Turns Out That People Care More About Job Security and Purpose Than They Care About Great Deals at Walmart

you can't buy off people's desire for economic stability with iPads

The debate over globalization, neoliberalism, and the rise of the Thatcherite-Reaganite order never seems to end, but that’s appropriate given the stakes. Broadly expressed, this top-down policy consensus pushed by elite right-wing forces resulted in a shift from widespread protectionist policies (such as tariffs or quotas on imports and subsidies for domestic producers) to much lower barriers to economic activity across international borders. You can dress this up however you’d like, but the core appeal of this for the wealthy people and institutions that run our country is pretty simple: over centuries of struggle and at enormous human costs, American workers clawed out better working conditions, hours, protections, and pay for themselves. And corporations and rich people would much prefer if that wasn’t true - they’d like to be able to hire children to do dangerous work for pennies a day, thanks, for the sake of their stock price. Globalization allowed them to do an end run around the problem. If you can’t exploit labor in Wisconsin to the same degree that you used to, you might as well exploit powerless labor in Bangladesh.

The moral failure of all of this seems rather obvious to me. Yes, having any work at all helped destitute Bangladeshis crawl into a better rung of poverty, and I’ll address that below. I also am a really big fan of real globalization, which means tearing down borders in their entirety and along with them the structures that the rich and powerful have built to keep themselves rich and powerful. In the reality we have, though, globalization is nothing more than a race to the bottom for workers. That’s it, that’s what it is; it’s a way to essentially force all workers into a labor price competition that inevitably hurts workers in those places where better pay and conditions have been achieved through great struggle. Unionized factory in Pennsylvania in the 1970s that built durable goods, paid workers a living wage, and provided the kind of job security that enables community? Tear it down, send the work to dangerous factories in the Philippines that pay workers pennies, and then condescendingly tell anyone who objects that they’re economically illiterate. That’s the most common defense - that rather than representing a clash between fundamentally different values, this debate simply reflects dummy dumbheads who like workers against the glorious globalization master race. This has been Brad Delong’s shtick since he was in the Clinton administration.

Matt Yglesias, today, conveniently explained that all people care about is being able to buy cheap plastic shit on Temu.

Beyond the market response, though, just as Democrats are saying in response to Trump, it turns out that people like cheap stuff!

Voters in New England don’t want higher taxes on their fuel oil. Parents don’t want to pay higher prices for berries imported from Mexico. For a very long time, overall inflation was consistently low and the price level for durable goods specifically was falling.

During that long stretch of falling durable goods prices that started in the mid-1990s, it was probably easy to talk yourself into the view that making toasters or fridges or furniture or tires cheaper wasn’t an important policy issue. But when inflation spiked, people got really mad! Nobody wants to pay more for tables.

Now my moral take on this is pretty plain, right. But Yglesias’s piece is about the political effects of globalization. And here’s where I think people like him and Brad Delong and Jon Chait and the whole neoliberal crew just consistently demonstrate a profound failure to understand basic human nature: most everyone cares more about the security, community, sense of purpose, and structure of the jobs that were lost than they do about cheap tables. The whole neoliberal world has refused to believe that people want jobs that bring security and community more than they want to buy unnaturally cheap patio furniture at Target. But that is in fact true, and that’s why the postwar order is in slow-motion collapse. Trumpism is one part of that collapse, and of course Trumpism is also driven by various kinds of bigotry and (especially) intense hatred of the liberal elites who make up this country’s administrative class. The bigger picture is simple: Yglesias’s policy project cannot achieve durable political victory because that policy project destroys a beloved vision of American life.