The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday.
Yeah, ok, fuck the Bush administration and their entire coterie of fucking accountants and upper-level managers.
“You need to lose your job for the benefit of an abstract statistic!”
You know, trade wouldn’t be an issue if the GOP wasn’t so goddamn adamantly opposed to assistance to people who lost their jobs to trade. But noooooo, that’d make babby jesus cry!
I guess we are going have a wonderful Star Trek-like future where we don’t even need money! That’s good, since we won’t have any jobs more advanced than Burger-Boi.
Okay, pretend for just a minute that there aren’t little brown people taking your job. Imagine someone invented AI software that was good enough to write code to spec. Imagine that all it needed was electricity and a processor to run on, and it would churn out commented C++ as pretty and bug-free as any human alive, and even provide tech support when the job was done.
Should that invention be quashed? Should the inventor never be allowed to sell his product, because of the enormous economic dislocation that would result? Should millions of man hours continue to be spent each year doing work that could be done more efficiently by machines?
So corporations posting record profits and moving their labor force offshore so they can reduce labor costs and further increase profits is an invention that shouldn’t be quashed? Poor analogy, Kyle.
Worse than most of my analogies! There’s quite a backlash starting and I truly believe we are going to have a record election turnout. (And we have to keep one hell of an eye out to see how the fuckers plan to steal this one.)
agreed. it isn’t right to talk about the great long term effects and ignore the very real, very negative short term effect this trend has on so many people.
I don’t think Kyle’s story (it’s more an allegory than an analogy, but whatever…) is that far off. However, the other points made are still perfectly valid. If such a code-producing program were invented, then it would be the responsibility of the government to grapple with the issue: how will it help the displaced software writers? To tell us that it’s good for the long term is bullshit… how will those people eat dinner tomorrow? Any governmnet that says “tough luck” is not a government that we want in place… and it should be voted out of office.
The government either needs to quash that program, (assuming it affects enough of the population to warrant interference in new technology) or, preferably, it should figure out what to do with the displaced workers. At the very least, a financial safety net should be in place.
Kyle, you didn’t specify how many people would get fired as a result of the invention, in what jobs, and how hard it’d be for them to get new ones.
And in my patented Midnight Son impersonation drive-by special, it seems Kerry is doing a phone blitz on Wisconsin. Using Canadian telemarketers. rimshot
I’m sure the unions will forgive him, just a terrible misunderstanding.
YOU CAN"T HANDLE the patented Midnight Son drive-by. Werd to ya mutha.
Oh, uh, we are all upset over outsourcing to ragheads on other continents. Why, Canadians are practically Americans! Sheesh! :lol:
Well, I’m assuming that everyone who writes code would be out of work. I’m not sure how many people that is, but I figure it’s a lot. I’d be one of them. I’m not sure how hard it would be to find new jobs, but I’m reasonably confident that I’d find something. If software was that cheap to produce, there’d be a whole lot more of it made, and I’d expect an explosion of demand for systems and requirements analysts and the like, the people who determine and specify what software needs to be made.
And it’s a damn good analogy to the current situation, because it is an extension of the current situation, less the undercurrent of xenophobic nationalism that always seems to roil just below the surface of free-trade discussions. I’ll be the first to agree that aid and (especially) continuing education of displaced workers is a good thing. But I feel even more strongly that a closed-off protectionist economy is a bad thing. The United States is a far better place today than it would be if we didn’t have cars from Japan, CD players from Taiwan, and steel from Brazil.
I generally agree with the proposition that job shifting is going to inevitably occur as a result of technological change, productivity increases, and global trade, no matter what we do. I also think that the proper government response is to try to ameliorate the short term negative impact on the population. However the devil is as always in the details. I can think of two bad ways to go about this and one way that would be probably work OK, but would only be a partial solution. There is no good answer to this problem.
The bad answers are extensive job retraining and direct cash compensation for displaced workers. The good but limited answer is expanded unemployment benefits for displaced workers.
IMO, programs aimed at direct job retraining work very very poorly. I’ve worked as a workers’ comp attorney for 10 years, doing both worker side and employer side. I work in California which used to have the most extensive work comp vocational retraining program in the country. I’ve seen a lot of vocational retraining and its a miserable failure IMO. For the most part, adult workers who are willing to be retrained will do so on their own irregardless of any compensation, government program or other incentive. And workers who don’t want to retrain (which is in my experience around 80% to 90% of adult workers) will not succeed in retraining no matter how much money, vocational counseling, schooling etc you are throw at them. Its not an issue of resources or opportunity. Its an issue of personality, willingness to change, networks of friends and relationships, lifestyle issues, and so on. The most common outcome of vocational retraining in workers comp in that the worker becomes disabled from the old job, is given retraining for a new job, either fails to complete retraining, or completes retraining but doesn’t find a new job. Then, after their case settles, they typically go back to work in their old job or a related job (which theoretically they are too disabled to do, but they go back anyway). This pattern occurs in something like 70% or 80% of work comp vocational retraining cases. The fraction who actually get retrained and find a permanent position in a new field is around 10% to 20%, and even then its fairly common for people to end up disliking the new field and changing either back to their old vocation or to an entirely new 3rd profession a few years down the road. Bottom line, these programs are very expensive and work like crap. They work so badly that even before the recent political changes in CA, the liberal CA legislature had already voted to change the law and get rid of vocational rehabilitation in its entirety.
Also, in my opinion large payments of direct compensation (specifically cash grants or other lump sum compensation) are not very effective. The specific reason is that there is no control on the worker to make them use that money to retrain themselves or set themselves up in a new business. In CA the new system replacing vocational rehabilitation is lump sum payments and I’ve already seen that it works quite poorly - it essentially just gets used as a bargaining tool for case settlement and I haven’t seen any evidence that the workers are actually using the money to retrain themselves. Once again, the fraction who want to retrain will do so, and the free money can help them, but the ones who don’t will just get a windfall.
The one partial solution that would work IMO is a shared risk unempoyment insurance type system. We all pay taxes into a common pool and if your job is displaced to another country you receive payments for a period of time until you can find a new job, up to a certain number of months. The difference between this and current unemployment would be higher benefit rates and longer periods of eligibility, and that instead of having to look for work to remain eligible, displaced workers could be eligible if they look for work or if they engage in schooling / retraing. Unemployment rates are kept as low as possible to create a strong incentive for the unemployed to find a new job - for worker’s whose jobs have displaced out of the country I think you need to be a bit more lenient and given them a higher rate of benefit . Also periods of eligibility are kept short for the same reason. In other words, this would just be an expanded unemployment insurance system for people whose jobs have left the country. I think those workers should be treated differently from the current system b/c of the greater impact of jobs leaving the country (ie when your industry is GONE its a lot harder to bounce back in a new job).
So basically this would be money that would allow worker’s to voluntarily retrain themselves or would allow them to look for work for a longer period. Obviously this would only ameliorate the impact of jobs leaving the country not solve the issue entirely. In the long run, the globalization of the economy is likely to raise global standards of living and have a net positive effect worldwide. But in the short term we are going to have to come up with ways to cushion the immediate impacts.
Another possible solution is government loans to assist in retraining costs, sort of like federal student loans for adults.
I’m willing to listen to alternative methods but my extensive experience in retraining in the work comp system has convinced me that most of the well meaning programs for adult retraining and/or direct cash compensation are a tremendous waste of resources and don’t actually achieve their goal of permanently retraining people. Truly permanent retraining pretty much only happens voluntarily of the worker’s own initiative.
Dan
Makes sense Dan – I read an oped in the paper a few weeks ago saying the same thing, that retraining programs don’t work, and that everyone “in the know” knows that already.
Myself, sure, I might not be a computer programmer till the end of my days, but and perhaps its just delusion, but I can see myself willing to do the whole retraining thing, as long as the other jobs available have me doing something that’s fun and interesting (ie - not slinging burgers).
Of course, the other thing I can (and may) do is work for a defense company. I can’t see those guys offshoring anytime soon.
Well, I’m assuming that everyone who writes code would be out of work. I’m not sure how many people that is, but I figure it’s a lot. I’d be one of them. I’m not sure how hard it would be to find new jobs, but I’m reasonably confident that I’d find something. If software was that cheap to produce, there’d be a whole lot more of it made, and I’d expect an explosion of demand for systems and requirements analysts and the like, the people who determine and specify what software needs to be made.
And it’s a damn good analogy to the current situation, because it is an extension of the current situation, less the undercurrent of xenophobic nationalism that always seems to roil just below the surface of free-trade discussions. I’ll be the first to agree that aid and (especially) continuing education of displaced workers is a good thing. But I feel even more strongly that a closed-off protectionist economy is a bad thing. The United States is a far better place today than it would be if we didn’t have cars from Japan, CD players from Taiwan, and steel from Brazil.[/quote]
Ok, but I suggest you read up on the Luddites if you think it’s crazy to be extremely upset when new technology kills your job. Also retraining isn’t as easy as you’re saying; young people have an easy time of it, but anyone over 40 tends to end up out of the workforce.
Anyway, the problem is that the people who lose their jobs to trade are totally, completley fucked. We don’t do anything for them, pretending it’s just like losing any other kind of job. Yet the free trade advocates (it’s worse on the right, but it’s still there in disturbing amounts on the left) act shocked when people get totally, completely pissed at having their livelihood taken from them by something they don’t understand, with no way to get a comparable income back, especially if they’re old. Trade shifts also tend to devastate entire geographical areas, too, in a way regular unemployment doesn’t; see Roger & Me, for example.
I basically agree with Sharpe; the problem is that there’s no chance of anything like that happening without the Democrats controlling all three branches of government, and even then it’d be iffy.
See, things like this greatly limit my sympathy for the unemployed. I’m in the game industry, where there is no job security. The longest-lasting job I’ve had since I got out of grad school lasted a year and a half. I’ve worked at five companies in the last six years, in three different states. I’ve been lucky enough to keep finding game programming jobs, but I don’t expect for that to last for the rest of my life. I fully expect to transition out of games, or at least into management, or consulting, or writing, or something largely unrelated to my current skillset in the next ten years or so.
And I think that’s the future for everyone. People make cracks about nothing being left but McJobs, but the fact is that we need fewer and fewer people to make stuff, because we’re getting really good at it. The last century saw the U.S. go from having 30% of the population involved in farming to under 2%. The same thing is happening in manufacturing now. But we’re growing more food, and we’re making more stuff. The same thing will happen in the software industry, as tools and components get better and as software engineering matures, regardless of whether jobs move offshore or not.
That doesn’t mean that we should anticipate a future in which few wealthy capitalists live in splendid gated communities and the impoverished masses fight for food in the jungles outside. But it means that the kind of company-man jobs that characterized the twentieth century are a thing of the past. The future is in service, aesthetic, managerial or editorial jobs. The jobs that are left are going to require a lot more creativity, selectivity, and inter-personal communication skills, because work will center around figuring out what people want and how to supply it, rather than the manufacturing of the thing itself.
See, things like this greatly limit my sympathy for the unemployed. I’m in the game industry, where there is no job security. The longest-lasting job I’ve had since I got out of grad school lasted a year and a half. I’ve worked at five companies in the last six years, in three different states. I’ve been lucky enough to keep finding game programming jobs, but I don’t expect for that to last for the rest of my life. I fully expect to transition out of games, or at least into management, or consulting, or writing, or something largely unrelated to my current skillset in the next ten years or so.
Speaking for yourself of course. Not everyone has the capacity to be able to change jobs at the drop of a hat. Nor does everyone have the same opportunities or funding to be able to pay for such re-skilling.
Companies need to go back to good old fashioned values where long term workers are valued and kept. Employees who have invested years of their life becoming experts in their chosen field should be kept and nurtured.
The US has a population of 300 million people or so. Unless the government enforces a 1 child family system like in China they shouldn’t be encouraging offshore jobs when their own workers are becoming increasingly unemployed in a shrinking job market.
Jason- Except we know what happens when the government intervenes to protect an industry from the horrors of free trade: farmers get paid not to grow corn.
Life is tough, and the nanny state can’t protect you from everything.
Anyone who wanted Kyle’s mythical program squashed, roll back that analogy any amount of years you’d like and see how great things turn out. Worker productivity increasing is bad? God, every time I think, “leftists are rational individuals who simply believe in different policies than I feel are optimal” you guys go and advocate Brave New World. Gah.
Despite the near certain possibility that Bush is the worst president any of us will ever see, God bless him for having the balls to say that. It’s the sort of hard truth the left is incapable of dealing with, but it’s true. The world is changing, if we don’t we’ll simply be left behind. I don’t want a President that values short term comfort over long term economic viability.
Also, the whining from the white collar guys is pretty pathetic. It’s a hell of a lot easier to switch professions than trades, and a college degree opens a lot of doors. There were people who lost significant amounts of standard of living from free trade, but it happened decades ago, and it happened in the skilled labor field. No computer programmers are being put out of the street.
No, they move back in with their mom and work at Starbucks.
What a country!
Uh, Ben, I’m not saying we should close the borders, but saying “tough shit” to people who lose their jobs isn’t a viable alternative, either.
And I don’t think ag subsidies are a trade reaction; that’s just corporate welfare. Ironically, we grow food so cheap (breadbasket types, at least) that we don’t have to worry about foreign competition.