Posted on 01/15/2004 6:50:24 AM PST by xsysmgr
Sowell food--for thought.
Let me get in one comment before the usual fists start flying...
I think the real new thing here is the increasing velocity of job dislocation as technology marches on.
So the effect is a compression of what used to happen over 100 years into 5 years' time.
Which means that a generation ago, you held one job for 40 years -- not because the process we are observing now was not happening then, but because it was happening at a glacial pace. So most people wouldn't be touched by it in their working life.
It's not that anything new is happening in the American economy. It's just happening much quicker, so we feel it now. And the velocity will only increase.
You can't have a $500 billion trade deficit am tell us we are gaining jobs - not gonna drink that Kool-aid.
Thomas Sowell vs you.
No contest.
The high level intellectual discussions one finds on FR simply amaze me.
I saw this happen in my first career. The phototypesetting industry gave way to the PC/Mac revolution, and the one-man business I had nurtured with such care went bust almost literally overnight. I was able to jockey the few computer skills I had as a typesetter into a position in the IT business (networking). A generation before, hot-metal typesetters had seen their careers lost to the cold type process. Before that, hand-set type lost out to hot metal. It's a never-ending process, and there's little sense in railing about the injustices of life.
So, just as prairies
get strip-mined, populations
get cut up and used...
No offense intended, but I think the difference between you and Sowell is that while Sowell is a fool, he understands that he's a fool. You're analyzing the situation as if you truly believed you are capable of understanding every element of free market dynamism and forming a reasoned opinion based on that understanding. Sowell knows that this is impossible, because market forces are too complex and varied for the human understanding to account for them all at one time. Therefore, he predicates his analyses on broad principles that have been observed over time in the real world.
Milton Friedman used to illustrate this by asking his readership whether, solely on their own initiative, they could produce a common pencil. It seems simple, of course, but once Friedman is finished, you're inclined think otherwise.
NOUN: 1. One who is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding.
I don't think Sowell is a fool.
Those who are railing about sending our jobs overseas simply do not understand the revolution we are in the middle of. "Globalization" has many shades of meaning, depending on who is ranting at the moment. But the root phenomenon is technological; technology (computer and broadband) is driving everything we are seeing. The debate at the political level is a reflection of the anguish at the grassroots level which is, in turn, a simple effect of the ongoing information revolution, which will not peak.
"Globalization" is inevitable. It cannot be stopped. It is, at the root, science in the service of wealth, which is itself just a symbol for comfort. This is not a moral position, nor a political position. It is simply an observation. Technological advance can be paused, but it cannot be arrested.
I do note that the picture of the world system at the end of time in the Revelation of St. John is of a single system, based on trade and commerce, which has subsumed all other values, including all political divisions. This one world system traffics in every thing, including "men's souls".
You don't have to be an evangelical prophecy loon to observe the teleological force of the information revolution is to subsume EVERYTHING under the power of technology-seeking-wealth.
It will happen. It is happening. It is Man, imposing the condition of his heart onto his external world, inexorably, over the course of 5,000 years, and it was observable in seed form in Palestine in 30 A.D.
End of sermon. Resume your tired perennial debates.
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