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Globalization’s Backlash Is Here, at Just the Wrong Time


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2018 Mar 23, 5:49pm   4,051 views  4 comments

by Heraclitusstudent   ➕follow (8)   💰tip   ignore  

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/upshot/globalization-pain-and-promise-for-rich-nations.html

Here the NYT explains that we were just about to see the reward for decades of being pushed around economically: the much hoped for rise of a new class of middle class customers in China and elsewhere, that will massively benefit businesses in the West.

But if this is the case, why isn't the deficit going down rather than up? The fact is China maintains its massive national saving rate - as if it was poor - even as millions of Chinese are now middle class - and even as millions of Americans are now sufficient poor that they should in theory be better able to compete with Chinese workers.

Not only that, but the author warns us against the next wave of globalization :

"Now, the challenge is Chinese competition on more technologically complex products, like automobiles, airplanes or microprocessors. The manufacturing of more labor-intensive, less technologically complex products like apparel is migrating to lower-wage countries like Bangladesh and Ethiopia."

Get it?
1 - no more manufacturing jobs even for China: these workers are racing to bottom fast and going to third-world countries like Bangladesh and Ethiopia.
2 - information-intensive industries (automobiles, airplanes, microprocessors software development) are about to meet the same fate as manufacturing industries: i.e. massive competition from countries like China.

But don't worry you'll keep your chances for a local "service job": waiter job, or maybe hair-dresser, to serve the few rich people who will make it and will be insanely rich.

It's really surprising people don't get it and reject globalization at just the wrong time.

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1   MisdemeanorRebel   2018 Mar 23, 6:06pm  

Thank you for this amazing piece, @Heraclitusstudent. I congratulate you on your strong stomach to read Slim's Globaloney Organ.

Heraclitusstudent says
But if this is the case, why isn't the deficit going down rather than up? The fact is China maintains its massive national saving rate - as if it was poor - even as millions of Chinese are now middle class - and even as millions of Americans are now sufficient poor that they should in theory be better able to compete with Chinese workers.




And still keeps it's currency artificially low.

Heraclitusstudent says
It's really surprising people don't get it and reject globalization at just the wrong time.


The good news is that so-called Journalism is self-destructing at just the right time. The Legacy Media is being replaced by Outlets with a Firm Bias. That's fine, because that's what we had until Television. There were countless dailies, even smaller cities like Buffalo or Sacramento had two or three daily papers, and each had opposing editorial views.

Great to see the NYT show their true colors.

"Just give it another couple of decades" - yeah, no thanks. NAFTA and China's MFN and 1-sided Free Trade generally was sold as if it's benefits were going to be immediate, to the American Middle Class. Instead we got H1Bs for the tech jobs, and outsourcing for the manufacturing, replaced with nothing but shit no future coffee jobs.
2   MisdemeanorRebel   2018 Mar 23, 6:11pm  

It's really and truly amazing to watch how the New Left has endorsed Neoliberalism almost entirely, with a few holdouts at the Nation, maybe.
3   Heraclitusstudent   2018 Mar 23, 6:14pm  

They are trying really hard to not see that economic efficiency now means:
- a fraction of workers, preferably very poor and desperate, do most of the work that needs to be done.
- a tiny fraction are owners, making out like bandits, and driving the system
- the rest is the useless class that doesn't work and doesn't consume anything outside debt (gov or personal).
None of this is going to change.
If anything it's going to get worse year after year.

Remember Sun Tzu:
"To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill.
To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."
4   Patrick   2018 Mar 23, 10:50pm  

Heraclitusstudent says
no more manufacturing jobs even for China: these workers are racing to bottom fast and going to third-world countries like Bangladesh and Ethiopia


Lol, had not considered this, and love the irony.

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