China

So true, since its inception with GHW, its execution and realization through Clinton and then once fully engaged the timid, supplicant responses from GW and BO, China has contributed to the stagnation of the blue collar worker on America with the full complicity of Democrats, Republicans and most of Industry and even unions who didn’t oppose their cozy politicians. They all only saw starry dollar signs...

That’s where we are now. People have had enough. That’s why they put up with the guy no one likes because he’s willing to sever that codependent relationship.

Now, if you ask any pol running for the nomination who the greatest threat to America is... it’s not going to be China...

Misrepresenting him as "willing to sever that codependent relationship" is harmful. He's just as complicit if not more than most politicians, and most of his actions involving China have been inconsistent and self-serving.

On the economics issue though, readers should know he disagrees with economists, who nearly universally agree that trade with China benefits Americans as a whole, with the caveat that there are concentrated losses in certain populations. Economists are highly certain on this, with uncharacteristically few people responding "uncertain" on the survey [0]. You can go through the other surveys on the IGM Forum to see what more common distributions looks like.

[0] http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/china-us-trade

Also, it goes without saying of course that it would also hurt the Chinese workers who are equally deserving of good employment as their American counterparts, and it's not clear why discounting their welfare is anything other than tribalism.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...

[2]https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/how-much-would-an-all-america...

I think what we're seeing is a president who is at odds with the intelligence and diplomatic communities. It's truly testing the ideas of who's actually in charge.

The president assumes since he was elected and runs the executive branch that he has the final say on what will be done, and will go "off-script" in direct communications with other leaders to forward his agenda. The diplomats/intelligence have long-established precedents and procedures and want everyone, including the president, to not rock their boat.

When they are unable to work together, you will see these inconsistent decisions being made.

Pick your flavor of elitist sub/urbanism, it doesn't matter, none are substantially different.

(HN's poor Markdown formatter transfers asterisks cross-paragraph, so what was originally "George Mason University (asterisk)" and "(asterisk)Pick your flavor" just made everything between italicized.)

I, and I’m sure many many others, would be willing to pay a little more if I know that money is staying here and supporting families in this country. I can do without more plastic crap from China, and I consider it strategically important that high tech manufacturing comes back to the US. For defense reasons, among others. I’m sure someone will link the Wikipedia page with some neat plots from “economics 101”, which is fine. But some things are worth paying a little more for.

This mercantilism on display here will be extremely harmful to people in America who rely on low cost imported goods just for the sake of predominantly wealthy people attempting to play geopolitics. If you're willing to harm poor Americans and cut trade then please state it like this, don't wrap it up in patriotism.

And to expand on the 'jobs coming back'. Given the high production costs that American companies would have to live with would instantly make their products unattractive in the rest of the world, where people are still going to buy Chinese phones. Giving companies like Apple an incentive to drastically increase the pace of automation, which again is the primary eliminator of jobs.

And even worse, unless you put a tariff on Samsung who will still produce in countries with access to cheap labour, american products will be uncompetitive in their own markets. If you do eliminate competition, the incentive to innovate will vanish. This in fact already happened in the US in the 80s, when the Reagan administration engaged in a trade-war with the Japanese to protect the automotor industry. We all know what this did to the american car market as a result.

This is a binary choice dem or repub any other choice is a vote for the incumbent

Given the condition of the lowest of our nation, "traitors" isn't an unreasonable way to describe the 1%, and no one in the 1% has ever seen a firing squad or the electric chair. Not even lethal injection. If they aren't subject to the same rules as Americans, are they really Americans? If they have a higher amount of wealth than sovereign countries, can they be considered anything but sovereign?

> In Japan, honne are a person's true feelings and desires (本音 hon'ne, "true sound"), and tatemae are the behavior and opinions one displays in public (建前 tatemae, "built in front", "façade").

Well, that's not exactly true. There is at least one person who ran his campaign saying exactly that- China was America's greatest threat... He's "the guy nobody likes"... he is the current President!

The thing is: economists are hardly unbiased and neutral. Their theories are far from scientific truth, and typically embed significant political content.

For instance: "benefit" can be a highly political term. How do "economists" define it and is that the definition we should be using?

This is an interesting article on the subject:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalizatio...

> ECONOMISTS ON THE RUN

> Paul Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than they thought it would. Did America’s free market economists help put a protectionist demagogue in the White House?

The current buffoon political administration has identified a surface problem, but not the causes and certainly not a solution. The only solution I see comes in two parts: 1) The world needs to make China persona non grata. 2) Shareholders and corporate boards need to hold corporations accountable, not just on a moral basis, but also in terms of good business. Foreign companies cannot win there because the playing field isn't fair.

Thus, while yes we need politicians who can defend American interests, we also need to hold their corporate masters accountable.

On the other hand, perhaps a reduction in frivolous consumption would be good for an ailing planet.

> it's not clear why discounting their welfare is anything other than tribalism.

They are citizens of an authoritarian regime, and for the most part, deeply nationalistic. Their labor produces the regime's prosperity, and enables the very economic influence that leads the international community to constantly turn a blind eye to its human rights abuses.

I don't think it's controversial or inhumane to suggest that we should allocate resources to those who play by (or belong to groups that play by) fairer rules.

Praising him doesn't mean he likes him or he'll make of him his friend. It's more of a respect thing. He respects the man for working on the interest of his country.

That’s not a problem if we put in place policies and regulations that put our workers on even footing with foreign workers. Benefits, protections (OSHA), anti-dumping, market-based pay (no institutional labor), IP protections, even access to markets, etc. that is handicap any imports proportionately for not meeting those baselines.

Voting 3rd party exercises your right to say you don't like either of the other 2 candidates. I will not argue which candidate it will help, but i think this line of thinking is detrimental to our voting process and wrong to rub in peoples faces.

The ability for an individual to choose their favored tax jurisdiction is an artifact of law, and laws can be changed. If America decides to clamp down on the 1%, it can also create laws to disincentivize leaving for tax reasons, like Saverin did.

https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...

You know what, I’ll start caring about their wellbeing soon as they give two shits about the American workers they have displaced.

It’s their economy, they can fix their own problems.

Without belaboring the argument which I'm sure everyone's seen before, I would like to re-focus on the point of my comment: The idea that "The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship" is counter to everything we know about economics. You can give counter examples yes, but overall trade has been a benefit to Americans, especially for lower-income Americans who rely on low cost goods. We can say with our engineering jobs that we're willing to bear the cost of protectionism, but we don't really bear that cost in the first place.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-costs-...

[1] https://fee.org/articles/tariffs-hurt-the-poorest-the-most/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-costs-...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-steel/in-michig...

This story is improbable because the overwhelming majority of America's poorest are employed in the domestic service industry who are not facing negative exposure to international trade. Every store clerk, every McDonalds worker, every garbage man, cleaning lady, janitor, nanny, teacher and so on will be one-sided losers of an increase in prices due to reduced trade.

The benefactors will be a relatively small number of American manufacturing workers (given that it's overall only a small source of employment), who already earn solidly middle-class wages.

The world has too many people to support as is, so it is beneficial if automation reduces the number of workers needed in the long run. But sending all of the factories out of the US benefits no one.

Why are they poor? Hasn't globalization directly contributed to making the American working class poorer? For instance: Offshoring a factory obviously eliminates those workers' jobs. The owner of a American factory can also use the threat of offshoring to keep wages down. The owner is better off, but the workers clearly aren't.

One of the obnoxious things about free-trade ideology is that the cause of problems and the proposed solutions often seem to be one and the same: more market faster.

Having access to cheap goods might not make up lost jobs, but weren't most of the manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt automated away rather than being offshored? Since 1990, production of metals in the U.S. has held roughly constant, but the number of people employed in the industry has fallen steadily. So it's not like the steel mill jobs from the Rust Belt were shipped overseas, they were just automated away.

This leading argument is not specific to China at all and would equally apply to India and most poor countries. Severing trade with all those countries would severely hurt their economies and their citizens.

It's the same logic behind "dey terk er jerbs" but somehow made reasonable by throwing accusations of fascism.

Of course I don’t wish to argue the efficacy of my poker moves. They are an expression of my free spirit.

I find it a bit hard to understand how someone could suggest that having access to garbage cheap Walmart goods would make up for the utter destruction of a region’s economy. A good place to observe this is southwestern Pennsylvania: there are hundreds of former industrial towns which are now almost completely empty. Drug use is also rampant in these areas and indeed it’s easy to make a direct connection between offshoring jobs and the opioid epidemic.

It’s unlikely the response to not China will be America.

There are reasons to believe the US should still do not China even if it means Bangladesh or Vietnam (in fact, this is exactly what the TPP was supposed to have achieved, and would have better protected worker rights as well as IP...but I guess that wasn’t blunt enough for America).

The US is wealthier than it has ever been thanks to trade abroad. It makes absolutely no sense that the country that has overall benefited the most from trade, is complaining about it.

What the US hasn’t done, is spread the benefits of trade internally. The US economic problems stem from whatever led to a small percentage of the economy pocketing the vast gains. It’s far more likely that tax changes, regulatory changes, and changes in union power have a lot more to do with that than anything else.

But it’s always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner and people have been doing it for millennia, so there’s no reason to believe the US would be immune from it.

But if all you have is trump saying "good strong leader", then you don't have much. Show actions not words.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say in your post, that you'd like to live like a WW2 soldier on the homefront rationing food without a phone? Or that you think there is majority support for your romanticised wartime lifestyle?

The replies to my original post are getting increasingly strange and unhinged

I wish there was a way to raise the level of discussion on HN. Instead, completely uninformed comments like this get upvoted.

Decisions are political, and these decisions have been, more or less, presented to the losers as a fait accompli by the winners. It is good and right that such a decision be challenged, and that it potentially be moderated or rolled back entirely.

These decisions also have had important effects outside of the areas typically focused on by "economists" that need to be taken into account.

> The idea that "The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship" is counter to everything we know about economics.

The thing is, it's not inaccurate to say economics is a political ideology. We should speak about it honestly: as politics and not science. So it's more accurate to say that idea is "counter to everything we know about [my?] political ideology."

Posting links to blogs from explicitly libertarian think tanks that quote chapter and verse does little to convince me economics is something other than politics by another name.

If China is an ocean instead it’s still gone, forever, either to other cheap country or robots.

It’s currently politically convenient to hate China, but quit blaming every woe on China.

Or in Austria: "The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500,000 tons of robust steel wire a year—vs. as many as 1,000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-21/how-just-...

You can say whatever you want, but no one is listening. Voter turnout is so low that the signal of voting 3rd-party is completely lost in the noise of passive non-voting. 3rd-party votes might feel good, but pragmatically (and what is voting except a pragmatic attempt to advance your preferred policy), they are useless.

I encourage everyone on this comment chain to read Clay Shirky's "There is no such thing as a protest vote" [0], and really take it seriously, instead of jumping to thought-terminating cliches by angrily denouncing him as a sheep or whatever. He's right.

[0]: https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-protes...

It’s easy to draw abstract analyses from afar, but without actual hands-on experience, you end up with unexpected side effects - like the current rise of populist protectionism.

The biggest issue with him is how he's destroyed our system of alliances, which administrations of both parties have defended and cultivated over decades. See, for instance, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/18/china-signs-defe....

This is disastrous. It's insane that the US is losing South Korea to China, considering we sacrificed tens of thousands of soldiers and considered starting nuclear war to prevent it in the 1950s. And people just shrug, because to the extent people care about politics right now, it's to focus on impeachment hearings, which themselves are happening because Trump blackmailed an important ally.

The core foreign policy of whoever is President should be recognizing China as our most formidable strategic competitor and working to maintain and build upon a system of alliances to limit its power and reach. Instead Trump is just a thug trying to shake down our allies for cheap wins and PR releases based on an idiotic understanding of American foreign policy interests.

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." - Carl_von_Clausewitz

That may be true, but are there any less biased and more neutral experts on the economy to turn to, or do we just throw up our hands and say that no one knows anything about the economy and thus all opinions are equally valid?

Not being blasé, but the rust-belt is the trade-off for globalization. The US asked the rest of the world to open up their markets for American goods and services and promised to do the same.

The same thing happened to artisan economies with factories during modernization, yet people didn't decry the loss of the local blacksmith when the rust belt took over their jobs too.

The transition from local to city to regional to global specialization is a natural effect of economies of scale. Trying to freeze economic development and preserve the status quo is like trying to push water uphill.

"Voting 3rd party exercises your right to say you don't like either of the other 2 candidates"

I actually voted for a third party, i liked better than the other 2. It was not a protest. I did just read your link and won't denounce him as anything, but I do think telling people who vote for someone they like who is not in the main 2 parties that their vote was a "throw-away" is again not a good thing.

We will have to agree to disagree on this. Although it is interesting in some other countries where there are more than 2 parties that do all compete.

The point is that academic economists pushed policies that had unintended side effects (populism and protectionism) that perhaps they would have anticipated if they had actual experience in the areas that were affected.

Finally, there’s a difference between merely studying a place from afar and enacting policies that dramatically affect said place.

The problem is this President does not take into account the knowledge and capabilities of his intelligence and diplomatic communities, leading to stupid and naive decisions because the other heads of state are better informed and are better negotiators than him.

The intelligence and diplomatic communities are resources at his disposal he often chooses to ignore, so his screw ups are squarely his own with no one else to blame.

That is, it's not the economists job to predict that the demolishment of the rust belt will lead to Trump's election; their job is to predict that the demolishment of the rust belt will bolster the coastal cities, and improve the health of the American economy in general.

Also notably, towns come and go based the industries they support -- it has happened in the past, and will happen in the future. It's simply the inevitable outcome of an ever-evolving economy. How to mitigate the impact of that fact is not the really job of the economist.

And economists are not expected to live in the towns they discuss.. the local politician is intended to represent the local concerns. If he's failing to do so, or failing to have any impact, the economist can merely say "this is what will probably happen, if you do this and don't do that", and nothing will happen.

Chinese economy is definitely struggling. I don't buy the argument that the trade wars do not work. They hurt both sides. Question is who does it hurt more?

It feels like you haven't thought of it in a game theoretic perspective. In the classical prisoner paradox, the two prisoners gain the most by collaboration. But if one of the prisoner shows no good faith collaboration, it might be necessary for the other prisoner to also stop putting their faith in the uncollaborative one.

The bargain of cheaper goods in return for us moving up the value chain may be good for GDP, but we have left tens of millions behind in the process, and they are pissed.

I am pro free-trade, but we need to come up with a system that more equally distributes the gains. You can't kick millions of people out of work, leave them to fend for themselves and not expect massive societal issues.

The main benefit that they give for Americans is that everything became cheaper. We can buy cheaper phones, appliances, cars, clothing, and household goods. But that's exactly what most of these things are - cheaper. We're importing a vast quantity of crappy junk, exporting untold pollution and human suffering onto factory workers and laborers in China, and hollowing out the American middle class in the process.

When presented with evidence about the declining quality and huge externalities of imported goods, they hand-wave about rational actors and price discovery and how consumers will just select for the products that minimize heavy metal pollution in some far off mine in rural China. There's similar hand-waving about how Americans will simply find new jobs when all the factories in Ohio automate or close. When products die more frequently because they're not engineered for durability or serviceability, they hand wave again about how consumers are making informed decisions to maximize their utility at the time of purchase.

The truth is a lot of this was a great con with a thin veneer of respectable economics on it. A few of the economists were in on the con, but most of them were taken for a ride. There were a few warning us all along about market failures, wealth inequality, disruption of rapid globalization, and unchecked externalities, but most just wanted in on the money.

Allegedly blackmailed, which nobody who was actually involved corroborates, to investigate exactly how it is that Joe Biden's son managed to get a very high-paying make-work job on the board of a Ukrainian oil company, and Joe Biden bragged on videotape about how he did infact blackmail the Ukrainian Government to fire the prosecutor who was investigating that.

What we're discovering is not that Trump is that out there. It's that the entire US Government and political elite has been that out there for many years now, and the entire mainstream media conspired to ignore it and cover it up. As they are continuing to do now.

In the US we ended up with 40 hour work weeks, and universal high school as a government response. We will need similar large measures to deal with globalization and automation this time as well.

Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin etc the calculation totally changes of course.

Unfortunately the focus is on blaming immigrants and other countries, not helping the disenfranchised American workers get back on their feet. It's easier to be an angry luddite but it's also historically the wrong side to be on.

So now we need to keep the status quo because they are no longer middle class?

Your argument doesn’t make sense and until you understand that Trump wins re-election easily.

Even if he was not particularly effective in improving their lot, at least he followed through on his promises instead of preaching to them how raping them was good for them.

Globalization went too far.

0 may not be equal to 1, but it isn't equal to -1 either. It takes TWO people changing their vote from <your favored major candidate> to <third-party candidate> to match the effect of one person changing from <your favored major candidate> to <the opposing major candidate>.

Economists do not enact those policies -- they suggest policies. The fisherman also suggests policies to benefit his own work, just as the steel worker suggests his own policies, and just as the architect, the construction crews, the parents, the etc..

These policies are aggregated, and enacted, by your politician (of cascading hierarchy), whose job is to do that -- review the possible set of policies and their impact on different areas of his total domain, and with this overarching view, enact policies. The fisherman does not himself review his policies for how they would impact the steel worker, and neither does the economist review his policies for how they will impact the presidential election.

If your local politician is blindly following the recommendations of the economist, without concern for the rest of his domain, whose fault is that but the politician's?

The economist is not supposed to be an expert in all things about the world, and it would be absurd to imagine him to be. He is intended to be an expert of his domain (economics), and is meant to be one of many experts, each supplying their own, scoped, understanding of the world.

If the economist claims that his suggested policies will purely benefit all aspects of the economy, and have zero negative impact, then it would be fair to blame him, because he was plainly incorrect about the area he's intended to be an expert in. But if he fairly claimed that it would generally be beneficial, but certain areas of the economy would be impacted negatively in such a fashion, and his predictions are generally correct, then he has done his job without fault. The decision to enact the policy, knowing the benefits and the losses, is not made by him.

What seems to be happening is people are losing some of their dirty money connections (like these post term engagements and talk circuits and appointments where you have no expertise, etc and these people are furious and upset. So they are willing to engage in destabilization or at the minimum distractive tactics (collusion didn’t work, let’s try this for that, no, let’s try bribery, if that doesn’t work it’ll be something else).

Not to say the current president is a Saint, but it would appear he’s ruffled some important feathers, otherwise they just wait him out.

Sure, the Chicago school of economics has been banging this particular drum for ages, but it found a responsive ear in the "deciders" in both public and private spheres from the late-80's.

This rust-belt is a symptom on ongoing class warfare, pure and simple - China only happens to be a tool (and a convenient scape goat). The global domination of Wall Street and Silicon Valley is the flip-side of the globalism coin.

I'd say on average the US benefitted, but this hasn't been evenly distributed (capital wins). How do you fix that without using any big-government, pinko communist/socialist interventions? (being sarcastic here, but that's ironically a big part of rust-belt politics).

So, well, I would add disclaimer to not blindly trusts the economists on this one. Their opinion are probably much better than the one from the average Joe, and also much better than anything you'll get out of the news or a politician's mouth, but not completely reliable either... and the most certain a economist is of it, the less I would trust him.

Other places don't cheat with market access or steal IP anywhere as much as China. Any economic rebalancing would have been far more gradual.

"What the US hasn’t done, is spread the benefits of trade internally. The US economic problems stem from whatever led to a small percentage of the economy pocketing the vast gains."

You mean policies such as open trade with China, which was inherently biased towards profits to the top, given the way offshoring worked?

This does not mean there weren't other factors at work, rather that China trade was one policy in an array of policies with a similar outcome.

"But it’s always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner and people have been doing it for millennia, so there’s no reason to believe the US would be immune from it. "

My country profited from the US's Free Trade advocacy, and I still think the US's China policy was either insane or driven by elite concerns. It's one thing to have free trade, another to have one-way free trade with a country that cheated so openly, and is now a superpower competitor.

Does Hitler really not belong on a list like that? So would Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, of course - but I don't think greatness requires goodness.

Or from popular culture:

> “The wand chooses the wizard, remember … I think we must expect great things from you, Mr Potter … After all, He Who Must Not Be Named did great things – terrible, yes, but great.” - Ollivander

Well, they asked a similar question during one of the democratic party debates [1] and some candidates said Trump but others pointed out climate change, Russia meddling in elections, China, etc. But the question was greatest "geopolitical threat" so I guess it's not exactly the same.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/2020-democratic-debate-respo...

No, sorry. It's not that clean cut. Your links had economists stating things like "America’s low-income households benefit the most from free trade and having access to cheap imports." But defining good as having access to cheaper goods is an intensely political statement (even ignoring the fact that statement was made though an organization advocating for a particular political policy).

If economics was not political, economists would merely say things like "All else being equal, if our models are correct, increased tariffs will lead to increased domestic prices of international trade goods. However, all else is not equal, so we cannot comment if tariffs are good policy or not."

And more unequal than it has been since the Gilded Age, when the infamous robber-barons ruled the economy unrestrained.

As you said, the US hasn't "spread the benefits of trade internally", but that has a lot to do with globalization. Workers lost bargaining power and income as competition for their jobs increased due to globalization, and unions became weak when companies responded to strikes by moving operations overseas.

The benefits of globalization naturally flow to foreign workers and the few Americans in charge, while the cost of globalization falls on American workers.

My understanding is that our standard of living has continued to increase throughout my lifetime, and thus that the American working class is on the whole richer than it was decades ago.

> The owner is better off, but the workers clearly aren't.

Aren't they? If they make $10/hour instead of $15/hour, but the goods they buy are 40% the cost that they would have been, their $10/hour is effectively $16/hour (I think I got the math right there).

Of course, maybe they are making $9/hour, or maybe they lost their jobs after all, or maybe the goods they buy are 95% the cost that they would have been … but the principle still holds that they can be doing less well than they would like but still better than they were.

And it wouldn't matter one whit, because 90% of the expenses of the average American aren't going into buying consumer goods.

They go into buying transportation, medicine, education, food, and housing (With the price of housing rising to consume all of the middle class's economic surplus). None of those things are made in China.

Housing is the most fun one, because no matter how much people save, the price of houses rises to eat all of those savings. The only reason for why a house can cost a million dollars, is that people have saved that amount of money up. If that money weren't there, housing prices would be lower.

This is a description of a property or behavior of a system.

> But defining good as having access to cheaper goods is an intensely political statement

This would be apolitical in all but the most semantic of arguments. "Buying the things I want to buy" is assumed to be a good thing by the vast majority of people.

The Apple example is a good one, but, again, I find it very hard to believe that an 80% (or hell even 90%) automated manufacturing footprint here in the US is a) infeasible and/or b) undesirable relative to the status quo.

I’m tired of the fatalism about this issue. It’s pathetic and signals that America is near collapse if we are essentially just giving up on our industrial base and willing to be reliant on cheap consumer goods from China.

> this line of thinking is detrimental to our voting process and wrong to rub in peoples faces.

Our voting framework is detrimental to our voting process. The line of thinking that a 3rd party vote is a vote wasted is simply an assessment of reality.

There are only two realistic candidates for President in a given US election. And no matter the reasoning, a vote for third party is equivalent to a half vote for both major candidates.

If you truly find equally unappealing, then a third party vote is a (very quiet) way to voice that opinion. Otherwise, you are giving a half vote to your least preferred option.

I think it's a mistake to treat it like a math equation, since (among other things) that engages in the fallacy of equating Homo economicus with Homo sapiens.

But if you do want to treat it like a math equation like that. The workers may still be worse off because they don't just buy trade goods. The owner's income didn't drop, and maybe increased, so he can use greater relative income to bid up non-trade goods like real estate, healthcare, and education, pushing those things out of reach of the workers.

The US could compete with foreign countries on manufacturing, but not through human labour unless you want Americans to work 9/9/6 in hazardous conditions and under environmental degradation. The dematerialisation of the US economy has made it cleaner, more energy-efficient, less physically demanding, and richer, because it extracts value from its global IP, and it has given Chinese workers a step up the ladder to prosperity. If manufacturing is coming back its in the form of robots, and that does very little for displaced workers.

There is no reason for fatalism because the premise is all wrong that deindustrialisation is bad. It's not. The problem the US has is a cultural one where the vision of the Ford company man working the same job at the conveyor belt with a dog and car and a house in the suburbs hasn't been updated. Adjust the political system to compensate the segments of the population that lose out, find different ways to provide meaningful work, and we'll be better off, instead of making everyone worse off.

> This would be apolitical in all but the most semantic of arguments. "Buying the things I want to buy" is assumed to be a good thing by the vast majority of people.

That's a myopic view: it's not the only good thing, and it's arguable that it's not even the most important good thing. The politics are embedded in the shape of the myopia.

Because the expenses that are killing us (housing, health care, education) aren't outsourced at all.

As far as I can tell (and according to most economists), the idea that "we can fix the middle class by going after China trade" is intuitive, simple, and wrong. And it's popular on both sides of the aisle. And historically, it's always been easier to find some group to blame than to fix structural economic issues.

So I think the further we go along this path, the less likely it is we will end up fixing our actual problems, and the more likely countries will be distracted by trade wars and maybe real wars in various parts of the world as those problems increase, and various groups are blamed instead of fixing economic policy.

This is separate from the human rights issues. But I think if we want to put penalties to try to address the human rights issues, we should be clear about that. Because if the penalty is for other political reasons it doesn't add an incentive to improve human rights, since that wouldn't make the penalty go away.

The TPP set up an alliance between all of the players in that region and explicitly left out China in order to give that group negotiation power over China. But nuanced policy debate is dead in America so let's use the tool that fucks us all.

The worst part about the trade deal is the harm on our agricultural sector, but I guess at least they voted for their own demise.

I want to frame this.

If that’s the trade off, it wasn’t worth it. Glad we are finally being honest, though. Could’ve used a bit more of this frankness in the 1990s.

I mean, pretty sure biologists would disagree. Maybe economists need to rethink their trade if that’s the prevailing mindset. The idea that you are modeling a social structure that you don’t think you need to have ever been a part of or experienced is pretty rich.

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that the US opened its arms to free trade and the rest of world shrugged and took advantage. Non-reciprocal free trade might be good for the US economy on the whole, but when a handful of people control half the wealth, and their half is the part of the economy that reaps the benefit while everyone else sees full time employment harder to come by and inflation adjusted wages stand still for 3 decades, I think it’s probably a bad policy for a democratic republic.

Here in Australia at least I can do that every time and still have my vote go to the lesser evil due to preferences.

Lots more killing of non-German citizens, of course...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War...

I don't see the problem. USA has practically no leverage in the trade relationships with China. They can't change China for the better. So cutting China off is a net benefit even if other countries will take its role. That also means USA can now trade with countries that actually respect American laws and do in fact share American values like democracy or human rights.

This idea that we must sell our soul for a small profit must die.

The rest of the world also took hits in some industries - US farm subsidies destroyed corn farming in poor countries

Different US industries fared differently - without globalization, Silicon Valley (and American tech in general) as well as Wall street wouldn't be as globally dominant as they are

> I think it’s probably a bad policy for a democratic republic.

I think it could work great for a democratic republic with sane corporate tax and safety net policies to more evenly distribute the upside

Why would we want this?

Because the alternative is a destruction of the USA manufacturing sector. Moving those jobs overseas only helps two groups:

1.) The Chinese 2.) The owners of capital in America, high up business men (the so described 1%).

The third group who may be helped, are everyday Americans who benefit from cheap goods.

What would imposing large tariffs do?

Goods are more expensive, so people can buy less. TVs, Clothes, Cars etc are more expensive. But middle class Americans keep middle class jobs. Right now the policies are ultra capitalist, the middle class is being gutted and replaced with a heroin epidemic.

Why dont we replace their jobs and retrain the workers?

The retraining of older workers for new industries has never been shown to work. Its an economic theory that has yet to play out in any economy on a large scale. I believe the root of Americas economic woes among the middle classes is this concept, which was conceived of and pushed hard in the 90s. Behind the scenes academics like Noam Chomsky fought hard against this concept, but the arguments never trickled down into the public.

In short, tariffs stop the outsourcing and middle class destruction. Things get more expensive, we accept that. If automation kills the jobs here, it still holds off the destruction of the middle class for another 15 - 30 years. Which is better than nothing.

True. But how would modern medicine have faired?

I think the bigger issue with globalization is that it has a huge environmental impact and makes our species more susceptible to the effects of climate change.

We ought to at least enforce free trade policy better; I can tell you first hand that competing against unregulated competitors in manufacturing is hilariously unfair. If we really cared about the Environment or Human rights we would at least level the playing field in markets we control. It’s cheaper to buy from China largely because of our regulatory environment.

“We consume a lot of goods therefore we are prosperous.”

Utter nonsense. I implore you to actually hang out in, not just visit, these places that got blown up so that some companies could make some basis points on their quarterly returns.

It’s also amazing that you’re saying that the “cultural” hangings on about the mid 20th century are something to be readjusted. Dude, these people are not going to become firmware engineers at night school. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting what was a normal family life at that time to exist in 2019. If your claim is that that is not possible, then declare what sacrifices are required. Did globalism make this impossible?

I agree that retraining doesn't work. But I disagree that stopping trade can save the middle class. Manufacturing is only 7.9% of jobs [1] and stopping all trade will only slow the decline, with huge amounts of collateral damage for other jobs. Almost all jobs used to be in farming, but now they aren't. Manufacturing isn't going to be something that employs a huge number of people anymore. In China they're automating away jobs that pay $10,000 a year.

How are you going to help retail workers, 9.8% of jobs [1], as automation (Amazon warehouses) takes their jobs? Tariffs don't help them any although they'll pay for them.

There's real problems for the middle class and/or certain geographic regions, but stopping trade is a solution that almost no economists think will work. I'd rather try something more promising like UBI.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...