in the middle class (as if it isn’t public knowledge, acknowledged by nearly everyone), is there a website you won’t object to? Rather than cater to your straw man I’d rather be open at the outset.
You obviously didn’t read my OP because you asked “What goods are not available to you that you think should be?” which has nothing to do with my point. For clarity I appreciate your asking for a cite but your availability of goods line has me thinking you’re not looking for a reasonable discussion.
Justin, you have to at least focus on a central point. What it is you think globalization should be doing that it isn’t?
I mean, right away I can fix on one thing; tuition costs. You seem to think they’re too high. But that - rather obviously - has absolutely nothing to do with international trade barriers or a lack thereof. American students pile up loads of student debt for a variety of reasons (a wider variety than you suggest) and we could talk about THAT all day, but none of them I can think of relate to globalization. Other countries with free trade deals don’t have sky high university tuition. Why do you think that is?
Use government statistics. That’s what I would do. And you’ll need to define “obscurity”, but I can help you out with that: Somewhere in the neighborhood of < 1%.
Firstly, I read your OP twice. It’s borderline incomprehensible as you skip from topic to topic even within the same paragraph. But if you’re not concerned with goods, then please ask a mod to change your thread title to what you want to talk about.
Let’s assume globalization will be more difficult to undo *well *than simply putting tariffs on Chinese steel, it’ll take decades to do but if the motivation is there it is possible, and the next POTUS will have very little bearing on the outcome.
Assuming the above points; that is isn’t a partisan issue but one of economics, that we’re tied in very strongly and will need a lot of luck to reverse the process, and that we’re ignoring the repercussions of getting in deeper into globalization, will it ultimately be a good or bad thing to continue as is?
Will the FT do? America’s Middle-class Meltdown. It was the first ‘cite’ of legitimacy I found, I’m surprised that needs evidence. The gutting of America’s blue collar middle class has been the topic of economic papers for at least a decade, automation and globalization have put previously worthwhile blue collar workers out of work - is this not general knowledge?
The thread title is an idiom (look it up).
“Firstly, I read your OP twice.” And secondly? Never mind, it seems you haven’t understood the thread yet. Sleep on it, read it a few more times. I admit there’s a lot there to comprehend, it’s not as though I put it together in a few minutes.
Thanks, I put a lot of thought into a little amount of writing, for allowing me to clarify.
Tuition costs have grown much faster than CPI or RPI recently - and have grown as globalization has. As has the reduction in possibilities for decent middle class incomes grown. The coincidence of more expensive education at the same time as fewer possibilities for earning a middle class wage is something I think is worthy of questioning. I’m probably being unclear, but at the same time the prospects for a ‘good’ job have shrunk (due to, arguably, globalization), the blunt instrument to achieve that ‘good’ job has gotten more expensive as demand has risen.
Now I attended university in classes of around 60 and we all received an education, through a lot of hard work and persistence. I paid a small amount in fees. I hear class sizes are today much smaller but that doesn’t mean the students will spend hours studying at home any more than I did. Regardless of my personal experiences, the rise in tuition costs has been in relation to the demise in job/career security, which has also coincided with the reduction in middle class opportunities, which is because of globalization. My point is, is this globalisation having the intended consequences we were led to believe? I’m not so sure.
The World Bank says that extreme poverty has fallen below 10% for the first time ever. Most of that is due to jobs being exported from Westernized nations to poor nations. At least in that regard globalization is a great boon.
Globalization has been going on for a very long time. 200 years ago you’d get almost all your food either from your back yard or from a farm very nearby. Then you started being able to buy meat from Chicago and vegetables from the Central Valley of California, or south Jersey. Shoes and clothing would be made at home or locally, until you could buy it from the Sears catalog.
The local shoemaker, tailor, seamstress suffered from the disruption, but overall society prospered.
Aside from reducing the availability of blue-collar jobs, what do those two things have to do with each other? Would you be able to separate the two in the stats? And if one were to do something about globalization, how would you know that automation wouldn’t pick up the slack?
Yes, Deeg, that point was made in my first paragraph you highlighted (along with the negative consequences). Let’s assume globalization is two sides of the same coin, heads you win and can send your kids to school, tails your kids are born with deformities. The question for The Dope in China would be ‘Is that a risk worth taking?’ but here in comfy western countries we could be asking ‘Is that a chance we want them to take?’, rather than just ‘Where can I get a flat screen TV cheaper?’
Which is part of the debate I’m offering, in that is globalization as good as we’re being led to believe?
Good points. Automation and globalization have certainly been concurrent but are not necessarily correlated with lower incomes in the west. By your second sentence I assume you think automation would still be a threat to workers even if they stopped ‘stealing our jerbs!!’ I think the meme reads. Maybe (probably) it would for some jobs, certainly, but (with the risk of derailing the thread) there are thousands of jobs that are at very low risk of being automated any time soon, and most likely the automation of many jobs would lead to others appearing. I can’t provide evidence of the new jobs as I’m not a time lord
Yes it has been going on for a long time, we used to then live in a seemingly infinite capacity for growth too. Apologies for the trite answer but I can’t put it in any other way. Shoes are made by kids for $1/day in Asia, marketed by sports superstars who’re sponsored millions, to be sold to impressionable teenagers for $90/pair. You can buy a pair of jeans for under $10 - there’s no way a seamstress has even been involved with their design let alone manufacture - and any food you buy from China could be laced with heavy metals, or labelled with some other country on its way here.
You’re vastly overstating the environmental problems. Yes, there are definitely problems in China but then the US has superfund sites. As the Chinese become more affluent they will start to demand better conditions.
The World Bank has a goal (which they think is viable) of eliminating extreme world poverty in the next 15 years. That is a massive achievement and IMO dwarfs the downsides of globalization.
Right. And in 1900 clothes weren’t made by local seamstresses but by tenement girls in New York working in awful conditions. As populations stabilize there a worker shortage will force at least some wage increases, which will enable growth in consumption (they’ve got a lot of headroom) which will enable economies closer to ours, at least ones with decent working conditions. We might pay more for our junk, but that could be a good thing. Less waste. Sure we will get disrupted, but maybe not as much as our great grandparents who lost domestic servants. (Not mine, they were FOB from Russia.)
Why do people who are rightfully upset at income inequality in the US care nothing about global income inequality?
The Chinese are vocally - as much as they are allowed to - demanding better conditions and have been for years. If they’re too vocal they disappear or are at least arrested, sometimes their families disappear too. I don’t see how anyone can vastly overstate ‘cancer village’ or millions of children potentially developing brain abnormalities because of toxic air, food and water.
I thought all measures of poverty were relative, so you can’t actually eliminate any of them. The measure rises as general wealth rises, although maybe the World Bank has a different way of measuring that.
Yes, I think that a high percentage of outsourced blue-collar jobs would be automated if trade barriers were enacted. There are certainly big categories of jobs that are not easily automated, but these tend not to be easily outsourced, either–construction, plumbers, electricians, etc. Some jobs, like garment manufacturing, have been traditionally difficult to automate, but you can bet that there would be an enormous push in that direction if the economic incentive was there (i.e., no longer any giant masses of low-wage workers available).
With globalization, you still at least have people competing against people, so depending on the economics (the foreign jobs get more expensive over time, too), it may make sense to bring the jobs back onshore. But once you build a good enough robot, it can reach the point where it’s not worth hiring a person even for free (no matter where they live). So in the long run I think automation is the greater threat and globalization a relatively short-term issue.
Income (in)equality is one measure, and one we’ve been fed as the barrier the great leveller of globalization is breaking down. I’m not so sure we’re not just guilty of cultural imperialism. Say a farmer in China loses his farm because a factory owner has ganxi (influence) with local politicians, goes to work in the factory built on previously his land and his salary goes from $1 to $4 a day. Great, he can feed his family on goods from someone else’s farm and send his daughter to school, all good.
Then the factory is outsourced to cheaper Vietnam and he loses his job (with no safety net in China) and his farmland is never recovered or too polluted to farm, or he and his family get sick and he can’t work (with no safety net in China), or he suffers an industrial accident (with no safety net in China) and can’t work, or his daughter gets sick on the chemicals being let into the local waterworks and its either feed the rest of his family or care for her (with no safety net in China) etc.
My ‘cultural imperialism’ comment is that the higher income is always assumed to be the better option, when actually it’s the difference between being able to not afford to send your child to the hospital or not needing to. Maybe the father, rather than send his daughter to school, saves the money in case he or they get sick (with no safety net in China). The Chinese save more than almost any other nation because…
