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American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow. From a long term perspective, its absolutely amazing that the US has managed to export all the factory level jobs to other countries and yet managed to keep the better paying jobs back here in the states. The current lack of (low skilled) jobs in manufacturing has made it clear to those Americans willing to listen: they (or their children) need to acquire those skills that make them employable in the 21st century, and those do not include low-skilled factory jobs. The next generation will be better prepared and I predict the US will continue as a global technological powerhouse (unless it gets fucked by Trumpism and populism of course).

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> continue as a global technological powerhouse (unless it gets fucked by Trumpism and populism of course).

Capitalism breathes credit, credit is a function of belief in the future. I'm curious how much protectionism is necessary at home to maintain necessary levels of belief in the future.

> they (or their children) need to acquire those skills that make them employable in the 21st century

How? What skills are necessary and where do they get them? As far as I can tell the education ecosystem in the US is wholly unsuited for this task.

Programming, obviously.

Sure, but what kind of programming? Web and Java developers are a dime-a-dozen. Sure there are different levels of skill within those specific fields, but you're never short for developers who know those things.

Now Machine Learning or AI or even potentially low-level programming. Those are some areas where knowledge could be _extremely_ lucrative in the near (10-15 years) future.

Short answer: "scripting"

Longer answer: programming isn't necessarily a job where you build things. I'd argue it's more generally about communicating with and controlling computers. And computers are increasingly where our lives are spent and/or tracked.

I learned to program when I was relatively young, and I've spent my whole life witnessing people doing mundane tasks that a script could have easily automated away. It's everywhere: doctors' secretaries copying forms, grocery clerks scanning through shelves, office workers manually editing excel documents, etc. The reason these tasks remain un-automated is because programmers don't do these jobs; programming is considered a profession rather than a basic skill. I showed my friend's secretary how to easily automate a task she spent hours a week on, but she felt like the solution was foreign and rejected it. That one script could have made freed up 100s of hours a year to do other things, but she didn't get it.

In a world where business people are looking to "disrupt" a lot of jobs through automation and consolidation, I think there's room for people to help automate away parts of their own jobs and share in the wealth (with more free or recreational time). I believe this is how a lot of people will keep jobs in the next 20+ years.

Gaining skills is just a matter of effort nowadays as everything anyone needs to learn to do pretty much anything is of course just clicks away.

I think that's the real change that needs to be addressed...self directed learning should be the future, and the need for formal education is dying

Except that while you do that, you still need to provide for your family.

I mean... nobody is saying its easy, but its easier and more possible to do it today than what it used to be.

>I'm curious how much protectionism is necessary at home to maintain necessary levels of belief in the future.

For the people who are actually issuing credit I would say very little is necessary.

> American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow

This is an important and underrated idea that so often gets lost thanks to politics. Much like the drug war, people think that market trends and phenomenons can be controlled somehow, that they are simply choices that people make, and those choices can be controlled - people can simply just choose not to make that choice or face consequences from the state. Rather than a whole new paradigm, something that generates real value that taps into a raw supply/demand, even if it means taking big risks, and that will exist whether or not we ignore it. This is how many ineffective government policies get made.

America needs to embrace globalism as an unhappy reality. The problem is that they have been operating for two decades as if it didn't come with a big downside - that globalism is this great new thing that will make everyone richer. Trump and Bernie have been feeding off this ignored reality without addressing the real consequence. Rather globalism being sold as something that is all good, it should have been sold as a tough new evolution of the marketplace, much like a recession correcting an imbalanced investment bubble. It doesn't need to be rejected by an outsider strongman politician but embraced by an outsider who is willing to face the reality that the consequences extend well beyond the influential class in Washington and they aren't all good.

You can't force your way back to the old reality as if the market phenomenon didn't exist, but you can minimize the downside as you transition to the new reality and do what you can to stay on top of it.

Sadly, hard medicine and politics don't go together. Even if it's the best (and only) medicine.

To continue the drug war analogy, the goal should be minimizing the harms of peoples addictions rather than trying to pretend the addictions won't happen. Likewise the economy needs to either a) compete with the globe in manufacturing and/or b) develop new industries.

I'm not as convinced as many people are that a) is not possible, Apple clearly thinks there's plenty of potential there and so do I. But I'm quite confident that that US is failing to do b) properly. In my business class they called it a new "service-based economy" but clearly that has been insufficient to keep employment and wages high. To develop new industries in place of manufacturing they need to rekindle entrepreneurship and small businesses to give life to new industries. I get the impression the US government is obsessed with appeasing existing BigCos (just look at TPP or Obama's policies during the financial crisis) rather than developing the next generation of industry that functions well in a global marketplace. Silicon Valley is a big piece of the puzzle, but even then it's treated as a sideshow in Washington (even more so now, which is a big fault of Trump) but in the same vein it can't be the only one moving forward.

I really hope Trump's liberal tax and regulatory policy helps boost b). The risk of course is that the usual Washington backroom dealings by legacy BigCos and special interests will guide policy even further towards tired old ideas (like making Wall St even more money) over helping develop new business. At a minimum we know that Trump is motivated to help with a)... so that's something.

(I purposefully ignored social policy consequences here as this comment is getting long enough)

> market trends and phenomenons can be controlled somehow, that they are simply choices that people make, and those choices can be controlled

This double standard galls me. If a trend is detrimental to American workers, it's market trends, like the hand of God, irresistible. If it's beneficial, it's a historical fluke (post-WWII boom).

I might buy this if the U.S. government had been a neutral bystander in this process of globalization and the hollowing out of the middle class. In that case, we could say that it was just economics. But, in reality, the government:

- Incentivizes and fails to do anything about offshore tax havens

- Doesn't bust trusts

- Has low tax rates on capital

- Sets immigration and trade laws favorable to corporations

- Spends tons of money on pork, including the porkiest pork of them all, the military

and so on, ad infinitum. Would this process have happened anyway? Maybe. But our government, and the companies running it, actively accelerated it in every way they could. If these trends can't be controlled to some extent, why have so many lobbying dollars been spent to accelerate them?

So basically you think the US government has been highly influential in developing 'globalism' and it's not entirely a natural phenomenon as a result of air travel, telecommunications, mature financial markets, lack of global war/conflict, the opening of the east to global markets, etc?

Most of the things you mention, poor enforcement of tax havens, immigration policy, low taxes on capital, massive military spending, coincided with the development of globalism or were a reaction to it.

But regardless I disagree with your thesis, as I hardly see globalism as something that's detrimental to America as a whole. That may be the mainstream narrative but it's largely inaccurate. The thing about capitalism is that it goes throw booms/busts and it evolves. This is just another phase and we've all been pretending we're in control but the reality of the situation has become apparent recently.

So the dichotomy between historical fluke and market trends doesn't really exist. Historical flukes are market trends.

Seems like the OP was saying that globalization may have been inevitable, but it's current extant structure and nature have been shaped by US governmental policy to directly benefit a limited segment of society, those who benefit from the policies they listed.

> So the dichotomy between historical fluke and market trends doesn't really exist. Historical flukes are market trends.

On further thought, you're right about this. I was rather inarticulately trying to remark on the fact that the supposed "inevitability" of market trends is always used as an excuse to avoid pro-labor legislation, but never pro-business legislation.

> I hardly see globalism as something that's detrimental to America as a whole

Well, we're increasingly seeing that there's no such thing as America "as a whole". There's capital, who it's good for, and labor, who it may be good and bad for in various ways, but a net bad, I'd say. Good for your 401K and the cost of your iPhone, not so much for your salary or employment prospects.

If you take "good for GDP" to mean "good for America as a whole", then yeah, it's probably good. Problem is where that GDP growth is going.

> you think the US government has been highly influential in developing 'globalism'

Yes and no. I think the gov't has been highly influential in ensuring the gains from it go to capital and that its negative effects on labor are not reined in. Globalization would have happened anyway but the govt's approach to it has resulted in more inequality and dislocation than was necessary.

As for whether the government could have slowed or did hasten the process, hard to say, but I think so.

> Yes and no. I think the gov't has been highly influential in ensuring the gains from it go to capital and that its negative effects on labor are not reined in. Globalization would have happened anyway but the govt's approach to it has resulted in more inequality and dislocation than was necessary.

This is most certainly true. And I think dmix hit on a very important point when he mentioned that its hard for politicians to sell a future thats not all rosy and prosperous for everyone.

Off the bat, one of the things the US Govt. could most certainly have done is provide Universal Healthcare and some kind of funding for expanding basic education. I think about all that money earned by US corporations lying abroad...if you think about it, if we had a better taxation system, the strength of US corporations, their ability to generate such profits from around the globe could have been deployed to make all (or most) Americans have better healthcare and education.

> I think dmix hit on a very important point when he mentioned that its hard for politicians to sell a future thats not all rosy and prosperous for everyone.

I couldn't find where he made that exact point, if he did, I would reply to it by saying that what politicians sell and what they actually do are two completely different things. Both sides of the aisle have been selling rosy futures and working towards the exact opposite for decades. I'd say that Bernie & Trump were evidence that the message "your future isn't all that rosy unless we change substantially" resonated this election.

dmix and I agree globalization is here to stay. I was just a little irritated by his implication that the way we need to respond is by "developing new industries" and "adapting to the global marketplace" and all that jargon. I'd say the S&P has adapted just fine to the global marketplace. The problem is that the median American is worse off anyway. Your second paragraph is apt about some potential solutions.

"they (or their children) need to acquire those skills that make them employable in the 21st century"

Who's going to pay for that? Who's going to pay the mortgage while they go back to school? This is, of course, not even getting into the rampant agism in a lot of industries, and that many of these people are over 40.

> American labor was fucked anyways, Globalism only accelerated trends that would have happened anyhow.

Globalism didn't "accelerate" trends that would have happened anyhow, it created those trends. American labor is fucked because of globalism.

You might argue the standard of living might have ended up the same under protectionist policies (e.g. poor because of high prices rather than low wages), but I doubt we'd see the same level of inequality under protectionism.

Even without globalism, automation will still give them a hard time. Hence globalism accelerated trends.

> You might argue the standard of living might have ended up the same under protectionist policies (e.g. poor because of high prices rather than low wages), but I doubt we'd see the same level of inequality under protectionism.

The inequality that you see today wasn't caused by globalism, but by tax cuts on the very rich, which incentivized and legitimized overblown executive pay. All that wealth was then funneled into influencing the govt. to fuck American labor (i.e. ridiculously low minimum wage, further tax cuts for rich, less benefits for the needy etc.).

Globalism is an easy straw man to blame for inequality, but its actually allowed people with stagnant incomes to maintain a certain standard of living (or not let it deteriorate too fast) via cheaper goods and services.

> The inequality that you see today wasn't caused by globalism, but by tax cuts on the very rich

Source?

Only a minority of companies in the US even have executives that get the much maligned high pay and bonuses in the last decade or so. What about the massive percentage of wealth that didn't fall into this category? They may have gain significantly from globalism but that was hardly the result of US tax policy alone.

Lets not forget that democrats were in power for the last 8yrs and the state has only grown exponentially since the 1990s under both republican and democrat governments. Just because tax rates weren't the extremes of pre-1980/1970s doesn't make them low. They've been relatively consistent while the middle class income dropped.

The complexity of the tax code and lack of competitiveness with international countries may have heavily influenced inequality. But it was hardly the result of explicit tax reduction for the rich...

The idea that tax havens are something that were merely a matter of weak policy is naive. Even worse than the drug war hawks.

Just because the middle class didn't keep pace with the wealthy doesn't mean only the wealthy were at fault. The fact the middle class lost wealth is hardly singularly the fault of the wealthy. I know this narrative sells well in politics but it's very short sighted.

Even if the US adjusted tax policy to redistribute a larger chunk of taxes towards the middle class it would hardly make a dent in the new reality in the fact there is hardly a middle class economy like there used to be. So you must either develop a new middle class economy or you get temporary perks of taking it from the wealthy. This is the big whale in the room that the Bernie bro guys are ignoring. The likely scenario is that the wealthy would become continually less competitive over the years, shift way more money over seas, and the middle class would be in the same situation with a little bit more money for a short period.

Gov spending under any administration that enacts those policies would largely offset most of the gains going directly to the people regardless (which is good if it results in universal health care, but little else if it's not sustainable).

I actually have a couple of sources for this :). Apologies for the late reply, I also have a day job ;)

I would recommend Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal for an entertaining read. He referenced another book, aptly called Inequality[1], which I'm currently going through. Its a little more academic prose so its not something I can finish quickly (in short, its not an entertaining read...not that all books have to be of course).

Both of these books examine historical precedents for income inequality and attempt to analyze the current situation as well. I think they did a fair job, although I am open to change my mind if there is a better explanation. But these and other books, such as Dark Money[2], and just general news about the scummy activities of people like the Koch brothers have made me more convinced of this viewpoint.

Now to address your comment...

> Only a minority of companies in the US even have executives that get the much maligned high pay and bonuses in the last decade or so. What about the massive percentage of wealth that didn't fall into this category? They may have gain significantly from globalism but that was hardly the result of US tax policy alone.

This is most certainly not true [0]. From [0] and from Krugman's book, you can see just how much the changes in tax policy has incentivized ballooning executive pay and created a new class of executives, who may not be as rich as the landed/inherited, but are certainly "rich". And this class has grown and become more enriched due to globalism, the opening of foreign markets and plummeting of labor costs, both due to automation and cheap foreign labor. I almost think of it as a weird form of trickle down effect, where most of the wealth goes to the very rich but a little (relatively insignificant but in absolute terms very much so) trickles down to the executive class.

> Lets not forget that democrats were in power for the last 8yrs and the state has only grown exponentially since the 1990s under both republican and democrat governments. Just because tax rates weren't the extremes of pre-1980/1970s doesn't make them low. They've been relatively consistent while the middle class income dropped.

Yes Democrats were in power for 8 years but how many of their policies could not be enacted due to obstructionism? But lets not get into that area here: 8 years is a relatively small time to create/destroy inequality. And I don't see any Democrats pushing for tax cuts on the rich, especially cutting estate taxes, which affect only the very rich.

> The complexity of the tax code and lack of competitiveness with international countries may have heavily influenced inequality. But it was hardly the result of explicit tax reduction for the rich...

Its not the complexity of the tax code but its very nature. The top tax rate for personal income is around 35% in the US whereas it is much higher in other developed economies. And the sources that I've listed point to historical trends that prove the same point: once you have a class of super wealthy, they will inevitably influence the Government to reduce their tax burden no matter how that is achieved.

> The idea that tax havens are something that were merely a matter of weak policy is naive. Even worse than the drug war hawks.

I don't think that comparison achieves anything but hyperbole so I'm not going to comment on it.

> Just because the middle class didn't keep pace with the wealthy doesn't mean only the wealthy were at fault. The fact the middle class lost wealth is hardly singularly the fault of the wealthy. I know this narrative sells well in politics but it's very short sighted.

I think you're conflating wealth with income. The middle class, by their definition, is not wealthy (at least in the same country; middle class in US is most certainly more wealthy than in India, say). The US middle class hasn't lost wealth, its their incomes that have not been growing as fast as the incomes of the wealthy. Its unfortunately not just politics: investments in people reap great benefits for society. If a country fails to invest in the health and education of its citizenry because its unable to raise the revenue to do so by the wealthy, then its most certainly the fault of the rich.

> Even if the US adjusted tax policy to redistribute a larger chunk of taxes towards the middle class it would hardly make a dent in the new reality in the fact there is hardly a middle class economy like there used to be. So you must either develop a new middle class economy or you get temporary perks of taking it from the wealthy. This is the big whale in the room that the Bernie bro guys are ignoring. The likely scenario is that the wealthy would become continually less competitive over the years, shift way more money over seas, and the middle class would be in the same situation with a little bit more money for a short period.

I don't think that is likely. Sure its a changed reality now, and I certainly don't see what other future markets will open up, but this new reality demands a healthy, educated workforce to operate it. Income redistribution is less about taking from wealthy and giving it to the poor as much as taking from the wealthy and investing in institutions/programs that can assist the most vulnerable in society. More taxation by itself won't make the wealthy less competitive... I mean, how does that even happen? On the contrary: educating a kid from Inner City Detroit might give us the next Steve Jobs.

> Gov spending under any administration that enacts those policies would largely offset most of the gains going directly to the people regardless (which is good if it results in universal health care, but little else if it's not sustainable).

You seem to imply that all Govt. spending is wasteful which is most certainly not true. Surely its not perfect, but that's another problem that needs fixing.

Also, you asked for a source but failed to provide a single one for any of the many many assertions that you have made.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Pay-without-Performance-Unfulfilled-C...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Inequality-What-Can-Be-Done/dp/067450...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radic...

Thanks for the extended reply. I'll read this during the weekend and get back to you.

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