Particularly now, that we are doing exactly that. Hollowing out our economy, eliminating jobs and our own industry. At a very, rapid pace.
Giving away our riches, and our productivity.
We look away, and debate everything (but) the important issue of destroying our very own industry.
Yet economists, seem determined to avoid the reality.
Why? Is economics simply a set of old beliefs, passed down from the past, believed to be some primal truth?
Almost like alchemy? What happens when something happens which is not in the theory?
Does economics then go into simple denial? Hands over the ears, softly repeating "la la la I can't hear you..."
(I would posit, based on current evidence, that is exactly what is happening)
If national de-industrialization is not in the theories, it simply does not exist?...
What good are the theories then?
No!
You don’t need a study ,, just look at England.
I don’t like globally managed trade through international trade groups. Trade should be a free for all affair with trade deals made and broken between individual nations.
That said, we still need to acknowledge our own fault in the current mess. Things like over taxation, over regulation and over unionization drives business into the arms of the trade groups.
A central government takes the reins and controls the people and there is personal freedom no more.
It's obvious via history time and time again.
Maybe it’s the best way to achieve a “New World Oder” and a global centralized government. I still gag when I remember when George Bush Sr. mentioned it. President Reagan really screwed the pooch when he gave that family of democRat-lites an opportunity to infest the body politic.
This is where free-market concept clashes with any patriotic idea (American exceptionalism, buy-America first, and so on). Both concepts, interestingly, were supposed to be the foundation for American conservatism.
If protectionism and tariffs are a good idea then we should introduce them between the states.
Sure and gravity too. Global warming was an idea invented in the 1980s after the sale of global cooling did not win the statists their way.
The benefits of trade have been known for over 100 years if not 100s of years.
Of course, if you don’t think gravity is true, you can always jump out of a 10th floor window, fly down and save yourself all that wasted time waiting for elevators. Similarly if you don’t think there are benefits from trade, you can make your own shoes, build your own house, build your own car, sew your own clothes etc. As with jumping out the 10th floor window, you will see if your life is better off if you never trade. And the good news is unlike fighting gravity you will probably live if you give up before your bad diet and self medication without any meds produces by someone else soon enough.
The concept of free trade is based on the idea that some nations are better suited to producing certain things than other nations. Nations with fertile land and low labor costs are best suited to agricultural products while nations with mountainous terrain and rich ore deposits are best suited to mining, for example. Free trade allows each nation to exploit its natural advantages and provide cheaper products to all the other nations than they could provide for themselves. Due to politics, America has, in many cases, forced other nations to allow our products in and still artificially supported American products making foreign products less competitive. Farm supports such as milk, produce and corn, for example, keep some American products cheaper than some foreign products. In addition, illegal aliens are allowed in to America to keep American produce cheap.
Deindustrialization is due to many complex factors. Lawsuits, taxes, labor laws, unions the EPA, OSHA, socialization using the workplace and ever increasing regulation are driving American companies to produce products where it is not only cheaper, but legalistically safer for the company. Chinese labor won’t strike or sue for sexual discrimination. No Chinese EPA inspector will shut down your entire plant on a whim. (Not if you’ve paid off the higher level authorities.)
Our government is the source of all America’s economic problems. Crony capitalism, laws favoring plaintiffs and excessively expensive regulation compliance are just the tips of many icebergs crowding the course companies must navigate. When or if we resolve these issues business will flood back to American shores. Until then, we can only try to survive.
There is good and bad in everything; the law of unintended consequences is in full play.
You need to check your basic premise. You are assuming that the U.S. is falling behind in manufacturing.
It's not. The U.S. is the world's leading manufacturer and has been since about 1947 and perhaps earlier.
What's changed is the mix of things we manufacture. Some things where we were once dominant are gone forever, conceded to the lower labor costs of China, India and Indonesia.
But we run circles around the Chinese and others in the areas of aircraft, machine tools, turbines, equipment for construction and mining and medical and scientific equipment.
Are the Chinese catching up? Will they pass us in total manufacturing? Probably, but they will be doing it with a population that is 4 times that of the U.S. And they will be making toys and shoes and we will be building 747s.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/issues10/
I’ll comment briefly:
With the industrial revolution, the trading areas of the world tended to specialize according to the following pattern:
(A) the more advanced economies specialized in manufacturing and
(B) the less advanced economies in minerals, agriculture, ranching, forestry and fishing
By the late 20th century, the global economy could no longer be adequately described by more versus less developed countries.
Nowadays, there are three different kinds of countries: high income countries (or, highly advanced economies), middle income countries and low income countries.
The middle income countries of today are about where the U.S. and U.K. were around 1900, while we are at a much higher level of income (albeit a level of income that is under stress because of creeping socialism).
As a result, we have a more complex pattern of trade in the world.
(A) high income countries tend to specialize in knowledge-based services and high-wage manufacturing (where items such as farm equipment and airplanes are made one at a time by teams of workers heavy in mechanics and engineers)
(B) middle income countries in low-wage, assembly ling manufacturing and
(C) low income countries in mining, agriculture, etc.
To get an idea of the impact of the relocation of assembly line production, consider what happened in New England from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, when the textile industry relocated to the southern states.
New England wasn’t made poor by this relocation, although many workers of the region found themselves challenged by the disappearance of the jobs they had. Rather, New England moved to a higher level of income, as did the Southern states to which the textile industry relocated.
So, while the transition is difficult, and we should always be mindful of this, the effect are, in net, beneficial to each of the regions or countries involved and, in the long-run, everybody is better off.
De-industrialization has occurred in the USA because the USA has taxed and regulated business more than in other countries.American businesses located in America cnnot compete. With comparable tax and regulation environments American workers are more productive in the USA than workers anywhere else. But we do not have comparable environments. American business have far greater costs other than labor than do businesses in many other countries. American workers produce more per dollar of labor input than Indonesians do. It is cheaper and more profitable to produce goods in America except that the American government imposes more extraneous costs on American business. It becomes more profitable or it is the only way to be profitable to move production offshore where government imposed costs are less.
Free Trade is alot like capitalism.
It works.
Nothing like global warming non-sense.
Over regulated overtaxed economies find it difficult to compete in the international economy.Which is exactly what the US has become.
“Yet economists, seem determined to avoid the reality. “
True. They never seem to notice that no matter how cheap the goods are, they won’t be purchased by people who have no jobs.
“If national de-industrialization is not in the theories, it simply does not exist?...”
They imagine that it is irrelevant. In their “thinking”, they seem to think that people can be retooled, rather like machines, able to change careers literally at will, with no negative impact whatsoever. They also imagine that somehow everyone will have a job shipping around said cheap imported goods, or selling them to each other, if they bother to think about it at all. They tend to see things like industrial production as “its all the same, just the location is different”, while ignoring the effects, or dismissing them as temporary.
“How is it, such a basic question is not addressed by economists? Those very people whose job is, to understand and study, our economy.”
Academics tend to live in a fishbowl, circling around their doctoral thesis and biting each other like sharks. Notably, academics also don’t care much for the nation-state as a concept, preferring a more ‘universal’ outlook, as they would see it. (That’s one-world globalist scumthink, to the rest of us.) If the evidence points some other direction than their predetermined conclusion, they ignore it.
“Does economics then go into simple denial? Hands over the ears, softly repeating “la la la I can’t hear you...”
Eventually, reality will step in. On our current course, it will break us. Our leaders, educated by these same academics I mentioned above, do not really believe there will be any consequences of it. Destitution will be the end result, but as I mentioned, they don’t care about the concept of the nation-state. The US is for them just another place on a map.