Re: Career change. Am I smoking crack?
From: Bitbucket (bitbucket_at_dev.null)
Date: 03/28/05
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Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 19:55:57 GMT
HEAR, HEAR!!
'nough said - I really can't add anything to it, except to say you hit the
nail dead-center with all of your points, Randy.
"Randy" <joe@burgershack.com> wrote in message
news:yUQ1e.38528$Ux.5446@tornado.texas.rr.com...
> beliavsky@aol.com wrote:
>> Bitbucket wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>>Good points. Even and fair trade policies for all involved would
>>>solve much of this problem pronto.
>>
>>
>> In general, the government has no business telling me what products I
>> can buy from which countries. The best trade "policy" is to just get
>> out of the way. Countries that forbid U.S. exports mostly hurt
>> themselves.
>
> In general, the role of a representative government must be to enable (or
> not disable) the people's potential to gain life, liberty, property, and
> happiness through necessary means, be they active or passive (e.g. greed).
> However and of course, we can rely on business to accomplish only SOME of
> what a nation needs. Other ends must arise from the will and dint of the
> people.
>
> For example, if government had not stepped in where capitalism had feared
> to tread, in America:
>
> - Women would be unable to vote.
>
> - Slavery would be legal.
>
> - Without a military, we'd still be British (1812, you know).
> Or we'd be Nazi or enslaved by Japanese warlords ...
>
> - Monopolies would dominate every industry in America.
>
> - You would work in a sweat shop run by a monopoly.
>
> - You would know dozens of people who died in industrial accidents.
>
> - Nobody in America would have vacation time or medical insurance.
>
> - And of course, business would have insisted that several of the more
> costly constitutional amendments be repealed.
>
> Etc, etc...
>
> Free trade platitudes notwithstanding, the invisible hand reaches only so
> far.
>
> Adam Smith as well as our founding fathers failed to foresee a great many
> of the mechanisms behind social, political, and even economic change that
> has come to pass. To imagine that natural forces (like the invisible
> hand) would have shepherded this country through crises like world wars or
> civil rights is sheer fantasy. Remember too, Smith was not an author of
> the Constitution. "The Wealth of Nations" was published only in 1776, and
> could not have significantly shaped the Constitution, ratified a mere 13
> years later.
>
> For that matter, nor was Darwin a constitutional contributor, who had much
> to say about the consequences of natural selection on populations who
> persist in the use of losing strategies.
>
> ...
>>
>> Access to cheap foreign programmers is a net benefit to almost every
>> American
>
> 1) To every American CONSUMER, that is.
>
> 2) Yes, but lower prices serve us in the SHORT term only. There are
> numerous long-term consequences to laissez-faire economic policy, like
> lost revenues, lost market share, lost industries, and lost jobs. That's
> why, for example, the US has laws preventing foreign nations from dumping
> products at a loss in order to take over a market... which is pretty much
> where we stand right now with globalization...
>
>> who is not a programmer,
>
> Or a steelworker or a farmer or a factory worker or a medical
> transcriptionist or a help desk worker or a welder... or the myriad other
> US jobs that are gone or fading due to globalization.
>
> In the case of those competitor nations who have nearly nonexistent
> Intellectual Property laws (like China and India), we can add to the list:
> inventors, actors, musicians, writers... innovators of all kinds. The list
> goes on to include pretty much everyone who's not in the service industry.
> After the non-service jobs are gone, buying from others while selling only
> to ourselves isn't going to last for long...
>
>> just as cheap foreign textiles
>> benefit everyone except American textile workers. Cheap imports raise
>> the American standard of living, and studies have shown that
>> protectionist policies cost consumers far more than they help workers
>> and investors in protected industries.
>
> By your reasoning, after the last job is lost in America, every American
> who never held a job and never wants to again will be doing absolutely
> GREAT.
>
> You seem unaware (or unconcerned) about several trends in US labor over
> the past 40 years. In that time, numerous US industries have faded or are
> fading to black due to the US's policy of unilateral globalization
> (farming, steel, consumer electronics, manufacturing, heavy industry, now
> software and engineering...). Each has employed workers with increasing
> levels of skill, and as each has failed, its outgoing workers have
> subsequently slid down the food chain, each successively falling from a
> greater height, falling farther and doing more damage to the country's
> economic strength. Unstanched, this exsanguination of this nation's
> skilled and professional labor supply is likely to have terrible and
> possibly irreversible consequences. Do not kid yourself, there is a race
> to the bottom here, and unless we change our game plan, America is going
> to lose at its own game, and worse, by its own hand.
>
> Low prices on Chinese made goods will not float *all* boats, only
> sampans...
>
> This situation invites an analogy with the extinction of a species. It
> takes millions of years for a higher vertebrate to arise through
> evolution. But through sudden tumult (like the unthinking destructiveness
> of man, or in this case, US politicians), species can disappear overnight.
> Their like will not be seen again.
>
> Likewise, our loss of skilled workers and industries does not mean new
> industries must soon arise, nor that those unemployed workers can readily
> shift to equally gainful work (to themselves or to the nation). Like an
> endangered species, a professional like an engineer has spent a decade in
> college and industry before s/he will become productive. It's a long
> gestation period. If all those years of travail are not rewarded, three
> things will follow:
>
> 1) Outgoing professionals will not make this same mistake again. They
> will not reeducate themselves in a comparable profession. Their skills
> will be lost in this country (even though they are still needed).
>
> 2) These folks will move into careers that are not vulnerable to
> outsourcing. For example, they'll exit technology and enter the service
> industry or sales.
>
> 3) Young potential professionals will see the dead soldiers that fell
> before them and choose NOT to follow their fallen comrades into oblivion.
> Without new blood, professions like science and engineering will fade and
> disappear in the US. It's already happening...
>
> In terms of science and engineering, what will happen to a technological
> nation like the US if it has to import all its technology from elsewhere?
> (We won't even be able to attract immigrant technologists, since every US
> employer will have outsourced all tech development.) It won't be pretty.
>
>>
>> An essay entitled "The Blessings of Free Trade" explaining these basic
>> economic concepts is at
>> http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/briefs/tpb-001.html .
>
> Yeah, there are lots of political and economic philosophers throughout
> history who promoted and sometimes believed a lot of things, often arguing
> persuasively, usually from principle and not fact. And as philosophers
> are wont to be, they were as often wrong as right. But they did manage to
> get their names in print and promote their employers' agenda, which were
> the reason they got published. In the real world, numbers and facts must
> trump philosophy -- beautiful theory be damned.
>
> For a far better known book that counters your argument, see "The
> Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen, and remember that innovation
> is akin to any sudden change in the rules of business (e.g.
> globalization's > 80% reduction in wages). Globalization, as a form of
> innovation, will have far broader AND deeper consequences to the welfare
> of nations than a mere shift in technology ever could to an industry. (The
> last point is the thesis of the book.)
>
> http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/christensen.htm
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0875845851/
>
> The bottom line is that our policy makers must focus on the future's
> bottom line, not just the present. In the past 30 to 40 years, America's
> population *has* been sliding to a lower standard of living. And despite
> what economic philosophers like Adam Smith and Milton Friedman have
> intoned, the rise of novel industries (like high tech) has *not*
> compensated for the loss of farming, manufacturing, skilled trades, and
> now, white collar and creative jobs. Perot's sucking sound is getting
> louder, and we'd better do something soon before it takes our future with
> it.
>
> It's not the job of our politicians to watch this and do nothing,
> confident that Adam Smith is always right. Nor should they speed the
> process along by promoting international trade agreements that help only
> large US corporations' quarterly P&L statements. In general, any US
> policy should not 1) help our competitors, and should never 2) hurt us,
> much less do both. Yet current policy is doing exactly that.
>
> In addition, productive economic policy cannot serve only the present
> while disregarding the future. We *must* base international economic
> policy on trend statistics that hail from longitudinal studies that track
> the employment of individual people as well as the progress of each
> industry. If the average American really is repeatedly losing their job
> to replace it with a lower paying position throughout their lifetime, only
> to watch their children begin their careers on a lower rung of the ladder
> than they did -- if gainful employment in the US is becoming extinct --
> then US economic policy MUST stop this trend, or the American Dream will
> be the next thing to go.
>
> What's the solution? Not so fast. First the nation has to recognize that
> there's a very serious problem that will be made only worse by current
> policies that blindly persist with practices that have not worked. Only
> then will the American voter see that the Emperor is seriously threadbare.
> And if our elected leaders are not up to the task, it's time for the
> little guy to roll up his sleeves -- while he still has a shirt on his
> back.
>
> Randy
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- In reply to: Randy: "Re: Career change. Am I smoking crack?"
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