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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

This aestheticization of factory jobs is something I've noticed to be driving the New Right's worldview. It's not dissimilar to and no less dangerous than the aesthetic fixation on the agrarian economy of Mao and Pol Pot.

Frankly, no, sweatshops are not important to the cultural fabric of a country.

The US has problems with housing affordability, with medical costs, and with service sector costs emerging from Baumol's cost disease, which are all things that will get worse with tariffs, ranging from higher construction costs, to higher pharmaceutical prices, to less service employees making the cost disease worse.

It's also untrue that comparative advantage only benefits capital. Consumers are hurt by higher prices and less job opportunities driving down demand on the labor market. This worldview of a zero sum contest between capital and labor is a populist fiction.

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Manufacturing doesn’t have to equate to sweat shops. It’s hard to take your argument seriously when your judgement is undermined by such fallacy.

We have problems with housing affordability because asset values inflate inverse to the devaluation of the dollar. The dollar is deflating because a service economy is not as sustainable as a manufacturing economy. This is particularly pronounced when we all see the labor value of intelligent workers decreasing at a precipitous rate due to AI.

>"Manufacturing doesn’t have to equate to sweat shops. It’s hard to take your argument seriously when your judgement is undermined by such fallacy."

You're right; humans will be as uninvolved as possible in the next domestic sweat shop lines. Astute observation!

Tech bros who are frustrated with their job fantasizing about doing "real work".

An entire generation has grown up without assembly lines so it is easy to mystify it. People in Vietnam don't enjoy making Nikes but it is better than what came before: subsistence farming. But the Vietnamese factory worker trying to send their kids to university too.

Manufacturing employment plummeted in the US after the 90s.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp

Lots of people remember the 80s and 90s being better times with quality manufacturing employment without romanticizing the past. To this day multiples of the “information” sector are employed in US manufacturing.

People remember those days because the Republicans hadn't destroyed trade unions and the pension system yet.

We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries. If you have free trade and zero Republicans the same thing happens. If the jobs go away the union doesn’t matter. That’s why the unions consistently lobbied against NAFTA, the WTO, etc.

I’m actually not even sure what specific labor law changes you could blame that on. Clinton was running the show in the 90s, and I don’t recall any big union busting under Bush, whatever else might be said of him.

> We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries.

I mean, they can, if you put up trade barriers or introduce capital controls. It's not a coincidence that after capital controls were removed, basically any manufacturing that could, fled America. And I (and my family) in Ireland were massive, massive beneficiaries of this!

Like, you can definitely make the argument that globalisation has benefited the world overall, while being bad for a bunch of people in the developed countries. And it's not a bad argument.

But unfortunately for all of the people who think globalisation is great, the votes of all the people who disagree count just as much as yours, and it looks like they're willing to vote for anyone who even hints at promising to fix this.

> Clinton was running the show in the 90s,

He introduced NAFTA, which made it profitable for much US manufacturing to move to Canada/Mexico. Bush let China into the WTO (or was that Clinton too?).

thanks for highlighting this. to those unaware the US currently employs 20M people in manufacturing while Information is only 3M.

so yeah even with a 'non-existent' manufacturing sector it has been able to provide more jobs than so called technology industry.

Perhaps this is the inevitable cycle of prosperity? We see this in so many facets now as generations progress - your comment reminds me of antivax social media people who haven't ever seen anyone more sick than a cold or tech bros thinking a trade job would be better since it might magically be "more rewarding" (I'm guilty of this!) with no regard for how much privilege is inherent in sitting at a desk all day and getting paid to think.

Like the stereotypical kid who grew up rich not understanding the value of hard work maybe the inevitable result of easy and safe living is a blind spot so big we're doomed to fall back down as a society and start over again and again.

Sure, anyone not agreeing perfectly with the current system of global trade is part of the "new right"... Another way to look at it: globalisation weakens democratic control over the economy and undermines unions. Is that not a problem in your opinion?

Globalisation Also creates markets for the more advanced goods and services to be sold.

If we are going to wade into the deep waters of international trade, then you can’t look only at america or American workers without getting blind sided constantly.

At the depth you are talking - globalization has created more nations than anything else.

The undermining of democracy came with increased deregulation and increased lobbying and wealth concentration.

That's a strawman. What I was doing was pointing out the appeal to the aesthetics of work and associated buzzwords ("capital"), noting the absence of any actual economy policy that will deliver tangible benefits to existing people. It's the same old populist shtick that we've seen in countless fascist and communist regimes where certain modes of work are fetishized and life is regimented around that prescription by a central authority, in the pursuit of a subjective notion of pure work. The giveaway is the attempted justification of an economic policy in service of a nebulous "cultural" impact.

> It's the same old populist shtick that we've seen in countless fascist and communist regimes where certain modes of work are fetishized and life is regimented around that prescription by a central authority

> Frankly, no, sweatshops are not important to the cultural fabric of a country.

And that's not a strawman?

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