Posted on 01/15/2004 6:50:24 AM PST by xsysmgr
"Manufacturing jobs" has become a battle cry of those who oppose free trade and are sounding an alarm about American jobs being exported to lower-wage countries overseas. However, manufacturing jobs are much less of a problem than manufacturing confusion.
Much of what is being said confuses what is true of one sector of the economy with what is true of the economy as a whole. Every modern economy is constantly changing in technology and organization. This means that resources -- human resources as well as natural resources and other inputs -- are constantly being sent off in new directions as things are being produced in new ways.
This happens whether there is or is not free international trade. At the beginning of the 20th century, 10 million American farmers and farm laborers produced the food to feed a population of 76 million people. By the end of the century, fewer than 2 million people on the farms were feeding a population of more than 250 million. In other words, more than 8 million agricultural jobs were "lost."
Between 1990 and 1995, more than 17 million American workers lost their jobs. But there were never 17 million workers unemployed during this period, any more than the 8 million agricultural workers were unemployed before.
People moved on to other jobs. Unemployment rates in fact hit new lows in the 1990s. None of this is rocket science. But when the very same things happen in the international economy, it is much easier to spread alarm and manufacture confusion.
There is no question that many computer programming jobs have moved from the United States to India. But this is just a half-truth, which can be worse than a lie. As management consultant Peter Drucker points out in the current issue of Fortune magazine, there are also foreign jobs moving to the United States.
In Drucker's words, "Nobody seems to realize that we import twice or three times as many jobs as we export. I'm talking about the jobs created by foreign companies coming into the U.S.," such as Japanese automobile plants making Toyotas and Hondas on American soil.
"Siemens alone has 60,000 employees in the United States," Drucker points out. "We are exporting low-skill, low-paying jobs but are importing high-skill, high-paying jobs."
None of this is much consolation if you are one of the people being displaced from a job that you thought would last indefinitely. But few jobs last indefinitely. You cannot advance the standard of living by continuing to do the same things in the same ways.
Progress means change, whether those changes originate domestically or internationally. Even when a given job carries the same title, often you cannot hold that job while continuing to do things the way they were done 20 years ago -- or, in the case of computers, 5 years ago.
The grand fallacy of those who oppose free trade is that low-wage countries take jobs away from high-wage countries. While that is true for some particular jobs in some particular cases, it is another half-truth that is more misleading than an outright lie.
While American companies can hire computer programmers in India to replace higher paid American programmers, that is because of India's outstanding education in computer engineering. By and large, however, the average productivity of Indian workers is about 15 percent of that of American workers.
In other words, if you hired Indian workers and paid them one-fifth of what you paid American workers, it would cost you more to get a given job done in India. That is the rule and computer programming is the exception.
Facts are blithely ignored by those who simply assume that low-wage countries have an advantage in international trade. But high-wage countries have been exporting to low-wage countries for centuries. The vast majority of foreign investments by American companies are in high-wage countries, despite great outcries about how multinational corporations are "exploiting" Third World workers.
Apparently facts do not matter to those who are manufacturing confusion about manufacturing jobs.
Well, then, if you and I agree on this, what was the point of your Post #56 to me?
Although there has been technological innovation applied to the practice of manufacturing overseas, it was not the cause of it.
Wouldn't the economy collapse if we all did that? It seems like our economy is entirely based on debt and borrowing.
What, then, was the cause of manufacturing overseas? What made it possible for dirt farmers in China to enter factories and begin producing cheap goods? Surely they didn't use their wooden plows and crude pick axes to build and run those semi-automated assembly lines.
I'm not trying to intentionally be obtuse or facetious. To me, though, it seems obvious that the same technological innovations that allowed unskilled workers here in the U.S. to mass-manufacture goods also allowed unskilled workers in other parts of the world to do the same. The manufacturers replicate the assembly line process elsewhere, and the Chinese or Malaysian or Brazilian workers do roughly the same job, for less pay.
Demand for cheap goods was the ultimate cause, I suppose, but without the technology (that the 3rd world borrowed from us), they peasnts would probably still be farming dirt, wouldn't they?
Sure, but why is our gov't more concerned with them than us?
That's one way to look at it. And the great thing about capitalism, as opposed to any other type of economy, is that it provides a mechanism to redress those grievances. To wit, start your own enterprise based upon your own ideals. Good luck (I'm not being sarcastic).
FWIW, I completely agree with you. I'll also add another law, the "goodness" of Liberty. If a "solution" involves a constraint on liberty, it isn't really a solution at all, just a continuation of the problem.
An interesting Hegelian debate; do men shape history or does history shape men?
I've come down on the latter. I think history is a force and men either ride it or get buried by it. Its easy to believe that IBM and GM and AT&T are creating history if you've never worked at one of those companies. For those of us that have there's no doubt that the Exec's are mostly reacting to market forces, or at best, trying to get in front of them.
Your concern vis-a-vis St. John is also poignant and my questions are; where does it end? does it have to end? or will it begin to unravel just like the empire he was so frightened of?
Individuals
can vote libertarian
and be self-righteous
about dissenting
from the "corrupt" two parties.
But their votes don't change
anything at all.
Solving ethical problems
just doesn't address
political ones...
Corporatism inflicts
political grief.
Our founding fathers
didn't solve their "tax problems"
as ethics issues,
they chopped away at
the whole political root
choking their freedom...
It is men who drive history, not something outside us. Technology is just the storehouse of men's tools. And men make tools to, first, survive, and then, to get the life they want.
So when I say technology is driving globalization all I mean is that what men want is in the direction of globalization, and men will go through the dissolution of national borders to get what they want, no matter what.
The real interesting question is not "what entity is driving events?" but "what do men want?" This question is nothing more than Aristotle's question of the final cause, or destiny.
The first, the root assertion of the New Testament happens also to be one with which we can empirically agree or disagree, using all the data of human culture. That first assertion is about men: they want things they shouldn't want. The "heart", which is the organ which WANTS, is broken.
If you find the New Testament reliable in an area where you can look around you and either agree or disagree (is the wanting organ in man broken or not?) then you proceed to trust it in further areas where you cannot look around and test it (i.e. God sent His Son to deliver us).
So, what do men want? Answer: They want pleasure. After they have solved the problem of survival, from that moment on they start making tools to get pleasure. Money is a shorthand symbol of convenience for pleasure. A free-market economy is simply the most efficient means to allocate resources to produce maximum efficiency, and efficiency is defined by the end, the final cause, the destiny, which is itself chosen not by economics but by the heart of man: pleasure.
This motive is the force of history. (I don't mean to say that all men are like this, nor that most men seek pleasure at every waking moment, nor that all pleasure is bad. Just that it is strong enough that the general tendency of mankind is governed by it.)
How did we get from a discussion of manufacturing to this theologizing, you ask? Simply because I look around me and see "globalization" as the logical and predictable course derived from the laws of economics, facilitated by technology, which is the tool of men's wants, which cannot be thwarted by any other known force.
Those among us who want to argue about "globalization" as if it is purely a question of economic pragmatism ("is it good economics in the long run?") are amazingly shallow.
"Globalization" is a process predictable by anybody who happens to have the oddity of twin interests in economics and the New Testament.
So, your "razor" cuts
away Hegel's "history,"
but it doesn't cut
the concept of "God?"
Your blade is convenient, it
cuts just where you want...
The razor cuts away all unecessary entities. What is the criterion of necessity? An explanation of all the data, of course. My personal opinion is that there is no alternative hypothesis which explains ALL the data. I'm sure we'll disagree, but most arguments about the existence of God are misplaced; the participants usually don't understand what they are really arguing about. The real debate is PRIOR to the razor, in the area where data is either preserved in the set or edited out of it.
The razor only cuts "god" away if he is not necessary in an explanation of all the data. Many people think he is necessary, many think he is not. That is the 5,000 year old debate.
William of Ockham was a Christian. You can agree or disagree with that conclusion, but to think that the rule he articulated automatically cuts out an unseen god is not to understand Ockham, or his logic, or the subsequent 800 years' debate.
I think the razor cuts "history" away because there is already an observed entity available to reside in the position of cause for the historical effects. I call that entity the "heart", after biblical language; you may call it "genome" or even "blip" if you like, but we don't need another entity called"history" for this specific set of effects.
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