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Comment by president | Hacker News Reader

That's a benefit of having nasty manufacturing sent overseas. Oh, but then jobs take a dip too. Now what's more important to us, the environment or our economy?

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This is a false dichotomy. On the whole, our economy isn't hurt by sending manufacturing overseas. If it costs less to produce a product overseas than here, then the price for that product will drop. Lower cost of product means higher standards of living for everyone. Why do you think so many people have smartphones? How many do you think would have smartphones if they were manufactured here?

On top of this, the number of jobs is not a fixed number. The workers who lost their jobs in manufacturing can be more productive in other jobs, which benefits everyone. Also, money people save by purchasing cheaper products is money that can be spent elsewhere, increasing demand for other goods and thus supply, which means more workers in other areas. By only looking at the smaller picture losses (manufacturing jobs), you're missing out on the larger picture gains (greater productivity, higher standards of living).

The problem in loss of manufacturing jobs is deskilling. You only have a solid industrial design base if you have manufacturing communities, otherwise their isn't a wide culture to draw on of people who understand these kinds of problems. And so you might be able to compete on design for a while, but the places you have sent your manufacturing to will learn really fast and will be competing with you in design and research and have all the manufacturing base that you no longer have, and all the skilled workers.

This is doubly false. First, offshore jobs has not led to high unemployment in the US; 2 million jobs were offshored between 1994 and 2007 even as the unemployment rate dropped from 6.6% to 4.4%[1][2] - apparently most of those people found other work. Secondly, the reduced emissions is not caused by offshored jobs, either; US manufacturing output is up this year[3] even as emissions have dropped 8%. Not that a cleaner China wouldn't be even better.

[1]http://www.trivisonno.com/offshoring [2]http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 [3]http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/

I don't think the first statement is a valid argument. One could instead note the number of jobs offshored between 1994 and 2012, and see that the unemployment rate has increased from 6.6% to 8.3%.

That's not to say the original comment is correct either. It's just that there seems to be many more variables that just one in what determines the unemployment rate.

Yes, I guess that's the better point - I don't think there's strong evidence to tie offshoring to unemployment either way. But regarding the 1994-2012 claim, I feel like that's the claim a lot of people are implictly making, since unemployment is high now and they are blaming offshored jobs for it, which is why I respond that it didn't seem to increase unemployment from 1994-2007, so why should even less offshoring be responsible for the 2007-2012 increase? (I suppose you could say there were other factors offsetting the offshoring earlier that weren't later, but I don't feel like people are making that nuanced of a claim)

You can create new jobs. Can't create a new planet though. I vote for the environment.

Since when are the two mutually exclusive ?

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