I really don’t think I am.
From my post:
From your second cite:
Your own cite backs up what I said, the same time period and a restriction to developed countries. You don’t seem to be arguing against the point I made.
Let’s take a step back or two.
If a poster here started complaining that we didn’t protect our own workers from the creators of goods with the wrong skin color, this sort of discussion would turn out much differently. If they provided cites that people of their preferred skin color lost a little, while people of their non-preferred skin color gained a lot, we would not see the discussion played out as it tends to in this thread and in others like it. At least, I don’t think it would.
If a poster here started complaining that we didn’t protect our own workers from the creators of goods with the wrong gender or sexual orientation, this discussion would not work out the way it normally does.
But here we have a thread in which some people, it seems, are complaining that we don’t properly protect our own workers from the creators of goods who were born on the wrong side of an an arbitrary line drawn on a map. And for reasons that I can’t quite understand, the discussion seems to go a completely different way.
People tell me it’s “natural” that they want to favor [their chosen ingroup] over [the resulting outgroup]. (We can fill in the blanks there in any number of possible ways.) And I agree completely, tribalism is completely natural to human behavior. We divide ourselves into groups and heap scorn on our preferred scapegoats. But what has happened with respect to some groups is that we have acknowledged (at least some of us…) that doing this is morally wrong. But when it comes to that line on that map, the old atavistic part of our brain starts squeaking in alarm, and for some reason we don’t recognize collectively as a group that this is problematic and morally questionable.
And then people start talking about politics.
One group of people is saying, hey, just leave us alone. We want to trade with who we want to trade with, and it really isn’t your business to interfere with that. And the other group is like, nope, we’re going to tell the people with guns that they’re going to interfere with that voluntary exchange because of, you know, lines on maps and all that. In any other context, this sort of discussion would not develop in the way that it does. But for some reason, this topic is different.
It’s not even every line on the map. Basically nobody worries about imports from Canada. We do more trade with them and with the EU than we do with China at present (altho maybe that won’t last much longer) but we don’t hear the same complaints about trading with developed countries that we do trading with poorer countries. This is, of course, because a place like Canada or France does not compete in the low wage labor markets.
We gain more trading with richer countries. They can afford to pay us more.
Yet those poor countries are slowly becoming rich countries. The current round of globalization is the biggest anti-poverty program in the history of the world. The moral questions above are about the weirdities of who we like to scapegoat – the people who aren’t good enough to be in our hallowed ingroup – but I think an even more fundamental moral question is one of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. One of the poorest countries on earth, where literally tens of millions of people had starved to death, is starting to become a rich country. This is one of the greatest goods that has happened in all of human history. Yet people are complaining about it. (I can understand complaints about the relative instability of their government, which I completely understand. But these sorts of conversations are complaints about starving peasants working in new factories, which I do not understand.)
After it becomes a rich country, it will no longer compete in the low-wage labor markets. We’ll stop complaining, like we don’t complain so much about Canada. It’ll be a bunch of rich people trading with each other, where it’s more emotionally obvious that everyone is a winner. This is what is going to happen. This is what is happening.
Even more than that, it’s not clear what our other options even would be.
How would we even stop the process if we wanted to? Island USA? All we’d manage to do in that context is create a mass of weak industries that people would falsely claim require permanent protection as they fell further and further behind the rest of the world. Rather than the very painful, but ultimately temporary, adjustment we’re suffering now, we would be crippling ourselves indefinitely, until the unknown future day when we eventually came to our sense.
This damage would be extremely bad. People have to keep in mind that “import” numbers have become a lot more hazy in the era of the global supply chain. Final assembly in the US still contains a lot of foreign parts. Foreign assembly still tends to contain a lot of US parts. The web of interconnection is deeper than any one person realizes, and in fact deeper than any human brain is capable of realizing. There are arteries and veins in the world supply chain that don’t get properly measured, and we cannot cut off those blood vessels without doing vast harm to the body. What is Seen and What is Not Seen, in the language of Bastiat. There is a shitload out that that we cannot directly see. It’s not a great plan which causes double the suffering in the attempt to alleviate the original suffering.
When the proposed cures are worse than the disease, we need to acknowledge that.