AHC: Keep the northeast and midwest Industrialized.

First off, you need to limit the expected pay and lower the standard of living in the USA to lower the cost of the labor.

Second, transportation costs for goods from overseas must be held high, so to inhibit the dislocation of the production there. As long as there is money to be made - and there will be as long as the marginal costs of an additional unit of labor in US exceeds the marginal cost of the additional unit of transport from China to the USA added to the marginal cost of producing the goods in China - the production that benefits from this will move. I expect, eventually, that as Chinese standards of living increase, production will move elsewhere. Probably India or South America.

Eventually, when income equalizes in all the countries, and no benefits could be accrued by moving the production, we will see it return to the USA.
 
Isn't it possible to achieve the goal by taking the opposite of the usual approach? Couple reduced production cost, by higher productivity, with raising the standards of living in Asia & Africa, creating a market for goods?

Or, failing that, changing what's being manufactured? Or diversifying it? I'm thinking of wind turbines & such. Can't that kind of "leapfrog" tech be sold to countries like India or South Africa, or even Afghanistan or Burma, & create a basis for inudstry in the U.S.?
 
Isn't it possible to achieve the goal by taking the opposite of the usual approach? Couple reduced production cost, by higher productivity, with raising the standards of living in Asia & Africa, creating a market for goods?

Or, failing that, changing what's being manufactured? Or diversifying it? I'm thinking of wind turbines & such. Can't that kind of "leapfrog" tech be sold to countries like India or South Africa, or even Afghanistan or Burma, & create a basis for inudstry in the U.S.?

We're doing that. Our annual exports amount to about 13% of our GDP. (I tried to find a figure for % of manufactured goods that are exported, and I came up with 75% to 50% of them, but I think that may include mined raw materials as well as manufactured goods.) We could probably do more of it, but that would require massive government intervention and spending - something on the order of 10% to 15% of GDP, representing a fairly large jump in the government component of the US economy.

Fundamentally, I think trying to bring back - or avoid losing - the manufacturing jobs is probably not a winning proposition in the long run. We're victims of our own success. Productivity is only going to keep increasing, so the amount you'd have to spend to keep people employed is only going to go up and up, and at some point it just stops making sense. Also, at some point you run into resource constraints.

We would be better off trying to better manage the transition to an economy where very few people work in manufacturing. If we're going to be spending 10% - 15% of GDP on reviving manufacturing, we could equally well spend that money to create other, better kinds of jobs. We could spend it on R&D, or building a moon base, or subsidizing webcomics artists; all of these create good-quality jobs that are probably more fun than hanging out on a factory floor. The future is a world where a few hundred thousand people manage a productive apparatus supporting a few hundred million, and we should be trying to find a model that can keep people gainfully employed - or happily unemployed - under those circumstances, rather than trying to keep the old kinds of jobs around.
 
We would be better off trying to better manage the transition to an economy where very few people work in manufacturing. If we're going to be spending 10% - 15% of GDP on reviving manufacturing, we could equally well spend that money to create other, better kinds of jobs. We could spend it on R&D, or building a moon base, or subsidizing webcomics artists; all of these create good-quality jobs that are probably more fun than hanging out on a factory floor. The future is a world where a few hundred thousand people manage a productive apparatus supporting a few hundred million, and we should be trying to find a model that can keep people gainfully employed - or happily unemployed - under those circumstances, rather than trying to keep the old kinds of jobs around.

The problems you raised about resources available make this not a particularly good idea, for a variety of reasons. A few hundred thousand people managing (and thus controlling) an apparatus that supports hundreds of millions in socially inherently dangerous, particularly in countries like the United States, Japan and Russia where these people have huge incomes and use that money to massively influence the governmental policies of their countries. Such a system would invariably fail to make anything like a middle class for most people in many places, as the massive power those on top of the system have would invariably make for them influencing it for their own benefit.

The better answer IMO is to make manufacturing jobs easier and massively improve resource recycling to allow nearly any good at the end of its useful life to be recycled for use in a new product. This can be done with virtually any paper product, most metals and plastics and many composites, and one could easily also focus considerably on the development of biofuels and organic fertilizers and the like to allow our natural resources to remain and be usable for following generations. Most machines of the present are computer controlled already, so what's stopping them from being controlled by sit-down workstations and being in cleaner environments than the plants of today? It's also true that long processes controlled by one man produce less quality products than the same process with several skilled people working on it, simply because the skilled people would be able to spot material defects or manufacturing errors before they are finished products, thus also reducing manufacturing waste. You are correct in that we should be shooting for such a system, but you cannot do it with the idea of a small class of managers with a thousand people under each of them. Human greed will wreck that idea very quickly, as it will turn into haves and have nots, and huge imbalance between those people almost always runs into huge societal problems.

phx1138's idea of raising Africa and Asia up is possible as well, and while this will not automatically lead to major benefits for the United States, the idea of a rising tide lifting all of the boats is in this case quite accurate.
 
The problems you raised about resources available make this not a particularly good idea, for a variety of reasons. A few hundred thousand people managing (and thus controlling) an apparatus that supports hundreds of millions in socially inherently dangerous, particularly in countries like the United States, Japan and Russia where these people have huge incomes and use that money to massively influence the governmental policies of their countries. Such a system would invariably fail to make anything like a middle class for most people in many places, as the massive power those on top of the system have would invariably make for them influencing it for their own benefit.

Although this is a valid point, I fail to see how it's significantly different from the system as it exists today. Who controls the manufacturing system and who operates it are generally two different classes of people; the situation I'm forecasting involves changes in the operators but not necessarily the controllers.

The better answer IMO is to make manufacturing jobs easier and massively improve resource recycling to allow nearly any good at the end of its useful life to be recycled for use in a new product. This can be done with virtually any paper product, most metals and plastics and many composites, and one could easily also focus considerably on the development of biofuels and organic fertilizers and the like to allow our natural resources to remain and be usable for following generations. Most machines of the present are computer controlled already, so what's stopping them from being controlled by sit-down workstations and being in cleaner environments than the plants of today? It's also true that long processes controlled by one man produce less quality products than the same process with several skilled people working on it, simply because the skilled people would be able to spot material defects or manufacturing errors before they are finished products, thus also reducing manufacturing waste. You are correct in that we should be shooting for such a system, but you cannot do it with the idea of a small class of managers with a thousand people under each of them. Human greed will wreck that idea very quickly, as it will turn into haves and have nots, and huge imbalance between those people almost always runs into huge societal problems.

While better resource efficiency is (almost) always a good thing, I don't see how this helps with the problem of technological unemployment. The idea of producing higher-quality goods rather than more goods is a very interesting one, but I'm not sure how that would translate into practice, especially given the nature of capitalist competition. And, unless the quality of goods can continue rising indefinitely, it only postpones the ultimate transition, it doesn't prevent it.
 
While better resource efficiency is (almost) always a good thing, I don't see how this helps with the problem of technological unemployment. The idea of producing higher-quality goods rather than more goods is a very interesting one, but I'm not sure how that would translate into practice, especially given the nature of capitalist competition. And, unless the quality of goods can continue rising indefinitely, it only postpones the ultimate transition, it doesn't prevent it.

What greater resource recycling allows is for the problems of resource exploitation to be much less produced, which when combined with intelligent development of economies and the system of resource production and usage to allow the Earth's natural environment to be able to support the population of the planet once it levels off in the late 21st Century, you can make such a development possible until at least when we are able to gather resources from other planets - Mars, for example, is red from the Iron(III) oxide in its crust, and Iron oxide is also what is used to make steel, for example.
 
Excellent points Asnys, phx and theMann!

I think IF American manufacturing considered the world market and marketing to suit their tastes and needs rather than hoping they come to us with orders, we'd have butterflied a lot of the breakdowns of the 80's.
I also think that if American companies got as serious about partnership with labor (basically adopting Deming's ideas re: quality and worker involvement in improving quality, kaizen, etc) in the 1960's, you'd see much better ROIs and adjustments to processes that'd yield massive savings, less waste, etc.

Asnys, you mention energy costs, but until the 1970's, nobody really paid much attention to that until the oil crises. I think we both agree more nukes would've been a better idea, especially MSR thorium-cycles would've been lovely. Thank you AEC for hosing that up!
OTEC and SSPS are all three-to-four-step techs that need MASSIVE investments in R&D to get viable techs that scale to needs, infrastructure to get and keep the installations in place,
and maintain said networks. If we had, US carbon footprint'd be a tenth of what it is now or less from power generation. Manufacturing would've seen a massive boost in employment getting all that set up and keeping the infrastructure going.

There were plenty of off-the-shelf solutions to improve energy efficiency and waste less inputs to drastically improve ROIs, product quality and productivity. Trouble with that was management pocketed the profits and left the workers hanging.

I feel Taft-Hartley should have been a statement of labor rights irrespective of closed vs open shops. I've been a union man here and there so I've seen both sides of the issues as a laborer.
Unions have their place as a lobby for worker rights and interests, but have fought the perception of being unwanted interlopers in corporate affairs and unnecessarily restrictive of workers abilities to do common-sense things.

Excellent points StevenAttwell re: Judith Stein's observations. I haven't read those books, but should get around to them. Fiscal policy and investment strategies shifted profoundly in the 1970's.
In addition, toward the 1990's there was a both a big push toward free trade and toward big-casino wins in IT and Big Pharma that sucked media attention and thus VC $$$ as the Next Big Things- making the 2K bubble much yeastier and more fragile.
Butterflying the casino culture of venture capital that contributed to a lot of market instability would have saved a lot of heartaches the last fifteen years.
 
Asnys said:
We're doing that. Our annual exports amount to about 13% of our GDP.
If you mean diversifying, I don't doubt it. I'm thinking you aim for lower-tech output, things like, IDK, hand pumps or hand-crank radios.
Asnys said:
We could probably do more of it, but that would require massive government intervention and spending
That I'm not seeing the need for.

Also, when I say "raise the standard of living", I don't mean by more foreign aid, I mean by less interfering with foreign countries. What you've got now is, the U.S. taking all kinds of protective measures against foreign exports to the U.S. This is making it impossible to raise standards of living. At the same time, NGOs are screwing around & putting an artificial cap on the death rate--& you get the world's biggest cluserf*ck.:eek::eek:
Asnys said:
We would be better off trying to better manage the transition to an economy where very few people work in manufacturing. If we're going to be spending 10% - 15% of GDP on reviving manufacturing, we could equally well spend that money to create other, better kinds of jobs. We could spend it on R&D, or building a moon base, or subsidizing webcomics artists; all of these create good-quality jobs that are probably more fun than hanging out on a factory floor.
I agree with this, actually. The U.S. is in the same position the Brits were in about half a century ago. Britain was world's leader in manufacturing a long time, only to be eclipsed by the U.S. What did the Brits do? They moved into insurance & banking. The U.S. needs to do much the same, plus into higher-tech manufacturing, like computers. Most profitable for the U.S. is going to be intellectual property: video games, phone apps, movies, & music.
Asnys said:
While better resource efficiency is (almost) always a good thing, I don't see how this helps with the problem of technological unemployment.
It does at least one way I can think of: it changes how long it takes for unemployment in manufacturing to catch up with low demand.
Asnys said:
And, unless the quality of goods can continue rising indefinitely, it only postpones the ultimate transition, it doesn't prevent it.
I don't see a reason quality can't continue to rise indefinitely.
TheMann said:
The problems you raised about resources available make this not a particularly good idea, for a variety of reasons. A few hundred thousand people managing (and thus controlling) an apparatus that supports hundreds of millions in socially inherently dangerous, particularly in countries like the United States, Japan and Russia where these people have huge incomes and use that money to massively influence the governmental policies of their countries. Such a system would invariably fail to make anything like a middle class for most people in many places, as the massive power those on top of the system have would invariably make for them influencing it for their own benefit.

...Human greed will wreck that idea very quickly, as it will turn into haves and have nots, and huge imbalance between those people almost always runs into huge societal problems.
I agree with this, & it paints a very troubling picture.:eek: Income inequality is poisonous. What you're already seeing in the U.S. is increasing middle class debt ("keeping up with the Joneses" means everybody wants bigger houses...). It also means more urban sprawl (lower taxes on bigger houses in 'burbs), which means more pollution (longer commutes) & more time wasted in long commutes (from 'burbs farther out...). It also means more crime....

And that's not counting what you could get when the top 0.1% own Congress. Like now.:mad:
TheMann said:
phx1138's idea of raising Africa and Asia up is possible as well, and while this will not automatically lead to major benefits for the United States, the idea of a rising tide lifting all of the boats is in this case quite accurate.
I think it does, for the reason that's been the historical experience. It happened in Britain, as manufacturing moved overseas. Britain got wealthier. So did the U.S. So did Japan after WW2, then South Korea. China is moving that way. India & Africa can, too, if you just get out of the way. It's not a zero-sum game.
 
If you mean diversifying, I don't doubt it. I'm thinking you aim for lower-tech output, things like, IDK, hand pumps or hand-crank radios.

I don't think America could make goods like those, but I think with modern technology most industries are within reach of American manufacturers. The obvious high-value ones (automobiles and auto parts, aircraft and their components, machinery, consumer electronics, shipbuilding and the like) are easier for a high-wage nation to have. It's also possible to do so with industries which have higher overheads and have higher raw materials costs (steel, metals, chemicals, refined fuels) if the industries are efficient. With modern equipment, I think even higher-end clothing products could be on deck for American makers.

Also, when I say "raise the standard of living", I don't mean by more foreign aid, I mean by less interfering with foreign countries. What you've got now is, the U.S. taking all kinds of protective measures against foreign exports to the U.S. This is making it impossible to raise standards of living. At the same time, NGOs are screwing around & putting an artificial cap on the death rate--& you get the world's biggest cluserf*ck.:eek::eek:

The United States is one of the most open-to-trade markets on the planet, honestly. Supply management and import restrictions are much worse in most other developed nations, particularly the Asian economies. (Japan isn't great but the best of the lot, Taiwan a little worse but not maddeningly so. South Korea, Thailand and China are massively restrictive on imports that would threaten domestic industries.) The Europeans tend to be more restrictive on importing from other countries than the United States is, too.

I agree with this, actually. The U.S. is in the same position the Brits were in about half a century ago. Britain was world's leader in manufacturing a long time, only to be eclipsed by the U.S. What did the Brits do? They moved into insurance & banking. The U.S. needs to do much the same, plus into higher-tech manufacturing, like computers. Most profitable for the U.S. is going to be intellectual property: video games, phone apps, movies, & music.

The problem with this point (though the historical references are accurate) is that intellectual property in modern times, with modern communications, are ludicrously easy to steal and/or pirate, which reduces the costs to some consumers but is a big problem for a company's bottom line. I won't say it isn't true (it is) that such industries can be beneficial, but you won't employ millions off of them, and what America needs more than anything is many good, solid middle-class jobs. You can also do this by raising the wages of many service workers, but that risks inflation which would be a big problem, or providing a greater number of middle-class jobs and fueling the economic growth through trade surpluses - but this would require either imports to be minimal or increases in exports, and the latter requires markets to export to.

I don't see a reason quality can't continue to rise indefinitely.

I don't see why it can't, either. Companies in competitive markets where they cannot cut costs are always looking at ways of increasing sales. Automobiles are a very good example - what got the Japanese automakers into North America in the 1960s was excellent fuel efficiency and cheap prices, but as Detroit fought back against that the Japanese kept improving the quality of their products to keep their ability to sell them even as their original competitive advantages eroded away. Detroit is currently trying the same thing, and many Japanese makers, in their attempt to fight Detroit, are trying to make additional profits on cars by cutting costs, which is causing them some unhappy problems. It hasn't seriously hurt their reputation, but if they keep having issues and Detroit keeps improving, then it will start hurting.

I agree with this, & it paints a very troubling picture.:eek: Income inequality is poisonous. What you're already seeing in the U.S. is increasing middle class debt ("keeping up with the Joneses" means everybody wants bigger houses...). It also means more urban sprawl (lower taxes on bigger houses in 'burbs), which means more pollution (longer commutes) & more time wasted in long commutes (from 'burbs farther out...). It also means more crime....

And that's not counting what you could get when the top 0.1% own Congress. Like now.:mad:

Don't remind me, please. :rolleyes: Seriously though, that's why when I do American TLs I always aim for bigger union movements and to try and nip the Reagan Revolution in the bud and/or try to move American business into the mold of thinking of their companies not as top-down empires but as large (in some cases very large) teams of people aiming to be greater together than apart. I'd rather not strictly regulate businesses but rather get them to either do things right on their own or be able to have their employees and/or consumers push or goad them into it.

I think it does, for the reason that's been the historical experience. It happened in Britain, as manufacturing moved overseas. Britain got wealthier. So did the U.S. So did Japan after WW2, then South Korea. China is moving that way. India & Africa can, too, if you just get out of the way. It's not a zero-sum game.

As I said above, getting out of the way will only get you so far in the lassiez-faire world, because then companies have all the incentive to keep on chasing the lowest wages, and when you lose a middle-class tax base in a society it invariably causes problems. I rather think that early on in a nation's industrial development, the idea of countries building their own industries rather than being branch plants for Western multinationals is a better idea.
 
TheMann said:
I don't think America could make goods like those, but I think with modern technology most industries are within reach of American manufacturers.
I don't see why not, if the idea is to sell in volume to 2d/3d World countries. Will this sustain the highest-wage jobs? No... It will, IMO, enable those countries to boost productivity, & so boost their attractiveness for higher-value exports by making them wealthier.
TheMann said:
The obvious high-value ones (automobiles and auto parts, aircraft and their components, machinery, consumer electronics, shipbuilding and the like) are easier for a high-wage nation to have....With modern equipment, I think even higher-end clothing products could be on deck for American makers.
Agreed. I find myself wondering if it's not possible to achieve a kind of "botique" manufacturing: combining robots & CADCAM to produce very personalized products like cars for a smaller, but high-profit, market--in effect, Rolls or Benz with bots.
TheMann said:
The United States is one of the most open-to-trade markets on the planet, honestly. Supply management and import restrictions are much worse in most other developed nations, particularly the Asian economies. (Japan isn't great but the best of the lot, Taiwan a little worse but not maddeningly so. South Korea, Thailand and China are massively restrictive on imports that would threaten domestic industries.) The Europeans tend to be more restrictive on importing from other countries than the United States is, too.
I'm thinking of restrictions on African agricultural products in the main, here. There's been a pretty concerted effort to stifle them. I'm also far less sanguine about Japan than you, but I'll confess substantial ignorance.

If true the U.S. is less restrictive, maybe higher tariffs are a good idea. I've heard it said high tariffs aren't necessarily antithetical to a strong economy; my grasp of economics is in no way competent to judge the argument.:eek:
TheMann said:
The problem with this point (though the historical references are accurate) is that intellectual property in modern times, with modern communications, are ludicrously easy to steal and/or pirate, which reduces the costs to some consumers but is a big problem for a company's bottom line.
I don't say that's the only, or even the best, option. It's only the one that came to me.;) I thought of banking & finance, & insurance, but seeing how the Bandits of Wall Street have been treating the U.S. economy in the last 5yr, alone, encouraging more of the same seemed like a bad idea.:eek: (Go back to the '80s & the S&Ls, IMO, there should be whole prisons just for bankers.:mad:)
TheMann said:
You can also do this by raising the wages of many service workers, but that risks inflation
It might, but if you recognize good service deserves higher pay... IMO, it does. We've done it with cheats, like "mandatory" tipping. And we've had a tendency in business to go after labor wages as if that's the only way to reduce cost. It's not.

I find myself coming back to Henry Ford's proposition: if your employees can't afford them, who's buying your products? (I know, it's nothing like so simple...;))
TheMann said:
I don't see why it can't, either. Companies in competitive markets where they cannot cut costs are always looking at ways of increasing sales. Automobiles are a very good example - what got the Japanese automakers into North America in the 1960s was excellent fuel efficiency and cheap prices, but as Detroit fought back against that the Japanese kept improving the quality of their products to keep their ability to sell them even as their original competitive advantages eroded away. Detroit is currently trying the same thing, and many Japanese makers, in their attempt to fight Detroit, are trying to make additional profits on cars by cutting costs, which is causing them some unhappy problems. It hasn't seriously hurt their reputation, but if they keep having issues and Detroit keeps improving, then it will start hurting.
I was thinking much the same thing. Japanese makers still have the reputation for quality, & Detroit still hasn't overcome the "junk" rep from the '60s & '70s, even tho the defects per 1000 of Detroit cars is comparable to Japan's & has been for more than a decade.
TheMann said:
Don't remind me, please. :rolleyes: Seriously though, that's why when I do American TLs I always aim for bigger union movements and to try and nip the Reagan Revolution in the bud and/or try to move American business into the mold of thinking of their companies not as top-down empires but as large (in some cases very large) teams of people aiming to be greater together than apart. I'd rather not strictly regulate businesses but rather get them to either do things right on their own or be able to have their employees and/or consumers push or goad them into it.
I agree on unions. My trouble with it is, how do you achieve it? What kind of social & economic conditions you need to make it true...? IDK anything like enough about it.:eek: The idea of profit-sharing looks good to me, but if it works out anything like executive stock options has...:eek: Some companies have gotten it right, but it looks so idiosyncratic, IDK how you'd translate it to the economy at large.

I think some regulation is essential, tho. At a minimum, tough standards on pollution & safety (product & worker both). Fraud protections. Restrictions on interest charges (so you don't end up with payday lenders & pawn shops charging tougher rates than loan sharks,:eek: & doing it legally:eek::eek::mad:--which is what we have now:mad:). Or, to take some recent examples, NINJA loans, or selling credit default swaps you know are poisonous, or selling shares you know are garbage (& in which you have a conflict of interest, to boot::rolleyes: either one ought to disqualify it being sold by you--& if it's such garbage, having anybody selling it:rolleyes:)

Some of the airline regulations were a good idea, too, because removing the regulations created enormous debt, shrunk the number of carriers, reduced service, & increased seat prices & fees...:eek::mad:

Not to say some of the crazy regs you find in rail make sense.:eek: (Seriously, a regulation on when you can, or must, blow a horn at city limits--set in DC?:eek::confused:) Neither am I a fan of the CAFE standards.:rolleyes:
TheMann said:
As I said above, getting out of the way will only get you so far in the lassiez-faire world, because then companies have all the incentive to keep on chasing the lowest wages
Could be. How far does it go? Let's say India is producing cars & exporting them to the U.S. That's taking some market share from U.S. companies, maybe--tho by now, probably not (& upmarket cars are more profitable anyhow). So India is making export dollars, & Indian workers are getting paid pretty good wages (for India, anyhow:p) making cars. What do Indian carmaking workers want? More iPhones & laptops & DVD players & Britney Spears albums & "Twilight" sequels? How much of that can you get from India? Or China? How much does that increase India's GDP? How how much does that stimulate, say, air travel, & the demand for 757s (or Challenger 600 RJs, to be a bit chauvinistic;))?
TheMann said:
I rather think that early on in a nation's industrial development, the idea of countries building their own industries rather than being branch plants for Western multinationals is a better idea.
I'm thinking much the same thing, actually. Just putting less clearly, it seems.:eek:

I have a sense local industry has to start that way in some fashion, since there are established, successful products, & it's easier to copy than innovate: so, Japan copies the Austin Seven & Jeep...& India copies (some British car I can't think of the name of:eek::p).
 
I find myself coming back to Henry Ford's proposition: if your employees can't afford them, who's buying your products? (I know, it's nothing like so simple...;)).
You do know Henry Ford never said that or anything like it or anything that even meant anything slightly similar.

Ford did raise wages but it had nothing to do with employees affording a Ford car, because that is a damned stupid business model (and also means Boeing for instance would be in big trouble ;) ). Ford raised wages as staff turnover at the time was obscene, I can't recall the exact figures but it was something hiring 50,000 people a year for a work force of 13,000. Ford worked out the hiring costs and lost time as new employees learnt the job was more expensive than paying higher wages to retain staff.

On a related point, how on earth did removing regulations "created enormous debt, shrunk the number of carriers, reduced service, & increased seat prices & fees.." All else being equal regulations increase the barriers to entry (so less competition, less services) and raise costs (so more debts, higher prices). Unless there were some damned weird regulations in the US how on earth did how making it easier and cheaper to run an airline causes those problems? If you'd said less regulation made things more dangerous or caused problems for the old legacy carriers then I'd understand, but at the moment I'm just confused. :confused:
 
El Pip said:
You do know Henry Ford never said that or anything like it or anything that even meant anything slightly similar.
I do. The net result was, he created a market. Intended or not, it worked.
El Pip said:
Ford raised wages as staff turnover at the time was obscene
I do know the objective was to reduce it.
El Pip said:
also means Boeing for instance would be in big trouble
I don't see a big consumer market for jumbo jets, no.;) AFAIK, they've never been marketed as such, either.
El Pip said:
On a related point, how on earth did removing regulations "created enormous debt, shrunk the number of carriers, reduced service, & increased seat prices & fees.."
It may not have been the aim, but it's been the net effect of airline deregulation.:eek: There are fewer carriers, fewer routes, fewer flights, & higher costs, & there was more debt created in the decade after deregulation than in 50 before it.:eek::eek:
 
Asnys, you mention energy costs, but until the 1970's, nobody really paid much attention to that until the oil crises. I think we both agree more nukes would've been a better idea, especially MSR thorium-cycles would've been lovely. Thank you AEC for hosing that up!
OTEC and SSPS are all three-to-four-step techs that need MASSIVE investments in R&D to get viable techs that scale to needs, infrastructure to get and keep the installations in place,
and maintain said networks.
If we had, US carbon footprint'd be a tenth of what it is now or less from power generation. Manufacturing would've seen a massive boost in employment getting all that set up and keeping the infrastructure going.

You could really say the same thing about MSRs.

Although a transition from a coal and gas based electricity sector to one based on OTEC, SSPS, or fission would create jobs, those would be temporary. For all of those systems, the primary cost is building it in the first place; once it's running, you need relatively few people to keep them functioning. On the other hand, I really shouldn't knock temporary solutions so much - after all, human history is basically one long string of temporary solutions. :p

Fiscal policy and investment strategies shifted profoundly in the 1970's.
In addition, toward the 1990's there was a both a big push toward free trade and toward big-casino wins in IT and Big Pharma that sucked media attention and thus VC $$$ as the Next Big Things- making the 2K bubble much yeastier and more fragile.
Butterflying the casino culture of venture capital that contributed to a lot of market instability would have saved a lot of heartaches the last fifteen years.

I think this is a good point. Fundamentally, a bigger problem than misallocation of resources is misallocation of elite interest and energy, which is a rarer and more precious commodity than mere dollars.

Also, when I say "raise the standard of living", I don't mean by more foreign aid, I mean by less interfering with foreign countries. What you've got now is, the U.S. taking all kinds of protective measures against foreign exports to the U.S. This is making it impossible to raise standards of living. At the same time, NGOs are screwing around & putting an artificial cap on the death rate--& you get the world's biggest cluserf*ck.:eek::eek:

An artificial cap on the death rate? WTH? :confused:

Look, I've spent some time in Uganda as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and certainly the foreign aid community has LOTS of fuckups - even more than is commonly realized. But I don't think the solution is just letting people die.

I don't think America could make goods like those, but I think with modern technology most industries are within reach of American manufacturers. The obvious high-value ones (automobiles and auto parts, aircraft and their components, machinery, consumer electronics, shipbuilding and the like) are easier for a high-wage nation to have. It's also possible to do so with industries which have higher overheads and have higher raw materials costs (steel, metals, chemicals, refined fuels) if the industries are efficient. With modern equipment, I think even higher-end clothing products could be on deck for American makers.

A lot of those - machinery, autos, aircraft - we DO still make.

The problem with this point (though the historical references are accurate) is that intellectual property in modern times, with modern communications, are ludicrously easy to steal and/or pirate, which reduces the costs to some consumers but is a big problem for a company's bottom line. I won't say it isn't true (it is) that such industries can be beneficial, but you won't employ millions off of them, and what America needs more than anything is many good, solid middle-class jobs. You can also do this by raising the wages of many service workers, but that risks inflation which would be a big problem, or providing a greater number of middle-class jobs and fueling the economic growth through trade surpluses - but this would require either imports to be minimal or increases in exports, and the latter requires markets to export to.

I think that's a very good idea - unionize Walmart! But sooner or later, it's likely we'll begin automating a lot of service jobs as well. Those automated checkout lines are just the start. Some service jobs probably can't be automated - there will probably always be a need for human doctors or engineers, at least until/unless the singularity happens. And some forms of retail, like grocery stores or any kind of high-end shop, are more resistant to automation than others. But, in the long run, what's to stop Amazon - or 3D printers - from completely taking over the non-perishable, non-boutique goods market?

Still, that's a problem for the future, and there's no reason we couldn't have created good-quality service sector jobs over the last 30 years, to replace the lost manufacturing jobs.

I don't see why it can't, either. Companies in competitive markets where they cannot cut costs are always looking at ways of increasing sales. Automobiles are a very good example - what got the Japanese automakers into North America in the 1960s was excellent fuel efficiency and cheap prices, but as Detroit fought back against that the Japanese kept improving the quality of their products to keep their ability to sell them even as their original competitive advantages eroded away. Detroit is currently trying the same thing, and many Japanese makers, in their attempt to fight Detroit, are trying to make additional profits on cars by cutting costs, which is causing them some unhappy problems. It hasn't seriously hurt their reputation, but if they keep having issues and Detroit keeps improving, then it will start hurting.

I don't see a reason quality can't continue to rise indefinitely.

Let me restate that. I'm not sure quality increases can increase the amount of man-hours needed to manufacture an item indefinitely. If I double the quality of my car, do I double the number of people needed to make it? What if I quadruple it? Or octuple it? And so on. And one of the big quality metrics is how long something lasts, which has obvious issues in a capitalist economy.

From a historical perspective, we've actually been here before. Back in the 30s there were people running around saying that the Great Depression was the first big manifestation of technological unemployment, and that it was all down hill from there. Obviously that turned out not to be true - we found new things to make and sell. We can probably do that here, too. But I don't think the factory jobs, at least, are going to come back - the new good jobs will primarily be in non-automatable service sectors, such as R&D and other white collar, professional work.
 
It may not have been the aim, but it's been the net effect of airline deregulation.:eek: There are fewer carriers, fewer routes, fewer flights, & higher costs, & there was more debt created in the decade after deregulation than in 50 before it.:eek::eek:
Really? I'd always got the impression it was much like deregulation in Europe - Big national carriers getting into massive financial trouble as small no frills carriers eat them alive. Big carriers rack up large debts trying to stay alive, while the small firms thrive. Certainly the only available stats I can find don't support the fewer flights line;

http://www.bts.gov/xml/air_traffic/src/datadisp.xml

So no. take-offs has gone up from ~600k to ~700k a month between '96 and today. Of course it could be that back in the 1980s there were a million take offs a month, but that doesn't really seem likely does it? Air fares have gone up on average, but it's not been smooth;

http://www.bts.gov/xml/atpi/src/avgfareseries.xml

In fact do you know what that looks almost exactly like? The graph of oil price over the same period, which is really what you'd expect in a deregulated competitive market.

Looking at those I cannot seen a problem where you can actually say 'Deregulation caused that'. Sure it must be awful being a shareholder in Delta or an employee of United, but for passengers I'm not sure what the issue is? Basically it looks a lot like arbitrarily blaming things you don't like on policies you disagree with. Of course if there is some evidence linking deregulation to problems, not just assert correlation is causation, I'd be very interested in reading up on it.


As for the Ford point. He doubled wages to $5/day but a base Model T still cost $500. Let's be generous and say he had 20,000 employees who all spent their entire pay rise on buying a Model T. Extra sales $10million. Excellent, what a nice new market! However there is a cost of the pay rises ($2.5/day, for 250 days a year for all staff) - $12.5 million.

So in year one he loses $2.5 million dollars and, then unless all those Model Ts need replacing in less than a year, he loses even more next year. However you cut it he did not create a useful market for his own cars, even under the most generous and unrealistic assumptions it would never have made it's money back in sales. So I can't see how it's any use for a more general discussion, unless your aim is to bankrupt US manufacturing very quickly.
 
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