China

most of the job losses of blue-collar work are the result of automation, not foreign trade (this is a statement for which ample evidence exists[1]), furthermore on the aggregate Americans do benefit from trade with not just China but also other low-cost nations, which again is economics 101. If the United States were to produce goods at the level of domestic wages a small segment of the workforce would benefit, but consumers on average would lose out due to the increase in price. The price for an iPhone could go from ~850$ to ~2000$[2]. Now imagine that this happens for every good that is produced largely in China and think again if bringing back a few ten thousand jobs is worth the total loss of consumer welfare in the states.

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...

>increase in price

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.

Well you may be fine if you have a lot of disposable income, but many poor Americans will not. Which is of course the opposite story that the OP tried to tell. If you are a minimum wage US worker paying hundreds of dollars more for basic goods is a drastic cut into your quality of life.

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.

Exactly. This is the template for emerging economies. Grow your domestic economy, have your consumers support your industry. That’s the recipe, but suddenly this is “bad” for our own economy and people.

> Now imagine that this happens for every good that is produced largely in China and think again if bringing back a few ten thousand jobs is worth the total loss of consumer welfare in the states.

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.

That's certainly the traditional narrative, but it always smelled a bit fishy to me because I've seen far more success in outsourcing manufacturing than I've seen in automating it. Sure enough:

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

>”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...”

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.

You don't know the steady state is harm to poor Americans. That Americans are poor is likely a consequence of the current trade imbalances.

>That Americans are poor is likely a consequence of the current trade imbalances.

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.

Do we still need a new phone every year or two like was necessary in the past? I've had no desire to upgrade my phone and don't see a compelling reason to in the future. If manufacturing had stayed in america there would be copious amounts of technical jobs in the (now decimated) regions, even if mechanization reduces the overall number of people.

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.

> Well you may be fine if you have a lot of disposable income, but many poor Americans will not.

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.

Not everyone is as materialistic as you. The goods you are talking about are luxury products we can do without - have you read of the sacrifices people make on the homefront during all out war? Even basic necessities such as food are rationed. To complain about not having the newest iPhone is a slap in the face of the sacrifices made by our ancestors in order to endure the world wars and stave off facism.

In places like the oil boom towns in west Texas and South Dakota the average salaries for all jobs are multiplied higher. Because the average worker in an oilfield makes so much more they have to pay the cashiers 4x what they normally would make. You are wrong.

Automation that is in China, you mean? Because most of it isn't in the US.

You will be surprised how materialistic the average American will be when their basic cost of living increases.

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

So you’re claiming if manufacturing had stayed and it offered decent wages those service workers would still choose to stay in the service industry?

Basic cost of living (housing, education, healthcare) has already sky rocketed.

Both are definitely contributing, but automation/process improvements is very apparent in steel production: "In the 1980s, American steelmakers needed 10.1 man-hours to produce a ton of steel; now they need 1.5 man-hours, says Joe Innace of S&P Global Platts." https://apnews.com/cae426730cd74e64932e4be7fa5cdebc/As-Trump...

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-...

there is no such scenario because manufacturing would not have stayed. As explained in my original post, automation constitutes the bulk of replacement of manufacturing jobs. If every single manufacturing job from China came back to the United States we would be talking about a low single digit percentage number of the american workforce.

What if they are only in those jobs because there are no factory jobs for them? If we started employing a lot of factory workers, they would have to come from somewhere. A lot would come from worse jobs. This would also make labor scarcer for those jobs allowing the people who do them to demand higher wages and better conditions.

Poor Americans in the rust belt are poor largely because of the decimation of a path to the middle class.

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.

> Hasn't globalization directly contributed to making the American working class poorer?

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.

> he price for an iPhone could go from ~850$ to ~2000$[2]. Now imagine that this happens for every good that is produced largely in China and think again if bringing back a few ten thousand jobs is worth the total loss of consumer welfare in the states.

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.

Yeah I don’t agree with any of this. I find it really fascinating that, after WWII, the US finds itself in this self-imposed fatalism where we can “never” compete with the rest of the world on manufacturing because of labor costs. It’s also a little odd because in multiple threads at a near daily pace I see people advocating that we explicitly cut back on consumption spending for environmental reasons (reasons I find very compelling). China is also one of the, if not the, world’s biggest polluter.

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.

> 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).

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 isn't near collapse at all. The postwar era and the fact that the US is the primary consumer of global goods is a different way of saying that the US is one of the most prosperous countries on the planet.

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 analysis is just garbage.

“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?