That, in the wake of energy shocks from Russia's invasion of Ukraine and everything-else shocks from the zero-covid policy in China, the author can still say with a straight face that free trade will solve our supply problems, can only be the product of motivated reasoning. It's one thing to supplement your domestic production with a bit of temporary outside help, but to allow whole industries to go overseas and have no substantive domestic production, in a nation as large as the USA, makes no sense. Free trade is what got us here. It's like the author slept through the last three years.
That's not what parent is saying. They are saying there is a connection between Covid and the Russian war in Ukraine; and supply shocks and inflation. They are saying that free trade policies are unrelated and won't solve the current supply shocks and inflation. I agree.
It's just an opinion. There's no serious argument being made in the comment everyone is replying to. It's just apriori reasoning, not based in evidence, about how the world works.
It's fun to read, but it's not founded on reality (evidence), and people should not take it seriously, just like virtually all comments on social media sites.
Free trade—if it results in greater reliance on foreign suppliers, which it pretty much always does—comes at some national security risk, since you're depending on sources beyond your control for the supply of more goods and resources. To illustrate by extreme example: that your country has realized its greatest Ricardoan(?) comparative advantage potential and has efficiently converted its entire productive capacity to making teacups is not great if there's a global food shortage and you don't produce any food.
Shocks to supply and to the economy (so, things like Covid or Russia invading a neighbor) can cause that risk to be realized as harm, or at least cause the risk to be more evident.
1. Optimization like outsourcing sacrifices resiliency in the name of maximizing profit. In the software world trying to save money by keeping no backups or not allocating additional server capacity in the name of maximizing profits would be seen as insane but that's how US manufacturing has been managed.
2. Economists in general don't account for any externalities or 2nd order effects when it comes to free trade. In theory comparative advantage makes sense, but it doesn't account for how outsourcing cheap manufacturing to China eventually allows them to build up an economic base that threatens the US militarily
Basically for the US economy to work requires the system to be completely perfect, anything like a war or pandemic that throws even a minor wrench in an extremely complicated system causes disaster.
If we put economists in charge they'd have outsourced all food production because cheaper labor in other countries would be more "efficient". Which would be fine until some sort of famine, then those countries would just keep the food and we'd be stuck with "high value" products while starving
> Economists in general don't account for any externalities or 2nd order effects when it comes to free trade.
Many do. They just don't get hired as lobbyists so their impact on the conversation is limited. The economics that gets done in economics departments is often quite different from the economics that percolates out into popular consciousness. But a lot of it involves math. . .
> If we put economists in charge they'd have outsourced all food production because cheaper labor in other countries would be more "efficient". Which would be fine until some sort of famine, then those countries would just keep the food and we'd be stuck with "high value" products while starving
I am going to use this line from now on. Your whole comment is brilliant, BTW
> Can you explain the connection between free trade, covid/russian agression, and the economy? It's not obvious to me
Negative externalities can happen such that access to your trading partners is severely reduced or eliminated.
In terms of COVID and China, the biggest trading center and very large (largest?) shipping port in China largely came to a grinding halt as the entire city was locked down for covid. Massive amounts of cargo ships were just stuck outside the port with nothing to do. This gummed up the entire inner workings of the international trade system and international shipping system, and this negatively impacted many economies due to lack of goods and increased cost of good that were available due to limited supply.
In terms of Russian aggression, the main issue has been restricted access to Russian oil. Energy drives economies. If energy prices go up and/or supply goes down, it slows the economy.
>have no substantive domestic production, in a nation as large as the USA
The US very much still has a domestic manufacturing sector, it just happens to be the case that fewer people work in it.[1] In fact the US manufacturing output is the second largest in the world, on par with China.[2]
Insofar as the US does struggle, I don't see the connection to free trade. The US has one of the largest domestic economies, and free trade only comprises about 23% of the American GDP. That makes the US the third least free trade reliant country in the world. Compare that to Germany or South Korea, two strong manufacturing countries in the developed world, where trade is about 4 times(!) as important.
Which is a shame because the low-end stuff is what makes an economy tick. And is the training grounds for engineers and tradesmen.
I also think it will help us as a society if we let people work rather mundane jobs that make essential products and receive good living wages. “I make a living making the bolts that keep your fancy EV together.” Service economy be damned.
That boat has long since sailed I’m afraid but maybe we can bring it back somehow. I remain hopeful.
It works in Germany (and Nordic countries). Assembling washing machines is tedious, but not that hard, and it pays well enough to buy a flat or even a house after years on the job. Cutting and welding metal containers all day long pays even better.
But these are industries where you don't job hop every couple of years - you do it for decades and your wage rises accordingly.
It's hard work, but there's always people who can do it and want to do it.
They don’t share a border with a country with cheap labor and basically a failed state in the northern regions where you can just throw up a factory and truck the finished goods a few kilometers back over the border. When that is too much then just import the cheap labor and keep them in a state where they are too scared to report labor violations.
If we could figure out a way to equally exploit the Canadians we’d be set for generations.
> They don’t share a border with a country with cheap labor
Poland has been used for cheap labor ever since the fall of Soviet. Only difference is that Poland got a lot less cheap over the years, while Mexico seems to never stop being poor.
Romania, Bulgaria (and soon likely Ukraine) are the Mexico of the EU.
It's actually beneficial to the workers - 6 months at basically ~1500 Euros saved per month = 9000 Euros. 5-10 years of these "deployments" and you buy a nice house.
But yeah, there's plenty of labour to feed smarter countries' industrial machines. I say "smarter" because the governments of RO/BG are absolute shite at improving conditions for startups/small business - you know, the things that become big business and bring in money, keep workers, etc given the chance and time. DE/NL/SE/etc know how countries become "developed".
Visit Rhineland, and you'll see the impact globalization has had on Germany. They are not immune to it. For example, Siemens has shut down a number of industrial plants over the years, shifting production to both Eastern Europe and China.
The neoclassical theory of (static) comparative advantage is dead and buried.
It was originally a kind of academic pretext for justifying exploitation of third world resources.
Then western economists drank their own koolaid.
They then tutted paternalistically at China in the 90s for engaging in export oriented industrialization and keeping their capital markets on a tight leash. They argued that China was shooting itself in the foot and should stick to things they were good at like making cheap tacky toys and clothes and open up their capital markets.
Those 90s New York Times op eds hailing comparative advantage and chastising China aged really badly.
China would do better economically if they were open to more trade and competition, they are shooting themselves in the foot compared to where their economy could go.
and comparative advantage operates just fine without trade barriers. Since it's just a mathematical relationship, i.e. it can't be wrong, it also operates with trade barriers, just not as efficiently.
According to comparative advantage most developing countries should just export raw resources and import everything else like food.
After all, the west has all the absolute advantages: rule of law, educated workforce, public infrastructure, financial capital, fertile soil, intellectual property.
No one should ever produce something in a developing economy. Just import all finished goods from the usual industrial nations until e.g. Greece is bankrupt from buying German made products. Suddenly the Germans introduce austerity policies and overall reduce the quality of life in Greece.
No, they wouldnt. They'd have ended up yet another cheap labor colony without protectionism. It takes a generation of protectionism to make Huawei's tech good enough to make America shit its pants.
The theory of comparative advantage assumes comparative advantage never changes and cant be changed by trade policy. 90s neoclassical economists pushing this cult werent just proved thoroughly and conclusively wrong by the ascendance of China, their koolaid might have spurred on the end the American empire.
Comparative advantage is mostly nonsense because humans are extremely good generalists and pretty much every country has every industry to some degree.
another problem, though, is that as production methods change, there becomes less meaningful low-end work. Making bolts might have been a basic job at some point, but is basically only done by large automated machines now, or in small batches to incredibly high tolerance on CNCs.
The thing we need to bring back is the full supply chain. E.g. it doesn't make sense to build things here if 90% of the components come from Shenzhen.
There are endless similar videos of people making simple machined, cast, or forged parts by hand like this, in horribly unsafe conditions, at least by today's workplace standards.
Ironically, people making things out of wood using very labor intensive, hundreds of years old technology is very much in demand.
I was watching a video on the YouTubes where they were doing a large casting in the UK and I can’t imagine it was much different to how it was done a hundred years ago when the original thing they were copying was made. Other than better ppe with all the space tech I’d guess but as a casual observer it looked “horribly unsafe”.
Manufacturing is similar to coding. You outsource the basic functionality to third-party libraries and create value on top of that. At some point, the inability to control your external dependencies obscure how your code actually run, introduce bugs and security exploits.
People then swear off third party code and start writing the basics themselves or at least stop updating their dependencies.
Inspiration to make improvements to the nuts and bolts requires daily, constant exposure to the nuts and bolts. There is a lifetime of knowledge required sometimes.
final step - "who cares, americans will just live in the Metaverse"
Facebook moving towards the "metaverse" is disturbing to me because they are basically betting on people giving up on the real world, it's a form of surrender. Don't bother trying to solve real problems, just plug into the matrix
Even then, our dominance in intellectual property is not assured. TikTok has taken the world by storm and I would have never imagined a Chinese company would make a social media app more successful and compelling than what any Bay Area company could produce. We're also seeing Hollywood movies become less successful overseas as other nations step up their own media production.
Not only do I see our competitive advantage in Intellectual Property declining, I also don't know what comes next after Intellectual Property.
Housing has become too expensive. The US would see huge GDP growth if it reduced the percentage of wages going to housing and rent-seeking corporations.
Housing is not expensive in much of the country. You're looking at a handful of heavily urbanized areas and projecting those dynamics to the rest of the U.S.
Housing values are strongly correlated with the local economy. By and large, the areas with cheap housing have weak job markets and low wages, and vice versa. Remote work may change this some, and it's great if you have the privilege of that option, but it is certainly not the norm across all workers.
> Housing is not expensive in much of the country.
Citation needed. Take me to this mystical place. I have lived in a couple of flyover states. Rent and housing aren't getting cheaper anywhere, compadre.
Dr. Strangelove was openly political. It was made as a dark comedy precisely as a way of making its message transparent and enjoyable to the audience. Modern films are quite different.
You originally said that Hollywood movies had become "heavily politicized". I think what you really mean to say is that they've started promoting certain ideas that you don't like. Or are you going to tell me that Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind didn't engage with any controversial political ideas?
Shit, Jaws would probably be regarded as "too political" these days, by some folks. It could easily be read as an anti-Covid-denier allegory, after all....
Taking that same reading further, you’d have to acknowledge that they now try to be politically palatable to 75% of the world because the global markets are now available and rich.
Catering to regional tastes just isn’t competitive at that scale.
People don’t come out of LOTR and think “hey you know what’s bad? Industrialization.” They don’t come out of Star Wars thinking about fascism. They definitely don’t come out of the matrix thinking about LGBTQ issues.
They come out thinking about killing orcs, killing storm troopers, and killing agents in slo motion.
Vader is German for father. The uniforms were largely based on Nazi uniforms. It's literally a story about defeating fascists using almost strictly German imagery, German names and so forth.
Not the OP, but a person from behind the former Iron Curtain who watched a lot of old commie stuff, the good and the mediocre and the really boring ones.
There is politicized and politicized. Art often has a political message, but there is a certain threshold where the message starts squeezing everything else out of the picture and the characters become stuffy - a weird kind of "ideal exemplars" of a certain desired stereotype instead of believable humans.
If the main hero can't be characterized more personally than "Soviet and a hero" or "trans and brave", the threshold is crossed.
People like to watch movies about other people, not stereotypized puppets.
There are loads of Hollywood movies from all eras that meet all these criteria. It's not a new phenomenon. Check out the oh-so-subtle characterization in The Sands of Iwo Jima, for example. Or if you want an idealized do-gooder character, how about Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night? (A great movie, but Tibbs's character is only a little more filled out than 'black and a good guy'.)
It's honestly astonishing to me that people would think that American movies with political messaging are somehow a new phenomenon. I'd have to assume that these folks have just not watched many old movies.
I think if you made two buckets labeled "sex" and "politics" a majority of well-regarded films from all of the 20th century, right back to the beginning of film, would land in at least one of the two. Lots would qualify for both.
Tons of our most beloved films are political, and that's true back to the dawn of cinema.
I don't even know what decade you're referring to. Movies, plays, and other forms of entertainment always had politics. Some of them (like Lolita) explicitly tried to court controversy.
Or do you mean like Disney movies, like how Peter Pan (1953 Disney cartoon) has great, "non political" songs like "What makes the red man red" ??
Like, you can't escape politics. Even when you're trying to be politically neutral (like a Disney cartoon aimed at children in the 1950s), these sorts of political issues just come up... because our base assumptions of life are in fact political.
Whether we court politics on purpose (Dr. Strangelove, Lolita), or accidentally (Peter Pan 1953, "What Makes the Red Man Red?"), these sorts of things have been going on since the dawn of movies and cartoons.
That film literally starts with some soldiers shooting surrendering enemies (a war crime) on the Beach of Normandy. It also takes the unusual stance to bring up the gore (charred bodies from flamethrowers, etc. etc.), which is almost certainly political. (How much gore to show, are we glorifying violence? Etc. etc.)
That the US actions were all positive in WW2. That the US were the heroes. This agenda is so seeped in modern culture today, that it's difficult to see today.
Doesn't mean that a war film is agenda free though.
Saving Private Ryan shows US / Allied soldiers murdering surrendering troops, which is 100% a political move (and _VERY_ unusual for a war movie to show).
> Even Downfall is pretty light on politics, even though it takes place in the Fuehrerbunker itself.
Downfall takes an anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi stance. Just because we all "agree" with the message doesn't change the fact that Hitler is seen as a weak, degenerating, hypocritical man throughout the film.
Who happens to be a good boss to the main character.
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Finally, the secretary openly apologizes for her role in Nazi-ism. The film makes it clear that even "good people" (like the secretary), who end up helping the Nazis in little ways are still partially responsible for the evils the Nazis caused.
The main character never killed anybody. But she helped Hitler write his last will (as well as Joseph Goebbels's last will), and other jobs that a secretary should do. The film is innately bringing to focus the role of the "typical" Nazi. Not the far right but just the little supporters and their role in Nazism. The "good people on the other side", if you will.
And they're openly apologetic. Because even those little ways of getting a job and helping out in little ways was still Nazism, and in support of that awful ideology.
Being anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi is 'political' now? They're simply acknowledging the reality that Nazism was an absolute, unmitigated disaster - even, and most surprisingly, for those who might have foolishly expected to benefit from it. That's what those apologetic attitudes are about. If you really wanted to draft a relevant political message from the whole Nazi thing, it would have to be "how the heck do we avoid falling into this awful trap again". The premise of Downfall is not good for that. The film mostly sticks to the historical sources - the crazy, delusional rants that everyone loves to make memes about actually happened, Hitler really said those things. He was quite weak in those circumstances.
> the crazy, delusional rants that everyone loves to make memes about actually happened
I'm presuming that you're talking about the "Steiner's Attack" meme/scene from the movie.
This scene "actually happened" according to Russian historians, who were writing for a single audience (Stalin). Their testimony is not to be trusted. I agree with you that its part of the historical record, but specifically part of the _RUSSIAN_ historical record.
Alas, that's the breaks. Russia captured Berlin with their army before the USA/British forces could. But there's plenty of "political decisions" made with respect to the movie (ie: whether to honor the Russian telling of events, or to focus upon say Traudl Junge's book... which didn't mention this "Hitler flies into a rage over Steiner's Attack").
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The Goring Telegram (which was in the movie, but rarely memed) is 100% accepted history IIRC, and probably serves as a better example of how Hitler really acted.
Absolutely it's political. Hitler was a political actor at the end of the day, as a ruler of a nation. And Nazism is a political ideology. Just because we all agree that Nazism is repugnant (and that too is debatable - several far right US organizations are still today pro-Nazi) doesn't make an anti-Nazi film apolitical.
This. Just because we agree with something - doesn't mean it's apolitical. Even a purely romantic film such as Brokeback Mountain, when it was released was called political by Christian conservatives. I don't agree with their views at all, but in this case they were right.
Because anything that can be targeted by legislation, is political in it's definition.
Also, multiple war movies, such as Rambo for example are explicitly political. So, this recent pearl clutching about Hollywood political honestly makes no sense.
This seems like one of those ideas that is in the air and keeps floating around without solid evidence. Is there any? Surveys or such?
Maybe a bigger issues are simply audiences getting used to only seeing a certain kind of movie outside the house, that there's enough good stuff on TV that the quality gap between home and theater is smaller, the expense of a movie theater visit, an ongoing pandemic.
Exactly. I refuse to watch the imperialist propaganda vehicle known as the Marvel cinematic Universe.
Only partially kidding. There is a comical parallel though with China’s Wolf Warriors movies. Hugely popular, and maybe even good cinema, but also propaganda
Whilst I'm annoyed with overly political story-lines, it's not proven that this moves the needle.
I'd say streaming is the main culprit in combination with the professionalization of the series format. The big budgets go into series now.
Other than that, subjective as it is, there just doesn't seem to be many eye-catching movies anymore. I used to have big discussions with my g/f on which movie to go to, as at least 3 or 4 at any time would compete for that choice. Now we look at what's playing and cannot even find a single one that we would want to watch. It's all Marvel and sequels.
Only because a certain side of politics thinks having a character of a certain identity is a political statement. Maybe people and characters should be free to be who they are without it being a big deal.
Yeah, I think the complaint is really more that “the cultural landscape has moved on such that people now want to tell stories about characters that make me feel uncomfortable, and I interpret this as pushing a political agenda on me.”
The kingsmen! First film has the president and the business elite using climate change as a ploy for word domination or something like that. Second film has evil pharma exec and evil American president planning to kill every drug user in America. Saved by a group including a good old boy who dies singing “country road”.
On the more liberal side: don’t look up. Features a ton of frankly disingenuous takes that imo are not presented as hyperbole. Personal dis favorite being the dumb conservative military man showing trying to shoot down asteroids in space with his small arms machine gun.
Both films are divisive and dishonest in their depictions of “the other side”. Both are more populist than democrat republican specifically
> I would have never imagined a Chinese company would make a social media app more successful and compelling than what any Bay Area company could produce.
Arrogance and hubris.
> Not only do I see our competitive advantage in Intellectual Property declining, I also don't know what comes next after Intellectual Property.
We maintain our interests as we always have: destabilizing other countries and war. However, I think pax Americana ends with climate change.
>However, I think pax Americana ends with climate change.
Perhaps, but it might also give opportunities to further it:
"No, Brazil, you can't cut down your forest in your country for farmland. We have to fight climate change! You need to stop right now or else."
If you read about Brazil cutting down parts of the Amazon in places like reddit you'll find that a lot of people in the developed world hold this kind of an opinion. They might even be willing to back some form of sanctions or punishment for Brazil for doing it. This gives a convenient excuse for developed nations to meddle with other countries again.
The problem is "Intellectual Property." does not really exist, it is more accurately called "Intellectual Privilege", and IMO you can not based a soild economy on it. Not even close
"Intellectual Property" based economics, like "Service Economy" that we all heard in the 90's has the same flaw, they are self canalizing and built on intangible "honor" based trade
Unlike Physical Manufacturing, of Physical Goods, or the development of Raw Resources.
Solid Foundational economies require the production of solid tangible assets, not "Intellectual Property"
I'm not sure, but what kind of margin can persuade business people to re-open factories that produce TVs/refrigerators and ordinary workers to accept such jobs?
Serious question: how does a car company like Tesla remain competitive manufacturing in the US? This was supposed to be a solved. If you asked car execs prior to Tesla if a new car company could compete with the existing players and produce their product in the US they would have laughed in your face.
Even now US electric cars are mostly a loss leader in the legacy market, without the constraint of being produced in the US. What's going on here?
The author assumes this is related to economic policy, although he mentions the "depression economics" problem. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's related to antitrust policy.
If you're a monopoly or oligopoly, a situation where there's not quite enough supply lets you crank up prices and run your factories at their most profitable point. You don't have to worry about losing market share to a competitor. If you're a monopolist in a range of products, you can deal with someone trying to move into part of your space by lowering prices for the competed items only, until the new entrant cracks. Known examples are generic drug companies, cable TV companies, cellular phone companies, and bulk agricultural product wholesalers.
It seems to take at least four real competitors before price competition happens. That's from an EU study. Once you're down to three players, the magic happens, the margins go way up, and supply shortages become profitable.
We've seen this with solar panel tariffs. We add tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing, but instead of domestic factories we just get cutbacks in installations and less employment overall.
There the impacts are direct and obvious, but I worry that similar things happen in other industries as well. There are certainly a lot of people that think copper, steel, and aluminum tariffs are leading to workarounds that involve more imports of finished goods.
Is the US ultimately hurting or helping domestic manufacturing with these policies? I don't think the answers are clear.
It's almost as though we've been warned for decades that tariffs are mostly harmful.
Time and time again we prove that R&D has a massive ROI, yet it's always being trimmed since it doesn't pay off in a short-enough time frame to keep the accountants happy (<6 months).
In 1601 a member of Parliament asked, when a list of monopolies was read out, ‘Is not bread there?’ His irony exaggerated only slightly. It is difficult for us to picture to ourselves the life of a man living in a house built with monopoly bricks, with windows (if any) of monopoly glass; heated by monopoly coal (in Ireland monopoly timber), burning in a grate made of monopoly iron. His walls were lined with monopoly tapestries. He slept on monopoly feathers, did his hair with monopoly brushes and monopoly combs. He washed himself with monopoly soap, his clothes in monopoly starch. He dressed in monopoly lace, monopoly linen, monopoly leather, monopoly gold thread. His hat was of monopoly beaver, with a monopoly band. His clothes were held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins. They were dyed with monopoly dyes. He ate monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, and monopoly lobsters. His food was seasoned with monopoly salt, monopoly pepper, monopoly vinegar. Out of monopoly glasses he drank monopoly wines and monopoly spirits; out of pewter mugs made from monopoly tin he drank monopoly beer made from monopoly hops, kept in monopoly barrels or monopoly bottles, sold in monopoly-licensed ale-houses. He smoked monopoly tobacco in monopoly pipes, played with monopoly dice or monopoly cards, or on monopoly lute-strings. He wrote with monopoly pens, on monopoly writing-paper; read (through monopoly spectacles, by the light of monopoly candles) monopoly printed books, including monopoly Bibles and monopoly Latin grammars, printed on paper made from monopoly saltpetre. He exercised himself with monopoly golf balls and in monopoly-licensed bowling alleys. A monopolist collected the fines which he paid for searing. He travelled in monopoly sedan chairs or monopoly hackney coaches, drawn by horses fed on monopoly hay. He tipped with monopoly farthings. At sea he was lighted by monopoly lighthouses. When he made his will, he went to a monopolist. (In Ireland one could not be born, married, or die without 6d. To a monopolist.) Pedlars were licensed by a monopolist. Mice were caught in monopoly mousetraps. Not all these patents existed at once, but all come from the first decades of the seventeenth century. In 1621 there were alleged to be 700 of them.
Apart possibly from beer and salt, these were not quite necessities. But monopolies added to the price of just those semi-luxuries which were beginning to come within the reach of yeoman and artisans whose standard of living was rising. They affected the daily life of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen. By the end of the sixteen-thirties they were bringing nearly £100,000 a year to the Exchequer.
Monopolies interfered with the normal channels of trade. Merchants were prohibited from landing their cargoes at the most convenient port whenever a monopolist’s right of search chanced to require their unloading elsewhere. By the late sixteen-thirties the economy was beginning to suffer. The clothing industry was hit by increased cost of soap and alum, and by the scarcity of potash caused by suppression of imports. The Greenland Company lacked oil. The salt monopoly embarrassed the Fishery Society. The rise in the price of coal hit nearly all industries. ‘No freeman of London,’ said a pamphlet of 1640, ‘after he hath served his years and set up his trade, can be sure long to enjoy the labour of his trade, but either his is forbidden longer to use it, or is forced at length with the rest of his trade to purchase it as a monopoly, at a dear rate, which they and all the kingdom pay for. Witness the soap business.’
Nor was the objection to monopolies only economic. Buckingham, the great monopoly-monger, had popish connections. The soap monopoly, which promised the King £20,000 a year in the sixteen-thirties, was attacked not only because it doubled the price and its inferior produc...
that's an incoherent set of policy recommendations.
we sorely need regulatory reform that focuses less on specific, ideological goals and more on market dynamism and fairness, but your list is a mishmash of more regulation and less.
and just sugar, really? not the fertilizer industry? or farm equipment? or corn? or anything else? you fall down the rabbit hole really fast this way.
moreover, punishing old people and single parents isn't going to make us more competitive. removing the mortgage tax deduction would though, as it'd make the housing market more efficient and dynamic, fueling growth and innovation. get rid of the implicit subsidy to housing via the government-backed mortgage companies, and we'd really get somewhere.
let's remove subsidies and price in externalities across the board, not just in some ideological subset, then you don't have to finely regulate every market and commodity, which is just begging for more regulatory capture and corruption.
1. Consumers will prefer safer conventional vehicles over shitty EVs
2. People will just burn oil
3. Add more regulations on farms - and the food will also be imported from China.
4. It probably has been decided at some point that it's cheaper to intervene while the person in their childhood, rather than dealing with adults who grew up in miserable conditions
5. It will increase labor force supply, therefore decreasing salaries. Is it the intent?
This list is emblematic of optimizing for a metric without considering the reason why we are optimizing for said metric in the first place.
The reason why it is good to have a competitive labor force is so that wages and quality of life can go up.
1,4, and 5 are in opposition to the underlying goal we want to achieve by having a competitive labor force. These propositions are trying to mitigate human suffering by... increasing human suffering? There is zero consistency here.
Just looking at #5, this is essentially a de facto ban on retirement, but it also doesn't make sense in practice because companies are already discriminating against older workers. I suppose you could argue that a shorter period of retirement would lead to decreased saving, and increased consumer spending, but I don't think the major problems with the US are currently caused by a lack of consumption.
upvoted you but disagree on 1's implementation, 4 & 5 entirely. also replace Ban by disincentivise in 2.
this list is also meta indicative of problems in US political system. Dems just have to be slightly better than rethuglicans to be viable so they keep adding unwanted half baked solutions till they are barely palatable.
Table 1 made me realize you could probably protect the rainforests and improve American health and help US ranchers with a small tariff on Brazilian beef. I'm sure most Brazilians would be 1) happy to each cheaper beef and 2) welcome reduced pressure on their rainforests. Even the Brazilian ranchers don't necessarily lose. They still have beef to sell. They just won't have to invest as much in land-clearing.
I think globalization is in a reversing trend due to freedom and control over supply chains. I also think cheap consumer non sustainable goods are reversing.
If you buy too cheap goods you sell your future freedom.
The current administration's ideas of supply-side reforms starts with the Defense Production Act and ends with Executive Order 11615. The opposition party's idea of supply-side reforms involves looking for additional ballots in Georgia.
Hang onto your inflation hedges, because it doesn't look very good for America.
So, make it cheap to be poor so the bottom 80% of Americans can generate free cash flow on the family/individual level.
* free health care
* free/cheap public transit (trains, bicycles, walking; energy efficient)
* cheap real estate (not only housing, but cheap retail/office space) --> density + kill zoning
And let the IRS do tax returns for people. Kill the Intuit strangle hold on tax returns.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadIt's fun to read, but it's not founded on reality (evidence), and people should not take it seriously, just like virtually all comments on social media sites.
Shocks to supply and to the economy (so, things like Covid or Russia invading a neighbor) can cause that risk to be realized as harm, or at least cause the risk to be more evident.
Then when bad things happen in that location, you lose that production. The result is that you can't get what you need at any price.
2. Economists in general don't account for any externalities or 2nd order effects when it comes to free trade. In theory comparative advantage makes sense, but it doesn't account for how outsourcing cheap manufacturing to China eventually allows them to build up an economic base that threatens the US militarily
Basically for the US economy to work requires the system to be completely perfect, anything like a war or pandemic that throws even a minor wrench in an extremely complicated system causes disaster.
If we put economists in charge they'd have outsourced all food production because cheaper labor in other countries would be more "efficient". Which would be fine until some sort of famine, then those countries would just keep the food and we'd be stuck with "high value" products while starving
Many do. They just don't get hired as lobbyists so their impact on the conversation is limited. The economics that gets done in economics departments is often quite different from the economics that percolates out into popular consciousness. But a lot of it involves math. . .
Better analogy would be the cloud. You could imagine a number of different points on the cloud vs. self host spectrum:
- Fully dependent on high level APIs of a third party.
- Dependent on commodity VMs and dedicated servers from third parties.
- Purchase equipment from third parties to host on leased premises with leased connectivity.
- Purchase equipment from third parties to host on own land with leased connectivity.
- Fabricate your own equipment to host on your own land and lay your own fiber to customers.
- Dig your own mines to obtain the raw material for such equipment. Fabricate your own machines to make it.
I am going to use this line from now on. Your whole comment is brilliant, BTW
This shows great ignorance of both farming and economics. For cereal crops, labor barely registers as an input.
Negative externalities can happen such that access to your trading partners is severely reduced or eliminated.
In terms of COVID and China, the biggest trading center and very large (largest?) shipping port in China largely came to a grinding halt as the entire city was locked down for covid. Massive amounts of cargo ships were just stuck outside the port with nothing to do. This gummed up the entire inner workings of the international trade system and international shipping system, and this negatively impacted many economies due to lack of goods and increased cost of good that were available due to limited supply.
In terms of Russian aggression, the main issue has been restricted access to Russian oil. Energy drives economies. If energy prices go up and/or supply goes down, it slows the economy.
The US very much still has a domestic manufacturing sector, it just happens to be the case that fewer people work in it.[1] In fact the US manufacturing output is the second largest in the world, on par with China.[2]
Insofar as the US does struggle, I don't see the connection to free trade. The US has one of the largest domestic economies, and free trade only comprises about 23% of the American GDP. That makes the US the third least free trade reliant country in the world. Compare that to Germany or South Korea, two strong manufacturing countries in the developed world, where trade is about 4 times(!) as important.
[1]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMAN
[2]https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-scor...
[3]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS?most_rec...
"who cares, america won't manufacture low end stuff like refrigerators, but we'll manufacture high end stuff like TVs."
"who cares, america won't manufacture low end stuff like TVs but we'll manufacture high end stuff like computer chips."
"who cares, america won't manufacture low end stuff like computer chips but we'll manufacture high end stuff like bored ape NFTs."
I also think it will help us as a society if we let people work rather mundane jobs that make essential products and receive good living wages. “I make a living making the bolts that keep your fancy EV together.” Service economy be damned.
That boat has long since sailed I’m afraid but maybe we can bring it back somehow. I remain hopeful.
Imperialism isn’t a necessity or even a proper answer. You need local expertise, education and decent living standards.
But these are industries where you don't job hop every couple of years - you do it for decades and your wage rises accordingly.
It's hard work, but there's always people who can do it and want to do it.
If we could figure out a way to equally exploit the Canadians we’d be set for generations.
Poland has been used for cheap labor ever since the fall of Soviet. Only difference is that Poland got a lot less cheap over the years, while Mexico seems to never stop being poor.
It's actually beneficial to the workers - 6 months at basically ~1500 Euros saved per month = 9000 Euros. 5-10 years of these "deployments" and you buy a nice house.
But yeah, there's plenty of labour to feed smarter countries' industrial machines. I say "smarter" because the governments of RO/BG are absolute shite at improving conditions for startups/small business - you know, the things that become big business and bring in money, keep workers, etc given the chance and time. DE/NL/SE/etc know how countries become "developed".
It was originally a kind of academic pretext for justifying exploitation of third world resources.
Then western economists drank their own koolaid.
They then tutted paternalistically at China in the 90s for engaging in export oriented industrialization and keeping their capital markets on a tight leash. They argued that China was shooting itself in the foot and should stick to things they were good at like making cheap tacky toys and clothes and open up their capital markets.
Those 90s New York Times op eds hailing comparative advantage and chastising China aged really badly.
and comparative advantage operates just fine without trade barriers. Since it's just a mathematical relationship, i.e. it can't be wrong, it also operates with trade barriers, just not as efficiently.
After all, the west has all the absolute advantages: rule of law, educated workforce, public infrastructure, financial capital, fertile soil, intellectual property.
No one should ever produce something in a developing economy. Just import all finished goods from the usual industrial nations until e.g. Greece is bankrupt from buying German made products. Suddenly the Germans introduce austerity policies and overall reduce the quality of life in Greece.
The theory of comparative advantage assumes comparative advantage never changes and cant be changed by trade policy. 90s neoclassical economists pushing this cult werent just proved thoroughly and conclusively wrong by the ascendance of China, their koolaid might have spurred on the end the American empire.
The thing we need to bring back is the full supply chain. E.g. it doesn't make sense to build things here if 90% of the components come from Shenzhen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZYPG1ADPg
There are endless similar videos of people making simple machined, cast, or forged parts by hand like this, in horribly unsafe conditions, at least by today's workplace standards.
I was watching a video on the YouTubes where they were doing a large casting in the UK and I can’t imagine it was much different to how it was done a hundred years ago when the original thing they were copying was made. Other than better ppe with all the space tech I’d guess but as a casual observer it looked “horribly unsafe”.
People then swear off third party code and start writing the basics themselves or at least stop updating their dependencies.
Inspiration to make improvements to the nuts and bolts requires daily, constant exposure to the nuts and bolts. There is a lifetime of knowledge required sometimes.
Facebook moving towards the "metaverse" is disturbing to me because they are basically betting on people giving up on the real world, it's a form of surrender. Don't bother trying to solve real problems, just plug into the matrix
"who cares, america won't manufacture low end stuff like computer chips but we'll manufacture high end stuff like Intellectual Property."
As this is the reality.
Not only do I see our competitive advantage in Intellectual Property declining, I also don't know what comes next after Intellectual Property.
Citation needed. Take me to this mystical place. I have lived in a couple of flyover states. Rent and housing aren't getting cheaper anywhere, compadre.
There's a good reason for this, the vast majority of people aren't shopping for homes in places without jobs.
Catering to regional tastes just isn’t competitive at that scale.
Star Wars is pretty much solidly on the side of opposing facism.
The Matrix was openly an LGBTQ metaphor (though now the Warhowski sisters claim it was specifically a trans metaphor).
Avatar, Dances with Wolves, and Star Trek IV strongly promoted ecological preservation ideologies.
They come out thinking about killing orcs, killing storm troopers, and killing agents in slo motion.
Vader is German for father. The uniforms were largely based on Nazi uniforms. It's literally a story about defeating fascists using almost strictly German imagery, German names and so forth.
There is politicized and politicized. Art often has a political message, but there is a certain threshold where the message starts squeezing everything else out of the picture and the characters become stuffy - a weird kind of "ideal exemplars" of a certain desired stereotype instead of believable humans.
If the main hero can't be characterized more personally than "Soviet and a hero" or "trans and brave", the threshold is crossed.
People like to watch movies about other people, not stereotypized puppets.
It's honestly astonishing to me that people would think that American movies with political messaging are somehow a new phenomenon. I'd have to assume that these folks have just not watched many old movies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sands_of_Iwo_Jima
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film...
Tons of our most beloved films are political, and that's true back to the dawn of cinema.
??
I don't even know what decade you're referring to. Movies, plays, and other forms of entertainment always had politics. Some of them (like Lolita) explicitly tried to court controversy.
Or do you mean like Disney movies, like how Peter Pan (1953 Disney cartoon) has great, "non political" songs like "What makes the red man red" ??
Like, you can't escape politics. Even when you're trying to be politically neutral (like a Disney cartoon aimed at children in the 1950s), these sorts of political issues just come up... because our base assumptions of life are in fact political.
Whether we court politics on purpose (Dr. Strangelove, Lolita), or accidentally (Peter Pan 1953, "What Makes the Red Man Red?"), these sorts of things have been going on since the dawn of movies and cartoons.
Lemme leave things off with this 1940s comic by Dr. Seuss: https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb3618599q/_2.jpg
Name me a war movie that isn't political.
Doesn't mean that a war film is agenda free though.
Saving Private Ryan shows US / Allied soldiers murdering surrendering troops, which is 100% a political move (and _VERY_ unusual for a war movie to show).
1917.
Possibly Dunkirk.
Even Downfall is pretty light on politics, even though it takes place in the Fuehrerbunker itself.
Downfall takes an anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi stance. Just because we all "agree" with the message doesn't change the fact that Hitler is seen as a weak, degenerating, hypocritical man throughout the film.
Who happens to be a good boss to the main character.
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Finally, the secretary openly apologizes for her role in Nazi-ism. The film makes it clear that even "good people" (like the secretary), who end up helping the Nazis in little ways are still partially responsible for the evils the Nazis caused.
The main character never killed anybody. But she helped Hitler write his last will (as well as Joseph Goebbels's last will), and other jobs that a secretary should do. The film is innately bringing to focus the role of the "typical" Nazi. Not the far right but just the little supporters and their role in Nazism. The "good people on the other side", if you will.
And they're openly apologetic. Because even those little ways of getting a job and helping out in little ways was still Nazism, and in support of that awful ideology.
I'm presuming that you're talking about the "Steiner's Attack" meme/scene from the movie.
This scene "actually happened" according to Russian historians, who were writing for a single audience (Stalin). Their testimony is not to be trusted. I agree with you that its part of the historical record, but specifically part of the _RUSSIAN_ historical record.
Alas, that's the breaks. Russia captured Berlin with their army before the USA/British forces could. But there's plenty of "political decisions" made with respect to the movie (ie: whether to honor the Russian telling of events, or to focus upon say Traudl Junge's book... which didn't mention this "Hitler flies into a rage over Steiner's Attack").
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The Goring Telegram (which was in the movie, but rarely memed) is 100% accepted history IIRC, and probably serves as a better example of how Hitler really acted.
Because anything that can be targeted by legislation, is political in it's definition.
Also, multiple war movies, such as Rambo for example are explicitly political. So, this recent pearl clutching about Hollywood political honestly makes no sense.
Maybe a bigger issues are simply audiences getting used to only seeing a certain kind of movie outside the house, that there's enough good stuff on TV that the quality gap between home and theater is smaller, the expense of a movie theater visit, an ongoing pandemic.
Only partially kidding. There is a comical parallel though with China’s Wolf Warriors movies. Hugely popular, and maybe even good cinema, but also propaganda
I'd say streaming is the main culprit in combination with the professionalization of the series format. The big budgets go into series now.
Other than that, subjective as it is, there just doesn't seem to be many eye-catching movies anymore. I used to have big discussions with my g/f on which movie to go to, as at least 3 or 4 at any time would compete for that choice. Now we look at what's playing and cannot even find a single one that we would want to watch. It's all Marvel and sequels.
On the more liberal side: don’t look up. Features a ton of frankly disingenuous takes that imo are not presented as hyperbole. Personal dis favorite being the dumb conservative military man showing trying to shoot down asteroids in space with his small arms machine gun.
Both films are divisive and dishonest in their depictions of “the other side”. Both are more populist than democrat republican specifically
Arrogance and hubris.
> Not only do I see our competitive advantage in Intellectual Property declining, I also don't know what comes next after Intellectual Property.
We maintain our interests as we always have: destabilizing other countries and war. However, I think pax Americana ends with climate change.
Perhaps, but it might also give opportunities to further it:
"No, Brazil, you can't cut down your forest in your country for farmland. We have to fight climate change! You need to stop right now or else."
If you read about Brazil cutting down parts of the Amazon in places like reddit you'll find that a lot of people in the developed world hold this kind of an opinion. They might even be willing to back some form of sanctions or punishment for Brazil for doing it. This gives a convenient excuse for developed nations to meddle with other countries again.
"Intellectual Property" based economics, like "Service Economy" that we all heard in the 90's has the same flaw, they are self canalizing and built on intangible "honor" based trade
Unlike Physical Manufacturing, of Physical Goods, or the development of Raw Resources.
Solid Foundational economies require the production of solid tangible assets, not "Intellectual Property"
Even now US electric cars are mostly a loss leader in the legacy market, without the constraint of being produced in the US. What's going on here?
https://www.carshtuff.com/post/where-are-tesla-cars-made
If you're a monopoly or oligopoly, a situation where there's not quite enough supply lets you crank up prices and run your factories at their most profitable point. You don't have to worry about losing market share to a competitor. If you're a monopolist in a range of products, you can deal with someone trying to move into part of your space by lowering prices for the competed items only, until the new entrant cracks. Known examples are generic drug companies, cable TV companies, cellular phone companies, and bulk agricultural product wholesalers.
It seems to take at least four real competitors before price competition happens. That's from an EU study. Once you're down to three players, the magic happens, the margins go way up, and supply shortages become profitable.
That's because three is the maximum amount of CEOs that fit in a golf buggy (with equipment).
There the impacts are direct and obvious, but I worry that similar things happen in other industries as well. There are certainly a lot of people that think copper, steel, and aluminum tariffs are leading to workarounds that involve more imports of finished goods.
Is the US ultimately hurting or helping domestic manufacturing with these policies? I don't think the answers are clear.
Time and time again we prove that R&D has a massive ROI, yet it's always being trimmed since it doesn't pay off in a short-enough time frame to keep the accountants happy (<6 months).
By Christopher Hill
Copyright © 1961, 1980 by Christopher Hill
In 1601 a member of Parliament asked, when a list of monopolies was read out, ‘Is not bread there?’ His irony exaggerated only slightly. It is difficult for us to picture to ourselves the life of a man living in a house built with monopoly bricks, with windows (if any) of monopoly glass; heated by monopoly coal (in Ireland monopoly timber), burning in a grate made of monopoly iron. His walls were lined with monopoly tapestries. He slept on monopoly feathers, did his hair with monopoly brushes and monopoly combs. He washed himself with monopoly soap, his clothes in monopoly starch. He dressed in monopoly lace, monopoly linen, monopoly leather, monopoly gold thread. His hat was of monopoly beaver, with a monopoly band. His clothes were held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins. They were dyed with monopoly dyes. He ate monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, and monopoly lobsters. His food was seasoned with monopoly salt, monopoly pepper, monopoly vinegar. Out of monopoly glasses he drank monopoly wines and monopoly spirits; out of pewter mugs made from monopoly tin he drank monopoly beer made from monopoly hops, kept in monopoly barrels or monopoly bottles, sold in monopoly-licensed ale-houses. He smoked monopoly tobacco in monopoly pipes, played with monopoly dice or monopoly cards, or on monopoly lute-strings. He wrote with monopoly pens, on monopoly writing-paper; read (through monopoly spectacles, by the light of monopoly candles) monopoly printed books, including monopoly Bibles and monopoly Latin grammars, printed on paper made from monopoly saltpetre. He exercised himself with monopoly golf balls and in monopoly-licensed bowling alleys. A monopolist collected the fines which he paid for searing. He travelled in monopoly sedan chairs or monopoly hackney coaches, drawn by horses fed on monopoly hay. He tipped with monopoly farthings. At sea he was lighted by monopoly lighthouses. When he made his will, he went to a monopolist. (In Ireland one could not be born, married, or die without 6d. To a monopolist.) Pedlars were licensed by a monopolist. Mice were caught in monopoly mousetraps. Not all these patents existed at once, but all come from the first decades of the seventeenth century. In 1621 there were alleged to be 700 of them.
Apart possibly from beer and salt, these were not quite necessities. But monopolies added to the price of just those semi-luxuries which were beginning to come within the reach of yeoman and artisans whose standard of living was rising. They affected the daily life of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen. By the end of the sixteen-thirties they were bringing nearly £100,000 a year to the Exchequer.
Monopolies interfered with the normal channels of trade. Merchants were prohibited from landing their cargoes at the most convenient port whenever a monopolist’s right of search chanced to require their unloading elsewhere. By the late sixteen-thirties the economy was beginning to suffer. The clothing industry was hit by increased cost of soap and alum, and by the scarcity of potash caused by suppression of imports. The Greenland Company lacked oil. The salt monopoly embarrassed the Fishery Society. The rise in the price of coal hit nearly all industries. ‘No freeman of London,’ said a pamphlet of 1640, ‘after he hath served his years and set up his trade, can be sure long to enjoy the labour of his trade, but either his is forbidden longer to use it, or is forced at length with the rest of his trade to purchase it as a monopoly, at a dear rate, which they and all the kingdom pay for. Witness the soap business.’
Nor was the objection to monopolies only economic. Buckingham, the great monopoly-monger, had popish connections. The soap monopoly, which promised the King £20,000 a year in the sixteen-thirties, was attacked not only because it doubled the price and its inferior produc...
we sorely need regulatory reform that focuses less on specific, ideological goals and more on market dynamism and fairness, but your list is a mishmash of more regulation and less.
and just sugar, really? not the fertilizer industry? or farm equipment? or corn? or anything else? you fall down the rabbit hole really fast this way.
moreover, punishing old people and single parents isn't going to make us more competitive. removing the mortgage tax deduction would though, as it'd make the housing market more efficient and dynamic, fueling growth and innovation. get rid of the implicit subsidy to housing via the government-backed mortgage companies, and we'd really get somewhere.
let's remove subsidies and price in externalities across the board, not just in some ideological subset, then you don't have to finely regulate every market and commodity, which is just begging for more regulatory capture and corruption.
2. People will just burn oil
3. Add more regulations on farms - and the food will also be imported from China.
4. It probably has been decided at some point that it's cheaper to intervene while the person in their childhood, rather than dealing with adults who grew up in miserable conditions
5. It will increase labor force supply, therefore decreasing salaries. Is it the intent?
The reason why it is good to have a competitive labor force is so that wages and quality of life can go up.
1,4, and 5 are in opposition to the underlying goal we want to achieve by having a competitive labor force. These propositions are trying to mitigate human suffering by... increasing human suffering? There is zero consistency here.
Just looking at #5, this is essentially a de facto ban on retirement, but it also doesn't make sense in practice because companies are already discriminating against older workers. I suppose you could argue that a shorter period of retirement would lead to decreased saving, and increased consumer spending, but I don't think the major problems with the US are currently caused by a lack of consumption.
this list is also meta indicative of problems in US political system. Dems just have to be slightly better than rethuglicans to be viable so they keep adding unwanted half baked solutions till they are barely palatable.
The sugar rush that comes from a bump in stock prices when you hire ex-MBB MBAs is corrosive to societal fabric and national security in the long run.
Hang onto your inflation hedges, because it doesn't look very good for America.
* free health care * free/cheap public transit (trains, bicycles, walking; energy efficient) * cheap real estate (not only housing, but cheap retail/office space) --> density + kill zoning
And let the IRS do tax returns for people. Kill the Intuit strangle hold on tax returns.