Why?
But does making most of the stuff locally really do that? By making e.g. cellphones here, you need to either pay Americans the same as Chinese workers make, or make Americans pay much higher prices for their cellphones. How does that help people closer to home? Seems like an handicap to me.
Personally, I enjoy the experience of purchasing bread from my local independent baker, as compared to purchasing a factory-made loaf at the grocery store.
This doesn't necessarily mean the good has to be made in the person's home country; I think a similar feeling is derived after traveling to a brewery in another country, for example, and then drinking that same brew when you get back home. (In which case, problems like this might even been partly attributed to a lack of tourism to the exporting country!)
Beyond that, I have no desire to contribute to the externalization of pollution, health and safety risks, etc, that come from exporting production overseas.
I think globalization is utterly ridiculous when countries are allowed to engage in a "race to the bottom" as China has by destroying its environment and poisoning its people to be more competitive against Western nations that aren't willing to do those things.
I'm happy to pay a little more: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/29/business/29shoe.html?ei=50....
?? They're just people.
Not likely. Everybody talks a good game, but very few actually follow through when it's time to open the old wallet.
I was raised multiculturally and have grown more cosmopolitan since leaving home, so I understand my reaction is a marginal one, but this emotion scared me. I am familiar with your comments on HN and so know you are an incredibly intelligent human being. Why, still, do you exclusively penalise the other party for unfamiliarity, which is a bilateral function? Why are intranational and international wealth inequality seen as diametrically opposed subjects?
Why one person deserves to work more than another, or one company deserves your business more than another, solely based on where they are on the globe, is beyond me.
Personally, I think it's one of the last vestiges of patriotism/nationalism that otherwise rational, worldly people for some reason still hold on to. Hopefully we can get past it.
Because social relations aren't symmetric. Successful societies are built on: families, local communities, and national unity (in that order). This is nearly universal. Certainly, someone in Chengdu cares far more about his neighbors than he cares about me!
> Why are intranational and international wealth inequality seen as diametrically opposed subjects?
I view things that way because poor people in America are part of the same body politic as myself, while poor people in China are not. The well-being of people on the south side of Chicago or in the Bronx affects me directly. The well-being of people in China does not.
The ironic thing is that the Chinese wouldn't find my viewpoint curious. Of course your own community is more important than other peoples' communities, and your nation more important than other peoples' nations. It's a self-evident truth in Asian culture.
...and you don't see that as the problem worth fixing?
I live in Canada, where we get copies of all the social-policy laws from the US forced upon us as treaties [to ensure Americans don't just drive up here for their marijuanas or what-have-you] with no ability to actually vote in the US elections that control these laws. This is just a mild case of a power imbalance that's much more pronounced in countries that rely on the US for much of their GDP (usually based entirely around exports.)
There's only one world economy, and it affects all of us, but only some of us are living in countries that get to affect it with each swing of local political sentiment. It would probably be beneficial to all of us--even you all in the US--for that to change.
I look around the world and what I see is that the countries people generally admire from the point of view of quality of life: the Scandinavian countries, Japan, etc, have a high degree of cultural and political homogeneity and unity. Meanwhile, I see a European Union in meltdown because of the difficulty of forming a political union between people in countries with very different economies and cultures.
I also see international organizations like the United Nations that are deeply dysfunctional, and fundamentally compromised by the influence of a number of Asian, Middle Eastern, and African countries who bring to it their basically corrupt political systems. Don't get me wrong, I think the U.N. is great for things like coordinating disaster relief and whatnot, but I can't imagine a world where something like the U.N. exercising political influence in the U.S. would in any way be good for Americans.
It would certainly be nice, though, if countries of people who do have homogeneous bodies politic, where country A is interested in the political decisions country B make because they affect A, could somehow trade something of their own for the right to have their own people get some control over A's affairs. They might, perhaps... buy stock in A? :)
(There's actually a lot of things putting governmental-policy "stocks" on a global market would solve, when you think about it. Certainly problems too, of course, but consider, for one thing, that it offers a workable alternative to "takeover by war" and "eternal austerity" that some Eurozone countries have been looking for for years now: "takeover by transfer of controlling equity as a liquidated asset during default.")
I like how quickly the framing of discussions jumps around in political arguments on HN; we start by talking about a government so authoritarian that individual police officers can arrest, try, and sentence you for up to a year in a labor camp on the spot, and we end up talking about how repressive the US is because we still criminalize marijuana.
China, by the way, publicly executes drug prisoners.
Don't see China in either case, though--they're in a very special position; they have enough population to sell to on their own, but they're also heavily invested in American credit markets. America has economic-coercive power over them in the same way a bad debtor has economic-coercive power over their credit card company: if you default, they get screwed, so they want to make sure they don't do anything that screws up your ability to pay them back, even if it would be good for their profit otherwise.
---
Also, as a note on framing: by thinking of the conversation as "jumping around," you're committing the Fallacy Of Linear Discourse In A Threaded Comment System (which I obviously just made up the name for, though I've heard it described before.)
Posts organized into a tree-structure are by default tangents from, not replies to, their parent. Only one subthread of each thread needs to actually "continue the conversation" -- the rest can have whatever other purpose their authors wish. Soapboxing for their personal issues, pedantry and pointing out typos, wordplay on the parent's speech, &c.
It's a self-perpetuating fallacy, since people who think threaded conversations are linear actually cause this jumping-around in the first place, by trying to force "the" conversation "back to the topic at hand."
This confuses enough people that I'm trying to work out a threaded-commenting UI where replies move down--like a message board--and only tangents move to the right (and default to closed.)
Notice that this post is actually two posts: one is a reply, and then the other, after the line, is a tangent. Don't they seem like they should be treated separately by the UI? :)
Delve into the myriad policies controlling trade, and you further discover this.
I find myself frequently annoyed by the free market... "mythers", I guess would be the word.
Think about the cute pandas.
> I'm happy to pay a little more
The problem is that its not just a "little more." I remember the 80s before China became a manufacturing powerhouse, and many things just got so much cheaper in the 90s.
The people in Wisconsin will be better off if they produce something at which their comparative advantage is the highest. You'd harm them, as well yourself and the Chinese people, by shifting the allocation of resources slightly away from optimal for all these parties.
1. If the USA bombs China, and China fights back, that means a global war and global wars accelerate the progress of science and technology, therefore in the long run people in Wisconsin will be better off just like quite possibly they are better off now than they'd be in the alternative universe where World War II never happened (where they might not have satellite TV, GPS navigation, nuclear energy, computers etc.)
2. If the USA continues to trade with China, in a number of years China may become equally as powerful as USA or more and then China may choose to go to war with America and win.
Did you mean any of the two? I'm assuming the long run part is critical since in the short term it's fairly obvious that people in Wisconsin and everywhere would be worse off if the US bombed China.
My point is that while I think globalized free trade probably maximizes world GDP (to the extent you can deal with externalities like pollution in the developing world), I don't think it's necessarily the course of action that maximizes prosperity for Americans. I wouldn't say that it definitely doesn't--I'm just not convinced.
What exploitation are you referring to?