One of the greatest tragedies of my lifetime has been watching as the idea of free trade, which has built the immense wealth we enjoy today in the west, come to be rejected by both major parties. What makes it even more painful, is that we literally won the fight! Clinton, Blair et al conceded free trade was good! Everyone was onboard! And yet a mere 30 years later and both parties have traded away free trade so we can’t they about the literal dumbest culture war BS.
Something that was so frustrating was seeing Hillary cynically oppose the TPP because she felt pressure from Bernie also opposing it. Unlike Bernie and Trump, she was smart enough to know better, but was too much of a political coward to stand up for what she actually believed.
I tend to think that *if* free trade was really that important and *if* it was necessary for Clinton to abandon TPP in order to defeat Sanders without taking excessive damage that would hurt her in the general election, then it would actually have been wrong and a betrayal of free trade for Clinton *not* to abandon TPP. But the ifs are debatable as a factual matter.
The thing that I legitimately wish that mainstream Democratic politicians would figure out is that the sort of people they think they need to appease are either not actually gettable voters -- they're always going to move the goalposts and end up staying home or voting Green -- or they're just going to cope and seethe and vote Dem no matter what they do.
Basically there's nothing to be gained by meeting their demands. The people who legitimately care about Gaza are either super-dialed-in partisans or they're the kind of people who wrote in Harambe, with no in between.
I'd say most Democrats still thought TPP was a good idea, just like most Democrats are still on balance pro-Israel (maybe not pro-this Israeli government but definitely not viewing Israel as a "settler colony" that needs to be wiped off the map), but Democratic politicians can't stop bending over backwards to accommodate a cranky minority of the party. To some degree we voted for Biden and got Warren anyway and it's annoying.
Arguably a much worse problem. On paper most elected Republicans want more border restrictions and funding for Ukraine, but they're refusing the half-loaf given to them by Democrats.
Notably, the death of the TPP and Biden’s unwillingness to commit to any of its successors has really stymied efforts to counter China and the Belt & Road initiative. The big carrot the US can offer is an FTA with the worlds largest economy. But Biden’s Build Back Better World has explicitly kept trade deals off the table.
Yeah, it doesn’t really need to be blocked and it’s probably not useful to do so since it’s a source of ongoing financial problems for China. Ongoing financial problems that are going to wreck their balance sheet as the population continues to age.
Free trade was never actually popular. There was an elite consensus that created a cordon sanitaire around an idea that a large section of the population (a plurality?) supported, which is an unstable situation in a democracy.
Then said elites immediately set about committing an own goal by giving China most favored nation status and wto membership. Acts that, at the least, very much over promised and under delivered in terms of reciprocal trade and political and economic reform in China.
Yes. Just going on my unreliable memory, the NAFTA debate included serious discussion of whether US manufacturers could compete with all 80 million Mexicans. Fortunately the pro-NAFTA group carried the day, with Al Gore in favor debating Ross Perot.
Sadly, the China in free trade/ WTO debate did not achieve the same intensity and focus. As many economists have noted, US manufacturers really struggled trying to compete with a billion Chinese. Ooops.
But most of the struggle would have been there w/o MFN. The important drivers were the fiscal deficit, CHINA's opening its economy and the container ship.
I don't want to say it's simple but I think it comes down to diffuse benefits and concentrated losers from the deal. The failure has been to find productive ways to pivot the latter. Instead grievances, real and imagined, have been allowed to boil over.
The sense I get is that America's relatively hole-ridden safety net is a big contributor to this. Protectionism qua protectionism seems a less potent force in other rich countries. I wonder if any political scientists have made a study of this.
I don't think it's really a question of the traditional welfare state. What we actually need is to do a better job a facilitating career changes. At the same time that global trade accelerated industry disruptions we've also had a bunch of stuff that makes it really hard to ditch locations/industries for greener prospects. Nimbyism/credentialism/DEI/regulatory capture/labor protectionism/etc etc, all make it much harder than it should be to go to where the work is.
Given your libertarian lean, do you think that defeating all the things in your list delineated by slashes would sufficiently facilitate the needed career changes?
It's hard to say how much of the problem would go away, but it would certainly be far more reasonable to administer a more value agnostic transfer/UBI-ish safety net system covering the remainder in the absence of the huge overhead imposed by our wildly overcomplicated regulatory/tax environment.
Sounds good to me. Government job training tends to cross some libertarian lines, and I know you think things through more than the doctrinaire libertarian does.
Credentialism needs to be unwound very slowly or it would destroy a lot of lives. How many people with families and house payments would suddenly find themselves several steps down on the marginal tax rate ladder?
Brexit is a pretty big data point against this theory unfortunately. Britain's safety net is not a strong as other countries in Europe but it is definitely stronger than ours. And the people who benefit most from the strong social safety net (pensioners) were the people most in support.
By the way, similar dynamics here. A huge part of the anti-immigrant/anti-free trade animus in this country comes from retirees or the very group of people who actually do benefit from something approaching a continental Europe welfare state.
Well, sure, unemployed people in most countries aren't "well off." There's plenty of right wing populism in many countries, but I think it's driven mostly by immigration and ethnic change. Americans seems particularly susceptible, though, to the siren call of protectionism. The Nordics run some of the most open economies in the world. Or, consider the example of the Trans Pacific Partnership: Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Mexico all managed to summon the political will to join. The US didn't because buying from foreigners here is more controversial than elsewhere.
"Americans seems particularly susceptible, though, to the siren call of protectionism"
Relative to where we were, yes. Relative to most other countries, no. We continue to be more open than most of the EU and way more open than almost anyone else.
>We continue to be more open than most of the EU and way more open than almost anyone else.<
Not so. It's just the opposite. EU external trade is higher (percentage of GDP) than the corresponding figure for the US, and individual EU states, of course, engage in much more trade than America does. Also, your "anyone else" seems questionable, as any number of countries outside Europe (Australia, Canada, South Korea etc) are more engaged in trade than the US is. Indeed, these last three all joined the TPP. Heck, look at the hue and cry over the US Steel sale to Japan: A) the firm is no longer a remotely important American company, and B) Japan is a highly valuable ally that has an excellent track record of investing in the overseas assets it buys. This transaction shouldn't be remotely controversial, and yet one would think it wasn't Japan and US Steel, but China and Lockheed Martin. I'm not saying the situation is remorselessly negative: the US still does a huge volume of trade with foreign countries in absolute terms, and it still attracts giant investment flows. But once upon a time the United States was THE primary champion in advancing the cause of trade liberalization (I mean, kinda makes sense given the high productivity of American workers). Those days, sadly, are gone (at least for the present).
"Protectionism qua protectionism seems a less potent force in other rich countries. I wonder if any political scientists have made a study of this."
Europeans were masters of industrial policy and national champions. You could argue that the Euro is just a big industrial win for Germany now that the over subsidizing and spliffing are banned by the EU rules.
Plus the Germans get the best industrial policy of all, a currency union with much weaker economies that keeps their exports significantly cheaper on the global market, without the sordid business of deliberately weakening their own currency.
Thanks for the clarification (and like City of Trees I just learned something!) Sadly I'm totally failing in Googling what EU trade policies relate to spiffing bans or why such bans are a good idea -- can you expand on that?
I've read more than one account that these retraining programs just aren't very good at what they claim to do. It's compensating the 'losers' with something worthless.
I’ve been saying for years that we need these coal miners to jack into the matrix and learn kung fu so they can defeat our machine overlords and rescue humanity from the flesh battery fields!!
For reasons I don't understand there is incredible nostalgia for boring, monotonous jobs that were essentially putting knobs on widgets, and the people who did those jobs don't want anything else.
I have a son who has a job putting knobs on widgets (well, sorting lottery tickets and putting them in boxes to ship out). It is a LOT less stressful than what many other people with a high school diploma do - front-facing jobs with the public where people put a lot of demands on you, but you have little power (retail, food service, front-line government jobs).
My father in law worked on a bunch of them and just take was-they didn’t work at scale for training 50 year olds. They worked really well for training 20 years olds for new careers in relevant industries. So you have this big demographic hold-over issue.
While I think this makes intuitive sense, do you know what precisely didn't work about them? Is it too difficult for older people to learn new skills? More set in their ways? Something else?
The hard part about scaling job training for 50-year-olds is that other obligations have a tendency to get in the way.
Finding a time when a group of 20-year-olds can all get together to attend a job training session is easy, because they basically have nothing but free time. Now try doing that for a group of 50-year-olds and you'll quickly find that finding a time when *all of them* are available is difficult.
I can speculate on root cause, but as a proximate cause, at least according my FIL, they just didn't get very good enrollment numbers.
Maybe that is due to marketing and awareness, or maybe other obligations as Thomas mentions, or maybe interested, stubbornness and not wanting to restart a career back on the bottom-rung even if that is better than unemployment.
Also, if it works well for, say, people in their 20s and 30s, maybe that's good enough to offset the decreased demand for those jobs? Wouldn't work if an industry suddenly collapses, but maybe for industries that are moderately contracting
Also you have the problem of geographic specialization. A set of a companies, even those in the same industry, failing in a vibrant metropolis is very different than in a one-factory company town.
That was specifically about coal miners in West Virginia, not so much about free trade. (I think I read that it was actually a very well-thought-out proposal, btw.) But job retraining has also generally been something that centrist Dems have strongly supported and emphasized since her husband was President.
The best one-sentence summary I've ever read on this subject is from a nearly 25 year-old Reason Magazine article:
"[I]t often seems as though free traders are trapped in a public policy version of Groundhog Day, forced to refute the same fallacious arguments over and over again, decade after decade."
And Reason videos are only scraping the surface. Penn and Teller have been Cato fellows for a long time, and above them, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been favorable to a fair amount of common libertarian principles as part of their skewering of everybody that does dumb things.
When Trump was first elected, working class wages had been stagnant for a generation. At a minimum, free trade did not create enough benefits for the working class to offset the harms of other policies. It’s also possible that manufacturing workers in the only major economy left standing were a privileged class, whose rents gradually withered through free trade.
I for the most part agree. But I really do think the downsides to the 90s free trade consensus was way underexplored and underestimated in the late 90s and early 2000s. The "China shock" was a very real phenomenon and something clearly underestimated by economists. The idea that free trade would also lead more democracy and specifically more democracy in China has proven to be wildly incorrect as well.
Also, "learn to code" became a mocking joke for very good reason. The complete inability from our political system to confront the fact there are very real losers in a world of every increasing trade is a real failure.
So while yes I wish our world would turn back to embracing the benefits of free trade, I think we need to acknowledge the backlash is not entirely misplaced.
"Learn to code" became a mocking joke because it treated tech work as the only work of any real value, which is actually the opposite of the truth -- I'm not sure "code a bunch of games for people to play on their phone" produces any value.
yes, most people majoring in the humanities -- and *especially* people still majoring in the humanities after the STEMlords have been beating everybody over the head to go into STEM for two decades -- would not be good at STEM careers.
I can count on one hand the number of attorneys I know who are good at math.
I once worked for lawyers and many of them told me how they got into this profession due to their hatred toward math. It was fun telling one of them later how coding has a lot more in common with law than with professions with a ton of actual math in them.
Unfortunately, the commitment to global free trade wasn’t accompanied by any real effort to support communities who were built around industries that were devastated by international competition.
I think this is correct, but I'm not sure there is a model for the "real effort to support communities who were built around industries that were devastated" that works. But perhaps someone has more insight--were other countries, likely with more centralized governments (say, France or Japan), able to implement successful economic development models for former industrial towns? Or did any US states implement a successful model for this? (I know eventually we got to "eds & meds" in places like Pittsburgh...)
It's also worth asking how much of the economic problems caused by looser mergers & acquisitions regulations and anti-union policies caused middle/working class wage problems that were subsequently blamed on trade.
It's a little more complicated than that; I do think that there was a cost to inviting China into the freer trade orbit, which did hurt American manufacturing and hollowed out many American towns. America was better off in this scenario, but the transition was not painless.
Free trade makes the world richer. Additional wealth has diminishing marginal utility. America today is the wealthiest society that has ever existed; it is not surprising to me that there’s now less support for free trade.
Would you give up X for a little more economic growth? Every year that becomes a worse deal, for every X.
You aren't wrong about the economic bounty produced by free trade, but we made a pretty obviously bad application of it, induced mostly by campaign contributions, when we extended it to a billion person totalitarian Communist dictatorship in China without demanding that they moderate as a condition.
And I suspect that's the original sin here. People hate not only that the factories closed, but that the jobs were shipped to one of the worst regimes on the planet, and help make that country into a superpower and a very pernicious one.
The problem is you can't turn back the clock and re-run the 1990's with Bill Clinton not whoring his policy out for campaign contributions this time. What's done is done so outside of keeping some crucial supply lines and sectors within our control, we might as well just capture the benefits of free trade.
The China policy is fairly subject to criticism, but in my observation, the popular understanding of free trade among regular people who hate free trade is *much* more focused on Mexico than China.
There is certainly plenty of concern about Mexico. But I do think the China stuff carries a different level of vehemence, and it goes back to what I am calling the original sin. To be clear, it wasn't simply that we obviously sold out our China policy to campaign contributors, but that our elites so blatantly lied about it. They knew exactly what the Communists were trying to do but made transparently false claims about how trade would lead to the liberalizing of Chinese society.
So shipping the jobs + to Communist dictatorship + in response to campaign contributions/corruption + lying about how this would lead to reform in China + ultimately empowering China as geopolitical competitor makes the China issue far more toxic than Mexico. Indeed, Trump concluded a replacement deal for NAFTA with Mexico and nobody complained.
I think this is too uncharitable to Clinton-era thinking. The elites didn't lie about it -- they really believed economic liberalization and integration would lead to political liberalization. Being wrong doesn't mean they lied*.
*This applies to Bush-era thinking around Iraq also.
But if they really truly did believe that allowing all those businesses to come into China would somehow disempower the Communists, when the entire time China was carefully managing its trade so this wouldn't happen AND had engaged in brutal suppression of dissent already, then the Clinton people are some of the dumbest people to have ever served in government. This was not hidden or non-obvious.
Protests and uprisings really did happen all across China, culminating in the situation at Tiananmen Square. The belief that there was going to be a loosening of political repression wasn't crazy -- hundreds of thousands of Chinese people believed it too.
We didn't manage the distributional challenges. So voters who benefit, but not as much, want to kill free trade because they think it'll solve their problems.
That won't solve their problems, as we can see in brexit. But they'll still vote for it. Cool stuff.
I actually see Trump (and the new GOP) anti-market positions push a lot of the left into a new appreciation of the free market. If it sticks, I think it will be Trump's single greatest accomplishment.
I am as anti-Trump as they come but I would say Trump's biggest accomplishment was bringing to the forefront, the conversation about how big a problem China has become.
Operation warp speed was pretty incredible. His base didn’t appreciate it but it was probably the most amazing thing the government has done since the moon landing
Doesn’t that raise a question? If it’s so self evident and so successful why has the consensus been abandoned by *both* sides ? There is more to the story.
>All they see is Miller talking about how amazing it will be for South Carolina to tumble backward to a more primitive state of development.<
What the MAGA faithful really see is a return to an era when a high school education got you a decent factory job with which you could support a family and buy a house (They don't know the houses were small, drafty in winter and sweltering in summer—mostly because they weren't alive back then). I think they also tend to believe turning back the clock on the economy will somehow go hand in hand with restoring 1954's social conditions and cultural practices.
The reason people want to bring back steel manufacturing and coal mining is because they’re manly. Today’s paths to a good career are not manly, like being a nurse, and to some extent even studying and behaving well in school. I don’t have any evidence for these assertions, and don’t believe them myself, but it seems to explain Trump’s industrial policy pretty well.
I can’t find data on 1954 specifically. However, some Pew surveys include a question on whether life today is better or worse than 50 years ago.
Pew reports on these surveys haven’t included respondent gender, but, they do allow access to their raw data for surveys more than 2 years old.
I downloaded the data for 2021 American Trends Panel Wave 92. Both men and women in that survey said that life in 2021 was worse than life 50 years ago. There was not a substantial difference between rates of men and women finding 2021 worse than the past.
One of the greatest tragedies of my lifetime has been watching as the idea of free trade, which has built the immense wealth we enjoy today in the west, come to be rejected by both major parties. What makes it even more painful, is that we literally won the fight! Clinton, Blair et al conceded free trade was good! Everyone was onboard! And yet a mere 30 years later and both parties have traded away free trade so we can’t they about the literal dumbest culture war BS.
RIP TPP
Something that was so frustrating was seeing Hillary cynically oppose the TPP because she felt pressure from Bernie also opposing it. Unlike Bernie and Trump, she was smart enough to know better, but was too much of a political coward to stand up for what she actually believed.
I tend to think that *if* free trade was really that important and *if* it was necessary for Clinton to abandon TPP in order to defeat Sanders without taking excessive damage that would hurt her in the general election, then it would actually have been wrong and a betrayal of free trade for Clinton *not* to abandon TPP. But the ifs are debatable as a factual matter.
At the time, I remember the TPP being unpopular and that's what forced Hilary to abandon her line calling it the "gold standard' of trade agreements.
But I just found some polling here that shows it as relatively popular, not nearly as much as in some of the countries that were in the agreement, but a margin that is fairly decisive for US politics: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/06/23/americans-favor-tpp-but-less-than-other-countries-do/
The thing that I legitimately wish that mainstream Democratic politicians would figure out is that the sort of people they think they need to appease are either not actually gettable voters -- they're always going to move the goalposts and end up staying home or voting Green -- or they're just going to cope and seethe and vote Dem no matter what they do.
Basically there's nothing to be gained by meeting their demands. The people who legitimately care about Gaza are either super-dialed-in partisans or they're the kind of people who wrote in Harambe, with no in between.
I'd say most Democrats still thought TPP was a good idea, just like most Democrats are still on balance pro-Israel (maybe not pro-this Israeli government but definitely not viewing Israel as a "settler colony" that needs to be wiped off the map), but Democratic politicians can't stop bending over backwards to accommodate a cranky minority of the party. To some degree we voted for Biden and got Warren anyway and it's annoying.
The Republicans have the same problem.
Arguably a much worse problem. On paper most elected Republicans want more border restrictions and funding for Ukraine, but they're refusing the half-loaf given to them by Democrats.
Notably, the death of the TPP and Biden’s unwillingness to commit to any of its successors has really stymied efforts to counter China and the Belt & Road initiative. The big carrot the US can offer is an FTA with the worlds largest economy. But Biden’s Build Back Better World has explicitly kept trade deals off the table.
Then again, China's Belt & Road Initiative has basically imploded on itself.
Yeah, it doesn’t really need to be blocked and it’s probably not useful to do so since it’s a source of ongoing financial problems for China. Ongoing financial problems that are going to wreck their balance sheet as the population continues to age.
TPP is why I will never get over the Bernie movement. They forced Hillary Clinton into abandoning it as a policy goal.
Free trade was never actually popular. There was an elite consensus that created a cordon sanitaire around an idea that a large section of the population (a plurality?) supported, which is an unstable situation in a democracy.
Then said elites immediately set about committing an own goal by giving China most favored nation status and wto membership. Acts that, at the least, very much over promised and under delivered in terms of reciprocal trade and political and economic reform in China.
Yes. Just going on my unreliable memory, the NAFTA debate included serious discussion of whether US manufacturers could compete with all 80 million Mexicans. Fortunately the pro-NAFTA group carried the day, with Al Gore in favor debating Ross Perot.
Sadly, the China in free trade/ WTO debate did not achieve the same intensity and focus. As many economists have noted, US manufacturers really struggled trying to compete with a billion Chinese. Ooops.
https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/gtdw_e/wkshop13_e/peter_schott_e.pdf
A big difference between the two is that Mexico is an honest-ish country and China... isn't.
But most of the struggle would have been there w/o MFN. The important drivers were the fiscal deficit, CHINA's opening its economy and the container ship.
Yup, that was definitely the other option on the table...
I don't want to say it's simple but I think it comes down to diffuse benefits and concentrated losers from the deal. The failure has been to find productive ways to pivot the latter. Instead grievances, real and imagined, have been allowed to boil over.
The sense I get is that America's relatively hole-ridden safety net is a big contributor to this. Protectionism qua protectionism seems a less potent force in other rich countries. I wonder if any political scientists have made a study of this.
I don't think it's really a question of the traditional welfare state. What we actually need is to do a better job a facilitating career changes. At the same time that global trade accelerated industry disruptions we've also had a bunch of stuff that makes it really hard to ditch locations/industries for greener prospects. Nimbyism/credentialism/DEI/regulatory capture/labor protectionism/etc etc, all make it much harder than it should be to go to where the work is.
Given your libertarian lean, do you think that defeating all the things in your list delineated by slashes would sufficiently facilitate the needed career changes?
It's hard to say how much of the problem would go away, but it would certainly be far more reasonable to administer a more value agnostic transfer/UBI-ish safety net system covering the remainder in the absence of the huge overhead imposed by our wildly overcomplicated regulatory/tax environment.
Sounds good to me. Government job training tends to cross some libertarian lines, and I know you think things through more than the doctrinaire libertarian does.
Credentialism needs to be unwound very slowly or it would destroy a lot of lives. How many people with families and house payments would suddenly find themselves several steps down on the marginal tax rate ladder?
Brexit is a pretty big data point against this theory unfortunately. Britain's safety net is not a strong as other countries in Europe but it is definitely stronger than ours. And the people who benefit most from the strong social safety net (pensioners) were the people most in support.
By the way, similar dynamics here. A huge part of the anti-immigrant/anti-free trade animus in this country comes from retirees or the very group of people who actually do benefit from something approaching a continental Europe welfare state.
I don't think that's true. Immigration, not exposure to imports, was what drove Brexit.
The French welfare state does not make unemployed workers particularly well off, nor do any of the Nordic models.
Well, sure, unemployed people in most countries aren't "well off." There's plenty of right wing populism in many countries, but I think it's driven mostly by immigration and ethnic change. Americans seems particularly susceptible, though, to the siren call of protectionism. The Nordics run some of the most open economies in the world. Or, consider the example of the Trans Pacific Partnership: Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Mexico all managed to summon the political will to join. The US didn't because buying from foreigners here is more controversial than elsewhere.
"Americans seems particularly susceptible, though, to the siren call of protectionism"
Relative to where we were, yes. Relative to most other countries, no. We continue to be more open than most of the EU and way more open than almost anyone else.
>We continue to be more open than most of the EU and way more open than almost anyone else.<
Not so. It's just the opposite. EU external trade is higher (percentage of GDP) than the corresponding figure for the US, and individual EU states, of course, engage in much more trade than America does. Also, your "anyone else" seems questionable, as any number of countries outside Europe (Australia, Canada, South Korea etc) are more engaged in trade than the US is. Indeed, these last three all joined the TPP. Heck, look at the hue and cry over the US Steel sale to Japan: A) the firm is no longer a remotely important American company, and B) Japan is a highly valuable ally that has an excellent track record of investing in the overseas assets it buys. This transaction shouldn't be remotely controversial, and yet one would think it wasn't Japan and US Steel, but China and Lockheed Martin. I'm not saying the situation is remorselessly negative: the US still does a huge volume of trade with foreign countries in absolute terms, and it still attracts giant investment flows. But once upon a time the United States was THE primary champion in advancing the cause of trade liberalization (I mean, kinda makes sense given the high productivity of American workers). Those days, sadly, are gone (at least for the present).
"Protectionism qua protectionism seems a less potent force in other rich countries. I wonder if any political scientists have made a study of this."
Europeans were masters of industrial policy and national champions. You could argue that the Euro is just a big industrial win for Germany now that the over subsidizing and spliffing are banned by the EU rules.
Plus the Germans get the best industrial policy of all, a currency union with much weaker economies that keeps their exports significantly cheaper on the global market, without the sordid business of deliberately weakening their own currency.
Spliffing? The smoking of cigarettes comprising both marijuana and tobacco?
Whoops, I guess it’s a spiff, not a spliff.
Thanks for the clarification (and like City of Trees I just learned something!) Sadly I'm totally failing in Googling what EU trade policies relate to spiffing bans or why such bans are a good idea -- can you expand on that?
I thought you just typoed splitting, so today I learn a new word. (Not spliff, of course, I learned that one in college, like many others.)
Didn't Hillary Clinton have some kind of skills training for people whose jobs got outsourced? People didn't want to hear it, though
I've read more than one account that these retraining programs just aren't very good at what they claim to do. It's compensating the 'losers' with something worthless.
I’ve been saying for years that we need these coal miners to jack into the matrix and learn kung fu so they can defeat our machine overlords and rescue humanity from the flesh battery fields!!
For reasons I don't understand there is incredible nostalgia for boring, monotonous jobs that were essentially putting knobs on widgets, and the people who did those jobs don't want anything else.
I have a son who has a job putting knobs on widgets (well, sorting lottery tickets and putting them in boxes to ship out). It is a LOT less stressful than what many other people with a high school diploma do - front-facing jobs with the public where people put a lot of demands on you, but you have little power (retail, food service, front-line government jobs).
She did, but the sound bite was "coal is going away and people will lose their jobs" without including the part about mitigation.
Wouldn't surprise me if the programs didn't work as well as theorized, but I'm skeptical that they're actually "worthless"
My father in law worked on a bunch of them and just take was-they didn’t work at scale for training 50 year olds. They worked really well for training 20 years olds for new careers in relevant industries. So you have this big demographic hold-over issue.
While I think this makes intuitive sense, do you know what precisely didn't work about them? Is it too difficult for older people to learn new skills? More set in their ways? Something else?
The hard part about scaling job training for 50-year-olds is that other obligations have a tendency to get in the way.
Finding a time when a group of 20-year-olds can all get together to attend a job training session is easy, because they basically have nothing but free time. Now try doing that for a group of 50-year-olds and you'll quickly find that finding a time when *all of them* are available is difficult.
I can speculate on root cause, but as a proximate cause, at least according my FIL, they just didn't get very good enrollment numbers.
Maybe that is due to marketing and awareness, or maybe other obligations as Thomas mentions, or maybe interested, stubbornness and not wanting to restart a career back on the bottom-rung even if that is better than unemployment.
Also, if it works well for, say, people in their 20s and 30s, maybe that's good enough to offset the decreased demand for those jobs? Wouldn't work if an industry suddenly collapses, but maybe for industries that are moderately contracting
Also you have the problem of geographic specialization. A set of a companies, even those in the same industry, failing in a vibrant metropolis is very different than in a one-factory company town.
That was specifically about coal miners in West Virginia, not so much about free trade. (I think I read that it was actually a very well-thought-out proposal, btw.) But job retraining has also generally been something that centrist Dems have strongly supported and emphasized since her husband was President.
The best one-sentence summary I've ever read on this subject is from a nearly 25 year-old Reason Magazine article:
"[I]t often seems as though free traders are trapped in a public policy version of Groundhog Day, forced to refute the same fallacious arguments over and over again, decade after decade."
https://reason.com/2003/10/30/lous-blues-2/
Funny! This was my first thought: https://youtu.be/rw7PUrgU3N0?si=Ez90IN38-xQy_FA2
He also makes fun songs for Magic: The Gathering which I've inflicted on my husband who doesn't play.
I was wondering if that was the same guy. Weird crossover.
Ha ha! 😀 I had somehow missed that one.
Libertarians really punch well when it comes to comedy.
Indeed. "Desperate Mayors Compete for Amazon HQ2" is possibly the most brutal piece of satiric comedy since Jonathan Swift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_eG7leM6ew
And Reason videos are only scraping the surface. Penn and Teller have been Cato fellows for a long time, and above them, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been favorable to a fair amount of common libertarian principles as part of their skewering of everybody that does dumb things.
When Trump was first elected, working class wages had been stagnant for a generation. At a minimum, free trade did not create enough benefits for the working class to offset the harms of other policies. It’s also possible that manufacturing workers in the only major economy left standing were a privileged class, whose rents gradually withered through free trade.
I for the most part agree. But I really do think the downsides to the 90s free trade consensus was way underexplored and underestimated in the late 90s and early 2000s. The "China shock" was a very real phenomenon and something clearly underestimated by economists. The idea that free trade would also lead more democracy and specifically more democracy in China has proven to be wildly incorrect as well.
Also, "learn to code" became a mocking joke for very good reason. The complete inability from our political system to confront the fact there are very real losers in a world of every increasing trade is a real failure.
So while yes I wish our world would turn back to embracing the benefits of free trade, I think we need to acknowledge the backlash is not entirely misplaced.
"Learn to code" became a mocking joke because it treated tech work as the only work of any real value, which is actually the opposite of the truth -- I'm not sure "code a bunch of games for people to play on their phone" produces any value.
Also, as a coder, I have high confidence that the people who used this phrase mockingly would be woeful coders themselves.
I mean, sure, but doesn't that only reinforce their point that it's kind of vapid advice as a catchphrase?
yes, most people majoring in the humanities -- and *especially* people still majoring in the humanities after the STEMlords have been beating everybody over the head to go into STEM for two decades -- would not be good at STEM careers.
I can count on one hand the number of attorneys I know who are good at math.
I once worked for lawyers and many of them told me how they got into this profession due to their hatred toward math. It was fun telling one of them later how coding has a lot more in common with law than with professions with a ton of actual math in them.
Unfortunately, the commitment to global free trade wasn’t accompanied by any real effort to support communities who were built around industries that were devastated by international competition.
I think this is correct, but I'm not sure there is a model for the "real effort to support communities who were built around industries that were devastated" that works. But perhaps someone has more insight--were other countries, likely with more centralized governments (say, France or Japan), able to implement successful economic development models for former industrial towns? Or did any US states implement a successful model for this? (I know eventually we got to "eds & meds" in places like Pittsburgh...)
It's also worth asking how much of the economic problems caused by looser mergers & acquisitions regulations and anti-union policies caused middle/working class wage problems that were subsequently blamed on trade.
It's a little more complicated than that; I do think that there was a cost to inviting China into the freer trade orbit, which did hurt American manufacturing and hollowed out many American towns. America was better off in this scenario, but the transition was not painless.
Free trade makes the world richer. Additional wealth has diminishing marginal utility. America today is the wealthiest society that has ever existed; it is not surprising to me that there’s now less support for free trade.
Would you give up X for a little more economic growth? Every year that becomes a worse deal, for every X.
You aren't wrong about the economic bounty produced by free trade, but we made a pretty obviously bad application of it, induced mostly by campaign contributions, when we extended it to a billion person totalitarian Communist dictatorship in China without demanding that they moderate as a condition.
And I suspect that's the original sin here. People hate not only that the factories closed, but that the jobs were shipped to one of the worst regimes on the planet, and help make that country into a superpower and a very pernicious one.
The problem is you can't turn back the clock and re-run the 1990's with Bill Clinton not whoring his policy out for campaign contributions this time. What's done is done so outside of keeping some crucial supply lines and sectors within our control, we might as well just capture the benefits of free trade.
The China policy is fairly subject to criticism, but in my observation, the popular understanding of free trade among regular people who hate free trade is *much* more focused on Mexico than China.
There is certainly plenty of concern about Mexico. But I do think the China stuff carries a different level of vehemence, and it goes back to what I am calling the original sin. To be clear, it wasn't simply that we obviously sold out our China policy to campaign contributors, but that our elites so blatantly lied about it. They knew exactly what the Communists were trying to do but made transparently false claims about how trade would lead to the liberalizing of Chinese society.
So shipping the jobs + to Communist dictatorship + in response to campaign contributions/corruption + lying about how this would lead to reform in China + ultimately empowering China as geopolitical competitor makes the China issue far more toxic than Mexico. Indeed, Trump concluded a replacement deal for NAFTA with Mexico and nobody complained.
I think this is too uncharitable to Clinton-era thinking. The elites didn't lie about it -- they really believed economic liberalization and integration would lead to political liberalization. Being wrong doesn't mean they lied*.
*This applies to Bush-era thinking around Iraq also.
I choose to believe they were not that stupid.
But if they really truly did believe that allowing all those businesses to come into China would somehow disempower the Communists, when the entire time China was carefully managing its trade so this wouldn't happen AND had engaged in brutal suppression of dissent already, then the Clinton people are some of the dumbest people to have ever served in government. This was not hidden or non-obvious.
Protests and uprisings really did happen all across China, culminating in the situation at Tiananmen Square. The belief that there was going to be a loosening of political repression wasn't crazy -- hundreds of thousands of Chinese people believed it too.
We didn't manage the distributional challenges. So voters who benefit, but not as much, want to kill free trade because they think it'll solve their problems.
That won't solve their problems, as we can see in brexit. But they'll still vote for it. Cool stuff.
I actually see Trump (and the new GOP) anti-market positions push a lot of the left into a new appreciation of the free market. If it sticks, I think it will be Trump's single greatest accomplishment.
I am as anti-Trump as they come but I would say Trump's biggest accomplishment was bringing to the forefront, the conversation about how big a problem China has become.
He just immediately took it to a really stupid place.
Operation warp speed was pretty incredible. His base didn’t appreciate it but it was probably the most amazing thing the government has done since the moon landing
If free trade was the magic elixir of "the west," how do you explain the situation in South America?
A combination of Peronism, overregulation and autocracy explains a lot of Latin America’s lacklustre performance.
Also unstable governments.
Doesn’t that raise a question? If it’s so self evident and so successful why has the consensus been abandoned by *both* sides ? There is more to the story.
>All they see is Miller talking about how amazing it will be for South Carolina to tumble backward to a more primitive state of development.<
What the MAGA faithful really see is a return to an era when a high school education got you a decent factory job with which you could support a family and buy a house (They don't know the houses were small, drafty in winter and sweltering in summer—mostly because they weren't alive back then). I think they also tend to believe turning back the clock on the economy will somehow go hand in hand with restoring 1954's social conditions and cultural practices.
> 1954’s cultural practices
The reason people want to bring back steel manufacturing and coal mining is because they’re manly. Today’s paths to a good career are not manly, like being a nurse, and to some extent even studying and behaving well in school. I don’t have any evidence for these assertions, and don’t believe them myself, but it seems to explain Trump’s industrial policy pretty well.
Good point. I'd love to see a crosstabs by gender on nostalgia for the world of 1954. I bet men are far more nostalgic than women.
I can’t find data on 1954 specifically. However, some Pew surveys include a question on whether life today is better or worse than 50 years ago.
Pew reports on these surveys haven’t included respondent gender, but, they do allow access to their raw data for surveys more than 2 years old.
I downloaded the data for 2021 American Trends Panel Wave 92. Both men and women in that survey said that life in 2021 was worse than life 50 years ago. There was not a substantial difference between rates of men and women finding 2021 worse than the past.