"All of this was more or less to plan, by the way. Barack Obama represents many things, but more than anything he represents the total takeover of the Democratic party by the Brownstown Brahmin class. "
Why should they say they are sorry? Those who promoted these policies suffered nothing, nothing personally or professionally. In fact, they are still held up as Serious Thinkers and Policy Heavyweights.
One even might say that the policieis were entirely intentional, and the effects were consciously downplayed as to make passage easier.
vid. The War On Iraq and The War On Syria. Turning these countries into failed states was entirely intentional, but the neocons could not say so at the time, hence the risible "weapons of mass destruction" and "human rights" lies.
EDIT: shoulda been "War on Libya", although Syria also is an instructive example.
Of course the policies were intentional, because these people believe they are the right policies. There's nothing nefarious about any of it. Global trade has massive benefits in terms of getting cheap products in the west and increasing living standards around the globe. The people in favor of these policies may have different moral tradeoffs than some Americans, but it's silly to think they were intentionally ruining anyone's lives. When you get to the top of the pyramid of power you have to make choices, and all of those choices result in tradeoffs for someone below you. It's the nature of the beast at the top.
And I don't think anyone wanted Iraq to become a failed state. The fact that it became one was a drag on the entire Republican party/neoliberal consensus. I know a couple people who served in Iraq near the beginning of the war, and they're opinion based on their training/preparation before deployment seemed to be that the military truly did not expect the type of resistance they received. They had a completely unrealistic idea that they could topple the regime and just put a new one in place without complete societal breakdown, and they were dead wrong about that. They made up excuses to get us into that war, but they did not want what they got. What they got was total failure, and they thought they would achieve total success.
But why did they want to topple the regime in Iraq? Is your position that if people genuinely believe that "global trade has massive benefits" around the globe, then it is acceptable to invade a sovereign country? And that the only wrong step was that the Bush administration turned out to be wrong about succeeding?
What? No. I'm not defending the Iraq war at all. It was a completely horrible decision that never should have been made. It's the defining foreign policy mistake of the US in the 21st century. I'm only arguing the goal was absolutely not to create a "failed state". They wanted a new regime favorable to the US to succeed in the country.
Backing rebels fighting against regimes that are aligned against you is a logical choice. That those countries could result in failed states as a result of those rebellions was probably very well considered in those cases, because the US invested nothing in propping up a real alternative compared to what they did in Iraq. They likely chose to do it anyway as they saw an opportunity to overturn longstanding US enemies without directly involving our military in much of the fighting which seemed like it could end up with a result favorable to the US. (yes we fought in Syria against ISIS, but not directly against Assad out in the open). It was a gamble, they knew it was a gamble, and everyone lost.
But we invested hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq in an attempt to NOT make it a failed state. It was definitely not the goal.
Those states are not "aligned against" you. Rather we designated them as enemies, and we dropped them as quickly as we could as soon as the state failure happened.
"overturn longstanding US enemies" Saddam Hussein was an ally of the US. They supported him in the war with Iran, and let's not look to closely as to why that war even got started. These are all "enemies" of the neocons running US foreign policy, regardless of Democrats, or Republicans in the White House of Congress. What makes them enemies of the neocons is worth pondering on.
"I'm only arguing the goal was absolutely not to create a "failed state".
They wanted a new regime favorable to the US to succeed in the country."
My point is that I can't see any purpose to the invasion except to bring Iraq into line with Middle Eastern regimes that are favorable to US trade, so whether or not they intended to create a failed state is beside the point.
Its memory holed now, I should have kept it, but state department published a list of 122 reasons to prosecute the Iraq war. They were all just cause reasons alone. Our nuclear non proliferation treaty obligations to Kuwait, Saddam sending assassins against former president Carter, assassins against George H W Bush, The Big Gun, funding suicide bombers (families after the fact), like I said: 122 items, each a just cause for war.
Even Krugman has admitted that he completely underestimated the scale of job losses in the US due to deindustrialization and offshoring.
Were these mistakes intentional? Of course not. But they are still mistakes and we should consider whether we want to keep the people who screwed up so badly in power given their abysmal track record.
The neoliberal economic and the neoconservative military efforts did not continue *decade after decade* without a great deal of deliberately uncaring, and often downright malevolent, intent from the people at the tippy-top and/or those powers behind the scenes. Sure, their activities produced many unintended destructive consequences that surprised even them, but these people are simply not that stupid. They are, instead, *mostly* psychopaths, sociopaths, and wanna-be's suppressing their better natures, driving the policy zeitgeist. Their intent has always been to control and impoverish the lesser, and now-soon useless, eaters. (To take just a single well-verified example, you might want to ask yourself how the hell Operation Northwoods ever made it to JFK's eyes.) This attitude has been repeated countless times throughout history, no matter what the forms of governments.
What tangible goal did the neocons hope to achieve by creating failed states? A refugee crisis? What American interest did that serve? If anything, the collapse of those states rendered it impossible to build exploitable markets in those nations. I think the goal of the Iraq war was to expend a shitload of munitions, sign blank checks for KBR and keep the defense-industrial money train moving along a solid clip, which is nefarious enough. I don't think it's necessary to imagine them muah-ha-ha-ing in dark conference rooms over images of migrant children bodies washing up on Mediterranean shores.
Elimination of enemies of Israel and the various gulfie tyrannies. Cardinal Richelieu followed a similar strategy in Germany, FWIW.
This was not about creating explotable markets. To give one example, Saddam would have been thrilled to have been able to sell oil freely for dollars on world markets. We did not allow him to do so, if you recall the "oil for food" program.
Sorry, I don't follow. We invaded Iraq not because along with our invasion of Afghanistan, it makes a sandwich of Iran, Israel's actual sworn enemy, but because ten years later it would implode and, in combination with the Arab Spring backlash, fall to ISIS? That was the neocon plan? To create even more misery and further fuel radical factions in the surrounding region that already hate Israel? Because it seems to me like they wanted to squeeze Iran and it blew up in our faces.
That doesn’t really track at all with your previous comment where you pointed out we had no interest in cooperating with/supporting Saddam, which, I think, is obviously true.
“Saddam would have been thrilled to have been able to sell oil freely for dollars on world markets. We did not allow him to do so, if you recall the "oil for food" program.”
But whatever, I don’t understand why or how a failed Iraq serves US interests or why that wouldn’t be the goal, and you haven’t offered a tangible reason. It was not an Islamist state or harboring any particular threats—WMDs, radical Islamic terrorists, etc, as has been exhaustively stated by everyone. If the neocons genuinely thought Iraq threatened Israel, did they ever say so? I don’t remember ever hearing from that. I think you’re just wrong and know it and don’t want to walk back the statement. But again, whatever.
Actually, the neocons said Iraq was a threat to Israel. If fighting Iran was the goal, we would have cooperated with Saddam. We didn't.
And after turning Iraq into a failed state, the beocons proceeded to repeat the process in Libya and Syria. For that matter, the Israelis repeatedly stated that they preferred ISIS in Syria.
You genuinely don’t think containing Iran was and is a goal of the US?
What I don’t understand about your argument is how those states imploding—halting markets, creating refugees, and radicalizing young men (and women)—makes Israel safer or promotes any western interest.
On the first re: Iraq., Ok now I think I understand what you're say, though still disagree.
On the second re: yes, Real men going to Tehran" is pretty much exactly what I i said, "it seems to me like they wanted to squeeze Iran," and which you earlier disagreed with.
I don't think this essay alone can tell us that much about 2024. Biden buys much of this critique and appoints people accordingly. Note the lack of any substantial trade deals this administration.
I do think this undersells the importance of the late Obama administration being the starting point of the present rise to much lower unemployment. I think a fair number of people in the administration are full employment Democrats and that's why the demand boosting response to Covid-19 was so robust.
But if Trump wins, a good part of it will be that people really hate inflation. They hate it even when it's in their class interest (because labor is a contributor to higher prices) and their wages are rising faster.
This surprised me, I'm not a dyed in the wool Biden-ite, but I'm proud of his economic performance and I would have thought the election would not be so tight given the economic stats. In short, I think progress for economic equality is hard in part because it needs to hit a narrow corridor between full employment and rapid management of any inflation episodes. That's just a hard job, but an incredibly important one.
Full employment doesn't necessarily mean that much reindustrialization, though some is important. But I do think that high demand for laborers is critical to reducing the social costs of trade. Transfers don't cut it because transfers aren't enough to give workers real leverage and may quickly evaporate.
>>> Overall, Tierney said, the Republican governor has been trying to work collaboratively with the federal government on the response and “we’ve gotten support when it’s been asked for.”
I'd also point out the CHIPS ACT and the IRA, both of which had billions in spending to boost manufacturing and have been followed by a major jump in factory construction.
The term humanitarian aid came from the initial Fox news hit piece. The bill included both, but presumably Fox was more offended by the provision of aid to other nations in distress than weapons.
Look at auto repossessions, rising credit card debt, etc. The problem is that the US economy has bifurcated and the lower half is in significant distress.
Trump is siphoning large numbers of black and Hispanic voters away from the Democrats. I doubt it's any coincidence that those are populations with high percentages of blue collar workers for whom paying for groceries and rent simultaneously has become increasingly problematic.
"I am increasingly convinced that Chuck Schumer’s notorious comment before the 2016 election is a Rosetta Stone for the 21st century Democratic party. Schumer said, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”"
Of course this was a preference, as you said. You cannot expect a self-evidently superior individual, A Chuck Schumer, to be assocaited with people who are fat and who have bad taste.
US manufacturing output has been increasing for decades, as employment has declined. Rising productivity is good!
But Freddie's larger point is accurate: all of these trade deals had "trade adjustment assistance" as a fig leaf to buy off interest groups. But no one much cared about how effective these programs were. Did they work? Is there reporting about this that I've missed? Neither party seems to care.
A better analogy would be how solicitous a farmer is of their farm hands. And that already happened, far more completely and much longer ago than manufacturing did. And it was to the better of society.
Really sucked to be a farm hand during that time...but at least they could move to a city and get a manufacturing labor job or construction job? We don't really build nearly so much in this country anymore (manufacturing or structures), so there simply aren't as many low-skill jobs.
There may be some green shoots after the devastation but the devastation is still very much a part of the working class story.
This happened during the Clinton years (another time where the working class wholeheartedly supported a Democrat and then felt totally betrayed by his actual labor policies) but we had an auto manufacturing plant transformed into a shopping mall with a few people talking about how happy they were to find work in the area after having lost their manufacturing jobs. Not discussed in the media but in the community was the permanent loss of jobs that paid living wages that made raising a family economically possible.
I would generally agree that the Democrats usually support unions and higher wages but even at that some of the push for higher minimum wage has meant cuts in hours or even whole positions that many people feel they are worse off than before the minimum wage hike and these are the people this change was supposed to help.
There are a lot of reasons that the working class has turned on the Democrats and while there has much sneering at this choice (especially since it involves supporting Trump who also actively screws over workers--and anyone else) but for many people the two sides seem like being between the rock and the hard place and things rarely get easier and often have gotten radically worse under the supposedly pro worker Democrats.
That's why voting for either two of the uniparty candidates is a huge mistake. Voting for a third party at least makes clear your disgust at the uniparty, and shows exactly why, depending on which third-party candidate you vote for. There are plenty of those in charge who are happy to throttle alternate voices. Why should be a party to that silencing?
I had the same reaction to that podcast, but I think there might be a bit more to the timeline piece of it than you let on.
The Rust Belt collapse is the psychologically destabilizing elephant in the room of our politics and culture, and is just a vast human tragedy, undeniably true. But would it actually have been averted had Chinese integration into the WTO and permanent normal trade relations not happened? If NAFTA had not happened? Do those decisions have the causal force we assume?
Furman is correct to say that retaining uncompetitive manufacturing industries in the Rust Belt would have been a net drag on the country economically, such is the bloodless logic of GDP.
But the how, and what that alternate universe looks like, seems under-theorized to me. Bird brained trad nostalgia fills that hole in an unhelpful way, IMO.
The US gave in so easily to the argument that they were doomed to be uncompetitive in manufacturing. They can pay 5x wages for software and pharma and many other industries and still be the best in the world. But manufacturing? No... that can only be done in Asia.
Tim Cook had an interesting comment a while back on outsourcing their manufacturing. Wages are only a small portion of why they do it. They main reason is the highly trained and specialized workforces readily available. These simply don't exist in the US anymore.
The attempted onshoring of the semiconductor industry is facing something similar right now. Their problem isn't that wages are too high, it's that they can't find enough people to do the work.
So perhaps an alternate universe actually could have included a very competitive US manufacturing industry.
It could have, and I wish it had. But it would have required massive automation (with corresponding job losses still, though with, likely, more jobs to replace them than we have now...and even still, those jobs would be higher-skill jobs mostly). The only things made in the USA today, generally speaking, are things with enormous automation, things with military / government customers, and "job fabrication projects" -- the sort of bespoke manufacturing that isn't very susceptible to the manufacturing economies of scale.
It's a complex situation but part of the motivation is to protect defense sensitive industries that would be vulnerable to a boycott from China in case of a war.
"The US gave in so easily to the argument that they were doomed to be uncompetitive in manufacturing. They can pay 5x wages for software and pharma and many other industries and still be the best in the world. But manufacturing? No... that can only be done in Asia."
What amazing advantage does the US have in manufacturing? Note even the Germans with their currency manipulation, price premiums and luxury auto brands are facing their own reckoning now as they become very uncompetitive.
It still has most of the same advantages it had when it was the world leader. Natural resources, Financial markets, large and educated workforce, railway, road and port system, etc. Plus it’s now also an energy exporter and not nearly as dependent on foreign sources. The same can’t be said of Germany.
I grew up in the rust belt, and it was rusting long before Obama or Clinton. Every graph I checked shows an unrelenting decline in manufacturing jobs from the 60s to the present. It's interesting that those states remained the blue wall for so long, and only began to turn red after NAFTA, when other states began to share the misery -- and after decades of union-busting.
“ That the policy effort was made to benefit huge corporations and the wealthy only makes the whole situation more inexcusable.”
The public also loves cheap shit from China. It’s not all about bad policy being imposed by “elites” from above. It’s also the public’s voracious appetite for the benefits of globalization.
Well yes, this is one of the major arguments for free global trade. You lose some jobs, but overall things get vastly cheaper for the rest of the employed population by leveraging cheap foreign labor not subject to the environmental/labor standards of the west. Supposed net win.
Yes, and no. People love cheap stuff, this is well known. But, and here is the kicker, people dislike shitty stuff. No one likes having to replace the dishwasher every year, no matter how cheap it is. Also, no no likes that fashions come and go so quick to hide this, because now you have to replace the counter top to go with the new style of dishwasher.
Ditto. It's becoming so hard to find anything good on Amazon because nowadays 80% of it is Chinese made. And 80% of THAT is poor craftsmanship. So, you CAN find quality there...you just have to do a ton of research and be really lucky.
Sorry if that bugs anyone, but it's the truth. Nowadays, for all my non-tech needs, I mostly fish at eBay for 40yo items because the quality is so much better.
Why is it poor quality? I don't have the answer, but I might have an idea about one reason. I have a friend in Hong Kong who used to be in the toy business. They made quite clever toys that had a recording system to let you send a message in it. They got an order from Walmart for a container full. The amount Walmart would pay, after costs, meant a profit of $10 HKD per 100. They said no, but many say yes, and you can imagine what gets cut. No room for QC with that kind of margin. So for most of these corporations, they control the outcome of the quality because they won't pay enough to allow for quality. Who has the leverage to push back?
Yeh…no. A regular Maytag dishwasher in 1972 is the price of a Gaggenau now. And Gaggenau remains a niche but extremely expensive and high quality manufacturer. People’s reveled preferences are pretty clear.
I just replaced my Whirlpool after a year of service, which replaced another Whirlpool that had 15 years on it. The reason was two components went bad, the heating element and, much worse, the impeller on the water pump. The reason the impeller died was due to it being plastic and mounted on a steep motor shaft. Essentially the hardware to mount it is much tougher than the piece itself and it ended up just spinning on the shaft.
But, hey, they saved a few cents per unit!
If you think people like cheap shit, which is not in anyway shown in your comment, go ahead. But when cars go through their seventh recall in five years, dishwashers fail after a year of service, and so on, you going to need a lot more than talking about the price of a Maytag in '72 vs. an upscale Chinese model.
You’re not getting Bronx’s point here. A Maytag in 1972 cost what a Gaggenau costs now! Comfortable middle class people scrimped and saved to buy new appliances. Today we take it for granted that they can be bought with like two days’ salary. But the quality ones are still available, they’ll just cost you two weeks’ salary, just like the Maytag in 1972.
In other words, the market still provides reliable appliances, at a comparable price to what reliable appliances have always cost. People are choosing the cheap shit.
The large appliance industry recently got a law passed that they don't need to supply parts any longer than 5 years. That's shut down the re-sell of old machines that lasted decades without problems.
It’s not “lasting decades” if it needs a constant supply of spare parts. Part of the issue is where a dishwasher cost the equivalent of $4,000 and it broke you paid your local appliance repair man the equivalent of $250 to fix it. Now that it costs $400 it doesn’t make sense to spend the same $250 to try and fix it.
They frequently flicker, dim, and wholly burn out. These are not in cans; they're in normal chandelier-style and screw-in fixtures. We don't have HUE, but I'm not super interested in running my lights off Bluetooth and changing the colors -- or paying for those features. What I want is a basic LED lightbulb that actually achieves rated life at maximum efficiency.
I would be willing to pay a premium for an equivalent of the "Dubai Bulb": A bulb with high-quality, efficient driver electronics and decent heat dissipation. Unfortunately, no company seems to be willing to produce such a product in the West.
This post rolls a whole lot of things together in a way that isn't really sensible to me. NAFTA came into effect in 1994 and I definitely buy that it accelerated deindustrialization. But deindustrialization started in the late 70s; manufacturing share of employment peaked in 1979, a full 15 years before the policy Freddie is blaming for its decline. But then also we're focusing on Jason Furman and Obama, who were in power from 2008-2016, which is a further 15ish years after NAFTA went into effect? There's definitely continuity of thought in this area from Clinton to Obama, but what exactly did we want Furman to do?
I do want the Democratic party to pay more attention to helping the Rust Belt and similar areas, but we still have to ask: are the alternatives to globalization actually better? Is it really preferable to just have everyone be poorer, for most things to cost more, for most people to make less money?
When I worked for Giant Telco, when driving a car with their branding on it, if you got in an accident you were told to never say you are sorry, as that can be seen as an admission of guilt to some.
Well, accident victims often say that the most meaningful thing to them in regards to the accident is for someone to say that they are sorry to have gone through this.
The solution is a combination of regionalisation and a more active industrial policy - the US should be pursuing trade links with Mexico and the rest of Central America, but not China, and government should be working hard to ensure that when the low value stuff disappears from US communities, it is replaced with the higher value stuff rather than simply leaving them to rot.
The problem you have here is that, like you say, the debate becomes so unbelievably crowded that the bad stuff gets mixed in with the good. The notion of globalisation becomes intertwined with ‘free trade’ such that it becomes impossible defend the genuinely valuable factors of comparative advantage and trade without having to sign up with the crowd who thinks all jobs should be dumped into the black hole of inefficiency that is the the Chinese economy. Likewise, when people start using ‘neoliberalism’ as a catchall term, it starts to obfuscate between the good bits (market mechanisms, non-excessive regulation, competition), and the bad bits (the idea that the state can stop paying attention to the economy and play no role as in the ‘free market’ everything will suddenly magically turn out fine).
For the most part I think I agree with the principle of everything Freddie is saying here, but he does the same thing he always seems to do when discussing economics, whereby he takes a number of perfectly legitimate criticisms, and dresses them up in an incredibly vague term such as ‘capitalism’. He then proceeds to declare ‘capitalism’ a bad thing, and states that this therefore means everyone should reject ‘capitalism’ and pick the opposite, ‘socialism’ instead. Then we people go ‘hang on a minute’, he then turns around and goes ‘oh, so you think poverty is okay then?’. This is exactly the sort of reasoning that leads to the above result.
The irony is that if this was a social issue, he’d spot this reasoning a mile off, and call it out for what it is. It still amazes me that he can’t do the same on economic ones.
Great work, Freddie. Much appreciated. Though you don't want to dismiss nativist sentiment and xenophobia too much, this piece captures the understandable economic rage that was the wellspring to Trump ascending to the presidency.
I can only think of Mark Fisher talking about, "Market Stalinism" when you mention cold indifference to the deindustrialization of big parts of the US. This idea that any pain caused by neoliberal reforms will be outweighed by future benefits, the desperate attempts to paint the victims as politically retrograde enemies of the state who got what they deserved.
Capitalism can't fail, it can only be failed. That's their creed.
In 1979, 22% of Americans worked in manufacturing. Today 8% do. The loss of these jobs has been a disaster for all the reasons Freddie lists. But I think this piece lays too much of the blame on NAFTA and trade deals. Economists estimate that only about 20% of the job losses were lost to outsourcing. The rest were lost to technology making manufacturing require fewere workers. So if we'd never passed these trade deals manufacturing share of employment would have fallen from 22% to 11%, rather than 22% to 8%. That extra 3% is very bad, but most of the decline was not caused by outsourcing.
The trade deals are still bad. American Affairs is a right wing magazine completely dedicated to how bad it is that America has such a bad manufacturing deficit. But I don't think it's accurate to cite trade deals as the main cause of the decline in manufacturing employment.
The replication crises alerted many to issues in the Social Sciences. I think most people are now somewhat skeptical when they see the latest studies in psychology and sociology.
The next nasty shock will be that economics is even worse. All the same issues are rampant in the field, but they are amplified by the fact that utter garbage can be implemented in policy that drastically effects millions of lives. It is a field absolutely full of frauds and grifters, hiding behind unsophisticated math they barely understand themselves.
Everyone in this thread has just accepted that US manufacturing has to be uncompetitive, that globalization has to increase wages and productivity overall, and probably dozens of other economic "findings". In reality there is shockingly little supporting those findings. Everything leads back to the opinions of a few highly credentialed and politically connected professors.
Yeah, does anybody but me remember the Harvard analysis that supported austerity measures -- until a grad student pointed out that they had only selected part of one of their Excel columns? When economists call what they do 'science,' I want to throw things around the living room.
"Some defenders of NAFTA specifically and free trade generally frequently insisted that predictions of mass closures of American plants and factories was just doom-saying; it was not. Others, though, steered into it, arguing that yes there would be job loss, but it would be worth it. (This kind of “that’s not happening/it’s happening and it’s good” arguments have a constant presence in American politics.)"
By far the most common view of pro-trade economists is neither of these views. It's that it is coming either way. If you refuse to accept the coming change, erect barriers to protect less efficient industries, you won't save those industries, but you will hurt every other industry that uses those products. For example, you can erect trade barriers in the U.S. to preserve a domestic shipbuilding industry, but in the long run, if that industry isn't globally competitive, that domestic shipbuilding industry will be tiny and employ virtually no one, while every business required to use domestic ships will suffer. Steel would not be a different story. Just a much, much bigger story.
The poison pill in this is the definition of efficiency, isn't it? If it's just defined in terms of units per cost, eventually those countries that command slave labor or completely automate will always outcompete those that pay their workers. So the model has to be adjusted if we wish to maintain any other aspects of society, like democracy or a middle class or other such arbitrary luxuries.
I think this is a semi-legitimate question when it comes to the environment and, in fact, we have seen inherently dirty industries like mining, move to less efficient producing countries because they have lower environmental costs. For certain highly-localized types of environmental despoliation, one could reasonably argue that is a mutually beneficial trade, but it's complex for other types of environmental harm.
Slave labor? I'm sorry, this is an incredibly marginal issue in the context of total global commerce (I mean, not to the slaves, I suppose, but in the big picture...).
Not sure what Democracy has to do with low-cost labor. There are high wage authoritarian regimes and low-wage democratic regimes. Your comment about the middle class appears to misunderstand causality. The export of industry to developing countries created the middle class in those countries. Service-dominated economies have also successfully created or sustained middle class standards of living for broad swathes of countries. Not adjusting the model.
I think these examples highlight the delusion we see so much these days. Maybe they have always been present, but not as manifest - confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. How could Furman possibly express regret? That is the same as admission that their world view is wrong. Such admission would create severe discomfort (for the thinker). The real question is how the US is to adjust in the next ten years. Now what?
"All of this was more or less to plan, by the way. Barack Obama represents many things, but more than anything he represents the total takeover of the Democratic party by the Brownstown Brahmin class. "
Why should they say they are sorry? Those who promoted these policies suffered nothing, nothing personally or professionally. In fact, they are still held up as Serious Thinkers and Policy Heavyweights.
One even might say that the policieis were entirely intentional, and the effects were consciously downplayed as to make passage easier.
vid. The War On Iraq and The War On Syria. Turning these countries into failed states was entirely intentional, but the neocons could not say so at the time, hence the risible "weapons of mass destruction" and "human rights" lies.
EDIT: shoulda been "War on Libya", although Syria also is an instructive example.
Of course the policies were intentional, because these people believe they are the right policies. There's nothing nefarious about any of it. Global trade has massive benefits in terms of getting cheap products in the west and increasing living standards around the globe. The people in favor of these policies may have different moral tradeoffs than some Americans, but it's silly to think they were intentionally ruining anyone's lives. When you get to the top of the pyramid of power you have to make choices, and all of those choices result in tradeoffs for someone below you. It's the nature of the beast at the top.
And I don't think anyone wanted Iraq to become a failed state. The fact that it became one was a drag on the entire Republican party/neoliberal consensus. I know a couple people who served in Iraq near the beginning of the war, and they're opinion based on their training/preparation before deployment seemed to be that the military truly did not expect the type of resistance they received. They had a completely unrealistic idea that they could topple the regime and just put a new one in place without complete societal breakdown, and they were dead wrong about that. They made up excuses to get us into that war, but they did not want what they got. What they got was total failure, and they thought they would achieve total success.
The people in charge known what benefits them.and theirs, and fuck the rest of us.
But why did they want to topple the regime in Iraq? Is your position that if people genuinely believe that "global trade has massive benefits" around the globe, then it is acceptable to invade a sovereign country? And that the only wrong step was that the Bush administration turned out to be wrong about succeeding?
What? No. I'm not defending the Iraq war at all. It was a completely horrible decision that never should have been made. It's the defining foreign policy mistake of the US in the 21st century. I'm only arguing the goal was absolutely not to create a "failed state". They wanted a new regime favorable to the US to succeed in the country.
Which is why they went and did the same thing to Libya and are still occupying Syria in hopes of doing the same.
Stop kidding yourself.
Backing rebels fighting against regimes that are aligned against you is a logical choice. That those countries could result in failed states as a result of those rebellions was probably very well considered in those cases, because the US invested nothing in propping up a real alternative compared to what they did in Iraq. They likely chose to do it anyway as they saw an opportunity to overturn longstanding US enemies without directly involving our military in much of the fighting which seemed like it could end up with a result favorable to the US. (yes we fought in Syria against ISIS, but not directly against Assad out in the open). It was a gamble, they knew it was a gamble, and everyone lost.
But we invested hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq in an attempt to NOT make it a failed state. It was definitely not the goal.
Those states are not "aligned against" you. Rather we designated them as enemies, and we dropped them as quickly as we could as soon as the state failure happened.
And we protect ISIS in Syria.
"overturn longstanding US enemies" Saddam Hussein was an ally of the US. They supported him in the war with Iran, and let's not look to closely as to why that war even got started. These are all "enemies" of the neocons running US foreign policy, regardless of Democrats, or Republicans in the White House of Congress. What makes them enemies of the neocons is worth pondering on.
"I'm only arguing the goal was absolutely not to create a "failed state".
They wanted a new regime favorable to the US to succeed in the country."
My point is that I can't see any purpose to the invasion except to bring Iraq into line with Middle Eastern regimes that are favorable to US trade, so whether or not they intended to create a failed state is beside the point.
Its memory holed now, I should have kept it, but state department published a list of 122 reasons to prosecute the Iraq war. They were all just cause reasons alone. Our nuclear non proliferation treaty obligations to Kuwait, Saddam sending assassins against former president Carter, assassins against George H W Bush, The Big Gun, funding suicide bombers (families after the fact), like I said: 122 items, each a just cause for war.
Even Krugman has admitted that he completely underestimated the scale of job losses in the US due to deindustrialization and offshoring.
Were these mistakes intentional? Of course not. But they are still mistakes and we should consider whether we want to keep the people who screwed up so badly in power given their abysmal track record.
The neoliberal economic and the neoconservative military efforts did not continue *decade after decade* without a great deal of deliberately uncaring, and often downright malevolent, intent from the people at the tippy-top and/or those powers behind the scenes. Sure, their activities produced many unintended destructive consequences that surprised even them, but these people are simply not that stupid. They are, instead, *mostly* psychopaths, sociopaths, and wanna-be's suppressing their better natures, driving the policy zeitgeist. Their intent has always been to control and impoverish the lesser, and now-soon useless, eaters. (To take just a single well-verified example, you might want to ask yourself how the hell Operation Northwoods ever made it to JFK's eyes.) This attitude has been repeated countless times throughout history, no matter what the forms of governments.
What tangible goal did the neocons hope to achieve by creating failed states? A refugee crisis? What American interest did that serve? If anything, the collapse of those states rendered it impossible to build exploitable markets in those nations. I think the goal of the Iraq war was to expend a shitload of munitions, sign blank checks for KBR and keep the defense-industrial money train moving along a solid clip, which is nefarious enough. I don't think it's necessary to imagine them muah-ha-ha-ing in dark conference rooms over images of migrant children bodies washing up on Mediterranean shores.
Elimination of enemies of Israel and the various gulfie tyrannies. Cardinal Richelieu followed a similar strategy in Germany, FWIW.
This was not about creating explotable markets. To give one example, Saddam would have been thrilled to have been able to sell oil freely for dollars on world markets. We did not allow him to do so, if you recall the "oil for food" program.
Sorry, I don't follow. We invaded Iraq not because along with our invasion of Afghanistan, it makes a sandwich of Iran, Israel's actual sworn enemy, but because ten years later it would implode and, in combination with the Arab Spring backlash, fall to ISIS? That was the neocon plan? To create even more misery and further fuel radical factions in the surrounding region that already hate Israel? Because it seems to me like they wanted to squeeze Iran and it blew up in our faces.
If the goal was to make a sandwich of Iran, there was no need to invade in the first place.
Saddam's enmity with Iran is well-known. As is the US role in ensuring the survival of ISIS in Syria, and to keep the puppet state in Baghdad in line
.
That doesn’t really track at all with your previous comment where you pointed out we had no interest in cooperating with/supporting Saddam, which, I think, is obviously true.
Not sure where I said that. I said that we saw a failed state as a desirable and intended outcome.
If fighting Iran was the goal, we would have supported Saddam.
“Saddam would have been thrilled to have been able to sell oil freely for dollars on world markets. We did not allow him to do so, if you recall the "oil for food" program.”
But whatever, I don’t understand why or how a failed Iraq serves US interests or why that wouldn’t be the goal, and you haven’t offered a tangible reason. It was not an Islamist state or harboring any particular threats—WMDs, radical Islamic terrorists, etc, as has been exhaustively stated by everyone. If the neocons genuinely thought Iraq threatened Israel, did they ever say so? I don’t remember ever hearing from that. I think you’re just wrong and know it and don’t want to walk back the statement. But again, whatever.
Actually, the neocons said Iraq was a threat to Israel. If fighting Iran was the goal, we would have cooperated with Saddam. We didn't.
And after turning Iraq into a failed state, the beocons proceeded to repeat the process in Libya and Syria. For that matter, the Israelis repeatedly stated that they preferred ISIS in Syria.
You genuinely don’t think containing Iran was and is a goal of the US?
What I don’t understand about your argument is how those states imploding—halting markets, creating refugees, and radicalizing young men (and women)—makes Israel safer or promotes any western interest.
Because none of those failed states now can fight Israel.
And the plan always was to do to Iran what was done in Iraq, Syria and Libya. "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."
On the first re: Iraq., Ok now I think I understand what you're say, though still disagree.
On the second re: yes, Real men going to Tehran" is pretty much exactly what I i said, "it seems to me like they wanted to squeeze Iran," and which you earlier disagreed with.
I never saidc tht Iran was not a target, only that the neocons seek to do to Iran what they did to Iraq and others.
Fair critique of unfair accounting for deindustrialization. If Trump wins, the themes of this essay will have much to do with it.
I don't think this essay alone can tell us that much about 2024. Biden buys much of this critique and appoints people accordingly. Note the lack of any substantial trade deals this administration.
I do think this undersells the importance of the late Obama administration being the starting point of the present rise to much lower unemployment. I think a fair number of people in the administration are full employment Democrats and that's why the demand boosting response to Covid-19 was so robust.
But if Trump wins, a good part of it will be that people really hate inflation. They hate it even when it's in their class interest (because labor is a contributor to higher prices) and their wages are rising faster.
This surprised me, I'm not a dyed in the wool Biden-ite, but I'm proud of his economic performance and I would have thought the election would not be so tight given the economic stats. In short, I think progress for economic equality is hard in part because it needs to hit a narrow corridor between full employment and rapid management of any inflation episodes. That's just a hard job, but an incredibly important one.
Full employment doesn't necessarily mean that much reindustrialization, though some is important. But I do think that high demand for laborers is critical to reducing the social costs of trade. Transfers don't cut it because transfers aren't enough to give workers real leverage and may quickly evaporate.
The Democrats are in a hole they spent several decades digging. I'm not surprised that one term from Biden hasn't dug them out of it yet.
If they really, genuinely want to improve their treatment of and perception amongst the working class, they'll have to be patient.
If Team D genuinely cared about the working class, they ought to, like, actually do something other than preen and virtue signal.
Ukraine is lavished with money and weapons, but the citizens of East Palestine were denied so much as a single hotel voucher.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/multiple-federal-agencies-supporting-east-palestine-contrary-to-partisan-claims/
>>> Overall, Tierney said, the Republican governor has been trying to work collaboratively with the federal government on the response and “we’ve gotten support when it’s been asked for.”
I'd also point out the CHIPS ACT and the IRA, both of which had billions in spending to boost manufacturing and have been followed by a major jump in factory construction.
That your link describes the billions in weapons for Ukraine as "humanitarian aid" tells us all we need know about your source.
The term humanitarian aid came from the initial Fox news hit piece. The bill included both, but presumably Fox was more offended by the provision of aid to other nations in distress than weapons.
Even more than patience, they have to want to do so.
Hence why I said "if."
Look at auto repossessions, rising credit card debt, etc. The problem is that the US economy has bifurcated and the lower half is in significant distress.
Trump is siphoning large numbers of black and Hispanic voters away from the Democrats. I doubt it's any coincidence that those are populations with high percentages of blue collar workers for whom paying for groceries and rent simultaneously has become increasingly problematic.
"I am increasingly convinced that Chuck Schumer’s notorious comment before the 2016 election is a Rosetta Stone for the 21st century Democratic party. Schumer said, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”"
Of course this was a preference, as you said. You cannot expect a self-evidently superior individual, A Chuck Schumer, to be assocaited with people who are fat and who have bad taste.
US manufacturing output has been increasing for decades, as employment has declined. Rising productivity is good!
But Freddie's larger point is accurate: all of these trade deals had "trade adjustment assistance" as a fig leaf to buy off interest groups. But no one much cared about how effective these programs were. Did they work? Is there reporting about this that I've missed? Neither party seems to care.
Why should they care? You think a farmer is solicitous of veal calves?
A better analogy would be how solicitous a farmer is of their farm hands. And that already happened, far more completely and much longer ago than manufacturing did. And it was to the better of society.
Really sucked to be a farm hand during that time...but at least they could move to a city and get a manufacturing labor job or construction job? We don't really build nearly so much in this country anymore (manufacturing or structures), so there simply aren't as many low-skill jobs.
If it is not obvious, non-elite class humans are seen as a resource to be exploited and thrown away.
Farm hands are treated better, and at least got to eat at the family table.
I grew up a barn cat in rural Iowa and currently live elsewhere in rural America, so I know something of which I speak.
There may be some green shoots after the devastation but the devastation is still very much a part of the working class story.
This happened during the Clinton years (another time where the working class wholeheartedly supported a Democrat and then felt totally betrayed by his actual labor policies) but we had an auto manufacturing plant transformed into a shopping mall with a few people talking about how happy they were to find work in the area after having lost their manufacturing jobs. Not discussed in the media but in the community was the permanent loss of jobs that paid living wages that made raising a family economically possible.
I would generally agree that the Democrats usually support unions and higher wages but even at that some of the push for higher minimum wage has meant cuts in hours or even whole positions that many people feel they are worse off than before the minimum wage hike and these are the people this change was supposed to help.
There are a lot of reasons that the working class has turned on the Democrats and while there has much sneering at this choice (especially since it involves supporting Trump who also actively screws over workers--and anyone else) but for many people the two sides seem like being between the rock and the hard place and things rarely get easier and often have gotten radically worse under the supposedly pro worker Democrats.
That's why voting for either two of the uniparty candidates is a huge mistake. Voting for a third party at least makes clear your disgust at the uniparty, and shows exactly why, depending on which third-party candidate you vote for. There are plenty of those in charge who are happy to throttle alternate voices. Why should be a party to that silencing?
I had the same reaction to that podcast, but I think there might be a bit more to the timeline piece of it than you let on.
The Rust Belt collapse is the psychologically destabilizing elephant in the room of our politics and culture, and is just a vast human tragedy, undeniably true. But would it actually have been averted had Chinese integration into the WTO and permanent normal trade relations not happened? If NAFTA had not happened? Do those decisions have the causal force we assume?
Furman is correct to say that retaining uncompetitive manufacturing industries in the Rust Belt would have been a net drag on the country economically, such is the bloodless logic of GDP.
But the how, and what that alternate universe looks like, seems under-theorized to me. Bird brained trad nostalgia fills that hole in an unhelpful way, IMO.
The US gave in so easily to the argument that they were doomed to be uncompetitive in manufacturing. They can pay 5x wages for software and pharma and many other industries and still be the best in the world. But manufacturing? No... that can only be done in Asia.
Tim Cook had an interesting comment a while back on outsourcing their manufacturing. Wages are only a small portion of why they do it. They main reason is the highly trained and specialized workforces readily available. These simply don't exist in the US anymore.
The attempted onshoring of the semiconductor industry is facing something similar right now. Their problem isn't that wages are too high, it's that they can't find enough people to do the work.
So perhaps an alternate universe actually could have included a very competitive US manufacturing industry.
It could have, and I wish it had. But it would have required massive automation (with corresponding job losses still, though with, likely, more jobs to replace them than we have now...and even still, those jobs would be higher-skill jobs mostly). The only things made in the USA today, generally speaking, are things with enormous automation, things with military / government customers, and "job fabrication projects" -- the sort of bespoke manufacturing that isn't very susceptible to the manufacturing economies of scale.
The percentage of workers in manufacturing has been growing the last few years as "reshoring' takes hold. I don't think this is a one way street.
And which types of manufacturing have been growing?
It's a complex situation but part of the motivation is to protect defense sensitive industries that would be vulnerable to a boycott from China in case of a war.
"The US gave in so easily to the argument that they were doomed to be uncompetitive in manufacturing. They can pay 5x wages for software and pharma and many other industries and still be the best in the world. But manufacturing? No... that can only be done in Asia."
What amazing advantage does the US have in manufacturing? Note even the Germans with their currency manipulation, price premiums and luxury auto brands are facing their own reckoning now as they become very uncompetitive.
It still has most of the same advantages it had when it was the world leader. Natural resources, Financial markets, large and educated workforce, railway, road and port system, etc. Plus it’s now also an energy exporter and not nearly as dependent on foreign sources. The same can’t be said of Germany.
I grew up in the rust belt, and it was rusting long before Obama or Clinton. Every graph I checked shows an unrelenting decline in manufacturing jobs from the 60s to the present. It's interesting that those states remained the blue wall for so long, and only began to turn red after NAFTA, when other states began to share the misery -- and after decades of union-busting.
This might be Freddie's greatest piece ever!
“ That the policy effort was made to benefit huge corporations and the wealthy only makes the whole situation more inexcusable.”
The public also loves cheap shit from China. It’s not all about bad policy being imposed by “elites” from above. It’s also the public’s voracious appetite for the benefits of globalization.
Well yes, this is one of the major arguments for free global trade. You lose some jobs, but overall things get vastly cheaper for the rest of the employed population by leveraging cheap foreign labor not subject to the environmental/labor standards of the west. Supposed net win.
I work in tech. If you ask me if cheap shit is a worthy trade off for somebody losing their job, I'm not going to be directly affected.
Obviously there's going to be a different answer from the person that's actually going to lose their job.
Yes, and no. People love cheap stuff, this is well known. But, and here is the kicker, people dislike shitty stuff. No one likes having to replace the dishwasher every year, no matter how cheap it is. Also, no no likes that fashions come and go so quick to hide this, because now you have to replace the counter top to go with the new style of dishwasher.
Ditto. It's becoming so hard to find anything good on Amazon because nowadays 80% of it is Chinese made. And 80% of THAT is poor craftsmanship. So, you CAN find quality there...you just have to do a ton of research and be really lucky.
Sorry if that bugs anyone, but it's the truth. Nowadays, for all my non-tech needs, I mostly fish at eBay for 40yo items because the quality is so much better.
Why is it poor quality? I don't have the answer, but I might have an idea about one reason. I have a friend in Hong Kong who used to be in the toy business. They made quite clever toys that had a recording system to let you send a message in it. They got an order from Walmart for a container full. The amount Walmart would pay, after costs, meant a profit of $10 HKD per 100. They said no, but many say yes, and you can imagine what gets cut. No room for QC with that kind of margin. So for most of these corporations, they control the outcome of the quality because they won't pay enough to allow for quality. Who has the leverage to push back?
Yeh…no. A regular Maytag dishwasher in 1972 is the price of a Gaggenau now. And Gaggenau remains a niche but extremely expensive and high quality manufacturer. People’s reveled preferences are pretty clear.
I just replaced my Whirlpool after a year of service, which replaced another Whirlpool that had 15 years on it. The reason was two components went bad, the heating element and, much worse, the impeller on the water pump. The reason the impeller died was due to it being plastic and mounted on a steep motor shaft. Essentially the hardware to mount it is much tougher than the piece itself and it ended up just spinning on the shaft.
But, hey, they saved a few cents per unit!
If you think people like cheap shit, which is not in anyway shown in your comment, go ahead. But when cars go through their seventh recall in five years, dishwashers fail after a year of service, and so on, you going to need a lot more than talking about the price of a Maytag in '72 vs. an upscale Chinese model.
Why didn’t you buy a Gaggenau?
You do understand the difference between "a niche but extremely expensive and high quality manufacturer" and cheap shit, do you not?
You’re not getting Bronx’s point here. A Maytag in 1972 cost what a Gaggenau costs now! Comfortable middle class people scrimped and saved to buy new appliances. Today we take it for granted that they can be bought with like two days’ salary. But the quality ones are still available, they’ll just cost you two weeks’ salary, just like the Maytag in 1972.
In other words, the market still provides reliable appliances, at a comparable price to what reliable appliances have always cost. People are choosing the cheap shit.
The large appliance industry recently got a law passed that they don't need to supply parts any longer than 5 years. That's shut down the re-sell of old machines that lasted decades without problems.
It’s not “lasting decades” if it needs a constant supply of spare parts. Part of the issue is where a dishwasher cost the equivalent of $4,000 and it broke you paid your local appliance repair man the equivalent of $250 to fix it. Now that it costs $400 it doesn’t make sense to spend the same $250 to try and fix it.
My preference is for LED bulbs that cost more but last the actual 30 years they were advertised to last. Where can I find those?
I’ve had my HUE lights for 10 years and they still work great. What issues are you having?
They frequently flicker, dim, and wholly burn out. These are not in cans; they're in normal chandelier-style and screw-in fixtures. We don't have HUE, but I'm not super interested in running my lights off Bluetooth and changing the colors -- or paying for those features. What I want is a basic LED lightbulb that actually achieves rated life at maximum efficiency.
I would be willing to pay a premium for an equivalent of the "Dubai Bulb": A bulb with high-quality, efficient driver electronics and decent heat dissipation. Unfortunately, no company seems to be willing to produce such a product in the West.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BigCliveDotCom/comments/kw8np1/the_lamps_youre_not_allowed_to_have_exploring_the/
“ They frequently flicker, dim, and wholly burn out. ”
Sounds like you have an electrical problem. Are you also someone who has issues with the control modules in your appliances?
Yeah this was a completely ridiculous sentence in the article. It's what happens when you view everything through the outdated Marxist lens
This post rolls a whole lot of things together in a way that isn't really sensible to me. NAFTA came into effect in 1994 and I definitely buy that it accelerated deindustrialization. But deindustrialization started in the late 70s; manufacturing share of employment peaked in 1979, a full 15 years before the policy Freddie is blaming for its decline. But then also we're focusing on Jason Furman and Obama, who were in power from 2008-2016, which is a further 15ish years after NAFTA went into effect? There's definitely continuity of thought in this area from Clinton to Obama, but what exactly did we want Furman to do?
I do want the Democratic party to pay more attention to helping the Rust Belt and similar areas, but we still have to ask: are the alternatives to globalization actually better? Is it really preferable to just have everyone be poorer, for most things to cost more, for most people to make less money?
Look at the share of manufacturing as a percentage of all jobs in places like Germany and Japan. Compare that to the United States.
There is a middle way.
When I worked for Giant Telco, when driving a car with their branding on it, if you got in an accident you were told to never say you are sorry, as that can be seen as an admission of guilt to some.
Well, accident victims often say that the most meaningful thing to them in regards to the accident is for someone to say that they are sorry to have gone through this.
The solution is a combination of regionalisation and a more active industrial policy - the US should be pursuing trade links with Mexico and the rest of Central America, but not China, and government should be working hard to ensure that when the low value stuff disappears from US communities, it is replaced with the higher value stuff rather than simply leaving them to rot.
The problem you have here is that, like you say, the debate becomes so unbelievably crowded that the bad stuff gets mixed in with the good. The notion of globalisation becomes intertwined with ‘free trade’ such that it becomes impossible defend the genuinely valuable factors of comparative advantage and trade without having to sign up with the crowd who thinks all jobs should be dumped into the black hole of inefficiency that is the the Chinese economy. Likewise, when people start using ‘neoliberalism’ as a catchall term, it starts to obfuscate between the good bits (market mechanisms, non-excessive regulation, competition), and the bad bits (the idea that the state can stop paying attention to the economy and play no role as in the ‘free market’ everything will suddenly magically turn out fine).
For the most part I think I agree with the principle of everything Freddie is saying here, but he does the same thing he always seems to do when discussing economics, whereby he takes a number of perfectly legitimate criticisms, and dresses them up in an incredibly vague term such as ‘capitalism’. He then proceeds to declare ‘capitalism’ a bad thing, and states that this therefore means everyone should reject ‘capitalism’ and pick the opposite, ‘socialism’ instead. Then we people go ‘hang on a minute’, he then turns around and goes ‘oh, so you think poverty is okay then?’. This is exactly the sort of reasoning that leads to the above result.
The irony is that if this was a social issue, he’d spot this reasoning a mile off, and call it out for what it is. It still amazes me that he can’t do the same on economic ones.
He just wants to take place in that ol' chestnut favored by socialists, yelling at liberals for all of society's problems.
Great work, Freddie. Much appreciated. Though you don't want to dismiss nativist sentiment and xenophobia too much, this piece captures the understandable economic rage that was the wellspring to Trump ascending to the presidency.
I can only think of Mark Fisher talking about, "Market Stalinism" when you mention cold indifference to the deindustrialization of big parts of the US. This idea that any pain caused by neoliberal reforms will be outweighed by future benefits, the desperate attempts to paint the victims as politically retrograde enemies of the state who got what they deserved.
Capitalism can't fail, it can only be failed. That's their creed.
When AI comes for the same people who had a callous indifference to the plight of the working class, I’ll have a grin and a chuckle.
I imagine it won’t be seen as such a positive then.
"They Still Won't Say That They're Sorry"
Because they aren't.
And that is just bad politics.
In 1979, 22% of Americans worked in manufacturing. Today 8% do. The loss of these jobs has been a disaster for all the reasons Freddie lists. But I think this piece lays too much of the blame on NAFTA and trade deals. Economists estimate that only about 20% of the job losses were lost to outsourcing. The rest were lost to technology making manufacturing require fewere workers. So if we'd never passed these trade deals manufacturing share of employment would have fallen from 22% to 11%, rather than 22% to 8%. That extra 3% is very bad, but most of the decline was not caused by outsourcing.
The trade deals are still bad. American Affairs is a right wing magazine completely dedicated to how bad it is that America has such a bad manufacturing deficit. But I don't think it's accurate to cite trade deals as the main cause of the decline in manufacturing employment.
The replication crises alerted many to issues in the Social Sciences. I think most people are now somewhat skeptical when they see the latest studies in psychology and sociology.
The next nasty shock will be that economics is even worse. All the same issues are rampant in the field, but they are amplified by the fact that utter garbage can be implemented in policy that drastically effects millions of lives. It is a field absolutely full of frauds and grifters, hiding behind unsophisticated math they barely understand themselves.
Everyone in this thread has just accepted that US manufacturing has to be uncompetitive, that globalization has to increase wages and productivity overall, and probably dozens of other economic "findings". In reality there is shockingly little supporting those findings. Everything leads back to the opinions of a few highly credentialed and politically connected professors.
Yeah, does anybody but me remember the Harvard analysis that supported austerity measures -- until a grad student pointed out that they had only selected part of one of their Excel columns? When economists call what they do 'science,' I want to throw things around the living room.
"Some defenders of NAFTA specifically and free trade generally frequently insisted that predictions of mass closures of American plants and factories was just doom-saying; it was not. Others, though, steered into it, arguing that yes there would be job loss, but it would be worth it. (This kind of “that’s not happening/it’s happening and it’s good” arguments have a constant presence in American politics.)"
By far the most common view of pro-trade economists is neither of these views. It's that it is coming either way. If you refuse to accept the coming change, erect barriers to protect less efficient industries, you won't save those industries, but you will hurt every other industry that uses those products. For example, you can erect trade barriers in the U.S. to preserve a domestic shipbuilding industry, but in the long run, if that industry isn't globally competitive, that domestic shipbuilding industry will be tiny and employ virtually no one, while every business required to use domestic ships will suffer. Steel would not be a different story. Just a much, much bigger story.
The poison pill in this is the definition of efficiency, isn't it? If it's just defined in terms of units per cost, eventually those countries that command slave labor or completely automate will always outcompete those that pay their workers. So the model has to be adjusted if we wish to maintain any other aspects of society, like democracy or a middle class or other such arbitrary luxuries.
I think this is a semi-legitimate question when it comes to the environment and, in fact, we have seen inherently dirty industries like mining, move to less efficient producing countries because they have lower environmental costs. For certain highly-localized types of environmental despoliation, one could reasonably argue that is a mutually beneficial trade, but it's complex for other types of environmental harm.
Slave labor? I'm sorry, this is an incredibly marginal issue in the context of total global commerce (I mean, not to the slaves, I suppose, but in the big picture...).
Not sure what Democracy has to do with low-cost labor. There are high wage authoritarian regimes and low-wage democratic regimes. Your comment about the middle class appears to misunderstand causality. The export of industry to developing countries created the middle class in those countries. Service-dominated economies have also successfully created or sustained middle class standards of living for broad swathes of countries. Not adjusting the model.
I think these examples highlight the delusion we see so much these days. Maybe they have always been present, but not as manifest - confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. How could Furman possibly express regret? That is the same as admission that their world view is wrong. Such admission would create severe discomfort (for the thinker). The real question is how the US is to adjust in the next ten years. Now what?