Of course, if we somehow prohibit the purchase of that cheaply made $9.99 Chinese toaster, there is nothing to stop some stateside company from using the exact same schematics and materials to produce an “AMERICAN MADE!!” toaster and sell it for $24.99.
I’ve tried to make this point to members of the Trumpenproletariat who insist that a big ol’ tariff will solve all our economic ills. No luck yet.
Henry Ford is a problematic character, but he got it right when he paid his workers enough to afford the product they built.
Corporate greed and race-to-the-bottom neoliberal globalism put paid to that for Americans, and in the last few decades an enormous supply chain, distribution, and retail apparatus has been put in place to keep it that way. Absent extreme protectionist policies (ones that would see Americans screaming about the price of their goods doubling or tripling) things will continue in the current unsustainable direction: a growing unneccessariat that won’t be able to afford goods at their current prices, let alone “made-in-America” ones.
That’s before we take into account domestic automation, which has “stolen” more jobs in coal country than bad ol’ Al Gore ever did. The fact is that a lot of those lost jobs that paid something approaching a middle-class wage are never coming back. That, combined with outsourcing and offshoring, means a permanent 20% unemployment rate. The only real solutions I see here are either a revived independent trade union movement or a UBI. The latter is most likely to be (given that union-averse neoliberals will have no choice but to accede) a highly restrictive one aimed at maintaining a sham consumer economy and keeping the profits flowing to the incumbent wealthy.
This fever dream is good enough for me. I never would have met my wife or kids without it.
Well, Keynes also called for laying off the public investment and paying down debt when the economy was doing well again. People are only Keynesian during recessions. I think
Yeah, in Europe a “liberal” is economically liberal (deregulation), while in the US and Canada a “liberal” is socially liberal (not judging people for who they are or their lifestyles). In the US it was called neoconservatism instead of neoliberalism. I’m sure someone will tell me that’s not the same thing. For one thing I don’t think european neoliberals had the love of foreign wars that US neocons do. But I think there is a western zeitgeist that is its own thing whatever we call it. Thatcher, Reagan, Obama and European technocrats imposing austerity are all part of the same big tide, whatever we call that tide.
I think there may be a number of things stopping that. Some of the cheaper price of things made in China may be the result of labour laws that don’t do as good a job of protecting worker safety. I’m certainly not an expert on worker safety laws in China or the US, but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here. There may also be different environmental laws that let companies dump byproducts. I found an OECD document from 2010 that estimate the statistical value of human life in china at about one thirteenth of that in the US. Some substantial part of the lowered cost is the higher disposability of the human beings involved.
That sort of doesn’t get to your central point - that America make crap just as crappy as the crap from China. Do any of those regulations that would prevent them from using the same process mean they would have to create a better product? I’m not sure. I can’t make a straight line connection between the two things in my head, but I think it’s worth considering whether there isn’t some broad impact of valuing people more that makes its way into processes.
Absolutely, and with good reason. The Keynesian approach requires the deficit spending during recession to be balanced with surplus budgeting and paying down the accumulated debt during booms. Essentially, the tax rate trends slightly behind the strength of the economy to either stimulate (during recession, using public investment) or compensate (during growth, to pay down accumulated debt). It makes sense to me, it’s what Clinton did quite well during his terms, and it was the model that proved workable during the 5-ish decades between WW2 and the late 1990s.
What I don’t think Keynes accounted for, that makes it difficult to practice, is how far off the rails the US economy has gone. Between public debt so large that the bulk of tax revenue goes just to servicing that debt and the US government being the largest employer in the country, by far, the structure of the economy has become too inflexible to make the Keynsian stretch-and-contract adjustments to the global economy.
To be fair, stateside shell corporations already take the exact same 9.99 Chinese toaster and sell it as a 12.99 MADE IN USA toaster because of the popular appeal of nationalism.
Show me who does that.
Walmart literally did it a couple years ago. The product packaging complied with federal trade standards, but the company advertised them as made in the USA in their marketing and website as a part of their push to sell products that support American jobs. It’s been pretty common for decades, especially in hardware.
On top of that, the government attempted to define what the official “made in USA” designation meant, but it failed to pass congress in the 90s leaving the wording extremely vague.
My solution to this is to run my own hedge fund: https://www.quantopian.com/posts/meb-fabers-global-tactical-asset-allocation-gtaa-strategy
I’m not sophisticated about it. I just chose a common strategy that tries to match the returns of buy & hold without the big drawdowns and high volatility. Someone had already written the code I needed. I really was surprised how easy it was to set it all up. But, I don’t know if I would have pulled the trigger if I weren’t a programmer. It was important to me that I understand what the algorithm is doing.
The fear-mongering of the cold war still runs deep in the mind of American-trained political theorists, I see.
You seem to be making the same mistake I have made.
Neo-Liberals are not (American) Liberals.
Neo-Liberals are Laissez-Faire Libertarians.
Why didn’t they let it burn! We could have built something amazing out of those ashes!
It’s borne out by history. The years 1929 to 1935 (when that killjoy FDR got his New Deal policies off the ground) are remembered as one of the high points of the American epic.
I think it’s rather optimistic, really, that we’d make it alive to 2140 with predatory neoliberalism still around.
As I recall from the novel, KSR sees unfettered neoliberal capitalism still having at least a couple more catastrophic financial crises between now and 2140, when the environmental crisis to which it contributed finally causes the economic disaster that gets people to rethink it as the default system.
Affluent New Yorkers are still alive and relatively content in 2140’s soggy city, but they’re not enjoying the same lifestyle that current ones do. The biggest hint he drops is that residents of upscale co-op buildings are now used to dining communally in the building cafeteria and that those who get to the meal late scrape the trays of earlier diners for scraps (without complaint).
116 comments and no mention of John Kenneth Galbraith? Is he totally forgotten in the USA or what?
The discussion isn’t that nuanced in the U.S. You’re lucky if someone here understands that Keynesian economics isn’t “socialism”, let alone that it has offshoots.
I quite agree! For me that spoiled the plausibility of the novel. Which is a pity, because otherwise the world-building was excellent.
I think you missed the point. These are not upscale co-ops, but rather the only available choice for the remnants of what would have once been the middle class, barely hanging on. Upscale would be the superscrapers that the crowds try and march on after the hurricane.
