Interesting article on foreign trade

waterfield wrote:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-griswold-globalization-and-trade-help-manufacturing-20160801-snap-story.html

The author is a senior fellow in George Mason University School of economics which is credited with two Nobel Prizes in Economic Sciences.

In the author’s opinion the loss of manufacturing jobs is by far more to do with technology than foreign trade.

Waterfield,

George Mason’s Mercatus Center is a well-known right-libertarian “free market” center, funded by the Koch brothers. I wouldn’t trust a thing that comes from that propaganda front, I mean, “college,” which is really just a vehicle for the spread of properatarian lies and disinformation. The author also worked for 14 years at CATO, another Koch brother propaganda “think tank.”

Kinda surprised you’re posting articles by true believin’, Ayn Rand-lovin’ right-wingers.

wv wrote:

Well, i would ‘guess’ technology is certainly a ‘part’ of the reason
jobs are often lost. And some thinkers seem to be saying when the robot-revolution really gets going a TON of jobs are gonna be lost.

It will be one of the great issues of our time, i would think.

w
v

Yes, it’s a part of the reason. But why is it being instituted in the way it is? Because capitalism, unlike any previous economic system, is dependent upon endlessly “innovating” to increase profits. And by innovating, I don’t mean creating new technologies — ironically. Innovation in the sense that capitalists must forever find new ways to squeeze out more profits from a system that also naturally drives them down. Profits naturally go down as firms compete for customers, because this generally means competing on prices.

With mass industrialization, competing on “quality” mostly went out the window, except for niche-markets and wealthy clientele in general. So they have to (in general) price goods more cheaply, which means they have to continuously reduce their own costs, which means lowering labor and production costs, etc. etc. One of the best way to do that, of course, is automation. It’s even cheaper than shipping jobs overseas, though ideal is to do both. Ship automation and the fewer and fewer jobs required to manage that automation overseas, where there is even less resistance to capitalist exploitation than we have here — and we have next to none.

The true genius involved in this is to package “technology” as something great for all of us, when, in reality, it means slashing total jobs by ever greater portions, with the likelihood that someday, 99% of work will be automated. The twin catastrophes of Climate Change and the Robot Apocalypse — which is much worse than the Zombie one, actually — I’m not so sure humanity survives that.

wv wrote:

Well, i would ‘guess’ technology is certainly a ‘part’ of the reason
jobs are often lost. And some thinkers seem to be saying when the robot-revolution really gets going a TON of jobs are gonna be lost.

It will be one of the great issues of our time, i would think.

w
v

This reminds me of those old black and white newsreels where they show an assembly line humming along and the narrator says “automation will free up man to do more important things”. But those other, more important occupations don’t exist. Not on a scale necessary to make up for all the jobs that were lost to automation anyway. That idea only works where you have a small population. It doesn’t work on a planet with 7 billion people and counting. What it does is raise corporate profits by eliminating waste (ie employees).