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A Malaise Speech for the Current Time
#33
(05-29-2019, 12:12 PM)Mikebert Wrote:
(04-05-2017, 08:41 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: But I have caught onto something:

Trade Deficit down, American Workers winning

Maybe. Here is US-china trade deficit for the first quarter of each year from 2001 to 2019. 2019 is down from 2018, but 2018 was an unusually high spike, reflecting massive Chinese buying before the first tariffs went into effect. Averaging the last two values gives 1.65% of GDP, same as the two years before. We'll need more time to see any effects it would seem. 

Note I support a Chinese trade war so I want Trump to succeed here, but I fear he has already lost Sad

Year              Def              % of GDP
2007              57.1              1.58
2008              55.2              1.50
2009              50.4              1.40
2010              51.7              1.38
2011              60.3              1.55
2012              66.0              1.63
2013              69.2              1.65
2014              69.6              1.59
2015              83.2              1.83
2016              77.9              1.67
2017              78.9              1.62
2018              91.1              1.78
2019              80.0              1.52

I'm not sure that a trade war means much anymore.  Yes, the Chinese have stolen (actually demanded and received) intellectual property in abundance, but why is that not the fault of our own industrial community? They wanted into the Chinese market badly enough that they handed this stuff over -- always short term thinking by us and the long game by them.  And yes, they have used espionage as well, but we still line-up to do business with them.

But isn't the bigger issue the one Andy Yang is raising: intelligent automation?  Will any of this matter if virtually all jobs are automated into the ether?  What constitutes trade when our robots and their robots are the only ones competing?  For that matter, what constitutes a good life?  

Between ACG and an inexorably changing economy, we have a lot to worry about and very little time to implement fixes that are, at most, fuzzy concepts.  Our children and theirs will not think highly of us if we ignore these elephants, and spend our time dithering -- a bad habit we've adopted in the last 40-50 years.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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RE: A Malaise Speech for the Current Time - by David Horn - 05-30-2019, 10:06 AM

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