01-16-2017, 01:43 AM
(01-16-2017, 12:33 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:Quote:And the fact that third world laborers can improve their standard of living by making twice as much as they did before is a bonus.
On the surface admirable, but does your sympathies extend to the first-world laborers displaced by the same? These sorts of price pressures are just as likely to pull us down to their level as raise them to ours (or, more accurately, make them meet in the middle somewhere). The resource base and waste sinks on which industrial civilization depends are not infinite, and cannot sustain standards of living on a European level, much less an American one. And the experience of the past 40 years suggests that the good-paying jobs we were supposedly giving these things up for never really materialized in sufficient numbers.
There were never any significant number of first world laborers displaced by these third world laborers. Prior to manufacture in the developing world, these products were luxury products or nonexistent. The reason polyester and polyester blend clothes were in fashion in the 1970s wasn't because people actually liked polyester; it was because they couldn't afford 100% cotton and wool. Be glad you didn't have to live through that.
The things that did go overseas were things like auto manufacture. A lot of that has come back, albeit under Japanese ownership. The jobs didn't come back as much because of automation.
The biggest problem, though, is that jobs which used to be "good jobs" no longer are. Back in the 1970s, for example, slaughterhouse workers made $25/hour in today's dollars; now they make half that. There hasn't been any outsourcing there; the wage decline is all attributable to substitution of immigrant and illegal immigrant labor for US born labor.
Quote:Quote:Really I shouldn't have to justify myself on this, though; it should be enough that I prefer them. The purpose of a good economic policy should be to raise everyone's standard of living, not to drag it down to the lowest common denominator.
Like I said, I am not committed to total autarky. If we made a good-faith effort to maximize our own industrial production, particularly the high-value stuff, then I'd be happy to see a certain amount of goods, uneconomic to produce here, manufactured in Guatemala or something. The only further point I'd like to add to this issue before I drop it is that the point of good economy policy by the American government is to maximize the standards of Americans as a whole, and not to optimize the global economy or your or my condition specifically. Of course you might argue that that is exactly what it is doing, which is something reasonable people can disagree over, but the present conditions of trade may be doing much more to create that "lowest common denominator" you mentioned above.
I agree that the policy should be to maximize the standard of living of Americans as a whole. That's one of the reasons why I think it's great to offshore labor intensive manufacture to places where wages are a fraction of ours: we get to have all sorts of nice things that we couldn't otherwise have.
Quote:Quote:Woven clothing - as opposed to knits - are a good example of a product that can't presently be produced in a highly automatable way, and are thus unsuitable to manufacture in the US. I didn't know you were a millenial when we started this conversation, though; perhaps I should have been concentrating on whether you really wanted to be paying $2000 for your smartphone.
I AM a millennial, and a programmer (well, data analyst/programmer) to boot, but otherwise you are woefully off-base. I don't own a smartphone, I gave mine up some time ago, and estimates for manufacturing an Iphone in the States, for instance, would only add about $100 to the price.
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Quote:Perhaps we should be arguing about smartphones, though. Those have extremely dispersed supply chains; I question whether it's realistic to bring them back onshore. The components are also much lower weight per dollar than knit cotton, for example, so proximity matters less.
Referenced above, and apparently Apple has made some noises about reshoring production since the election. Coincidence? Dunno, not a higherup at Apple or Foxconn.
If it makes you happier, here's an alternate price estimate, that ends up around your $2000 mark. I can post more, but most of them seem to cluster closer to the MIT one than to that one. It would also be worthwhile to consider the multiplier effects from those wages and investments being located in the US as well, coupled with changes in the demand from the price. But that's possibly outside the scope of this sort of discussion.
Technology Review estimates are hardly MIT estimates; it's the target audience that's MIT - alums that MIT hopes will donate - not the people writing the magazine. That said, they do make the typical MIT mistake of ignoring business realities. If you increase the $200 worth of component and assembly cost, the other $600 of the price does not stay constant - it increases too, due to inventory costs and requirements for increased margin due to decreased sales. The $2000 estimate is thus more realistic, though smartphones might just disappear from the market entirely. Then we can all go back to Motorola flip phones, which could probably still be made in the US for $800.
So do you have a phone at all? When I replaced my 15 year old phone recently, there didn't appear to be any nonsmartphone options.
Quote:Quote:Then perhaps you shouldn't be arguing on the dress shirt issue.
As you may or may not have noticed, I LIKE arguing. It's really what I'm here for. So, not committed to the dress shirt issue per se, but I still find your arguments about the basic infeasibility of dress shirt manufacture in the US without turning it into something out of Charles Dickens questionable and worthy of contesting.
You could always argue that the singularity will solve the automation issue for dress shirt manufacture.
Quote:Quote:I do think we made a mistake when we somehow allowed CPU chip manufacture slip overseas for them.
Hey, man, that's "free trade", isn't it? At least we still have American lawyers and doctors, amirite?
Quote:I skimmed it. It didn't seem to add anything to what we were already discussing and didn't seem to address the 2000 discontinuity.
You should look a little closer. It showed the absence of a productivity surge and the expansion of manufacturing imports during that time, bolstering my thesis. I'd love to have a discussion about it if you'd like to dispute it, but I'm gonna need a little bit more than "skim" if so.
Apparently unlike you, I'm not here to argue; I'm here to learn. For me, the argument is just a way to make sure I only learn stuff that survives careful scrutiny and is likely to be true. The idea that there was a policy change in 2000 that affected things suddenly was new to me and thus a potential learning experience; the general loss of manufacturing is something I'm familiar with and not worth rehashing for me. Sorry.