Good new ideas: Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.
Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.
Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US? Does it even benefit anyone outside the US ruling class?
I’m from Bangladesh. The US backed world order has been amazing for the country. The World Bank and IMF have helped countries like Bangladesh modernize their economies, and they’re US-led institutions.
As the US pulls out, China displaces it. In Bangladesh, Chinese investment is flowing in, along with middle eastern culture. Neither of those things are good in my opinion.
I don’t think the US needs to continue footing the bill alone. But the other western powers don’t seem interested in helping. When I think about what I want the future of Bangladesh to look like in 50 years, I want it to be basically like the US or Canada, only with different food and religious holidays and movies and literature. And that seemed like the future in the 1990s, but it’s getting cloudy today.
To paraphrase Churchill: "The US hegemony is the worst hegemony for the world, except for all the other hegemonies."
The US retreating into isolationism would likely open up a vacuum eagerly filled in by less, well, liberal-minded states. The globalization you describe was pushed by the US-EU-(Japan/India/etc.) alliance, with the US's armed forced being the big stick in case someone would object. At least this is my current understanding.
Yup having big stick lets one tell the rest of the world to shut up and do what the're told to do. Nice example of democracy and mutual respect in action.
Is that supposed to be a back-handed way of making a point? I don't understand what those things have to do with global stability.
Someone will be the de facto world police by force, now that the technology to utilize energy is so efficient. This situation has nothing to do with some sort of (USA-centered) Politically Correct philosophy. This situation is the eventuality of our time.
>"...This situation is the eventuality of our time."
This it what you say. I disagree.
This is how peace is kept, regardless of how you feel about it. More importantly, power fills a vacuum, and the choices in the absence of the USA are not exactly better for the world.
And the sky is blue. Everyone including my cat knows it. Of course one with the biggest club gets to write the laws and to ignore those when it suits. Just stop pretending to be a knight in a shining armor. And being not as shitty as some others is not a reason to claim high moral ground.
You're free to believe something else of course, but then again most people have no perspective or experience of the suffering and violence in the world while they throw out these casual statements about how terrible America is.
I’m interested to see how the shifting demographics affect this conversation. The three biggest things that shaped history are demographics, geography, and information flow. Two of these three are going to be significantly different since the last time the US moved towards isolationism.
If you review history, large wars broke out between the major powers vying for dominance on a regular basis in the 19th and early 20th century, culminating in the First and Second World Wars. For all the negatives of what the US has done with its military since then, they're not a hundredth as bad as what went on before by any objective measure.
The Pax Americana has been good for stability and with stability comes prosperity. If the United States truly gave up its hegemony and turned isolationist, you'd see a resurgence of rearmament and jockeying for power among nations, inevitably followed by a new era of war after war.
Then I thought about it a bit more, and realised (and the last four years have shown) that if America withdraw, the Russians and the Chinese will move right in, and while I'm not a major fan of American imperialism, I'm even less of a fan of the Russian or Chinese flavours.
And the US built the UN and all the other multilateral organisations post WW2, so yeah they work for the US, but they're also pretty good for everyone else.
I owe that to hundreds of years of human progression and development, not to the US.
Not to mention the Cold War, which only stayed cold because of the nukes holding both sides back.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
Pax Americana usually means the same thing, though the borders of the empire are a little less clear.
But you have to understand, the shift of manufacturing from the US has just devastated the economies of entire regions. You have children fleeing where their families have lived for generations. I'm convinced a factor in opiates getting a toehold in these areas was due to people going on disability to try to stay economically afloat, and getting prescribed painkillers as cover for faked injuries or in recovery for real but unneccessary surgeries (I have no proof, just anecdata).
US hegemony was good for them. It helped payed their mortgages and their kids' tuitions. It's easy to magnanimous when you aren't the one losing your house or kids aren't ODing from fentanyl. And the resentment is real when you see new grads at Google or Facebook making 10 times what you make, or CEOs making 1000 times what you make.
edit: the president did little, if anything to help their situation and channeled that resentment for his own benefit. It is a matter of national security that we all fix this and I hope the new administration will prioritize it.
IME it's less about disability fraud and more about treatment of the physical injuries sustained from blue-collar work. Those faking it are the ones with enough foresight to sell their pills to others.
But you are otherwise right from what I've seen; the opiates are addictive, the demands of the job do not lessen (they only increase) and the rest writes itself.
As someone not steeped in it, I think the charitable interpretation is that these people like working a job for the dignity of supporting themselves. The jobs went away, but the desire for that dignity hasn't. So social welfare policies remain uninteresting. In fact any top-down analysis sets off their "government handout" detectors, so they're left pining for the age before the need for labor dried up.
IMO a lot could have been done (and perhaps could still be) by decreasing the definition of full time work. With technological progress, offshoring, and women entering the workforce, full time employment should be around 10-15 hours per week. It's a radical departure from the status quo, but that's due to progress being held back so long. Instead we're stuck between a rock and a hard place with an economy tuned to force people into working 40+ hours a week, but little actual work to do.
(BTW the work in cities is more about communication, so the same trend manifests itself as the creation of non-producing bullshit jobs. There is less financial pain, but similar existential pain)
Almost everyone just wants to be safe, happy, economically secure, and the same for their kids. That transcends nationality, religion, or party. I think trying to frame it around economic policy reversed the way the mindset was bootstrapped.
False claim
I think Obama's strategy of a trading block with Asia was much smarter/efficient.
As you alluded to in the previous paragraph, it's good for people because it means we're not participating in the kind of horrific wars that ravaged the world in the century before. And the US has been far less extractive than previous global hegemons. (So in that sense it's worse for US citizens, but better for the rest of the world)
Now, everything is a tradeoff, and perhaps this particular tradeoff hasn't been worth it. But there are most certainly good things that US hegemony has given the world.
Being economic hegemon (again likely to be challenged by China) is obviously good for the US but the rest of the world might not share this view for the large part.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-trump-brou...
Trump brought war on US soil, Americans VS other Americans, is it better?
If you mean to say that BLM in the US is comparable to the great wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, I'd say that you're off by a factor of a million in deaths.
Well, it that's true it means that wars started by US have only caused less than fifty deaths...
Given that the war in Afghanistan alone caused between 500.0000 and 800.000 deaths (depending on the source), the factor is more probably around 2 to 1
> Over 111,000 Afghans, including civilians, soldiers and militants, are estimated to have been killed in the conflict. The Cost of War project estimated that the number who have died through indirect causes related to the war may be as high as 360,000 additional people based on a ratio of indirect to direct deaths in contemporary conflicts. These numbers do not include those who have died in Pakistan
And it was about time.
Also: US Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 “Victim Nations” Since World War II
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...
"But what about BLM and domestic conflict, US hegemony is dead, and the US has killed a lot of people overseas"
I still don't see the connection.
Did the impoverishment of the middle class happen before, after, or during the US hegemony?
Did the large scale wars of the past 30 years happen before, after or during US hegemony?
Did the international terrorism escalation happen bwfore, after or during the US hegemony?
The west especially is poorer and less safe.
Trump was simply the final nail in the coffin.
I think people are just connecting dots here.
I really hope Biden will realise it.
Even if that article was remotely accurate (it isn't, see mcguire's comment), the kinds of wars that we fought before the US's new world order could produce that number of casualties in a single year (1942, 1945), so U.S. hegemony would still be a massive improvement. It's a massive improvement even over the two-pole world, as a quick glance at the battle deaths over time graph [1] shows.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-yea...
Just WOW
OK, let's make it easy for you
---
VIETNAMESE AND INDOCHINA WAR: A TOTAL OF 5.5 MILLION DEAD
THE VIETNAM WAR - 3.8 MILLION DEAD
1.7 MILLION MORE DEAD IN THE CAMBODIAN, KHMER ROUGE GENOCIDE
Source for death toll: Necrometrics and British Medical Journal, 2008
---
TOTAL IRAQI'S KILLED IN AMERIAN WARS (1990-PRESENT) - 3 MILLION IRAQI SANCTIONS: 1.7 MILLION TOTAL DEAD [1]
500,000 CHILDREN DEAD [2][3]
Source:
[1] Behind the War on Terror. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. 2003.
[2] Food and Agricultural Organization Study (1995)
[3] Iraq Sanctions Kill Children, U.N Reports (New York Times, 1995
---
Just these major events account to more than 10 million deaths
And they stop at the first gulf war
There are many more years to cover
Good luck denying that
> 1942, 1945
The massive improvement from 80 years ago happened even in third World countries run by warlord (financed by the US)
So what?
Can we not have another 80 years of US hegemony and compare the results?
Is it asking too much?
It's how science works: the US hegemony experiment is done and the results are meh, we ended up with Trump, now let's try something else and let's try not to bet on the wrong horse this time, ok guys?
"The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation."
"Over the years we have repeatedly heard about the Khmer Rouge’s role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia without any acknowledgement being made this mass killing was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death , injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people. So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge – a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge."
"Some people estimate that the number of Cuban forces killed range from 2,000, to 4,000. Another estimate is that 1,800 Cuban forces were killed on an open highway by napalm. This appears to have been a precursor of the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991 when U.S. forces mercilessly annihilated large numbers of Iraqis on a highway."
"Between 8,000 and 12,000 Nepalese have died since a civil war broke out in 1996. The death rate, according to Foreign Policy in Focus, sharply increased with the arrival of almost 8,400 American M-16 submachine guns (950 rpm) and U.S. advisers. Nepal is 85 percent rural and badly in need of land reform. Not surprisingly 42 % of its people live below the poverty level."
"Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of several republics. Since it refused to be closely tied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it gained some suport from the U.S. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, Yugoslavia’s usefulness to the U.S. ended, and the U.S and Germany worked to convert its socialist economy to a capitalist one by a process primarily of dividing and conquering. There were ethnic and religious differences between various parts of Yugoslavia which were manipulated by the U.S. to cause several wars which resulted in the dissolution of that country. From the early 1990s until now Yugoslavia split into several independent nations whose lowered income, along with CIA connivance, has made it a pawn in the hands of capitalist countries. (1) The dissolution of Yugoslavia was caused primarily by the U.S."
"Let us put this in historical perspective: the commemoration of the War to End All Wars acknowledges that 15 million lives were lost in the course of World War I (1914-18)." [But see the 1917-1919 flu pandemic, which may have started in the United States, making the US directly responsible for the deaths of 50 million people.]
But we all know that "behind a joke there's always the truth"
I still hope USA will understand what kind of criminal state they have been and still are.
No hard feelings, just hope for them to learn and be better in the future
Nietzsche said, “in times of peace a warlike nation turns on itself”.
> Globalization has lifted billions from poverty.
There, I reordered things for you to answer your own question. :)
Don’t you see the problem here?
Globalisation allowed it to grow, but i don't think isolation fixes any problem if every country starts doing that.
Does it only end when the US population is in the state that the poor Chinese, et al. farmers were in before we accepted this globalism?
At some point we have to stop and say, "OK, we gave you a leg up now let's spend a few decades and rebuild our own country". This is not what is proposed by Democrat politicians, they propose we continue to transfer wealth (in many forms) to other countries and fill the income gap that is produced with social welfare programs.
Would you prefer China or Russia instead?
Maybe if you live in US you can afford to not care, but I live in a weak, poor, corrupted country. For us it's either US, Russia (now) or China (in the long run) and I prefer US after all.
You yourself just wrote a the answer: it prevents wars.
US hegemony is to set be the US, not to serve the world.
The end result is ordinary people get caught up in less wars because politically war is much more rarely the right answer (either you're too politically weak to start one, or if you are the hegemon you just give people the evil eye and they usually shutup)
That doesn't make it a utopia, just a world with less war dead.
Korea was different, and also backed by the UN. But even there things aren't as clear cut as you imply. North Korea had yet to turn into the Kim-led hard core Stalinist regime.
This was already being done. That was the whole point of the end of the Obama admins shift to Asia strategy.
> Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.
Troop levels are the same today as they were in 2020. And I also don't think this is a novel idea, everyone wants out, but you have to do it in a way that doesn't leave us in a worst situation than just staying, and that is ridiculously hard. Nature abhors a vacuum.
> Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.
This is a mixed bag. Look around and tell me that the general middle class American is worst off than they were in any other decade of modern America. We live safer, cleaner lives. What we don't feel is security, which is a consequence of 40 years of treating the government as an entity that is the problem, and not an entity that can be the solution.
Funny, my whole generation has basically given up on basics like owning a house completely. But we got cool tech gadgets so it all evens out?
With that said, there are plenty of affordable places to move to, they just aren't super sexy and cool. But even San Francisco and Brooklyn were completely uncool not that long ago.
They're not even close to being as well off as they were up until the ~80's - 90's.
Exactly. You can do this the smart way, by gathering partners and encircling China with something like the TPP, or you can do it the dumb way, by picking stupid playground fights.
One is effective and the other is just for show.
For reference, see the movie Vice (2018) which is basically a third party account on Dick Cheney's biography. Scooter Libby, who got sentenced due to Plamegate due to leaking Plame's name while she was an active CIA asset on foreign ground (a retaliation move), as well. He got his sentence commuted by Bush and got fully pardoned by Trump. Why? I don't believe there's a valid justification. Nepotism 101.
Btw, while Obama did a fair amount of drone strikes, was vigilant on leaks, and probably knew all about NSA's ops before Snowden leaked, he did inherit a mess from Bush. After Obama, Trump did an ample amount of drone strikes (tho we need to put both into context as drone strikes are a new technology), and while Trump did not start a war in the traditional sense he escalated enough foreign relations including NATO and other treaties like WTO, Middle East (ISIS being partly a mess USA made with Iraq invasion), China (trade conflict), Iran (killing of Suleimani). Trump was a nationalist, and an egocentric one at that, who did not follow conventional scientific consensus on e.g. climate change. I'm all for freedom and opinion, but denying an important truth which is going to affect all of humanity if we don't act Soon (tm), is dangerous. Especially for people like me who live under the sea level (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). I'm so utterly relieved that Trump is gone. Senate isn't decided yet AFAIK, but I am not anti Republican by definition, and I believe dialogue is the way forward. Dialogue based on rationalization, facts, and science though; ie. not lies, denial, deception.
Dividing was his creed. Trump had a lot of hot air about helping Joe Sixpack, ie. rhetoric and short-term gains. On the long-term, climate change affects us all. Including the working class. We've seen some appetizers in the form of drought and massive fires. Reaction? Denial, cause he can't figure a way to profit from it.
There's ways to profit from climate change. Its a lack of willpower and lack of inventive thinking to not opt for it, and unfortunately the world can't afford to ignore it any longer.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/04/24/middle-class-f...
I think the main difference is that trump decided to take tactical action on these positions without regards for the strategic long term consequences, which other presidents have been unwilling to do (except the globalisation point, i think most previous really liked globalisation and werent just worried about the consequences)
The quest to keep NK from going nuclear started decades ago and spanned administrations from both parties, and finally failed miserably and objectively before Trump got into office. This, despite all best efforts from the best minds. The status quo was hardly a defensible glide path.
Similarly, we’ve been after real change in the Mideast for decades across multiple admins from both parties. We’ve never had movement. I’m not saying that the Abraham Accords fix everything, but getting four nations to finally recognize the right of Israel to exist and engage in trade and cultural exchange is certainly visible change. Energy independence also helps lessen our conflict of interest there. That’s visible change that was seemingly unobtainium for decades. Circumstance and technology have their role in this, but there are also specific policy and regulatory frameworks that will make or break this new path over coming years.
China.. I think there’s consensus that Kissinger’s laissez faire approach to opening China has not produced the intended outcome. Basically we’ve taken a totalitarian and repressive state and made them a rich totalitarian and repressive state.
So point being that the status quo - the unmovable track our foreign policy was on for decades regardless of president - was due for a shake up. It will be interesting to see what Biden does - revert to old paths, or take advantage of the new paths?
Have to go back a little further than that, the romans also wanted change in the middle east and didn't have much luck.
> Basically we’ve taken a totalitarian and repressive state and made them a rich totalitarian and repressive state.
I'd say under trump we have taken a rich toltalitarian and reppressive state and turned them into a rich toltalitarian/reppressive state with new friends in high places.
Just because something is a change does not make it a change for the better. Maybe the previous policy was trying to hold back the tide and failing. Opening the floodgates is a change, but i'm not sure its a good change, even if holding back the tide was a failure on slow motion.
By “we” I mean the United States, and by real change by last several admins, I’m of course referring to attempts to break the stalemate between Israel and the other ME nations after the wars (six years, etc), not world wars. Necessarily time-bound. Not sure what Romans have to do with this unless you’re making a point about futility? The Romans certainly impacted the near East for hundreds of years, right?
I think this is the biggest place where he said one thing, then immediately did another. We are involved in the Middle East as we ever were, and much much more so with more disastrous effects in places like Yemen. The US' involvement in Yemen should be enough to laugh Trump offstage any time he talks about "getting out of the middle east".
Please please please don't let him off the hook for this by saying he had "good ideas" here when he was talking out of one side of his mouth while civilian families are being slaughtered.
The military branch of the PYD party was crucial during the fight against ISIS. Leaving them to die in Erdogan's hands is tragic.
Energy independence from the ME is a reliable quality by which the US (and others) will care less about the region. But this also means leaving the regional developed powers to manage the area with greater and greater autonomy (e.g. Israel and SA).
To that end, we are arguably less “involved” today. Our dependence on that oil and our direct action involvement there are directly related.
By the numbers, we are less involved than in, say, 2005 if the US body count is the metric. If civilian deaths are the metric, Iraq’s numbers have fallen off a cliff since 2017 [0]. I would guess the same for Syria but don’t have data at hand.
It’s tough to want it both ways - asking the US to intervene for peace but not spill any blood. If the ME tells us anything, it’s that peace does not come from doing nothing - it is not the region’s default state given the cultural animosities. Stability seems the best chance for civilian peace there. The US is increasingly delegating or abdicating that role to the most friendly options available.
How would you prefer that the trajectory change? More direct “peacekeeping” involvement? Total abandonment while watching a regional death match play out?
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269729/documented-civili...
This is also how I feel about China and Hong Kong, NK, how I would have felt under WW2/Germany, and how I would feel basically every other foreign policy incident.
If you mean our borders, you know that’s untenable, and so not a serious conversation.
This seems overly simplistic. Globalization has led to a drop in the cost of many goods as well as multiple new markets for US industries.
I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that the spoils of globalization have not been shared as fairly as they should of, but imo that's way more linked to other policies (like tax rates & spending)
I don't think Trump was tested in this area, and I don't think most wars were trivially the fault of the presidencies they were started in (sure, some exceptions like the most recent iraq may jump to mind). I mean, "just don't participate" is also equivalent to ceding influence to whoever feels like a bit of shelling would do them good, so that's not always a good choice - under the assumption that the US (and world) was well served by some measure of imposed order.
Course, maybe I'm misinterpreting who had agency in those situations - do you think it's largely presidents' at fault for for the post-WWII military engagements?
He didn't, but he did abandon the Kurds:
* https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
* https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/yes-donald-trum...
Helping his Turkish buddy to be able to go after them.
Lower than the UK and Spain, a bit higher than Italy and France.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
I have no idea where the worldometers.info data is coming from.
Regardless of small differences, painting Covid-19 as a uniquely American problem stemming from American politics is silly. No countries have performed particularly well, despite trying everything from strict lockdowns to no response at all. East and South East Asia is outperforming, but that likely has more to do with past exposures and disease resistance than it is due to policy difference.
Some of these would never work in the US due to gov't structure and just the culture of people (privacy rights), but to discount American politics is a stretch. The entire debacle has been a war on misinformation from the top down.
South Korea, Vietnam, Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand would seem to be examples countries that have minimises deaths.
The US has numbers comparable to high density countries with extensive use of public transport. That is just terrible outcomes for a country where everybody drives and live far apart.
Nor is is really fair to even judge the Federal response to it at all, as under our system of government health care is largely a State matter not a federal one.
Remember the United States is a Republic of 50 States, joined together under a common Defense and Monetary system.
I don't for see large scale changes in policy under a Biden Presidency, you may get stronger messaging but power of the President is largely limited outside of dispersing money, and maybe requiring manufacturers to make certain things if there is a national shortage
Masks Mandates, Lock Downs, etc will still fall under the purview of State Governors as this how our constitution divides the powers of the government
If you mean full on authoritarian rules where by the government arbitrarily decides by executive fiat who is allowed to work, leave their home, engage in commerce, or other wise gather in any way for months.
I would say no that is not a proper role of a government in a free society that has any respect for civil or human rights...
US deaths minus NY: 200,248 NY population: 310,674,858 Death rate per million: 644
You'd have to remove NJ and Connecticut (the top three states) to make much of a difference.
Which, considering the wealth and expertise of the United States, makes a sort of sense.
At least those other nations are actually making an effort, and not denying science and spreading false, destructive information.
What specifically did Trump fail to do that you feel he should have done with regard to Covid? Keeping in mind that the US is a constitutional republic and does not have a lot of the same legal tools to compel people to do things en masse that other nations do.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/5/8/18619206/under-do...
See the War Powers Act to get an idea of the modern framework for governing war in the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution
And focusing on China as the new red scare would (is already?) simply result in a new Cold War, to nobody's benefit.
I personally don't think the US has any business being hegemon (feel free to check my post history), but if your primary interest is maintaining the position of the US from ~1992-2016, then your best bet is to maintain the foreign and economic policy of those times, which is basically what Biden is promising to do.
If advancing the interests of people outside the US to the detriment of US citizens accomplishes that, it's well within their purpose.
> The 1964 Brazilian coup d'état (Portuguese: Golpe de estado no Brasil em 1964 or, more colloquially, golpe de 64) was a series of events in Brazil from March 31 to April 1 that led to the overthrow of President João Goulart by members of the Brazilian Armed Forces, supported by the United States government.The coup put an end to the government of Goulart (also known as 'Jango'), a member of the Brazilian Labour Party [...] although a moderate nationalist, Goulart was accused of being a communist by right-wing militants, he was unable to take office [...] The coup brought to Brazil a military regime politically aligned to the interests of the United States government. This regime lasted until 1985, when Neves was indirectly elected the first civilian president of Brazil since the 1960 elections.
The usual same old story.
It's the same thing they did to Lula.
But you're right, bombed was an exaggeration on my part, they usually invade or send weapons and cavalry
Colonization through military power is not hegemony, is tyranny
Is it right, or wise in the long term, to use our position of power to stop the growth of wealth in non-developed countries? On the other hand, do we have any sort of obligation to elevate the standards of living of people in non-developed countries, especially when it may impact the standards of people living in our borders?
There is a moral question to be answered, especially given our purported system of values and the way in which the wealthy and wealthy countries came to be as such.
I'm not staking out a position or trying to shame anyone. I'm just saying I think it is the underlying question we should be thinking about to decide how we judge globalization and its effects.
Just to be clear I’m not on one side or the other because I’m relatively ignorant on the topic. Just looking for evidence
I don't know what evidence for this would look like except for all the goods that are manufactured overseas that used to be manufactured domestically. I'm not making a statistical argument. I'm making an argument based on life experience and inference. Although life expectancy in the US is declining. Wages are stagnant but that's an aggregate over the population. If a 30-year-old worker loses their job and an 18-year-old worker gets hired in a different industry for the same "real wage" then that looks like no change from the perspective of population statistics.
Since you asked for metrics, here is a site for working remotely as a freelancer [1]. You'll quickly notice the pay rates are abysmal. $7/hr for a three.js developer. $250 (or lower, possibly as low s $30) to make a fully functional & tested app on android+iphone (would normally take an entire dev team probably well over 1 or 2 weeks).
These are rates below minimum wage for highly technical skills.
This is even more true for hardware too but it's hard to quantify, because e.g. you can't just compare the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Shenzhen with the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Cleveland, because Cleveland doesn't manufacture capacitors.
However, I do have some data (though it's not the most sophisticatedly obtained). Sticking with capacitors as a benchmark, I was expecting there to be 0 US companies manufacturing capacitors, but apparently there are 7 [2]. In contrast, there are apparently 228 Chinese companies manufacturing capacitors [3].
All of this is just to say it's pretty clear that globalization has moved these jobs overseas (and significantly dropped the market rate for those who remain local).
[1] https://www.freelancer.com/jobs/ [2] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_united_states.htm... [3] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_china.html
To clarify the point, the US largely rode a post-WW2 manufacturing boom for a couple generations where the relative quality of life for US citizens disproportionately outpaced other countries. Globalization has started to erase that disparity. So while it’s bad for the US middle and working classes it’s largely benefited pulling people out of poverty for other nations, exemplified by China. The irony is that much of this is driven by the US’s addiction to cheap shit.
I’m only saying the above because I think people are confusing the discussion, not because I think that it’s the best long term strategy
I do think it's benefited other nations, but -- getting more into personal opinion -- I also think the "help other nations" argument is mostly used to justify cheapening wages. If companies were paying foreign workers the same rates that they would have paid US workers I'd be more empathetic to the argument. But something about the fact that the top 90th percentile of Americans has seen huge gains in the last 40 years, while the middle to bottom percentile has seen neutral or losses [1] raises flags to me that the push towards globalization was selfishly motivated. I know it's a huge inference to say the stagnating wages are caused by globalization, but realistically I would say it's the combination of outsourced labor/manufacturing, immigration, rise of women in the workforce, rise of minorities in the workforce, and automation. Most of these are positive changes, but I still think the average blue collar worker suffered a cost that the hyper-wealthy elite did not, so at the moment I don't see the push for globalization as a very selfless initiative.
I do think that a lot of people had these things on their agenda already. We didn't need Trump to come to these conclusions. Because he might have gotten the issues right, but didn't really understand them nor did he care about solutions.
Also, he didn't get out of the Middle East, he just picked a side. Not sure what that means for the region.
American politics has brief focus windows, direct action has more impact than vague "pivots" or "focuses" which last about as long as the next crisis.
I would be inclined to agree, if Trump had any strategy behind that. His policies, or rather lack thereof, don't support that. I'd say he just stumbled around and got lucky once. And even that has to be seen.
Energy independence helps us avoid relying on chinese solar panels and middle eastern oil.
Building carbon capture infrastructure in the US means the jobs would be here. Delaying means eventually pumping unprecedented amounts of money into whatever other country gets there first (probably China).
What concerns me is that just as Trump's election encouraged the proliferation of racism, Biden's election will encourage the proliferation of cancel/woke culture, which will lead to even more division than we have under Trump.
Globalization and isolation have two sides, neither of which is all pro or con.
Not saying it will, but that during the unrivaled US egemony after the end of the cold war things have been worse for the middle/poor segment of society, especially in the west.
Could be a coincidence, could be bad luck, could be a correlation.
I think you can make a strong case US hegemony may be in decline, but it’s harder to claim it’s gone
Why do you assume it was/will be replaced?
It could go back to the laissez-faire system that was present when all the European powers were running around basically doing anything they wanted. (It should be noted that the US wasn't as isolationist as the propaganda would have you believe: how else did they get pre-revolution Cuba, PR, Guam, Hawaii, etc.?)
I don’t think the US has been isolationist since before the Spanish American war.
I agree that US hegemony isn't gone yet, but we've lost so much of our manufacturing and materials sourcing that we'll soon need them more than they need us.
Having a nice battleship group does little for the average american public.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Eisenhower
That same adversary wouldn't sink a second [15 carriers in the next hour . . . 'cos they'll all be sunk]
> Back in reality, it's true [China] could ... sink 15 aircraft carriers [in an hour].
That is unlikely. The Chinese military relies on a combination of overwhelming manpower and tactical positioning, not aircraft superiority and tactical missile deployment (although they are equipping with more and more ballistic missiles). This puts the US at a distinct advantage in almost every conflict with the Chinese military. This includes the South Seas.
The presence of the 5 US carriers* off Singapore has deterred the staged Chinese invasion force for the last few months
https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/china-sends-two-aircraf... - 3 carriers sent.
2 More were sent by Trump in September (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvgKgLVPckA). .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_submarine_classes_in_s...
Phrasing it that way is unfair. Trump held China accountable for its mercantilist trade practices.
Ineffectual? I’d argue he’s one of the most consequential Presidents of the past 100 years.
He reshaped the federal bench, confirmed a 6-3 majority on the SCOTUS, overhauled the tax code, negotiated multiple Middle East peace deals, repealed and replaced NAFTA, and didn’t start a single foreign war.
His impact on the US political system will be felt for generations. Compare that to 8 years of Obama that can’t point to any meaningful accomplishment.