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As I understand it, the idea was that there would be winners and losers from globalization but overall the benefit would be more global and outweigh localized drawbacks. This means that you can tax the global benefit and compensate the losers while still having everyone come out ahead! Sounds fantastic right, but in reality there were winners and losers and no one gave a shit about the losers. Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.

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>Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.

For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.

One of the reasons for this is that the financial system - which is supposed to serve as a mechanism for representing value in a fungible way - does not assign value to many forms of structured, engineered creation. For instance, a high-performing team within an organization has value, held in the agreements and trusts between the people; organizations will destroy this in a second if it suits them because there is no quantitative record of the value of that group. Similarly, at scale, there is intense value in having all of the necessary tooling in one city to manufacture something as complicated as a car, to use your Detroit example. We can see the shadow of the qualitative value by looking at the losses incurred by all the ancillary industries affected when a major company like GM moves manufacturing out of town and everything downstream of that shuts down; and we can see the long tail of the loss in terms of the socioeconomic outcomes of the average working class person living there.

In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.

Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.

Capitalism offers a means of dealing with the problem. Workers are free to start their own companies. People can just do things and don't need permission. Henry Ford himself started from nothing.

Your "just" there is doing a lot of work. Don't trivialize the difficulty of starting a company. Most people who start companies and are successful either have some financial backing or reserves already, or they have very little in the way of other responsibilities (like a spouse, children, or elderly family members) to cause them to think twice about living on ramen for years.

Yes, there are exceptions, as with everything, but this isn't a path to be taken lightly. Your average worker who lost their job due to globalization ends up scrambling to find a job, any job, immediately, or else risk their family living on the street.

If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible excuse for failure.

Makes you wonder why poor people don’t just start their own companies.

> Henry Ford himself started from nothing.

Relatively speaking, it would seem Ford was well enough off.

Born in 1863, given a pocket watch at 12 (1875), starting a company at age 40 after some years pottering about as an apprentice machinist before working on steam engines and other "advanced machines".

This is well above "having nothing" for those times - some decades earlier a pocket watch was an extremely high end highly valued prestige item - not so much so when Ford was given one at 12, but absolutely a signifier of "better than nothing"

Working on machines at that time was also a fairly prestige career path, well paid, in demand, not at all like being "just an auto mechanic" might be seen in the 1950s.

> Workers are free to start their own companies.

You're falling into the liberatarian trap of assuming a level of agency on the part of average people that lines up with your own. Turns out that most normal folks do not feel empowered or capable in any way of starting their own company, or we'd see a hell of a lot more of it. Regulatory capture, tax and accounting, the need to drum up sales and do marketing - these are all things that prevent normal folks from bothering at all, because the juice doesn't feel worth the squeeze.

You can't just do things. You need permission from all kinds of folks to do anything anymore. We've strung ourselves up on that for good reasons - to prevent environmental catastrophes, labour exploitation, etc - but it does also serve to make the "free market" sort of an anachronism. Free for whom? Not for you and me, and honestly I don't want to go back to buckets of white paint being sold as milk, so I'm okay with a little less freedom there.

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