Reducing inequality: put the brakes on globalization?

Anti-globalization is so 2000.

What do you mean by sacrifice and protect? Which industries are protected in Germany? Which industries are protected in Sweden?

Why, whatever they happen to be exporting is what their governments are protecting: precision tools, machinery, whatever. Airbus stuff. Otherwise, why not move all those factories to China, hire workers for two bits/hour and dump all the toxic waste right out of the furnace? I can’t imagine a purely economic reason to produce anything in Europe, anything that can be imported.

decreasing inequality not decreasing in equaility. Damn.

One of the biggest problems with globalization is the attendant loss of consumer, worker and environmental protections. I don’t think we need to be protectionist or try to stop globalization, but lower labor costs aren’t the only source of savings for a company moving its plant overseas. The term “level playing field” is tossed around too much, but I think we need to work harder to make sure the goods we get from China aren’t destroying habitat or poisoning the air any more than local goods would, and that Chinese workers aren’t substantially more likely to lose a finger than their American counterparts. And of course there’s the whole consumer protection issue. I don’t think we should be trading reduced global income inequality for poisonous production processes and worker injuries.

It’s important to note that most of those you cite draw a sharp distinction between liberalisation of trade in goods and services on the one hand and global financial deregulation on the other. It’s the latter that has been the most spectactular and damaging manifestation of globalisation.

This series is what a teacher would call a “progressive reveal”. Is anybody making book on what Prof. Kenworthy will finally announce (one minute before the end of the lecture) as “the answer”? I’m prepared to bet on “all the above”, with the Prof. saying that elements of unionisation, education, regulation of globalisation and (insert next topic here) are all required in some proportion.

I’m prepared to bet on “all the above”, with the Prof. saying that elements of unionisation, education, regulation of globalisation and (insert next topic here) are all required in some proportion.

No fair peeking in the text in the middle of class! :)

The argument was never presented as ‘you should let your job be done in China because that’s good for the Chinese’.

Yeah, but it should be. For me, increasing income in the developing world is by far the most important rationale for trade liberalization. I feel very, very strongly about this and react very negatively to protectionist arguments defending developed world jobs. Especially because I believe that Europe and the US both developed their collective economies by stealing wealth from and generally exploiting the developing world. We have both a general moral imperative to help and a specific reparations-based moral imperative. I quite definitely support large amounts of aid; but actually developing these economies is the only long-term solution and, besides, it also benefits us in the long-term, as well.

I’m very concerned about environmental and human rights exploitation, as well as the more general problem of globalized mega-corporations. And, of course, displacement and other uncomfortable effects of international trade in developed economies are problems that must be addressed.

But all these issues can be addressed if there’s the political will. Part of the difficulty lies in the barriers of ideology and simplistic thinking. Liberalized trade policy on the right is unfortunately associated with perversely excessive pro-business and pro-corporate deregulatory policies which collectively do little to address or even exacerbate the short-term ills of trade. On the left, support for organized labor results in protectionism and labor rigidity that resists the structural adjustments that are necessary for evolving economic conditions associated with trade.

A deeper problem is simple ignorance. It seems to me that the vast majority of people simply don’t believe and/or comprehend the principles involved in explaining how trade generally increases the wealth of both parties. On the left, one often hears the assertion of the opposing, generally false, principle of “race to the bottom”. The chain of reasoning for the “race to the bottom” theory of trade is more intuitive and directly comprehensible than the variety of economic mechanisms which, in reality, collectively increase wealth as a result of trade, rather than the opposite.

Because a) my support of trade is primarily and strongly motivated by humanitarian concerns with regard to the developing world, in conjunction with the fact that b) I believe that ills such as pollution and worker exploitation on the developing world side, and displacement on the developed world side can be successfully addressed by pragmatic progressive policy, I feel and think that my support of trade liberalization is strongly progressive and not at all contrary to leftist principles. Nevertheless, I generally find my progressive “credentials” challenged because of my support for trade, as well as having to endure finding myself in bed with libertarian ideologues and big-business friendly fat-cats and their cronies.

It’s important to note that most of those you cite draw a sharp distinction between liberalisation of trade in goods and services on the one hand and global financial deregulation on the other. It’s the latter that has been the most spectacular and damaging manifestation of globalisation.

Yes, Paul Krugman is a good example of this. He’s extremely supportive of trade liberalization and globalization in general (which, incidentally, has amused me during the last eight years as the left has held him up to be an admirable leftist firebrand), but there’s numerous problems associated with financial deregulation and especially capital outflows.

Keith Ellis:

Hang on a second, I think you’re mixing two arguments here.

The moral case, “hat Europe and the US both developed their collective economies by stealing wealth from and generally exploiting the developing world. We have both a general moral imperative to help and a specific reparations-based moral imperative,” runs into two problems. First is that it wasn’t the working class who chose to steal from and exploit the developing world – it was the corporate class who were calling the shots. Second, given that the corporate class are in fact profiting hugely from the shift of production overseas, it hardly counts as reparations to begin with (reparations generally requires you to make restitution, not profit), and it’s reparations essentially with resources stolen from the working class.

I think it’s highly disingenuous to claim that the issue is one of political will, ideology, and simplistic thinking when you yourself recognize that “displacement and other uncomfortable effects of international trade in developed economies are problems that must be addressed.” The labor movement and the Left as the party of the broader working class have legitimate economic interests in objecting to the transferring of production overseas, and to insinuate otherwise when your own analysis points to the interest existing is deeply unfair to the labor movement, the left, and the working class.

The economic case should be considered separately from the moral case. This, at least, could be considered as an exercise in empirical investigation, but I don’t think you’re being fair here either. First, you claim that those who oppose trade and see negative side effects are ignorant. and wrong to claim that trade liberalization will cause a “race to the bottom.” Second, you claim that those who oppose trade are ignoring that “trade generally increases the wealth of both parties” and “collectively increase[s] wealth as a result of trade, rather than the opposite.” Third, you claim that “support for organized labor results in protectionism and labor rigidity that resists the structural adjustments that are necessary for evolving economic conditions associated with trade.”

To me, this is a strawman argument that avoids the real objections raised by those who challenge the beneficence of trade – namely the distributional case that the sacrifices of globalization are being made by those least able to make them and the rewards are going to those who already have much, and the argument that there are significant side-effects of trade in regards to labor and environmental standards. In regards to the distributional case, your own argument implicitly concedes – “structural adjustments” have to be made (you don’t describe what they are), and “displacement and other uncomfortable effects of international trade in developed economies are problems that must be addressed.” Likewise, on the side-effects case, you concede also that “environmental and human rights exploitation” and “globalized mega-corporations” are real side effects that need to be met with pragmatic progressive policy (although you don’t describe what those would be). Nonetheless, you ascribe ignorance and falsehood to your opponents, as well as moral selfishness.

So, let’s get down to the crux of the matter: why should the working class of the developed world pay the costs of the economic development of the developing world? If one takes the position that “my support of trade is primarily and strongly motivated by humanitarian concerns,” why is it a moral imperative for them to volunteer for unemployment, declining wages, a massive loss in bargaining power vis-a-vis the employers? Isn’t it fair to argue that, if exploitation and theft of wealth are moral crimes, the working class are morally correct in resisting their own exploitation and the theft of their livelihood and the sweat equity they’ve built up over the years?

If one takes the position that trade empirically beneficial, why is it the case that so many negative side-effects and qualifiers have to be acknowledged? Doesn’t this suggest that the situation is less a question of empirically true principles and universal economic mechanisms that can be obviously seen, and more an ambiguous situation with advantages and disadvantages to either course? Even if one accepts for the sake of argument that you’re right about the empirical effects of trade, wouldn’t it be fair for the working class to argue that they aren’t seeing any of the benefits and are inf fact incurring significant losses from trade, that they aren’t therefore a part of the “us” and in fact have opposing economics interests? If we’re going to accept economics as the test of empirical truth here, why shouldn’t the working class turn around and say that they are self-interested, profit-maximizing individuals like economics assume, and therefore are engaging in rational economic activity?

why should the working class of the developed world pay the costs of the economic development of the developing world?

Because the working class of the developed world is obscenely wealthy in comparison to the vast poor of the developing world and a portion of the resources upon which that wealth was built was stolen from the developing world in the past.

More generally, your deep concern for the developed world’s working class in a context where you actually manage to write a comment longer than mine without once mentioning the (relative) horror of the lives of the developing world’s poor is…deeply disturbing. Put into a more local context, it’s like the US’s GOP crying over the unfairness of taxing inheritances over a million dollars to pay for things like, say, food stamps. Oh, the humanity!

The labor movement and the Left as the party of the broader working class have legitimate economic interests in objecting to the transferring of production overseas, and to insinuate otherwise when your own analysis points to the interest existing is deeply unfair to the labor movement, the left, and the working class.

No, they don’t have a “legitimate economic interest” in objecting to the transferring of production overseas. First, the working class in general benefits economically from shifting production overseas (presumably because it’s less expensive) because they, in turn, purchase these same goods more cheaply. The typical American consumer has benefited tremendously from the shifting of much manufacturing to China. Second, the direct economic interest of income security is a public policy problem that can be solved and thus it is not necessarily in the interest of labor to protect specific jobs. Greatly increasing unemployment benefits, and vastly increasing re-training opportunities along with other labor reform that protects economic security while increasing labor liquidity would mean that labor wouldn’t need to protect a steelworker’s job, but rather protect a worker’s right or opportunity for a job.

To me, this is a strawman argument that avoids the real objections raised by those who challenge the beneficence of trade – namely the distributional case that the sacrifices of globalization are being made by those least able to make them and the rewards are going to those who already have much, and the argument that there are significant side-effects of trade in regards to labor and environmental standards.

Again, you demonstrate a strange blindness. I’d say that the “least able to make” sacrifices are the developing world’s poor, not the developed world’s working class—and yet the labor response to off-shoring is “I don’t care if the loss of this one American job means the tripling of income for ten Chinese families, we’re protecting our own and it’s their responsibility to protect theirs”.

Nonetheless, you ascribe ignorance and falsehood to your opponents, as well as moral selfishness.

Yes, because it has never been the case, in the long term, that increasing trade has failed to increase the overall wealth of both trading partners. It is not the case that, despite the inequality of the US income distribution, that all Americans, including the poorest and the working class, have failed to become more wealthy as a result of increasing international trade in the 20th century. When I was young, Americans worried that jobs were being exported to Japan and we’d all get poorer. We didn’t. We got richer. Trade always makes everyone richer in the long run. Claiming that it doesn’t, that it most likely will make both parties poorer is either deeply ignorant or an outright lie.

Yes, trade forces structural changes, which include the temporary loss of jobs. This is a problem solvable by public policy. Yes, trade often results in, at least in the short-term, large inequalities of income distribution. This is also a problem solvable by public policy. Furthermore, the solutions are better for everyone, anyway. Very good social safety nets lessen or even eliminate the economic pain caused by unemployment. Ubiquitous and free training and re-training opportunities allow workers more choices and improve quality of life. Income security and education improve economic productivity, in general. We should be doing these things anyway. There’s no good reason we should be tolerating the short-term ill effects of trade in the first place, except that we don’t have sufficiently progressive economic and social policy.

And, yes, it’s moral selfishness to argue, implicitly, for the status quo with regard to developing world poverty. I’m not happy about twelve year old children working full time jobs. But I’m even less happy about them starving to death. (Or working full time in more informal, yet typical, occupations like begging, trash collecting, farming, prostitution, etc.) I’d be thrilled if we could directly create developed world labor and environmental standards in the developing world in conjunction with raising income and living standards, but to do so would require, quite simply, a huge direct transfer of wealth from the developed world to the developing world—which would create far more loss of income and displacement to everyone in the developed world, including the working class, than increased trade causes. Obviously, that is not politically possible. No one but me would advocate this—the political left and right together would oppose it with every means possible.

The only realistic means to increase wealth and standard of living in the developing world is through trade. Anything else is accepting the status quo of intense poverty that is, frankly, criminal in the context of the sort of wealth that even the developed world’s poor enjoys. So, yes, opposing trade is selfish. It’s worse than selfish.

If one takes the position that trade empirically beneficial, why is it the case that so many negative side-effects and qualifiers have to be acknowledged? Doesn’t this suggest that the situation is less a question of empirically true principles and universal economic mechanisms that can be obviously seen, and more an ambiguous situation with advantages and disadvantages to either course?

Please. Do you have any idea how exactly equivalent your argument there is to the arguments used by creationists? I mean, really. It is not ambiguous at all that trade creates wealth for both parties participating in trade. It’s both theoretically obvious and empirically proven.

The “negative side-effects” and “qualifiers” are not inherent to trade, anyway. They’re contingent upon the social and political conditions in which trade exists. Few people are opposed to intra-national regional trade, for example, because the negatives are greatly reduced and the benefits well-recognized.

Even if one accepts for the sake of argument that you’re right about the empirical effects of trade, wouldn’t it be fair for the working class to argue that they aren’t seeing any of the benefits and are inf fact incurring significant losses from trade, that they aren’t therefore a part of the “us” and in fact have opposing economics interests?

No, because they are, in fact, seeing the benefits of trade more than the costs; they aren’t incurring significant losses from trade; and they emphatically are part of the “us”.

Over the last twenty years as globalization has increased, unemployment hasn’t risen (which would be the case if trade permanently destroyed jobs) , GDP hasn’t fallen (which would be the case if trade results in less wealth rather than more), and median income hasn’t fallen (which would be the case if trade results in lower income).

Furthermore, it’s not as if international trade is something new. There has been increasing international trade in the US and Europe for a century now, and industries have moved, and many local jobs “lost”. Yet income and total wealth has indisputably risen quite dramatically. We’ve all benefited greatly from trade.

What has happened is that a particular, historically-contingent situation with regard to the quality of heavy manufacturing, low-skill jobs has not been replicated with regard to service industry, low-skill jobs. The former were fairly well-paying with good benefits. The latter, not so much. That’s mostly the failure of the labor movement in combination with the increased political power of wealthy and business interests that have ensured that service industry jobs are relatively low-paying and with low security. This isn’t trade’s fault. This is a political, not an economic failure. It doesn’t have to be the case that off-shored well-paying and secure manufacturing jobs are replaced with low-paying and insecure service industry jobs. Service industry jobs are not inherently either low-paying or insecure any more than manufacturing jobs are inherently high-paying and secure.

Maybe the labor movement should be asking itself why it’s so jealously protecting a relative handful of manufacturing jobs while almost completely ignoring the vast numbers of workers slaving away at low-paying, insecure service industry jobs with no benefits.

Henri Vieuxtemps I can’t imagine a purely economic reason to produce anything in Europe, anything that can be imported.

Reliable infrastructure, less corrupt governments, skilled staff, more effective management systems (not perfect management systems, just more effective). I’ve heard plenty of nightmare stories coming out of China about quality control standards there or failure to meet orders at all.

Matt Kuzma: The term “level playing field” is tossed around too much, but I think we need to work harder to make sure the goods we get from China aren’t destroying habitat or poisoning the air any more than local goods would, and that Chinese workers aren’t substantially more likely to lose a finger than their American counterparts.

I am always puzzled why so many on the left link trade to local standards. I don’t think you really mean to imply that the only problem with the Chinese destroying habitat or poisoning the air or losing fingers just as long as no rich citizen benefits from the process. Global warming from greenhouse gases produced by sources like coal plants strikes me as equally a problem whether or not the goods produced are traded and I can’t see how losing a finger is nicer if you’ve lost it in the cause of home production.

I don’t think we should be trading reduced global income inequality for poisonous production processes and worker injuries.

How many worker injuries do you think there are in countries that are cut-off from trade like North Korea?
I don’t have any comprehensive figures, but I’ve read accounts of workers’ lives in medieval times in Europe, or coal-mining in Britain during the early stages of its industrial revolution, and those all imply that poisonous production processes and worker injuries were common even without international trade (Admittedly there was international trade in Europe during medieval times and Britain’s industrial revolution, just at a lower scale than now). Do you have any statistics that provides evidence that worker injuries go up as trade increases?
Increased GDP may of course be associated with increased use of poisonous production processes as GDP is increased by using said processes, for example the growth in GDP fuelled by railways in Britain was in turn fuelled by increased coal production. Increased cancer treatment may increase GDP and also increase the use of poisonous production processes. But generally people are willing to tolerate some, or a lot of, poisonous production processes rather than deal with the lack of goods produced that way. This strikes me as an economic growth issue, not a trade one. If we want to reduce the use of poisonous production processes we need to either come up with economic alternatives for producing goods like electricity and transport or try to convince people to remain poor.

Adding on to StevenAtwell’s reply to Keith:

Keith: ” We have both a general moral imperative to help and a specific reparations-based moral imperative. ”

“Because the working class of the developed world is obscenely wealthy in comparison to the vast poor of the developing world and a portion of the resources upon which that wealth was built was stolen from the developing world in the past.”

The second statement applies at least as well to the top 1% of the US population, as well. In addition, globalization results in them getting far richer.

Do you or don’t you support raising their tax rates by a large amount? Not just to Clinton-era rates, but to pre-Reagan levels?

That’s really the test of your alleged morality.

This post is pure class propaganda. You are just exacerbating the conditions to come with more globalization chatter.

Want a world of Maoists and insurrectionary anarchists in 10-20 years? Keep up the free market, yumyum time for the rich apologetics.

/Dialectics’d

I see no reason why a 40 year old autoworker in Oshawa should be forced to compete on with a sweatshop labour in China working in a plant with know labour or environmental standards.

Well in that case the morally respectable option strikes me as being to lobby to open your country’s borders to whoever wants to come there and share in your country’s labour and environmental standards.

Because the working class of the developed world is obscenely wealthy in comparison to the vast poor of the developing world and a portion of the resources upon which that wealth was built was stolen from the developing world in the past.
More generally, your deep concern for the developed world’s working class in a context where you actually manage to write a comment longer than mine without once mentioning the (relative) horror of the lives of the developing world’s poor is…deeply disturbing. Put into a more local context, it’s like the US’s GOP crying over the unfairness of taxing inheritances over a million dollars to pay for things like, say, food stamps. Oh, the humanity!

First, the working class’ current economic position is based on a century of struggle to get out from under a burden of poverty and exploitation. Go back to the 1930s, and I can show you poverty no different from anything you see in the developing world today – and I don’t want the working class to fall back into that. Second, my concern for the developed world’s working class stems from the fact that I’m a union activist and the son, grandson, and great-grandson of union activists. My first commitment must be to the working class of my own community; international solidarity can only be carried out successfully if the labor movement here has power to exercise on behalf of those elsewhere. Cutting our own throats first doesn’t help anyone.

However, I find the commitment of pro-globalization advocates to the poor, benighted developing world to be just as disturbing. In addition from uncritically associating capitalist development with progress, it tends to come with handwaving away larger questions as to what share of the gains are grabbed by working class of the developing world as opposed to their employers, to the health and environmental costs inflicted upon them. It’s moral absolution purchased on the cheap.

No, they don’t have a “legitimate economic interest” in objecting to the transferring of production overseas. First, the working class in general benefits economically from shifting production overseas (presumably because it’s less expensive) because they, in turn, purchase these same goods more cheaply. The typical American consumer has benefited tremendously from the shifting of much manufacturing to China. Second, the direct economic interest of income security is a public policy problem that can be solved and thus it is not necessarily in the interest of labor to protect specific jobs. Greatly increasing unemployment benefits, and vastly increasing re-training opportunities along with other labor reform that protects economic security while increasing labor liquidity would mean that labor wouldn’t need to protect a steelworker’s job, but rather protect a worker’s right or opportunity for a job.

As mpowell has already noted, if your wages are stagnant and declining and your likelihood of losing your job increasing, lower prices on goods doesn’t help – you’re still in the position of trying to bail out a gradually sinking boat. Second, I would argue that your analysis of the public policy program is missing the fact that the “specific jobs” are well-paying, unionized, and have benefits, and that new jobs tend to be lower-paid, non-union, and offer no benefits. Thus, public policy of increasing UI and training does nothing more than just smooth the transition – the worker is still facing a declining standard of income. Moreover, public policy is forced to work against huge countervailing pressures of declining purchasing power, increased demands on UI and retraining, and fewer living wage jobs available.

Again, you demonstrate a strange blindness. I’d say that the “least able to make” sacrifices are the developing world’s poor, not the developed world’s working class—and yet the labor response to off-shoring is “I don’t care if the loss of this one American job means the tripling of income for ten Chinese families, we’re protecting our own and it’s their responsibility to protect theirs”.

Again, as Barry has pointed out, this doesn’t answer the question of why the working class should have to pay the cost rather than the corporate class. Surely they are even better able to make sacrifices than the working class, and the loss of one American CEO could mean the tripling of income for hundreds if not thousands of Chinese families. Ultimately, you are asking for a saint-like level of sacrifice from the working class here – not only are they expected to give up their livelihoods, but they’re expected to do so cheerfully.

Yes, because it has never been the case, in the long term, that increasing trade has failed to increase the overall wealth of both trading partners. It is not the case that, despite the inequality of the US income distribution, that all Americans, including the poorest and the working class, have failed to become more wealthy as a result of increasing international trade in the 20th century. When I was young, Americans worried that jobs were being exported to Japan and we’d all get poorer. We didn’t. We got richer. Trade always makes everyone richer in the long run. Claiming that it doesn’t, that it most likely will make both parties poorer is either deeply ignorant or an outright lie.

As mpowell has noted, the the evidence for the universal benificence of trade is not that strong. However, you are STILL ignoring the distributional case. America has gotten richer due to trade, but it’s not the working class who are getting the benefits – rather, it’s the upper class and the upper middle class who have been able to enjoy lower prices and increasing incomes. Your missing the fact that there is no “we” – there’s a bunch of different “we’s,” and they are experiencing the economy differently, and have different economic interests.

Yes, trade forces structural changes, which include the temporary loss of jobs. This is a problem solvable by public policy. Yes, trade often results in, at least in the short-term, large inequalities of income distribution. This is also a problem solvable by public policy. Furthermore, the solutions are better for everyone, anyway. Very good social safety nets lessen or even eliminate the economic pain caused by unemployment. Ubiquitous and free training and re-training opportunities allow workers more choices and improve quality of life. Income security and education improve economic productivity, in general. We should be doing these things anyway. There’s no good reason we should be tolerating the short-term ill effects of trade in the first place, except that we don’t have sufficiently progressive economic and social policy.

Let’s see now – temporary loss of jobs, large inequalities of income distribution. Doesn’t sound like a minor problem to me, sounds like the working class might have real reasons not to favor this happening, especially if “income security and education” should be happening anyway. However, your solutions aren’t up to the task – social safety nets almost never eliminate the economic pain of unemployment, unless benefits are set at 100% of salary and benefits, which they’re not, and unless you completely compensate for the fact that future employment is going to be of much poorer quality, which wage insurance generally doesn’t. Training and re-training are not fixes if the economy is not producing a sufficient number of living wage jobs – (see Gordon Lafer 2002). Moreover, you also have to face up to the fact that such progressive policies generally havening been done in the U.S, and part of the reason is that the only constituency that would benefit from them – organized labor – is in the process of losing jobs and income, and therefore doesn’t have the clout. U.S corporations have certainly been happy to get the benefits of globalization without paying the costs, and neoliberals have been remarkably cavalier about “getting around to” providing those (limited) benefits, especially when the political cost for not doing so is so low.

And, yes, it’s moral selfishness to argue, implicitly, for the status quo with regard to developing world poverty. I’m not happy about twelve year old children working full time jobs. But I’m even less happy about them starving to death. (Or working full time in more informal, yet typical, occupations like begging, trash collecting, farming, prostitution, etc.) I’d be thrilled if we could directly create developed world labor and environmental standards in the developing world in conjunction with raising income and living standards, but to do so would require, quite simply, a huge direct transfer of wealth from the developed world to the developing world—which would create far more loss of income and displacement to everyone in the developed world, including the working class, than increased trade causes. Obviously, that is not politically possible. No one but me would advocate this—the political left and right together would oppose it with every means possible.
The only realistic means to increase wealth and standard of living in the developing world is through trade. Anything else is accepting the status quo of intense poverty that is, frankly, criminal in the context of the sort of wealth that even the developed world’s poor enjoys. So, yes, opposing trade is selfish. It’s worse than selfish.

And what’s the moral selfishness of those who call for others to sacrifice on their behalf? Why shouldn’t corporations have to lose money if they had previously exploited the third world? Why shouldn’t the comfortable upper, upper-middle and middle-classes pay some share of the burden? Why is it more realistic and more moral to turn around to one segment of developed society and tell them that they’re stuck with the check?

Right. It’s all in the definitions, semantics: globalization, trade…

It is quite possible that everyone benefits from trade in the long term. What we have, however, is not trade, but the focus of exploitation of labor shifting to more powerless segments of the world’s population; and whatever gains, power that has been accumulated by the workers in the developed world being slowly eroded and taken away. Some certainly do benefit from that, but it’s a very small minority.

Keith M Ellis 04.16.09 at 5:25 pm

Me, concerning Keith’s policy statements: “Do you or don’t you support raising their tax rates by a large amount? Not just to Clinton-era rates, but to pre-Reagan levels?”

Keith: “That’s really the test of your alleged morality.”

Yes, because we see you going from :Because the working class of the developed world is obscenely wealthy in comparison to the vast poor of the developing world and a portion of the resources upon which that wealth was built was stolen from the developing world in the past.”, but somehow the richest few percent in the developed world are now *not* included in that. They gain.

Keith: “This is typical of the prejudice with which my arguments have been received. Why are you assuming that I oppose raising tax rates on the wealthy by a large amount? It’s not as if mpowell, for example, was unable to discern my point of view.”

Keith, your stated morality and situation, IMHO, lead inevitably to higher taxation on the rich in developed countries. And it’s not ‘prejudice’, it’s Bayesian – we’re not arguing from a blank slate. Frankly, you flunked in the less likely manner – I expected you to dis taxing the rich

Keith, I don’t understand why producing nike shoes and walmart crap for Americans is the way to avoid starvation in poor countries. Why can’t they instead produce walmart-like crap and shoes for themselves, avoid starvation and wear flashy shoes and consume walmart-like crap too? Why can’t you agitate for building factories in poor countries, without dismantling them in the rich countries? Aren’t there enough feet in the world for the shoes produced in China and Brazil and the US?

Sorry – ‘Mitchell’

Barry, regarding your comment #37, it seems somewhat incoherent and so I’m not sure what your point is. (Note that you originally wrote the “test of your alleged morality” line and because there was a paragraph break, it was mistakenly not included in my blockquote section.)

Yes, most people who support trade are centrists or rightists who are anti-labor and all that. But I made it clear in my very first comment that I’m not one of them and when I mentioned that I’d support a large direct transfer of wealth from the developed world to the developing world if it were politically realistic, that should have been a pretty strong clue that I generally support very progressive economic policies. So I’m not sure how I “flunked your test” at all.

Keith what do you do? I mean what is your career? Are you a member of the working class that you are so eager to sell down the river? It is all to easy to advocate for someone else’s job to be shipped overseas.

At present I am disabled and live on disability benefits of less than $900 a month and have no assets. Truly. I am very poor.

I also went through a short period where I had a lot of dotcom money and I gladly paid the highest marginal tax rates on low-to-mid-six figure income. I have no sympathy for Americans who complain about paying too much in taxation. I think the highest marginal rate should be doubled. So, I’ve been on the high-end, too, and was happy to pay my taxes and would have been happy to pay more for more programs increasing social justice.

Furthermore, as you might guess, I worked in IT. Lots of IT jobs are moving overseas and I supported that and still do. You can bet your ass that had my company laid me and ten others off so that they could outsource and hire forty Indians, I wouldn’t have complained.

Mitchel, it’s not even that – the GOP is full of middle-class people intent on helping a party which has demonstrated that f*cking the middle class is a core party plank.

It astonishes me that anyone could read my comments in this thread and conclude that I’m a Republican. You’re just not paying attention.

Keith, I don’t understand why producing nike shoes and walmart crap for Americans is the way to avoid starvation in poor countries. Why can’t they instead produce walmart-like crap and shoes for themselves, avoid starvation and wear flashy shoes and consume walmart-like crap too? Why can’t you agitate for building factories in poor countries, without dismantling them in the rich countries? Aren’t there enough feet in the world for the shoes produced in China and Brazil and the US?

Because the Chinese and Brazilians and Indians can’t afford to buy those flashy shoes and consume Walmart-like crap. They’re not going to alleviate their poverty on their own (not unless you assume some Malthusian-like depopulation) in the foreseeable future, if ever.

A distressingly large number of the developing world’s countries are very resource poor and are overpopulated. The only resource they have is labor. Things will never get better for them without international trade. The others, like China and Brazil, have resources but large populations and, on their own without trade, would take many decades to develop their economies to developed-world standards (assuming this is even possible without international trade).

Because of specialization, economies of scale, comparative advantage, and more obscure reasons, trade creates wealth inherently and immediately and accrues to all parties involved. Even if it didn’t, or even if the wealth directly created flowed only to the wealthier country, it still will create wealth in the less wealthy country by virtue of circulating money through its economy and spurring more economic activity. In the very short-term, the jobs lost in the developed world represent investment in the developing world—investments that otherwise wouldn’t exist. This is seed money, in effect. And that’s all without the (true) assumption that trade itself directly generates wealth.

Without trade, the developing world would have to painstakingly develop its economies incrementally, essentially recapitulating the developed world’s industrial 200 year history, except without the benefit of colonialist resource theft or slave labor or the regional international trade the developed world has always had or (in most cases) the abundance of immediately exploitable resource wealth the developed world enjoyed. So, without technology transfer and education, what took us 200 years might take them 400 (or forever). With the tech transfer and education (they will, in fact, have—with or without trade) it might be reduced to 100-200 years (or forever).

With trade, it might take 40, as it has, for example, Japan. Or less. Look at China and India’s growth curves. Both are directly and indisputably driven by international trade. They might reach our level, especially China, in just 20 or 30. With trade. Without it, it’s almost two billion starving people.

I don’t understand how it’s the case that most Europeans recognize the wealth creating affects of EU integration and intra-EU trade while claiming that trading with China will impoverish them. The Irish were never going to build multi-billion dollar microprocessor fabs for themselves. China could, but not while 90% of its population was starving.

One of two things are possible: either eliminating all the ills associated with job dislocation can be solved—via safety nets, ubiquitous publicly financed training and re-training, public investment nurturing new industries—without incurring some permanent economic cost (lowering productivity for various reasons), or it can’t (and it will incur some cost). I think the former is true and that’s what we should aim for. But if the latter is true, I still advocate it because I think we’re obscenely wealthy as it is and we can afford to take the hit.

I want these things and advocate for these things not just because they allow trade to be pain-free for the developed world and thus allow wealth-generating trade which will improve the lives of the developing world’s poor…but also because, obviously, progressives and labor activists should be fighting for these things anyway. That’s what I find very strange about this argument. The changes I advocate which would eliminate the ills the working class suffer from international trade are changes that progressives and labor activists have always wanted—because of course trade isn’t the only reason jobs are eliminated.

So from my perspective, the anti-globalists who are motivated by labor-centric arguments and are concerned about the plight of the developed world’s working class are ignoring the essential problems here and instead are focusing on only slightly avoiding them via protectionism. You could be arguing for changes which result in eliminating the pain and insecurity working people feel about potential or actual job loss in general, but instead are just agitating against something which causes only a moderate portion of those lost jobs.

You might say, well, isn’t it better to stop jobs being lost than stopping the symptoms associated with lost jobs? Isn’t that attacking root causes? My response is that it’s obviously absurd to think about making it so that jobs are never lost…you couldn’t have economic development (or people actually having choices about what they do with their working lives) without jobs being created and eliminated. However, my argument is that it is possible, in a sense, to mostly eliminate job loss if we make “job loss” equivalent to “job change”. When manufacturing jobs are moved from the US to China, then equivalently-paying non-manufacturing jobs should be available to those American manufacturing workers. This could be possible if, on labor’s side, there was real interest in organizing the service industry labor, and on the government’s side, there was retraining benefits and investments in new industries…and when, in the short-term, there aren’t jobs available, there’s a strong safety net that meets the needs of the unemployed.

I guess I can understand that protectionism is a battle that labor thinks it can win and it will, in the short-term at least, definitely protect good working-class jobs. If this didn’t literally come at the price of starving thousands or millions of developing world workers, I’d support it. Even then, however, it seems to me to be remarkably timid or even cowardly. Here we have in the US, especially, a huge sector of the economy essentially without labor protections and no labor organization. It’s the burgeoning sector, and labor just dismisses its importance outright. Instead of fighting for an economy where service employees have collective bargaining, good wages, benefits, and job security, the labor movement dreams of an America where the entire working class has $30 an hour factory jobs. That’s fantasy, it’s not going to happen, and dreaming of it comes at the expense of the millions working in crappy service jobs who could immediately benefit from labor’s enthusiasm for social justice.

Furthermore, long-term working class interests are poorly served by the current US environment where re-training is unavailable or a joke and the safety net is largely non-existent. For manufacturing and service sector and everyone else, labor should be agitating for change in this regard.

From my perspective, the anti-trade arguments above are ignoring the biggest and most urgent essential problems facing labor in the developed world in favor of a relatively trivial, but winnable, battle that, nevertheless, comes at the expense of the world’s poor. Again, this seems to me to be exactly the nature of the typical centrist/moderate do-little-and-mostly-reinforce-the-status quo-while-turning-a-blind-eye-to-injustice-and-atrocity mindset that you probably ascribe to me simply because I support trade.

Keith M Ellis 04.16.09 at 8:14 pm

“Barry, regarding your comment #37, it seems somewhat incoherent and so I’m not sure what your point is. (Note that you originally wrote the “test of your alleged morality” line and because there was a paragraph break, it was mistakenly not included in my blockquote section.)”

Keith, I really don’t see the difficulty – the internets are full of people who praise globalization for helping the poor, are aghast at the evils of taxing the rich, and really don’t waste too much thought on the effects of a majority of Americans .

“Yes, most people who support trade are centrists or rightists who are anti-labor and all that. But I made it clear in my very first comment that I’m not one of them and when I mentioned that I’d support a large direct transfer of wealth from the developed world to the developing world if it were politically realistic, that should have been a pretty strong clue that I generally support very progressive economic policies. So I’m not sure how I “flunked your test” at all.”

Keith, just because you claim not to be a rightist, doesn’t mean that you are not one. And when it comes to the American working and middle classes being the ones to make amends for our historical grab of wealth, and not the rich, I really don’t believe that you are not a rightist.

Keith,
So basically your income is secure, you are in no danger of losing your job if the policies you support are implemented and you have absolutely no skin in this game whatsoever. Interesting how quick you are to sell someone else’s job down the river. These people have families and they work hard for a shot at a better life for themselves and their children. They rightly expect their elected politicians to support them in that. The chinese have their own officials.

Keith, just because you claim not to be a rightist, doesn’t mean that you are not one. And when it comes to the American working and middle classes being the ones to make amends for our historical grab of wealth, and not the rich, I really don’t believe that you are not a rightist.

Oh, come on. I’d raise the corporate income tax. I’d double the highest marginal tax rate and I’d tax inheritance over, say, one million at nearly 100%. I’d tax capital gains the same as income. This is not making the rich make amends for past wealth grabs? But I’d like to make it clear that I think that European colonialism and American equivalent theft of resources from the developing world is something that all citizens of these countries have benefited greatly from; and that all of us have a moral debt to the developing world as a result.

Also, I support single-payer health care; universal free higher education; guaranteed gender and sexual orientation equality; affirmative action; reparations to black Americans and Natives; massively increased aid to the developing world; restrictions on pharmaceutical industry profits; steep regulation of large global corporations; extremely comprehensive unemployment insurance; legal guarantees of labor organization and collective bargaining; reduced maximum workweek and increased vacation time; greatly increased taxation on pollution; mandated transition to renewable energy sources; mandated transition to alternative fuel transportation; mandated and funded large increases in mass transportation; sharply limited executive branch powers to engage in war without Congress’s consent; US participation in the International Criminal Court; prosecution of Bush admin officials for war crimes and other crimes; sharp reduction of the US prison population; change to a criminal justice emphasis on rehabilitation instead of punishment; legalize but tax most soft drugs; amend the Constitution to allow comprehensive gun control; greatly increased legal recognition of children’s rights; greatly increased oversight of children’s welfare; limiting law enforcement’s use of deadly force; comprehensive financial sector reform; reducing by two-thirds the US military budget; amnesty for illegal aliens and a greatly expanded allowance for legal immigration, particularly from western hemisphere nations; reduction of US support for authoritarian regimes; establishment of a Palestinian state; animal rights; and many other things besides.

But I guess I’m a rightwing near-fascist pro-business elite because I support international trade. Yeah, whatever. I think it’s impossible that you could discuss this with me in good faith.

So basically your income is secure, you are in no danger of losing your job if the policies you support are implemented and you have absolutely no skin in this game whatsoever. Interesting how quick you are to sell someone else’s job down the river.

Yeah, well, as Righteous Bubba says, you must be a little confused if you think that living on $900 dollars a month is a comfortable life. That aside, you’re completely ignoring the fact that I said that supported these same policies when they did threaten my own particular job. You’re also ignoring that I’ve said that I would support an alternate policy where even my absurdly low income was further reduced because of a wide-scale and huge transfer of wealth from the developed world to the developing world. So, you know, your accusation of hypocrisy and selfishness are false and offensive.

It’s also an unfair or dishonest argument to make. When conservatives make that argument about taxation, saying that it’s easy for liberals to want to tax the wealthy because liberals aren’t wealthy, it’s unfair and dishonest and often untrue. Some liberals are wealthy. But, also, it doesn’t matter whether they are or not. If the only people allowed to support public policy were those particularly adversely affected by it, then no one would support any public policies. Taxation on millionaire inheritances? Only the millionaire inheritors have a say. Going to war? Only the soldiers have a say. Laws against murder? Only the murderers have a say.

This is not a rational or practical way to decide who has a voice in public policy.

Anyway, in fact, I despise people that make exceptions or bend their ideals because of their own self-interest such as NIMBY or benefits-for-me-but-not-taxes or whatever. I do, and always have, decide on my principles and then stick with them, regardless of whether they adversely affect my own self-interests. And I think this sort of accusation is really perverse coming from anyone in the developed world where all of us are obscenely wealthy compared to the developing world’s poor who are dying by the millions of disease, war, and famine and living unspeakably horrifying lives.

Arguably, films like City of God or Slumdog Millionaire are “poverty porn”, but they nevertheless illustrate a reality that certainly is worse than anything the US has seen in eighty years. My mind has long boggled at the world’s complacency concerning two obscenities: the plight of the developing world’s poor, and the plight of at least a third of the world’s women. The former are living, or dying, in lives that are more impoverished, more constrained, and more horrific than they were a hundred years ago. They live in cities that are unimaginably huge and overcrowded, among violence and exploitation, with poor or non-existent housing, with poor or non-existent health care, and with poor or non-existent education. Many are in de facto slavery, as in Dubai. The latter are almost universally oppressed, institutionally sexually exploited, and a large portion are also de facto enslaved. Meanwhile, the one-quarter of the world which is wealthy and privileged is fabulously wealthy and privileged in comparison; and we worry about whether our food is organic, think that the height of virtue is passing on a slice of chocolate cake or driving alone to work each day in a hybrid vehicle. It’s truly obscene and in this context it seems to me that shedding tears for a wealthy nation blue-collar worker who has difficulties when losing a job is morally equivalent to shedding tears for the corporate CEO who lost his jobs. American blue-collar workers don’t starve or prostitute themselves when they lose their jobs; developing world workers do.

And, again, if one were truly committed to improving the lives of American labor, then one would strongly support all those policies which would eliminate the ills of trade without requiring protectionism, without regard to trade because these problems are much bigger than just the portion caused by trade.

The argument that I should be donating my money to starving people in the developed world is just as unfair and dishonest as the rightwing argument that those who advocate higher tax rates should voluntarily be paying the IRS more.

And I’m sure that I could locate things I wrote on the Internet in the late 90s supporting trade when outsourcing IT jobs first began…but I don’t need to because your presumption that my self-reporting here of my motivations and past positions are likely lies is both offensive and deeply in bad-faith. You don’t get to attack my argument on the basis that my motivations are badly-intentioned, in direct denial of my reporting of my motives, in the complete absence of any evidence for your claim any more than I get to claim that your argument is wrong because you’re actually a dog typing out words at random with your nose.

Some blogger, Yglesias, I think, often points out that some of the positions which conservatives clearly think are core and necessary to conservative identity are, in fact, rather arbitrarily linked to conservatism and really have very little, if anything, to do with each other than historical accident. That leftists are currently against globalization in the form of trade is also a historical accident and not inherent to progressivism, not necessary, and has little in common with, say, sex orientation equity and the right to collective bargaining. But just as American conservatism right now seems to wrongly believe that denial of man-made global warming is a necessary conservative position, American leftists seem to wrongly believe that opposition to globalized trade is a necessary progressive position. Therefore, in spite of the fact that I have asserted a large number of views which are, in the American context, collectively far left, the fact that I support globalized trade indicates to you that I must be lying about those views as well as my claims for my motivations for supporting globalized trade. It’s remarkably rigid , unimaginative thinking.

One of Krugman’s recent blog entries, perhaps the one linked in the original post above, makes a similar point about his positions. He generally supports international trade. Therefore, progressives (infrequently lately, but much more often ten years ago) accuse him of being a fake liberal. Meanwhile, because he supports limits on trade and capital flows in certain macroeconomic situations, free trade ideologues accuse him of being a fake supporter of trade. And his response is, wait, the solution to the supposed contradiction is that he’s pragmatic about the methods by which the progressive goals he supports are achieved. He doesn’t support trade because he believes there’s some inherent “natural” right to trade; he supports it as a means to an end. When it doesn’t achieve that end, he doesn’t support it. Similarly, when protectionism doesn’t achieve his progressive end, he doesn’t support protectionism, either.

With certain limited, though very important exceptions, conservatism and progressivism are ideologies about goals, not methods. Yet most people tend to conflate the two because there tends to be much more uniformity of opinion about methods than there rationally ought to be, because of peer pressure and the equation of ideology with social identity. Thus, positions on methods become ideological markers and heresy with regard to methods is not tolerated.

This greatly narrows the possibilities for productive civil discourse and opportunities to discover effective, efficient solutions to problems. I support globalized trade because I believe that it is the most possible, least inefficient solution to a deeply tragic and urgent humanitarian problem. And the solutions I propose to solve the short-term ill consequences of trade lead are the same solutions to wider-context problems obstructing economy-wide progressive goals. The pain of job dislocation, from any cause, for any class of worker, should be reduced or eliminated anyway. Newly created, non-manufacturing jobs should be higher-paying with unionized security anyway. Workers moving from one industry to another, for whatever reason, should have cheap or free opportunities for re-training anyway. The partial band-aid of protecting the jobs of a particular, small class of workers from the dislocation caused by the particular phenomenon of offshoring—not protecting the jobs of all workers, threatened for all reasons—while simultaneously ignoring the depravity or even the worsening of the lives of the developing world’s poor…well, that’s achieving a relatively tiny, tiny progressive victory while not even attempting the much larger and much more urgent victories, both home and abroad. It’s intellectually perverse to be arguing that protectionism is the obvious and natural progressive position on this issue.

A legitimate counter-argument would, given certain preconditions, be that my solution is politically unrealistic; that protectionism, being possible, has the virtue of actually achieving progressive goals as opposed to my much more ambitious plan, which will not. But the preconditions are that there either this has been attempted, and not achieved, or that it’s being attempted and there’s manifest widespread opposition to it, or that widespread opposition to it is self-evident. I don’t believe that any of those preconditions are the case. This seems to me to be a lot like the health care reform debate. I support a single-payer solution to the problem, including a nationalized health care system as the single-payer solution. Now, I agree that it’s quite arguable (though far from certain) that a nationalized system is politically unrealistic. But I don’t agree that a single-payer system, like the Canadian provincial insurance systems and many European systems, is arguably unrealistic. Many politicians and pundits are acting on that assumptions and leaving single-payer off the table; but I think they are quite wrong to do so without even attempting a push for it actually proving that it can’t be done. It’s by far the best solution to the problem; it’s irresponsible to not even put it on the table. Likewise, bank nationalizations. And, likewise, comprehensive labor reform as part of a wide-ranging progressive initiative that also just happens to solve the trade problems. This should be at least on the table; and my fellow progressives who accuse me of ideological betrayal because I advocate it are doing their part to continue the American tradition of just barely adequate governance.

Mitchell Rowe,
It’s quite easy to get a poor government to sign up to environmental standards and labour protection, it’s a lot harder to get them to enforce it. There are a lot of laws on books that aren’t enforced around the world and generally the poorer the goverment is the more incompetent it is at enforcing said laws (there are some exceptions, some totalitarian states have managed remarkable levels of control but not in a good way). If you want people to have the protection of a rich country’s government, I don’t see a better way than letting them into that rich country.
Also, another issue with reasonable environmental and labour policies – who decides what is reasonable? I remember while the Lord of the Rings movies were being made an American stunts rider was complaining about the low pay of the NZ riders undercutting the Americans – they were only being paid $500 a day. I’ve also encountered Americans criticising NZ companies for using 1080 poison – not knowing that the NZ Department of Conservation uses 1080 poison to to control possums and there is a shortage of native mammals in NZ and a lot of very rough remote landscape that makes 108o the best option anyone has discovered yet. Local knowledge is important.

All I know is this question should be honestly put to the people to decide. Let there be an election fough over it.

Difficult. When casting your vote in an election you’re choosing one government to deal with a vast range of topics, some of which you don’t even know will happen yet (quick question, in the election in your country that occurred before 11 September 2001 did you know what the main parties’ policies were if there was a major terorist attack in the USA? ). To pick one issue as the most important is tough. And to be blunt, most voters are focused on personal issues like the economy and healthcare.

Henri Vieuxtemps – yes, the poor probably could get themselves out of poverty by producing walmart-like goods and shoes for themselves. For example, China’s current population is around a billion, which is what the entire world’s population was in about 1800 when Britain was having its Industrial Revolution, so at a least first approximation there’s enough local demand in China to do the same. But it’s a far slower process than when you get the gains from trade. We admittedly don’t have reliable GDP growth rates for Britain, but it’s generally thought that it was far slower than the growth in Japan and South Korea, who had access, albeit with limitations, to the large Western markets when they started developing. (All this is subject to normal caveats, we can’t do controlled studies on what causes growth).

What does a US person wearing a shirt made in China produce for the Chinese person who made this shirt?

It depends. Wheat, corn, education, scientific research, IT goods, etc. There are also complicated loops, eg the Chinese spend the money they get from sellling the t-shirts to Americans on milk from New Zealand and the NZ citizens buy IT goods.

There’s also a complicated thing going on where for political reasons the Chinese government is accumulating US treasury bonds.

Mitchell Rowe:
Additionally I have yet to be convinced of the real benefit that those in the developing world have achieved from trading with us. Some of their own fat cats have gotten rich, but the average person who now breathes polluted air and drinks polluted water, is that person better off?

See http://www.wilsoncenter.org/events/docs/JEL%20McCulloch%20Trade%20Poverty.pdf for a summary of some evidence that the poor probably gain along with the rich in poor countries. (This is not up to the standard of a controlled experiment, as the authors take pains to point out).
Also please note that lack of development does not mean that the average person breathes non-polluted air and non-polluted water. Water supplies can be contaminated by a dead pig as well as by a factory. Cooking over a fire instead of turning on your electric oven exposes you to indoor air pollution. See http://www.scielosp.org/scielo.php?pid=S0042-96862000000900004&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en

Keith Ellis – how would Malthusian style depopulation improve the chances of economic growth? If anything I thought the relationship was opposite – more people = more money. The Pacific Island nations have very small populations but don’t appear to be bursting with success, and empty Australia has from memory a slightly lower GDP per capita than the crowded Netherlands. (This is just anecdotal evidence of course, my mere failure to think of some evidence in favour of your hypothesis doesn’t prove that there is no such evidence).

Ellis stakes out the most radical position available and is assailed as a rightist or a neoliberal, like a bird whose plumage is only visible in ultraviolet, to which we trichromatic primates are blind. We’re so bound to our usual quarrels that we can’t even recognize such an audaciously generous strategy.

It’s hard to see how to get from here to a world remolded to our hearts’ desire, but globalization is the path we’re already taking, so we ought to proceed willingly, with our eyes wide open.

The developed countries seem to be doing pretty well so far, even if there is a larger volume of finished goods in the incoming than the outgoing freighters. We’re better off reducing inequality at home than isolating ourselves from the rest of the world.

I bet the average Chinese worker (who is likely to be a factory worker) doesn’t consume anything produced outside of China. And the average American worker (who is likely to be a salesperson of some sort) doesn’t exactly consume a lot of stuff produced outside of China either. Some trade. The moral high ground, indeed.

Stop asking these sorts of questions and just making up answers that satisfy obviously entirely unexamined moral predispositions. Many of the questions you’ve asked can be reasoned out from a few, obvious assumptions. Others can be answered by Googling. And if you know global economic history of the last eighty years, you already know that in the long term trade rapidly generates wealth in the developing world and leads to better labor conditions and stronger environmental protection, huge reductions in the numbers of the starving poor, and more modest but significant gains in the developed world. Japan didn’t get wealthy by manufacturing and selling transistor radios and cars to themselves. Japan is a net exporter, but it has always imported to make up gaps in its economy, both with regard to resources and with regard to labor. South Korea is a much more recent example. And China and India even more recent. Actually look at the numbers for trade, GDP, and median household income for these countries during the relevant periods. Look at the corresponding numbers for countries that have grown or remained protectionist. Look at these numbers for Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Poland during EU economic integration. Imagine if England ended trade with the rest of the UK and Europe and elsewhere, or if the Netherlands did the same sort of thing, or Belgium. Or Canada. Or Quebec. In fact, Quebec of the 70s and 80s is a good example of something like this actually happening, but on a limited, though devastating, scale.

Your questions about trade are as uninformed, your answers as driven by prejudicial assumptions, as rightwing arguments that decreased taxation increases tax revenue or that stimulus spending can’t work because one person’s saving is another person’s spending, and vice-versa. These are not hugely complicated matters; those who assert the factually untrue answers are doing so because of an extraordinarily deep ideologically-driven selective blindness or delusion.

For example, it is utterly irrational to assert that tax cuts “always” produce revenue increases. Yet conservatives claim this everyday. If it were true, then eliminating taxation would produce infinite tax revenue. And you could look at historical data and see that past tax cuts have produced revenue increases (they haven’t) and past tax hikes have produced revenue decreases (they haven’t). This is not a difficult question to answer correctly, both theoretically and empirically. Nevertheless, many conservatives continually assert something economically equivalent to “the Earth is flat”.

Similarly, conservatives, even some economists (the Chicago school) have been asserting that stimulus cannot work because it works out to be essentially an accounting identity. Well, you only have to think about economic activity from first principles for a short while before you come up with the idea of the velocity of money. It’s theoretically inevitable. Stimulus spending is not essentially an accounting identity that merely moves money from one column to another. Furthermore, on this point anyway, the empirical evidence is clear. It’s a form of either selective insanity or egregious ignorance for, especially, trained economists to assert the conservative argument. And it’s not difficult for the non-economist to work it out and look it up, either.

And just so with trade. People like you and other here assert that trade reduces rather than increases wealth via the commonsensical notion of “race to the bottom”. But you can figure out from first principles that this isn’t the case if you think about it for awhile. I understood many of the benefits of trade (but not comparative advantage) long before I ever read a single authoritative word asserting it. I just figured it out. It’s not hard. And the empirical data is ubiquitous available proving that trade increases wealth. It’s not an open question, either theoretically or empirically. Yes, in the complex real world, there are exceptions to the rule and certainly in the short term all sorts of perverse and unjust things can, and do, occur. But the left-wing anti-globalist arguments against trade asserting wealth destruction are just as flat-earthist as the two conservative economic arguments I presented before it. You can’t be going around asserting these things confidently without being either ignorant or deluded; and one doesn’t go around confidently asserting these things unless one has a strong partisan allegiance to a certain variety of ideology that requires the answer to these questions be a certain way, regardless of truth. Yeah, the American right in recent years has made this into an art form, creating their own alternate realities, sound reasoning and empirical evidence be damned. Global warming, evolution, Iraqi WMDs, torture, taxation and revenue, recession economics and stimulus spending, FEMA re-education camps, Obama’s citizenship, Democratic reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, Supertrains from LA to Las Vegas, Government panels to control physicians’ choices of treatment, executive orders disallowing any religious activities at any facility that has received federal funding…the list goes on and on and on. These people just create a false reality out of whole cloth. They “know” it. Everyone one they know also “knows” these things are true. It’s only propagandists who claim otherwise.

Arguments of this nature are much more rare on the left. But the broad claims asserting that trade destroys rather than creates wealth are one of the few examples. If you are even remotely interested in the truth, you actually have to work at believing this lie. You’ve no less a responsibility to intellectual integrity and truth in this matter than are conservatives who claim that the financial crisis was caused by Feddie and Fanny being forced to give poor people bad loans. The truth is easily comprehensible and attainable.

Anyway, I think I’ve said all that I can say on this subject.

Keith, you failed to respond to my question as well. Nitpicking at (admittedly rough) illustrations won’t do.

Once again, the point I am making is that the phenomenon you describe in moralistic terms as “reparations-based moral imperative” is nothing of the sort. It’s exploitation and robbery of the developing world, with a side-effect of destroying the industrial base and many socio-economic achievements in the developed world.

Yes, it’s true, another (and certainly unintended) side-effect is a minor improvement in the standard of living in poor countries (some of them). But if you want to turn this accidental phenomenon into the centerpiece of your argument, then you could as well argue (and in moral terms also) for the transatlantic slave trade (trade! can’t be bad!), as it’s quite possible that for many of the slaves a North American cotton plantation was a standard-of-living improvement over their war-ridden homeland.

Keith: “Anyway, I think I’ve said all that I can say on this subject.”
Mitchell Rowe: “Of course you have Keith, of course you have.”

Nope. Serious logorrhea.

Keith:
“People like you and other here assert that trade reduces rather than increases wealth via the commonsensical notion of “race to the bottom”…But the left-wing anti-globalist arguments against trade asserting wealth destruction are just as flat-earthist as the two conservative economic arguments I presented before it.”

This is a strawman, and you are deriving accusations of ignorance, insanity, and mendacity from it. Most people on this thread are in fact arguing not that trade is causing net wealth destruction, but that the benefits and losses of trade are not equally distributed – the working class is economically losing, even as the middle and upper classes benefit; it might be a net benefit, but that doesn’t mean everyone gets a net benefit.

The volume of trade (and U.S imports especially) has expanded dramatically since the 1970s, but we haven’t seen a broad distribution of income increases; instead, the ultra-rich have gotten richer, and everyone else has either stagnated or lost income. It may be the case that public policy could theoretically compensate, but it is not accurate to say that expanded trade is a universally beneficial phenomenon.

“It is true. Today, the poor in the developing world primarily live in huge, overcrowded cities in contrast to, a hundred years, they lived in rural areas. In these “modern” cities, they are incredibly overcrowded, in slums with poor sanitation, disease, and intense crime. Their lives are much worse.”
Keith it is not true. Did you even read my comment? I said ” Worldwide, life expectancy has more than doubled, from 31 years in 1900 to 67 years today. India’s and China’s infant mortalities exceeded 190 per 1,000 births in the early 1950s; today they are 62 and 26, respectively. In the developing world, the proportion of the population suffering from chronic hunger declined from 37 percent to 17 percent between 1970 and 2001 despite a 83 percent increase in population. Globally average annual incomes in real dollars have tripled since 1950. Consequently, the proportion of the planet’s developing-world population living in absolute poverty has halved since 1981, from 40 percent to 20 percent”
I am not making these stats up. Either respond to them or admit you were incorrect. If you can’t do either on of those things than you are not worth the time it takes to respond to your ridiculously verbose comments. Finally your comment about how people are living in urban areas now does not fit in with the rest of your argument. Why are these people living more in urban areas? Because of the sweatshops created because of global free trade. You also state that I am against global trade. I want to make it clear that this is not the case. I am for trade, but it has to be fair trade with provisions to protect labour and the environment.

(end italics)

hmm
not sure why that is all in italics… Sorry