Report Card for Donald Trump

[Warren Dew]

(01-11-2017, 09:07 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-11-2017, 08:48 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-11-2017, 04:27 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Now you're just making things up.  The first Unimation robots went out to GE in 1961, and the PUMA was made in 1978.  And yet the global number of manufacturing workers has not shrunk, has it?  The US numbers peaked in 1979, but plateaued for 20 years, and didn't start to tumble until 2000, which I maintain had much more to do with trade policy than it did automation.  It is presently increasing.  The global number of manufacturing workers didn't shrink during this period either.  In any event, the use of machines to boost human productivity in manufacturing has been going on for at least 200 years, i

Out of curiosity, what policy changes do you think caused the labor market shifts in around 2000?

At a glance, I'd say that it wasn't so much anything that happened at/around the year 2000 so much as the effect of the Chinese opening up hitting critical mass.  I mean, you could point to its accession into the WTO, or the continuing advance of productivity, stimulus to boost consumption in the States, etc.  But I really think the sudden surge of this large, reasonably high productivity (in comparison to, you know, South Africa or something) country soaring from being the size of Italy to being bigger than Japan in a ten year span.  It's not like there wasn't an expanding service sector in the West, or that the other Asian tigers from Japan on hadn't followed basically the same model, but it was the sheer scale of it from such a small base as such speed that really did it.

I mean, look at what happened to the commodity markets (not just oil, which had other issues viz peaking conventional production, Middle Eastern wars, etc. but all of them) during that time, versus the 90s.  It just became this enormous roaring machine sucking in raw materials and intermediate goods and cranking out manufactured widgets for export (along with an enormous amount of internal improvements powered by foreign capital seeking better returns than in the West).

Of course, that's, just like, my opinion, man.

Thanks for the answer, but that doesn't sound like a policy change to me, and isn't really consistent with the apparent discontinuity in slope in 2000 or so.