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Does the place that gets "more stuff, cheaper" have a BIG?Question: Is there ever a point where, "more stuff, cheaper" isn't a good thing for a society or or country?
Does the place that gets "more stuff, cheaper" have a BIG?Question: Is there ever a point where, "more stuff, cheaper" isn't a good thing for a society or or country?
Yup, I read it. Like you, it conveniently ignores what the TPP text actually says and simply labels it a"free trade agreement".Did you read the article? It specifically addresses TPP.
More handguns might not be a great idea.Question: Is there ever a point where, "more stuff, cheaper" isn't a good thing for a society or or country?
You're saying that Chinese workers are currently commanding higher wages than before, and now it's Thailand's turn. When the poorest workers around the world are lifted out of poverty, how is that not a good thing?Btw, lots of low cost manufacturing is leaving or has left southern China for inland China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. I've been through shoe factories and textile good factories in the free economic zones there that are at like 10% capacity or are note now closed. Semi-skilled Chinese labor (like Japanese and Taiwanese labor before) has increased in cost so much that it is no longer the low cost leader despite great infrastructure and operational expertise there.
The race to the bottom continues.
Actually, this is a more fundamentally interesting question than my previous answer gave it credit for.Question: Is there ever a point where, "more stuff, cheaper" isn't a good thing for a society or or country?
Yeah, a lot also migrated to Ningbo and Shanghai, from where there is a move going on to particularly Xingang, Tianjin (Hebei SEC) and Chongqing. But moving inland (e.g. Chongqing) increases the logistics cost and lead time so that makes Southern Asia become attractive again to US and European buyers. If you look at what is produced these days in the Southern SECs it's mostly durable goods where before it was the cheap stuff. Now it's dishwashers, tvs, computers, iPhones etcBtw, lots of low cost manufacturing is leaving or has left southern China for inland China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. I've been through shoe factories and textile good factories in the free economic zones there that are at like 10% capacity or are note now closed. Semi-skilled Chinese labor (like Japanese and Taiwanese labor before) has increased in cost so much that it is no longer the low cost leader despite great infrastructure and operational expertise there.
The race to the bottom continues.
The migrant workforce and restrictions on internal migration might make China a more unique case than is generally thought.Actually, this is a more fundamentally interesting question than my previous answer gave it credit for.
One of the apparent paradoxes in economic development is that when a country increases its wealth and its standard of living, it doesn't necessarily increase its happiness. Based on surveys where people are asked to rate their overall life satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 10, and perhaps other more sophisticated methods I'm not aware of, people in China today do not seem any happier (and may be slightly less happy) than they were a few decades ago before they started making such economic progress.
I could riff on this idea and get into all kinds of tangents, but for now, I'll just post this link to an idea from Bhutan that seems kind of interesting.
It's all related. Sowell's theory is based on an academic view where "this industry in the U.S. has to close shop" and "jobs are outsourced to China" have neutral value. This stuff isnt off topic, it's the point of the quote you posted. They simply state a fact and are not good or bad.I'm not really sure what this means.
Seems pretty obvious to me. If goods are produced in a place that has slave wages with zero environmental regulation, then the competition is inherently unfair and no amount of efficiency is going to overcome it.I'm not really sure what this means.
Sorry Tim...."good articles" don't assume the premise that TPP is a real "free trade" agreement. They can't because it isn't.Good article on why Trump and Sanders are so wrong on this issue:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/11/donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-are-delusional-on-trade-policy.html
I like it, except when he veers off into his home ownership argument, which seems completely unsupported. I feel like this is a good description of a lot of us (including me): "Yet most people today, says Sedlacek, work in jobs they do not much like, to buy goods they do not much value – the opposite of any idea of the good life, Aristotelian or otherwise."Article that gets to some of my points: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/consumerism-reached-peak-stuff-search-for-happiness
A wonderful business to be in right now is the self storage business. Those things are going up everywhere it seems. We buy all kinds of stuff for our huge houses and that's still not enough, so we buy more and it flows over into these storage units because we can't part with it, but we also don't want it.I like it, except when he veers off into his home ownership argument, which seems completely unsupported. I feel like this is a good description of a lot of us (including me): "Yet most people today, says Sedlacek, work in jobs they do not much like, to buy goods they do not much value – the opposite of any idea of the good life, Aristotelian or otherwise."
I'd never seen that article before, so I'm pretty sure I didn't post it.As for TPP, I read the article Maurile posted.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/11/donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-are-delusional-on-trade-policy.html
Maurile, can you point to the data points in it that prove your point. Not what the author says in the article, but the information within the data points the article sites to give hard proof that free trade is good enough to overcome the issues I have with it above?
By 'fairness,' do you mean eliminating comparative advantage? If so, can you explain why such fairness is desirable at all? (Otherwise, what do you mean by it?)If goods are produced in a place that has slave wages with zero environmental regulation, then the competition is inherently unfair and no amount of efficiency is going to overcome it.
:By 'fairness,' do you mean eliminating comparative advantage? If so, can you explain why such fairness is desirable at all? (Otherwise, what do you mean by it?)
I understand why we'd want other countries to have sensible environmental policies (and to prohibit actual slavery), and I understand why we might use trade negotiations to induce them to implement such policies ... but in that case, the goal is sensible environmental policies, not fairness. 'Fairness,' in this context, sounds like a pretext for the kind of protectionism Bastiat parodied in his candlestick makers' petition against the sun.
It sounds like you're just fine with our businesses having to go toe-to toe, in our own marketplaces. with foreign companies who have little to no environmental regulations to add to their costs, extremely poor working conditions and near slave labor?Maurile Tremblay said:By 'fairness,' do you mean eliminating comparative advantage? If so, can you explain why such fairness is desirable at all? (Otherwise, what do you mean by it?)
I understand why we'd want other countries to have sensible environmental policies (and to prohibit actual slavery), and I understand why we might use trade negotiations to induce them to implement such policies ... but in that case, the goal is sensible environmental policies, not fairness. 'Fairness,' in this context, sounds like a pretext for the kind of protectionism Bastiat parodied in his candlestick makers' petition against the sun.
I completely agree. Free Trade is like Libertarianism, it sounds great in theory but it never works in practice because the world is inherently unfair.It sounds like you're just fine with our businesses having to go toe-to toe, in our own marketplaces. with foreign companies who have little to no environmental regulations to add to their costs, extremely poor working conditions and near slave labor?
All free trade is not equal.
The toll of tariffs
Historians find yet another way protectionism harms development
Apr 16th 2016 | CAMBRIDGE | From the print edition
Too much rolling in the hay
ECONOMISTS have long argued that tariffs are bad for a country’s development in the long run. They raise prices for consumers, steer capital away from the most productive investments and breed inefficiency and rent-seeking by limiting competition from abroad. To that long list add another baleful consequence: by coddling farmers, agricultural tariffs encourage them to have more children and to educate them less, hampering economic growth for decades into the future.
So, at any rate, suggests a paper presented at the conference of Britain’s Economic History Society in Cambridge earlier this month. The authors, Vincent Bignon of the Bank of France and Cecilia García-Peñalosa of Aix-Marseille School of Economics, look at the relationship between agricultural tariffs and demography in France in the 1890s. In particular, they look at how the Méline tariff on grain, which was introduced in 1892, affected France’s demographic transition.
In this section
Reprints
- Putin’s right-hand woman
- Who next?
- The key’s in Sin City
- A heavy load
- The green light
- System says slow
- The toll of tariffs
- Terms of enlargement
A demographic transition is a country’s gradual shift from high fertility and mortality to lower rates of both. Economists see it as an important factor in development. If a greater proportion of children survive, parents tend to have fewer of them and to invest more in their health and education. That, in turn, increases a country’s human capital and thus its growth prospects.
The paper shows that this process can be delayed by agricultural tariffs. The Méline tariff raised food prices by more than a quarter, as well as boosting agricultural wages. The authors found that fertility rates rose and primary-school attendance fell in the districts that benefited most from the tariff. This was because higher farm wages enabled parents in rural areas to have more children. It also reduced the relative return to education by increasing wages for (uneducated) agricultural labourers, thereby discouraging parents from sending their children to school.
As a result, Mr Bignon and Ms García-Peñalosa argue, the tariff strongly reduced human-capital formation in late-19th-century France. Their results show that in areas with the most employment in agriculture, the Méline tariff halted a century-long decline in the birth rate and set educational development back 15 years. This may go some way to explaining why the economy of Britain, which did not protect agriculture at all at the time, outperformed France’s during the early 20th century.
There is some evidence of a similar relationship in the modern world. Studies of the impact of agricultural tariffs in sub-Saharan Africa suggest that they encourage subsistence farming rather than prompting export industries to grow. Just as in France, that is likely to boost fertility and dent enrolment rates in schools. Farmers may like the sound of agricultural protectionism, but it does not do their children any good at all.
How are the lives of people in these countries going to get better without jobs?It sounds like you're just fine with our businesses having to go toe-to toe, in our own marketplaces. with foreign companies who have little to no environmental regulations to add to their costs, extremely poor working conditions and near slave labor?
All free trade is not equal.
If we are going to be in the world market and sticking our noses in everywhere, it should be perfectly acceptable for us (the United States) demand of these foreign governments adequate working conditions for their citizens. We should also not have a problem protecting our workers while these countries get up to speed with those demands. I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the road "price" became pretty much the only standard we measured value and fairness by. Which is unfortunate because it's one of many factors and I would argue not even the top 5 from a morality/ethical perspective.How are the lives of people in these countries going to get better without jobs?
There's a problem if an American has no more skills to offer than an uneducated foreign worker. I prefer to focus on improving the skills of American workers.
Because in the absence of similar regulations, COGS for manufactured goods simply cannot be competitive with other countries' COGS. That leaves the elimination of large-scale manufacturing of goods in the U.S. as a very possible outcome.Maurile Tremblay said:By 'fairness,' do you mean eliminating comparative advantage? If so, can you explain why such fairness is desirable at all? (Otherwise, what do you mean by it?)
I understand why we'd want other countries to have sensible environmental policies (and to prohibit actual slavery), and I understand why we might use trade negotiations to induce them to implement such policies ... but in that case, the goal is sensible environmental policies, not fairness. 'Fairness,' in this context, sounds like a pretext for the kind of protectionism Bastiat parodied in his candlestick makers' petition against the sun.
There are uneducated Americans, too. They're allowed to have jobs.How are the lives of people in these countries going to get better without jobs?
There's a problem if an American has no more skills to offer than an uneducated foreign worker. I prefer to focus on improving the skills of American workers.
BINGOHenry Ford said:There are uneducated Americans, too. They're allowed to have jobs.
I'd say the opposite. I understand why we'd want to keep manufacturing our own tanks, jets, and missiles; but I don't see why manufacturing our own vacuum cleaners or stereo systems has anything to do with that. (Maybe we don't want to become dependent on any single country for our vital stereo-system needs, but there will likely always be plenty of countries willing to sell them to us, so that doesn't really seem to be an issue.)It is undesirable that the United States not have a strong manufacturing base. The loss of large-scale manufacturing to other countries makes the U.S. vulnerable to political forces in other countries solely to keep our economy running.
A country that does not engage in large scale manufacturing trades primarily in services and raw materials. A country that trades primarily in services and raw materials is significantly more vulnerable to market fluctuations and international political concerns. Manufacturing is an economic stabilizer, particularly in volatile economic times.I'd say the opposite. I understand why we'd want to keep manufacturing our own tanks, jets, and missiles; but I don't see why manufacturing our own vacuum cleaners or stereo systems has anything to do with that. (Maybe we don't want to become dependent on any single country for our vital stereo-system needs, but there will likely always be plenty of countries willing to sell them to us, so that doesn't really seem to be an issue.)
I think what would render us vulnerable to political forces in other countries would be (a) a weak economy, (b) a weak military, or (c) weak political alliances with other nations. The last of those is probably most important.
I think a robust economy that takes full advantage of international trade is an important part of guarding against all of those things. A strong military depends on a strong economy to fund it. A strong economy depends on foreign trade to power it.
And I think it's indisputable that countries that trade with each other a lot are much less likely to go to war against each other, and much more likely to support each other in skirmishes against others.
None of these are why I am resistant to our current and proposed "trade deals". Well, maybe, if I try hard I can fit my position into the "selfish" theory.An interesting article concerning attitude towards globalization and international trade
Why Voters Don't Buy it when Economists Say Global Trade is Good
They aren't going to pass that on even with tariffs.Without getting into the "TL'DR" range, that's my issue with these deals. Yeah, they are great for business, but that's generally where the economic analysis ends in a lot of these conversations. We (at least I) don't trust the companies to pass the winnings/benefits to the rest of us via salary/compensation. There's little to no loyalty to the worker by the company and that seems to go unaddressed in most of these analyses.
To be fair....the band of usual suspects is void from this thread....give it timeI just stumbled on this thread and I have to say I am astonished at how polite and thoughtful it has been. Congrats.
I am 100% in favor of free trade. That doesn't mean I don't think these deals like TPP aren't fully loaded with special side deals to protect the well-connected.
“For a long time, Bangladesh – whose garment industry has become almost synonymous with sweatshops – has been used as a critique of capitalism. And for an equally long time, capitalists have said this is a process countries have to go through and in a few years Bangladesh will reap a reward of economic growth and development. So it’s relevant to hear that Bangladesh is booming, with per capita income tripling in a decade, poverty rates cut in half, near food self-sufficiency, and the UN graduating them out of “least developed country” status.” (Link)Some worthwhile articles on sweatshops by Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof.Can you expound on this? Are you referring to so-called sweat shops in third-world countries? Those jobs are generally seen as something to aspire to in those countries, and refusing to buy those products would make the people in those jobs worse off, not better.Completely anti free-trade with any nations that utilize slave-like labor. We shouldn't import anything from them.
Pretty decent programmers too, I know from experience“For a long time, Bangladesh – whose garment industry has become almost synonymous with sweatshops – has been used as a critique of capitalism. And for an equally long time, capitalists have said this is a process countries have to go through and in a few years Bangladesh will reap a reward of economic growth and development. So it’s relevant to hear that Bangladesh is booming, with per capita income tripling in a decade, poverty rates cut in half, near food self-sufficiency, and the UN graduating them out of “least developed country” status.” (Link)
The food aspect is promising.“For a long time, Bangladesh – whose garment industry has become almost synonymous with sweatshops – has been used as a critique of capitalism. And for an equally long time, capitalists have said this is a process countries have to go through and in a few years Bangladesh will reap a reward of economic growth and development. So it’s relevant to hear that Bangladesh is booming, with per capita income tripling in a decade, poverty rates cut in half, near food self-sufficiency, and the UN graduating them out of “least developed country” status.” (Link)