Comment by charcircuit
8 hours ago
I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage. It shouldn't come down to a 50/50 coin toss whether to offshore or not because they are seen as equally expensive.
I also don't think it would play out that well. If you are offshoring to country B but forced to use a factory following standards from country A you aren't going to be able to compete against a company from Country B using the best factories from country B. In my view you should either try and beat them at their own game by using equivalent factories or you should not outsource and use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory. Purposefully choosing an inefficient option leads to an inefficient economy.
> they are seen as equally expensive
They go off shore because they are less expensive.
Gotta love that switch to a passive voice whenever you're flagging your own guilt. You didn't see, things are seen.
You see them as less expensive, you want to pay less and less for every product and every service. If your provider charges you 25-50% extra per month because services are delivered locally, you just switch to the cheaper one. Most nationalists are more big mouth than standing by their stated values.
> I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage.
Why the whole country?
Are all your countrymen equally deserving? Do all of them work as hard, care the same, and give back to their nation the same?
I too, want my nation to “win”, but I want that advantage to be something that we built and something that endures.
They need to win by just being that good, and creating an environment that allows for that to happen.
Since everyone cannot be the best and brightest, I would want a safety net that allows for a society that isn’t constantly in fight or flight.
> offshoring .. best factories from country B.
What typically happens is that factory B will offload work to factories that wont be inspected.
> use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory.
This is what is happening today. We’ve been losing more factory jobs to robotics than outsourcing for a while.
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When manufacturing jobs are lost, the issue of underemployment and the loss of expertise is what hampers economies. Burger flipping pays far less than Foreman or specialist, and losing manufacturing hubs means no cross pollination and skill development in your populace.
This is all to say I am well aware of the issues, and sympathetic to your greater cause.
However, there is no victory for me in your ‘defeat’. The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.
Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential, more ideas, more culture, more resources to solve challenges, and a chance to live up the ideals we seem to be failing.
Not him but my 2 cents:
>The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.
The deepening of the middleclass here to me has seemingly meant that more people do jobs that are seen as middle class. At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.
>Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential,
You now compete with a foreign multinational which employs people at a fraction of your local wages. So you no longer compete and there's less real actual competition.
> At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.
You are drawing a causal line between correlated events.
The middle class globally has been weakened since the 80s.
One of the current issues we are contending with is the fact that wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
America recently had a year where the top 10% of earners drove nearly 50% of consumer spending.
We could spend the entirety of the conversation discussing wealth concentration, and it would still be a worthwhile digression.
You can’t have a consumer driven market if the consumers don’t have anything to purchase with.
However, when you dismiss flat screen TVs offhandedly also does your own argument a disservice. By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.
This is fine, but then you have to also make arguments for how the economic incentives must be aligned to achieve your subjective goals.
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From what I have said, you should know that I am sympathetic to the motivations behind your argument. I am not sympathetic to bad arguments.
Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive. The ability of MNCs to just offshore work should be benign, but appears malignant. If work is offshored, it should also result in more productivity or higher productivity in the nation it is offshored from.
You should see higher tax revenues as a result, which should be plowed back into your local economy.
Weirdly, our economies seem to all be becoming more productive, but not much richer.
This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.
The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.
If we had a number for how much retraining we can actually achieve, or how much time it would take, we could figure out how much we can outsource before it becomes impossible to retrain our citizens.
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Putting it politely, I think you may have xenophobic tendency. And for all your buster, I suggest you work on having a more sane world view.
Not him but....Having a hypercapitalist ultraliberal and globalist worldview that exacerbates wealth inequalities and encourages cutting corners to cut of costs here and there is not the definition of sane. Countries that have had semi-protectionist policies and tried to pull in or protect industry trough policy have done well at times. This includes jobs people now describe as shit.
Why wouldn't I want those to exist locally and pay well?