I thought David Boaz summed it up rather well, meaning Trump would be worse... although to be fair I don't think Trump actually believes half of what he says, but it is what he's running on.
Hillary is openly corrupt and totally without morals or ethics, so it's easy to picture her making deals with a GOP Congress.
Further, Hillary getting herself arrested while President wouldn't be all that bad, but the last time we saw a truly awful GOP President the result was a Dem supermajority.
Stillwater: ...The concept of base mobilization strikes me as implying that partisan individuals within institutions with the power to determine policy are (as you said upthread) pandering to the emotions of a segment of the electorate to gain their votes.
Not "power", more like "money". My expectation is that the people funding BLM are the same people paying for Hillary. Yes, the bulk of the movement are true believers (in what is unclear) but it's odd how their actions never really do her damage. Bern seems a lot more like a natural ally for BLM than Hillary, but that's not how it played out.
BLM wants "massive change". Bern ran as a revolutionary, Hillary is a moderate and one of the founders of a big expansion of the war on drugs/crime. Somehow he was taken to task and his meetings disrupted while she was not. That's over and above the idea that Hillary is going to do the massively good things for BLM that Obama has not.
Stillwater:Btw, my above comment reminds me of one of the few times I’ve robustly agreed with something Hillary Clinton has said during the primary. When BLM confronted her...
Oh, I agree with her too. She handled that really, really well... it made me wonder how much of a "surprise" BLM's visit was.
Hillary doesn't think on her feet, adlib, or go off script, if she's pressed she'll just evade and say basically 'nothing' (mostly this is a strength). And that was the only time I can think of where BLM "confronted" her.
Somehow I suspect after the election when they're no longer useful, BLM will experience a substantial budget cut. In short I think they're being used.
...it's not that I disagree with you (I don't), but imho the BLM movement is channeling their efforts unproductively. If the movement were about reducing the number of dead bodies, then ending the war on drugs needs to be part of the conversation and, as far as I can tell, it's not.
Short of that, there are things we can/should do, but mostly they also isn't part of the conversation. The list(s) of demands seems pretty unorganized and fairly removed from reality (dismantling the police is unlikely to lead to good things for their communities).
This seems more like base mobilization than a serious movement.
Guy:
Honestly, I might just say “all referenda require a 55% percent majority to change the status quo”, on the assumption that anything that winds up on the ballot is important and 50%+1 is vulnerable to noise on close decisions.
I don't know... the whole point of bypassing the politicians is to avoid the "agent" problem (where what's good for the agent isn't for the people). A 50%+1 vote is the legit will of the people, including the ability to be stupid.
Do we really want to establish a principal where 55%(-1) can declare they despise the current situation and have them still be told, "not good enough to override your political masters"? The powers in charge already have lots of ways to put their thumb on the scales, and I have to assume they did (competently is a different question).
I understand the attraction to wanting to override this one, but it seems like something which could and would be abused just as a matter of course.
Not supervillain, just an openly corrupt politician. And btw I'd vote for her to keep Trump out of the White House.
Go look at "Clinton Cattle Futures wiki". What she claims to have done is roughly the same as winning the lottery every week for months.
If she can actually get in/out of the market at it's absolute low/high on a daily basis, that's a Trillion (with a "T") dollar skill which no one else on the earth has and she's wasting her talents.
Now, the $64,000 question, of course:"Is this like or not like what Hillary Clinton was doing with her email server?"
Bush's actions are the nose of the camel, Hillary's are the entire camel. It's what server is hiding that I find disturbing.
Hillary is getting 700 emails a month from The Clinton Foundation (TCF).
Ergo she's actively taking part, presumably raising money...
...from the people she's dealing with as Secretary of State
That would be over and above how Bill Clinton's "speaking fees" skyrocketed after she became Secretary of State. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/more-money-more-problems-a-guide-to-hillary-clintons-cash-scandals/391299/
At it's root we're trying to compare the hiding of (assumed) dirty tricks getting Bush elected and what words do we want to use to describe this? Conflict of interest? Bribery? Clinton Cattle Futures 2?
DavidTC: Additionally, offshoring won’t raise the GDP at all!
The Scientific consensus disagrees with you. Free Trade increases the GDP.
DavidTC: cheaper things *lower* the GDP, not raises it, due to people generally spending less and savings more.
Then you must be thrilled that the cost of healthcare and education are going up. Good for society and the GDP are they?
DavidTC: Again, taxes apparently do not exist in your universe. Because there *are* taxes, if everyone spent everything the multiplier would be, essentially, two.
First, the multiplier deals with taxes and it's a measured value (which you proposed to be "2" and I agreed to).
Secondly, if everyone spent everything then the multiplier would be "infinity". I spent $500 on a TV => the guy selling TVs spends $500 on food => the food guy spends $500 elsewhere, etc. In reality money is taken out via taxes, savings, and so forth.
DavidTC: what money does to the *economy*, not what it does to *jobs*. Which, as I keep pointing out, are not the same thing.
If I tell you the GDP is tanking because of the economy, are you going to think the economy is also creating a lot of jobs? Increasing the GDP is good for jobs (and yes, the job market lags recoveries), and decreasing it is bad. Putting exact numbers on that is hard but those are the generalities.
DavidTC: You have conflated ‘jobs’ and ‘the economy’ again, assuming that because the economy is doing better, that jobs exist. In fact, that appears to be heart of everything you say, because you simply cannot grasp that something that is good for ‘the economy’ can be bad for the average American.
Are you claiming "the average American" would benefit by spending lots more money on clothes?
And btw, agreed, we have problems with job creation (although there are signs we're getting closer to full employment again short of changing laws). However there are things we can do to increase job creation without tearing apart the economy and going against the economic equiv of the theory of gravity.
DavidTC: Note ‘the average American’ is not the same as ‘every American on average’. Take ten dollars from every American, give that and another billion dollars to Bill Gates, and the Americans, on average, just got better off.
The example you're objecting to put money in every household in the US by decreasing the cost of clothing.
Dark Matter: GDP/Job: $110,525
DavidTC: you’ve completely completely forgets...
The big distortions we should be focused on is mis-reporting of GDP or Jobs.
1) GDP is problematic because there are aspects of the GDP which probably don't involve much if any labor.
2) The number of jobs reported doesn't include things which add to the GDP (illegals or whoever working 'off the books', people working for themselves in some cases).
3) The Bill Gates effect.
All of these effects push pretty hard in the same direction.
And yes, granted, this is a distorted view of things, I'm only going down this path because you object to my numbers without providing a sensible alternative.
DavidTC: ...you’re assuming that every extra dime people have will *go* towards the GDP. But, uh, no, it doesn’t. Not if they don’t spend it.
The multiplier effect deals with this issue (that's it's job). If no one spent anything we'd have a multiplier of zero, if everyone spent everything it'd be infinity.
DavidTC: And that leads us to the actual problem: To show that this would increase jobs, you’d have to show it increased the total amount of wages, *instead* of just increasing the total amount of corporate profit or investment income.
Earlier you claimed the Stimulus, which did something similar (but worse designed and temporarily) did increase the number of jobs by just dropping money on the economy.
DavidTC: There have been *huge* increases in corporate profits and investment income over the decades, and wages have stayed steady or slowly declined.
Wage growth is off topic, and even if it were zero, you're objecting to an effective increase in household income and a strongly progressive increase at that. Spending less money on clothing is nothing for the rich, but it's a huge thing for the poor.
DavidTC: Ecomonists are quite clear what they’re talking about when they talk about relative efficiencies. It is not their fault that people are being taught the theory of relative efficiency and then using it to justify something that doesn’t have anything to do with it.... Offshoring factory work from the US is not justified via relative efficiency.
And yet my example of "relative efficiency" show trade worked just fine even though Country "A" was less efficient at everything. By all means, come up with some Country A/B, Product X/Y math which shows what you mean and why I'm wrong about what economists believe. One of us doesn't understand what "relative efficiency" means in this context, perhaps the math will show it's me.
DavidTC: Taking away someone’s job *does not benefit that person* in any sort of sense. You keep trying to *imagine* circumstances where it does, but the actual fact is, we are talking about *averages* here.
Sure, agreed that the *average* person doesn't benefit. But you're trying to claim that they're simply dead right there. That they never move on with their lives, that they never get another job, that if they do get a job it's at the expense of someone else. That the damage is put-a-fork-in-them every-single-one-of-them is a 100% loss to society. In reality losing a job isn't a death sentence.
Which raises the question, how much does the *average* person suffer, which brings us back to my claim that the recovery ratio is 3, so the average person gets two thirds of their income back. Of course that's mean, some get more, some get less.
DavidTC: But that’s *total economic activity*, not ‘money to create jobs with’.
Fine. We'll do this a different way.
GDP of the US: 16.7 Trillion.
Number of Jobs: 151,097,000
GDP/Job: $110,525
Note this is a *serious* overstatement. This is mean, we want median, the Financial sector (etc) is going to be a serious distortion, so the amount of economic activity to justify a job will be a lot less. If we want to adjust for that... I'm not sure. The mean household income is 50% greater than the median which is suggestive but not conclusive. If we go with that then it's $70-75k. So take a third off of my "jobs created" figure.
DavidTC: I don’t actually *care* about relative efficiency, which has been this gigantic lie used to explain free trade.
A conspiracy involving 10s of thousands of economists and hundreds of governments? Why for?
DavidTC: Yes, it does exist, but it is almost completely moot with *factory work*.
Weirdly I've had their conversation where people have claimed it only works with factory work.
DavidTC: Factories, being enclosed buildings where things that are shipped in are turned into other things, *do not have relative efficiencies* based on location. ... or adding inefficiencies like safety regulations we’ve mandated *by law*.)
Factories located next to their customer have reduced shipping costs, in our just-in-time economy shipping and so forth becomes a big deal. Factory location also brings into play things like legal/governmental stability, electrical stability, availability of labor, and availability of other inputs.
Small Business estimates the cost of compliance to be $10k-$15k per worker (link below claiming $35k in manufacturing). Lots of industries have massive bureaucracies which mostly deal with other massive bureaucracies. Note this is both a problem and it's mostly invisible. The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of senior management.
Dark Matter: On a side note, there’s a lot of really counter-intuitive stuff in all this and it takes a semester or two for most people to get their head into it.
DavidTC: How long does it take for most people to actually learn what ‘efficiency’ is?
You were staring at an efficiency increase and you totally missed it. In our textbook example, the output of the larger economy increased. The efficiency of the entire economy went up, even though it happened via trading with a partner who was actually less efficient than they were.
Most of the benefits from FT come from opening up your own economy, i.e. imports, not exports.
DavidTC: Erm, it’s hypothetically possible to read it that way, but there’s as there’s no actual way that one factory could reduce the *average* cost of American’s clothing by any noticable amount, which was the *other* side side of my hypothetical, I don’t know how you can read it that way in good faith.
I assumed you were making up all these numbers as you go and didn't understand how big a 1% increase in household income was.
DavidTC: Economics says that, if people not having their current job would have helped them in any sort of average, then they would have, tada, quit their job. If there was something better for them to be doing, *they would already be doing it*.
Would you move across the country if someone offered you 5% more? If the answer is yes, then picture yourself married with children in high school. Getting fired and having no job is a huge shake up, and moving away from family/friends/church/school becomes a lot more reasonable in that context.
DavidTC: 99.99% of people working in an apperal factory are working there because they see that option as *the best option currently on the table* for them…and they’re almost certainly correct.
It's probably more accurate to say working there is the least risky option, at least in the short term. Hopping to a new job entails risks, many of them impossible to evaluate. Of course *staying* also entails risks but most people don't think that way, if the business has been stable the last few years then it will be stable forever... and the new job might be even worse.
DavidTC: We are discussing your claim that $X dollars in the economy resulted in $X/50,000 jobs paying $50,000.
Hardly. As I explained before, median personal income is $30k. Ergo I hand-waved the cost to create a job as $50k (those links I put out claim it's less). Ergo if you add $50k to the economy you're creating one, median job of $30k.
Household income is $50k (ish), and sometimes it's appropriate to use one and sometimes it's appropriate to use the other. That 1% reduction in the cost of clothing was measured in household income.
DavidTC: If one country can produce something *with less resources*, (less time and/or effort) than another country, than *it* should make that, and other countries should make other things, and they should trade. That is all 100% true.
That's intuitive, but no, this is a misunderstanding of how relative efficiency works and it's wrong. Free Trade doesn't depend on one country being more efficient than the other country, it depends on them having different relative efficiencies. It's perfectly acceptable for one country to be worse at everything, as long as the ratios are different.
Example:
Two Countries, A & B. Both Countries have 10 units of production. There are two products X and Y.
Each product trade for the other at equal value, both countries need a minimum of 3 units of each product.
If both of them have the same relative production ratios, then there is no point in trading.
Country A can use one unit of production to create one unit of Product X or one unit of Product Y.
Country B can use one unit of production to create two units of Product X or two units of Product Y.
Country A will produce 3 units of X and 3 of Y (and 4 of XorY).
Country B will produce 3 units of X and 3 of Y (and 14 of XorY).
Trade serves no purpose here. Total production of both countries will be 30 no matter what the product mix is.
Example 2:
Country A can use one unit of production to create one unit of Product X or one unit of Product Y.
Country B can use one unit of production to create two units of Product X or three units of Product Y.
Production is maximized if "A" only produces "X" and "B" only produces "Y" (even though Country "A" sucks at everything).
A produces 10 units of X.
B produces 30 units of Y.
They trade 5 units so it ends up being
A has 5X and 5Y
B has 5X and 25Y.
On a side note, there's a lot of really counter-intuitive stuff in all this and it takes a semester or two for most people to get their head into it.
DavidTC: ...outsourcing...
As far as I can tell, outsourcing is just another product.
My point was your made up numbers were massively in favor of trade-being-good and you were underestimating how 'good' things were by multiple orders of magnitude. You were claiming that closing *one* factory (not 200) clearly wasn't worth the cost even if it gave 1% of household income to everyone in America.
Ah, no. Serious problem, the amount of work in the economy isn't fixed. The number of jobs isn't fixed. Starting one small business or making a new product doesn't auto-magically eliminate another. If you notice your neighborhood doesn't have a lawn mowing service and you start one, then not only are you creating jobs but the people paying you may actually be making more money if they're working more hours because of the time you've freed up for them. This is especially true for Free Trade (FT) because (for the simplest text book version) you'd have one country which used to produce X+Y shift to X while their trading partner does the reverse.
This means potentially the loss to our economy is "zero". In practice it will be more but just multiplying the number of people who lost their jobs by their income is a VAST overstatement. Some people who lose their jobs from FT will be damaged, others will actually be helped, in practice you divide the total lost by a factor to reflect how many people got jobs (or how good those jobs are). I don't remember what that ratio actually is but I'll handwave a "3", for every 6 people fired, 3 completely recover, 2 get half the income they used to, and one is just screwed.
Secondly, the cost of clothing has not actually halved. The cost a few, specific, really cheap things has halved. The extremely poor can now wear new clothing instead of secondhand.
First, yes, this example does help the poor a lot more than the rich. Second, looking at this time frame is misleading because this is the tail end of long term trends. Looking at before trade started, imho, gives a better picture. The percentage of household income devoted to clothing went from 10% in 1960 (when we made everything) to 3.5% today (link for 10%, your own source agrees with 3.5% http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/05/24/madeinamerica/ ). This means an increase in household income of 6.5%, not 1%, but there's an element of cherry picking to this and I don't feel like looking up all the other numbers which I assume would also change so I won't.
DavidTC: The 2009 Stimulus bears this out…
Our example represents a Permanent increase to the economy, the Stim was a one off (and the Stim was inefficient for multiple reasons and even $280k was probably not even close to the full cost per job but whatever).
DavidTC: it cost about $280,000 per job created, which sounds right to me.
:Gack: :Choke: :Sputter: You really shouldn't be using "the Stimulus" as a baseline for how job creation is supposed to work. Unemployment actually went up when we did it, it was *that* inefficient. The Stim was enough money to give EVERY unemployed person a check for $60k and let them try to start a small business. Alternatively we could have spent the money on infrastructure (which the gov isn't bad at).
Median per person income is something like $30k. Do you really think the private sector has/gives out $250k in (benefits + compliance costs + overhead)?
At a handwave (see links) the cost to create a job is $50k (compliance, taxes, income, benefits).
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create-a-job-by-encouraging-entrepreneurship/
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2011/10/what_does_it_cost_to_create_a.html
Math time (without changing timelines):
Damage done by FT: $16 B
Benefit: $112 billion
Subtract one from the other and we have $96B. Use your multiplier and that's $192B, or roughly 4 million jobs created.
If we expand timelines then some of the numbers change but we're looking at a much higher benefit (probably not 6.5x better but whatever). Something else to consider is when we're measuring gravity and we get numbers which don't match the scientific consensus then either we get a Nobel or we made a mistake somewhere.
DavidTC: Let me quote Alan E. Steinweis, history professor:
Let's quote the rebuttal: His [Steinweis] speculation that Jewish disarmament was irrelevant to Holocaust is belied by the intensity of Nazi efforts to disarm their intended victims. Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and other 20th century mass murderers did not start their genocides until after they had disarmed whom they planned to exterminate. Murdering an armed person is harder than murdering the defenseless. The immediate victims may end up dead regardless, but they can still kill perpetrators, so that fewer perpetrators are available to murder the next victims. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/16/alan-steinweiss-bad-history/
DavidTC: Or let me point out, in actual history, Jews *did* have guns after they realized what was going on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_uprising
How many guns did they have? "Armed" might mean "one gun per thousand Jews". The only page I found with numbers was the biggest and best (Warsaw). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising
It lasted from : 19 April – 16 May 1943
Number of Germans: 2100 (ish)
Number of Jewish "soldiers" 1000 (600 of those ZOB for which we have gun details).
Number of handguns for the ZOB: 220 (many of which were home made).
Number of rifles for the ZOB: 33 (3 per area, I think there were 11 areas).
Number of machine guns: 1 (total).
Ammo: Not numbered but very, very little. In practice that might mean fewer bullets than Nazis.
Total number of jews in the getto to start with, 400k (ish). So, one gun for every thousand jews is probably optimistic.
They had 250(ish) guns and shut down the local Nazis for 5 weeks? And this is proof that guns don't matter?
DavidTC: the normal Chinese peasant in WWII had no *money* to buy a gun.
Exactly. So once again it's an example of genocide by those with guns against those without. And yes, granted, gun control laws weren't at fault because the economy got there first.
DavidTC: Yes, because guns are extremely useful in fighting against economic policies that create starvation. All those people in the USSR without food should have started shooting local government officials, that would have solved the problems of a direct economy not knowing how to distribute food.
My other examples were "failed states" and "wars". But Soviet agriculture is a story of forced collectivization, i.e. taking the peasants' land at gun point because the state has guns and the peasants do not. The USSR regularly abused it's population in ways that, in the US, would have led to armed revolt, so, of course, the Communists are always big on gun control. If the tens of millions of peasants had possessed guns, then that forced collectivization would have been far more expensive, ditto the occasional 'relocation' of millions of people.
DavidTC: [Comments about the KKK and then] "Tyrants do not come to power because the people are unable to stop them. Tyrants come to power because *the people want them to have power* and are willing throw away the rule of law for that."
Sure. Totally agree and very well put. The problem is, how does gun control do anything useful about the KKK during the bad old South? You seem to have this vision that somehow they're going to let themselves be disarmed (maybe the Sheriff will do it when he's not wearing a hood). My expectation is that it's only their victims who could/would be disarmed.
I wrote that before I googled 'gun control in the old South', what comes up are claims that the KKK was a gun control organization, i.e. forcing gun control on blacks. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/02/gun-control-was-historically-about-represssing-blacks.html
Kind of makes sense, if you're planning on abusing someone, you really don't want them armed. The villains of history loving gun control is something that keeps coming up again and again.
I think we're winding down... in case this is the last post, great talking with you.
DavidTC:
@Brandon Berg
So here’s the fun question: If removing minimum wage in the US made clothing affordable, then…would clothing *actually* be affordable if people didn’t make the minimum wage?
Yes, absolutely. My teenagers' minimum wage doesn't have much impact on the family budget, and this is very typical for a minimum wage worker. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents
Further, my teenagers are seriously functional people. If a businessman is choosing between hiring a dysfunctional adult at a too high minimum wage and my teen, then that's an easy choice; Which means no job for the person the min-wage is trying to 'help'.
Still further, when I was first starting out, I accepted a job that paid a lot less than I "deserved" (it was a dying company and all they could afford). The skills I learned there were marketable and I more than made up for it at the next job. Opportunity only knocks at work. I'd much rather dodge the question of 'how much did you make at your last job' than 'what's wrong with you to make you not be working'.
DavidTC:
@Brandon Berg
But let’s actually analyse what happens when a factory moves overseas:
Yes, Americans have cheaper clothing, but they also *make less*, on average. In fact, even if you average *everyone*’s salaries, Americans and people overseas, people make less! (The overseas factory is hardly going to be *more* expensive to operate.) The clothing might change from 2% of 99.99% of people’s salary to 1%, but it also changes from 2% to *infinite* percent of the salary of the laid-off people.
Let's take your numbers at face value because they don't say what you think they do.
How many jobs were destroyed? A thousand? Let's say 20 Thousand (200 factories of 100 people each).
Assuming $50,000 per worker, that's a loss to society of $1 Billion.
Average spent on clothing: $1,700 per household, or 2.8% (google)
Number of Households in the US: 134 million (google)
Total Amount of Savings: 114 Billion (1.7k x 134 million cut in half).
Now, that 114 Billion in extra income to households will go on to create more jobs (so the effect is greater), and a lot of those displaced workers will find other employment (so the effect is a lot less, my job has been destroyed at least 3 times so far).
And the politics of this is terrible. Some of those workers will suffer serious economic injury, and they know it. $850 per household is low enough they may not notice, the millions of jobs created by multiplier effects from that 114 Billion seriously won't know it. Worse (politically) everyone who is fired (in general, not from trade) may get the idea that their job has been eliminated because of trade. Economic forces inside the country have greater impact than trade does, but trade is at least an answer.
It's easy to point to the closed factories and say there was no benefit, that's also completely wrong.
Chip Daniels:
Tuition-free college... actually happened, and were commonplace prior to “Free Trade”.
We don't have Tuition-free college because it's something like 10x as expensive as it was in 1950.
If it were as cheap as it used to be, current state funding would just handwave everyone in.
So... is Free Trade is why College Tuition has increased by absurd multiples? (Personally I'd say it has a lot to do with these massive bureaucracies Colleges have created, they have to be paid for somehow).
And as long as we're using "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" reasoning (after this, therefore because of this)..
...was Free Trade Responsible for the Moon Launch? The civil rights movement?
Chip Daniels:
@Dark Matter
Asserting that “Free Trade” is somehow an unassailable proven fact like gravity is turning open ended science into a creedal faith.
:Amusement: The Theory of Gravity is Wrong, there are observable phenomenon which it doesn't get right (Spin of the Galaxy, etc). That's why we have 'Dark Matter'. Gravity is, imho, the weakest of all the grand theories (because we know it's wrong), some time in the next 50 years it will (hopefully) get a makeover and Nobel prizes will be handed out.
So yes, I agree, science should never be a 'faith'. However all disagreements with the grand theories are not equally valid, and it's certainly not an excuse to jump out a window (or throw the economy out the window). Notice that Gravity's wiki has a "Anomalies_and_discrepancies" section, also notice that Free Trade's does not.
From a theory standpoint, Free Trade is stronger than Gravity. Unlike with Gravity, none of these disputes have risen to the level of questioning/overturning the main theory, and I don't see mainstream work which suggests anything is coming. I've been hearing complains about how awful trade is for decades, and yet the econ community marches on with their consensus. Good links btw (although the 3rd didn't resolve). A good summation of the rise and fall of the economists whose work you're linking to is here: http://www.cfr.org/trade/dont-cry-free-trade/p14526
This country has serious economic problems, imho most of them stem from statist issues and not from Trade, adopting the trade policies of North Korea imho isn't a good idea. Further it's important to ask "what is the alternative, and is its record better".
Chip Daniels:
@Dark Matter
“Free Trade” is not a single entity at all; The term “Free Trade” refers to not a single principle defined by David Ricardo, but a series of international treaties and agreements like TPP, GATT, NAFTA and so on.
This is confusing 'Free Trade' the concept with the implementation in it's name, and I've already said I'd just tear up the existing agreements and go whole hog.
Chip Daniels:
@Dark Matter
Yet, would you assert that they all constituted Ricardian “Free Trade”?
It's important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these sorts of things. My hope is it, although imperfectly, moves the needle. It helps a lot that the complaints I hear are from people who disagree with the concept of trade and not the econ community.
Chip Daniels:
On my side of the political aisle, we call that “false consciousness”.
“false consciousness”: (especially in Marxist theory) a way of thinking that prevents a person from perceiving the true nature of their social or economic situation. (source: google)
Chip Daniels:
The American people are much better off, they just have a false consciousness, an inability to see how really successful free trade is. If their eyes were open, they would rejoice at the blessings of free trade being bestowed upon them.
Unfortunately, the true 'opening of their eyes' would involve taking 2nd(?) year econ and multiple hours of studying math and graphs. IMHO it's not *hard* (:cough: although I like math and graphs) but it takes a while.
Chip Daniels:
Seriously, this is just the “cheap I-phones and tee shirts” argument.
If you have a way to disprove free-trade-being-silly-good-for-the-economy, then I've got a Nobel Prize for you. I'm quite serious, you'd be undoing hundreds of years of economic study involving hundreds of countries and millions of examples.
And Stillwater pointed out I didn't source my original statement regarding free trade being the scientific consensus, so here is a link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade#Opinion_of_economists
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2016.07.19.T}”
I thought David Boaz summed it up rather well, meaning Trump would be worse... although to be fair I don't think Trump actually believes half of what he says, but it is what he's running on.
Hillary is openly corrupt and totally without morals or ethics, so it's easy to picture her making deals with a GOP Congress.
Further, Hillary getting herself arrested while President wouldn't be all that bad, but the last time we saw a truly awful GOP President the result was a Dem supermajority.
On “Second and Main”
Not "power", more like "money". My expectation is that the people funding BLM are the same people paying for Hillary. Yes, the bulk of the movement are true believers (in what is unclear) but it's odd how their actions never really do her damage. Bern seems a lot more like a natural ally for BLM than Hillary, but that's not how it played out.
BLM wants "massive change". Bern ran as a revolutionary, Hillary is a moderate and one of the founders of a big expansion of the war on drugs/crime. Somehow he was taken to task and his meetings disrupted while she was not. That's over and above the idea that Hillary is going to do the massively good things for BLM that Obama has not.
Oh, I agree with her too. She handled that really, really well... it made me wonder how much of a "surprise" BLM's visit was.
Hillary doesn't think on her feet, adlib, or go off script, if she's pressed she'll just evade and say basically 'nothing' (mostly this is a strength). And that was the only time I can think of where BLM "confronted" her.
Somehow I suspect after the election when they're no longer useful, BLM will experience a substantial budget cut. In short I think they're being used.
"
...it's not that I disagree with you (I don't), but imho the BLM movement is channeling their efforts unproductively. If the movement were about reducing the number of dead bodies, then ending the war on drugs needs to be part of the conversation and, as far as I can tell, it's not.
Short of that, there are things we can/should do, but mostly they also isn't part of the conversation. The list(s) of demands seems pretty unorganized and fairly removed from reality (dismantling the police is unlikely to lead to good things for their communities).
This seems more like base mobilization than a serious movement.
"
I'm a day late but I'll chime in.
IMHO it's naive to think tearing down the system would make things better, as opposed to worse.
I also wonder how much of this is election year pandering to mobilize the base.
On “Our Public Records Laws are Broken”
I don't know... the whole point of bypassing the politicians is to avoid the "agent" problem (where what's good for the agent isn't for the people). A 50%+1 vote is the legit will of the people, including the ability to be stupid.
Do we really want to establish a principal where 55%(-1) can declare they despise the current situation and have them still be told, "not good enough to override your political masters"? The powers in charge already have lots of ways to put their thumb on the scales, and I have to assume they did (competently is a different question).
I understand the attraction to wanting to override this one, but it seems like something which could and would be abused just as a matter of course.
"
Not supervillain, just an openly corrupt politician. And btw I'd vote for her to keep Trump out of the White House.
Go look at "Clinton Cattle Futures wiki". What she claims to have done is roughly the same as winning the lottery every week for months.
If she can actually get in/out of the market at it's absolute low/high on a daily basis, that's a Trillion (with a "T") dollar skill which no one else on the earth has and she's wasting her talents.
"
Bush's actions are the nose of the camel, Hillary's are the entire camel. It's what server is hiding that I find disturbing.
Hillary is getting 700 emails a month from The Clinton Foundation (TCF).
Ergo she's actively taking part, presumably raising money...
...from the people she's dealing with as Secretary of State
That would be over and above how Bill Clinton's "speaking fees" skyrocketed after she became Secretary of State. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/more-money-more-problems-a-guide-to-hillary-clintons-cash-scandals/391299/
At it's root we're trying to compare the hiding of (assumed) dirty tricks getting Bush elected and what words do we want to use to describe this? Conflict of interest? Bribery? Clinton Cattle Futures 2?
"
"awkward or embarrassing" would be viewed as "dangerous" to a politician if said information would cost them the election.
On “Gabriel Rossman: When the Invisible Hand Needs to Stay That Way”
Very good article, thank you for bringing it to my attention.
On “Morning Ed: Brexit II {2016.07.03.Su}”
DavidTC: Additionally, offshoring won’t raise the GDP at all!
The Scientific consensus disagrees with you. Free Trade increases the GDP.
DavidTC: cheaper things *lower* the GDP, not raises it, due to people generally spending less and savings more.
Then you must be thrilled that the cost of healthcare and education are going up. Good for society and the GDP are they?
DavidTC: Again, taxes apparently do not exist in your universe. Because there *are* taxes, if everyone spent everything the multiplier would be, essentially, two.
First, the multiplier deals with taxes and it's a measured value (which you proposed to be "2" and I agreed to).
Secondly, if everyone spent everything then the multiplier would be "infinity". I spent $500 on a TV => the guy selling TVs spends $500 on food => the food guy spends $500 elsewhere, etc. In reality money is taken out via taxes, savings, and so forth.
DavidTC: what money does to the *economy*, not what it does to *jobs*. Which, as I keep pointing out, are not the same thing.
If I tell you the GDP is tanking because of the economy, are you going to think the economy is also creating a lot of jobs? Increasing the GDP is good for jobs (and yes, the job market lags recoveries), and decreasing it is bad. Putting exact numbers on that is hard but those are the generalities.
DavidTC: You have conflated ‘jobs’ and ‘the economy’ again, assuming that because the economy is doing better, that jobs exist. In fact, that appears to be heart of everything you say, because you simply cannot grasp that something that is good for ‘the economy’ can be bad for the average American.
Are you claiming "the average American" would benefit by spending lots more money on clothes?
And btw, agreed, we have problems with job creation (although there are signs we're getting closer to full employment again short of changing laws). However there are things we can do to increase job creation without tearing apart the economy and going against the economic equiv of the theory of gravity.
DavidTC: Note ‘the average American’ is not the same as ‘every American on average’. Take ten dollars from every American, give that and another billion dollars to Bill Gates, and the Americans, on average, just got better off.
The example you're objecting to put money in every household in the US by decreasing the cost of clothing.
"
Dark Matter: GDP/Job: $110,525
DavidTC: you’ve completely completely forgets...
The big distortions we should be focused on is mis-reporting of GDP or Jobs.
1) GDP is problematic because there are aspects of the GDP which probably don't involve much if any labor.
2) The number of jobs reported doesn't include things which add to the GDP (illegals or whoever working 'off the books', people working for themselves in some cases).
3) The Bill Gates effect.
All of these effects push pretty hard in the same direction.
And yes, granted, this is a distorted view of things, I'm only going down this path because you object to my numbers without providing a sensible alternative.
DavidTC: ...you’re assuming that every extra dime people have will *go* towards the GDP. But, uh, no, it doesn’t. Not if they don’t spend it.
The multiplier effect deals with this issue (that's it's job). If no one spent anything we'd have a multiplier of zero, if everyone spent everything it'd be infinity.
DavidTC: And that leads us to the actual problem: To show that this would increase jobs, you’d have to show it increased the total amount of wages, *instead* of just increasing the total amount of corporate profit or investment income.
Earlier you claimed the Stimulus, which did something similar (but worse designed and temporarily) did increase the number of jobs by just dropping money on the economy.
DavidTC: There have been *huge* increases in corporate profits and investment income over the decades, and wages have stayed steady or slowly declined.
Wage growth is off topic, and even if it were zero, you're objecting to an effective increase in household income and a strongly progressive increase at that. Spending less money on clothing is nothing for the rich, but it's a huge thing for the poor.
DavidTC: Ecomonists are quite clear what they’re talking about when they talk about relative efficiencies. It is not their fault that people are being taught the theory of relative efficiency and then using it to justify something that doesn’t have anything to do with it.... Offshoring factory work from the US is not justified via relative efficiency.
And yet my example of "relative efficiency" show trade worked just fine even though Country "A" was less efficient at everything. By all means, come up with some Country A/B, Product X/Y math which shows what you mean and why I'm wrong about what economists believe. One of us doesn't understand what "relative efficiency" means in this context, perhaps the math will show it's me.
On “Morning Ed: Brexit III {2016.07.10.Su}”
“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
? Frédéric Bastiat
On “Morning Ed: Brexit II {2016.07.03.Su}”
DavidTC: Taking away someone’s job *does not benefit that person* in any sort of sense. You keep trying to *imagine* circumstances where it does, but the actual fact is, we are talking about *averages* here.
Sure, agreed that the *average* person doesn't benefit. But you're trying to claim that they're simply dead right there. That they never move on with their lives, that they never get another job, that if they do get a job it's at the expense of someone else. That the damage is put-a-fork-in-them every-single-one-of-them is a 100% loss to society. In reality losing a job isn't a death sentence.
Which raises the question, how much does the *average* person suffer, which brings us back to my claim that the recovery ratio is 3, so the average person gets two thirds of their income back. Of course that's mean, some get more, some get less.
DavidTC: But that’s *total economic activity*, not ‘money to create jobs with’.
Fine. We'll do this a different way.
GDP of the US: 16.7 Trillion.
Number of Jobs: 151,097,000
GDP/Job: $110,525
Note this is a *serious* overstatement. This is mean, we want median, the Financial sector (etc) is going to be a serious distortion, so the amount of economic activity to justify a job will be a lot less. If we want to adjust for that... I'm not sure. The mean household income is 50% greater than the median which is suggestive but not conclusive. If we go with that then it's $70-75k. So take a third off of my "jobs created" figure.
DavidTC: I don’t actually *care* about relative efficiency, which has been this gigantic lie used to explain free trade.
A conspiracy involving 10s of thousands of economists and hundreds of governments? Why for?
DavidTC: Yes, it does exist, but it is almost completely moot with *factory work*.
Weirdly I've had their conversation where people have claimed it only works with factory work.
DavidTC: Factories, being enclosed buildings where things that are shipped in are turned into other things, *do not have relative efficiencies* based on location. ... or adding inefficiencies like safety regulations we’ve mandated *by law*.)
Factories located next to their customer have reduced shipping costs, in our just-in-time economy shipping and so forth becomes a big deal. Factory location also brings into play things like legal/governmental stability, electrical stability, availability of labor, and availability of other inputs.
Small Business estimates the cost of compliance to be $10k-$15k per worker (link below claiming $35k in manufacturing). Lots of industries have massive bureaucracies which mostly deal with other massive bureaucracies. Note this is both a problem and it's mostly invisible. The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of senior management.
http://freebeacon.com/issues/report-cost-of-federal-regulation-reached-1-88-trillion-in-2014/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/30/ben-carson/cnbc-debate-ben-carson-cites-high-cost-regulations/
Dark Matter: On a side note, there’s a lot of really counter-intuitive stuff in all this and it takes a semester or two for most people to get their head into it.
DavidTC: How long does it take for most people to actually learn what ‘efficiency’ is?
You were staring at an efficiency increase and you totally missed it. In our textbook example, the output of the larger economy increased. The efficiency of the entire economy went up, even though it happened via trading with a partner who was actually less efficient than they were.
Most of the benefits from FT come from opening up your own economy, i.e. imports, not exports.
"
DavidTC: Erm, it’s hypothetically possible to read it that way, but there’s as there’s no actual way that one factory could reduce the *average* cost of American’s clothing by any noticable amount, which was the *other* side side of my hypothetical, I don’t know how you can read it that way in good faith.
I assumed you were making up all these numbers as you go and didn't understand how big a 1% increase in household income was.
DavidTC: Economics says that, if people not having their current job would have helped them in any sort of average, then they would have, tada, quit their job. If there was something better for them to be doing, *they would already be doing it*.
Would you move across the country if someone offered you 5% more? If the answer is yes, then picture yourself married with children in high school. Getting fired and having no job is a huge shake up, and moving away from family/friends/church/school becomes a lot more reasonable in that context.
DavidTC: 99.99% of people working in an apperal factory are working there because they see that option as *the best option currently on the table* for them…and they’re almost certainly correct.
It's probably more accurate to say working there is the least risky option, at least in the short term. Hopping to a new job entails risks, many of them impossible to evaluate. Of course *staying* also entails risks but most people don't think that way, if the business has been stable the last few years then it will be stable forever... and the new job might be even worse.
DavidTC: We are discussing your claim that $X dollars in the economy resulted in $X/50,000 jobs paying $50,000.
Hardly. As I explained before, median personal income is $30k. Ergo I hand-waved the cost to create a job as $50k (those links I put out claim it's less). Ergo if you add $50k to the economy you're creating one, median job of $30k.
Household income is $50k (ish), and sometimes it's appropriate to use one and sometimes it's appropriate to use the other. That 1% reduction in the cost of clothing was measured in household income.
DavidTC: If one country can produce something *with less resources*, (less time and/or effort) than another country, than *it* should make that, and other countries should make other things, and they should trade. That is all 100% true.
That's intuitive, but no, this is a misunderstanding of how relative efficiency works and it's wrong. Free Trade doesn't depend on one country being more efficient than the other country, it depends on them having different relative efficiencies. It's perfectly acceptable for one country to be worse at everything, as long as the ratios are different.
Example:
Two Countries, A & B. Both Countries have 10 units of production. There are two products X and Y.
Each product trade for the other at equal value, both countries need a minimum of 3 units of each product.
If both of them have the same relative production ratios, then there is no point in trading.
Country A can use one unit of production to create one unit of Product X or one unit of Product Y.
Country B can use one unit of production to create two units of Product X or two units of Product Y.
Country A will produce 3 units of X and 3 of Y (and 4 of XorY).
Country B will produce 3 units of X and 3 of Y (and 14 of XorY).
Trade serves no purpose here. Total production of both countries will be 30 no matter what the product mix is.
Example 2:
Country A can use one unit of production to create one unit of Product X or one unit of Product Y.
Country B can use one unit of production to create two units of Product X or three units of Product Y.
Production is maximized if "A" only produces "X" and "B" only produces "Y" (even though Country "A" sucks at everything).
A produces 10 units of X.
B produces 30 units of Y.
They trade 5 units so it ends up being
A has 5X and 5Y
B has 5X and 25Y.
On a side note, there's a lot of really counter-intuitive stuff in all this and it takes a semester or two for most people to get their head into it.
DavidTC: ...outsourcing...
As far as I can tell, outsourcing is just another product.
"
DavidTC: That’s way low.
My point was your made up numbers were massively in favor of trade-being-good and you were underestimating how 'good' things were by multiple orders of magnitude. You were claiming that closing *one* factory (not 200) clearly wasn't worth the cost even if it gave 1% of household income to everyone in America.
DavidTC: First, while *those* displaced workers might find jobs, that, obviously displaces *other* workers.
Ah, no. Serious problem, the amount of work in the economy isn't fixed. The number of jobs isn't fixed. Starting one small business or making a new product doesn't auto-magically eliminate another. If you notice your neighborhood doesn't have a lawn mowing service and you start one, then not only are you creating jobs but the people paying you may actually be making more money if they're working more hours because of the time you've freed up for them. This is especially true for Free Trade (FT) because (for the simplest text book version) you'd have one country which used to produce X+Y shift to X while their trading partner does the reverse.
This means potentially the loss to our economy is "zero". In practice it will be more but just multiplying the number of people who lost their jobs by their income is a VAST overstatement. Some people who lose their jobs from FT will be damaged, others will actually be helped, in practice you divide the total lost by a factor to reflect how many people got jobs (or how good those jobs are). I don't remember what that ratio actually is but I'll handwave a "3", for every 6 people fired, 3 completely recover, 2 get half the income they used to, and one is just screwed.
Secondly, the cost of clothing has not actually halved. The cost a few, specific, really cheap things has halved. The extremely poor can now wear new clothing instead of secondhand.
First, yes, this example does help the poor a lot more than the rich. Second, looking at this time frame is misleading because this is the tail end of long term trends. Looking at before trade started, imho, gives a better picture. The percentage of household income devoted to clothing went from 10% in 1960 (when we made everything) to 3.5% today (link for 10%, your own source agrees with 3.5% http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/05/24/madeinamerica/ ). This means an increase in household income of 6.5%, not 1%, but there's an element of cherry picking to this and I don't feel like looking up all the other numbers which I assume would also change so I won't.
DavidTC: The 2009 Stimulus bears this out…
Our example represents a Permanent increase to the economy, the Stim was a one off (and the Stim was inefficient for multiple reasons and even $280k was probably not even close to the full cost per job but whatever).
DavidTC: it cost about $280,000 per job created, which sounds right to me.
:Gack: :Choke: :Sputter: You really shouldn't be using "the Stimulus" as a baseline for how job creation is supposed to work. Unemployment actually went up when we did it, it was *that* inefficient. The Stim was enough money to give EVERY unemployed person a check for $60k and let them try to start a small business. Alternatively we could have spent the money on infrastructure (which the gov isn't bad at).
Median per person income is something like $30k. Do you really think the private sector has/gives out $250k in (benefits + compliance costs + overhead)?
At a handwave (see links) the cost to create a job is $50k (compliance, taxes, income, benefits).
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create-a-job-by-encouraging-entrepreneurship/
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2011/10/what_does_it_cost_to_create_a.html
Math time (without changing timelines):
Damage done by FT: $16 B
Benefit: $112 billion
Subtract one from the other and we have $96B. Use your multiplier and that's $192B, or roughly 4 million jobs created.
If we expand timelines then some of the numbers change but we're looking at a much higher benefit (probably not 6.5x better but whatever). Something else to consider is when we're measuring gravity and we get numbers which don't match the scientific consensus then either we get a Nobel or we made a mistake somewhere.
On “Two Spanish workers fired after 15 years of absence | Europe | News | The Independent”
I think it's more like 'defense lawyers'. It's their job to defend their guy, regardless of whatever else is involved.
On “Choosing A Side”
DavidTC: Let me quote Alan E. Steinweis, history professor:
Let's quote the rebuttal: His [Steinweis] speculation that Jewish disarmament was irrelevant to Holocaust is belied by the intensity of Nazi efforts to disarm their intended victims. Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and other 20th century mass murderers did not start their genocides until after they had disarmed whom they planned to exterminate. Murdering an armed person is harder than murdering the defenseless. The immediate victims may end up dead regardless, but they can still kill perpetrators, so that fewer perpetrators are available to murder the next victims. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/16/alan-steinweiss-bad-history/
DavidTC: Or let me point out, in actual history, Jews *did* have guns after they realized what was going on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_uprising
How many guns did they have? "Armed" might mean "one gun per thousand Jews". The only page I found with numbers was the biggest and best (Warsaw). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising
It lasted from : 19 April – 16 May 1943
Number of Germans: 2100 (ish)
Number of Jewish "soldiers" 1000 (600 of those ZOB for which we have gun details).
Number of handguns for the ZOB: 220 (many of which were home made).
Number of rifles for the ZOB: 33 (3 per area, I think there were 11 areas).
Number of machine guns: 1 (total).
Ammo: Not numbered but very, very little. In practice that might mean fewer bullets than Nazis.
Total number of jews in the getto to start with, 400k (ish). So, one gun for every thousand jews is probably optimistic.
They had 250(ish) guns and shut down the local Nazis for 5 weeks? And this is proof that guns don't matter?
DavidTC: the normal Chinese peasant in WWII had no *money* to buy a gun.
Exactly. So once again it's an example of genocide by those with guns against those without. And yes, granted, gun control laws weren't at fault because the economy got there first.
DavidTC: Yes, because guns are extremely useful in fighting against economic policies that create starvation. All those people in the USSR without food should have started shooting local government officials, that would have solved the problems of a direct economy not knowing how to distribute food.
My other examples were "failed states" and "wars". But Soviet agriculture is a story of forced collectivization, i.e. taking the peasants' land at gun point because the state has guns and the peasants do not. The USSR regularly abused it's population in ways that, in the US, would have led to armed revolt, so, of course, the Communists are always big on gun control. If the tens of millions of peasants had possessed guns, then that forced collectivization would have been far more expensive, ditto the occasional 'relocation' of millions of people.
DavidTC: [Comments about the KKK and then] "Tyrants do not come to power because the people are unable to stop them. Tyrants come to power because *the people want them to have power* and are willing throw away the rule of law for that."
Sure. Totally agree and very well put. The problem is, how does gun control do anything useful about the KKK during the bad old South? You seem to have this vision that somehow they're going to let themselves be disarmed (maybe the Sheriff will do it when he's not wearing a hood). My expectation is that it's only their victims who could/would be disarmed.
I wrote that before I googled 'gun control in the old South', what comes up are claims that the KKK was a gun control organization, i.e. forcing gun control on blacks. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/02/gun-control-was-historically-about-represssing-blacks.html
Kind of makes sense, if you're planning on abusing someone, you really don't want them armed. The villains of history loving gun control is something that keeps coming up again and again.
I think we're winding down... in case this is the last post, great talking with you.
On “Morning Ed: Brexit II {2016.07.03.Su}”
Chip Daniels: Well, yes, in the same way that it would be an error to confuse ‘Socialism’ the concept with the implementation in its name.
OK, I'll bite. Define 'Socialism' and how it should be implemented?
On “Two Spanish workers fired after 15 years of absence | Europe | News | The Independent”
Spanish tax dollars at work. And let's include the subtitle: Union to launch legal appeal against dismissals
On “Morning Ed: Brexit II {2016.07.03.Su}”
Yes, absolutely. My teenagers' minimum wage doesn't have much impact on the family budget, and this is very typical for a minimum wage worker. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents
Further, my teenagers are seriously functional people. If a businessman is choosing between hiring a dysfunctional adult at a too high minimum wage and my teen, then that's an easy choice; Which means no job for the person the min-wage is trying to 'help'.
Still further, when I was first starting out, I accepted a job that paid a lot less than I "deserved" (it was a dying company and all they could afford). The skills I learned there were marketable and I more than made up for it at the next job. Opportunity only knocks at work. I'd much rather dodge the question of 'how much did you make at your last job' than 'what's wrong with you to make you not be working'.
Let's take your numbers at face value because they don't say what you think they do.
How many jobs were destroyed? A thousand? Let's say 20 Thousand (200 factories of 100 people each).
Assuming $50,000 per worker, that's a loss to society of $1 Billion.
Average spent on clothing: $1,700 per household, or 2.8% (google)
Number of Households in the US: 134 million (google)
Total Amount of Savings: 114 Billion (1.7k x 134 million cut in half).
Now, that 114 Billion in extra income to households will go on to create more jobs (so the effect is greater), and a lot of those displaced workers will find other employment (so the effect is a lot less, my job has been destroyed at least 3 times so far).
And the politics of this is terrible. Some of those workers will suffer serious economic injury, and they know it. $850 per household is low enough they may not notice, the millions of jobs created by multiplier effects from that 114 Billion seriously won't know it. Worse (politically) everyone who is fired (in general, not from trade) may get the idea that their job has been eliminated because of trade. Economic forces inside the country have greater impact than trade does, but trade is at least an answer.
It's easy to point to the closed factories and say there was no benefit, that's also completely wrong.
"
RE: Trinity not being disputed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_God#Arguments_against_the_existence_of_God
"
We don't have Tuition-free college because it's something like 10x as expensive as it was in 1950.
If it were as cheap as it used to be, current state funding would just handwave everyone in.
So... is Free Trade is why College Tuition has increased by absurd multiples? (Personally I'd say it has a lot to do with these massive bureaucracies Colleges have created, they have to be paid for somehow).
And as long as we're using "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" reasoning (after this, therefore because of this)..
...was Free Trade Responsible for the Moon Launch? The civil rights movement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
"
:Amusement: The Theory of Gravity is Wrong, there are observable phenomenon which it doesn't get right (Spin of the Galaxy, etc). That's why we have 'Dark Matter'. Gravity is, imho, the weakest of all the grand theories (because we know it's wrong), some time in the next 50 years it will (hopefully) get a makeover and Nobel prizes will be handed out.
So yes, I agree, science should never be a 'faith'. However all disagreements with the grand theories are not equally valid, and it's certainly not an excuse to jump out a window (or throw the economy out the window). Notice that Gravity's wiki has a "Anomalies_and_discrepancies" section, also notice that Free Trade's does not.
From a theory standpoint, Free Trade is stronger than Gravity. Unlike with Gravity, none of these disputes have risen to the level of questioning/overturning the main theory, and I don't see mainstream work which suggests anything is coming. I've been hearing complains about how awful trade is for decades, and yet the econ community marches on with their consensus. Good links btw (although the 3rd didn't resolve). A good summation of the rise and fall of the economists whose work you're linking to is here: http://www.cfr.org/trade/dont-cry-free-trade/p14526
This country has serious economic problems, imho most of them stem from statist issues and not from Trade, adopting the trade policies of North Korea imho isn't a good idea. Further it's important to ask "what is the alternative, and is its record better".
This is confusing 'Free Trade' the concept with the implementation in it's name, and I've already said I'd just tear up the existing agreements and go whole hog.
It's important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these sorts of things. My hope is it, although imperfectly, moves the needle. It helps a lot that the complaints I hear are from people who disagree with the concept of trade and not the econ community.
"
“false consciousness”: (especially in Marxist theory) a way of thinking that prevents a person from perceiving the true nature of their social or economic situation. (source: google)
Unfortunately, the true 'opening of their eyes' would involve taking 2nd(?) year econ and multiple hours of studying math and graphs. IMHO it's not *hard* (:cough: although I like math and graphs) but it takes a while.
If you have a way to disprove free-trade-being-silly-good-for-the-economy, then I've got a Nobel Prize for you. I'm quite serious, you'd be undoing hundreds of years of economic study involving hundreds of countries and millions of examples.
And Stillwater pointed out I didn't source my original statement regarding free trade being the scientific consensus, so here is a link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade#Opinion_of_economists
"
Hey, I spent at least 10 seconds researching that! :)
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