The trace elements of a nation
A long discussion over on Angry Bear dealt with how economic choices, rational in the short term or in the service of one economic actor, can cumulatively cripple the societies in which these choices are made. Well worth hopping over to read the full conversation, and also taking another hop to read the 1994 address of Sir James Goldstein to the US Congress.
I added to the conversation, and was pleased enough with that comment that I lifted it for here.
For some reason, this discussion is reminding me of the “dead spots” in the ocean where fertilizers poured in and encourage the growth of oxygen sucking algae.
Like so many other issues in economics, the issue of training versus skills versus cost of acquiring those skills rests on a matter of balance. How does a society support the acquisition of skills which are, when all is said and done, not going to be needed frequently enough to support a large number of artisans? I took a tour of an engineering firm a few years ago, where they make to order generators and motors. The men doing this work are all my age now, and will probably be retiring shortly. The workplace was not a factory floor as you would at ordinarily imagine it — instead it was like a very large workshop, and the “coils” inside the motors and generators were actually bent from lengthy slabs of specially shaped copper. I know for a fact that units produced by this company were integral to parts of the space program from the 1960s.
Motors, generators and transformers have shifted over the past 30 years to a very small number of producers, most of them offshore. Although I’m not in the field anymore, at the time I retired there were really only three or four producers of large power transformers, and the lead time for a single transformer might be three years. In some cases, there would effectively be only one producer because the others were not at that time taking new contracts.
In an emergency situation, how do you quickly replace a damaged transformer? They are not kept sitting on the shelf, one of these would be large enough that it would only fit in my two-story house if I removed strategic portions of flooring and walls.
The crisis of American manufacturing is not, I think, primarily one of job loss. It is instead the loss of capacity to rebuild oneself independently in a crisis. That capacity is only partly dependent on the infrastructure — the factory floors and steel mills. More importantly, the working knowledge of how these things are built and the working attitude of coming in every day and bending some more copper into shape, but doing it precisely right, have been punished out of the American workforce I believe.
To become skilled in one of these jobs often requires an opportunity loss of becoming skilled in other areas — in order to train a good machinist requires enough time that the skill becomes the individual’s only resource, and if that resource is no longer in demand, the entire field looks like that oceanic dead zone where there isn’t enough oxygen to survive.
A balanced diet includes many things — sugar and fat and protein in large amounts, and iron and chromium and zinc in tiny amounts. But if a person’s diet includes no trace elements they end up with deficiency diseases.
I think the loss of niche professions is a deficiency disease in a nation. Identifying and supporting these fields of work may not be financially efficient — it’s much easier to eat a candy bar than it is to eat a balanced diet. But the result of always making the candy-bar choice is a particular disease that weakens its host out of all proportion to the size of the elements needed.
Noni
Noni, gosh, there is hope still. I certainly didn’t expect to read this today, or for that matter, any day. You are very spot on with this, and it’s what brings a tear to my eye, just as it does to the symbol of our wounded country, the Eagle. To those who don’t know or have forgotten, look up the word. If we somehow allow the dead zone to take over completely, then everything that has gone in the past, the blood, sweat, tears will have been for what? Thanks for the post.
150 years ago, 20 Dec 1860 saw South Carloina secede, the US was two nations, one agrarian, dependent upon labor. A society not unlike ancient Rome where farm labor was property used to make land productive. The other nation was industrialized, competing on the world level and depended upon labor which was rented to make capital useful.
One issue was the moral dilemma of huamn bondage, or ownership. The other issue was the main customer of the agrarian sections would have liked to sell manufactures from their factories at better deals than the competing industial sections would afford.
Today, the US is moving away from defending its industrial sections, in favor of importing manufactures.
Differently, the classes which depended on their labor being rented are now ignored by the rentier class.
And the new Littoral Combat Ship over budget and over weight and late and vulnerable one of the competitor designs is partly made in Australia. As the unneeded super tanker to deliver diesle fuel to Sammarkand is likely a job program for the French/German aerospace jobs program sustained by the ECB.
The US is heading back toward 1860. The industrial sector is in China now.
However, fear not there is enough factory floor decaying……………….
Military keynesianism is also being outsourced.
150 years ago, 20 Dec 1860 saw South Carloina secede, the US was two nations, one agrarian, dependent upon labor. A society not unlike ancient Rome where farm labor was property used to make land productive. The other nation was industrialized, competing on the world level and depended upon labor which was rented to make capital useful.
One issue was the moral dilemma of huamn bondage, or ownership. The other issue was the main customer of the agrarian sections would have liked to sell manufactures from their factories at better deals than the competing industial sections would afford.
Today, the US is moving away from defending its industrial sections, in favor of importing manufactures.
Differently, the classes which depended on their labor being rented are now ignored by the rentier class.
And the new Littoral Combat Ship over budget and over weight and late and vulnerable one of the competitor designs is partly made in Australia. As the unneeded super tanker to deliver diesle fuel to Sammarkand is likely a job program for the French/German aerospace jobs program sustained by the ECB.
Outsource the militarist jobs as well.
The US is heading back toward 1860. The industrial sector is in China now.
However, fear not there is enough factory floor decaying……………….
“The crisis of American manufacturing is not, I think, primarily one of job loss. It is instead the loss of capacity to rebuild oneself independently in a crisis.”
I don’t disagree that this is an important issue. However, there is a tendency to see the issue at hand as “the” issue. In the above-quoted sentence, a contest is set up between two problems. Seen this way, one has to be the bigger problem. I don’t think the world works that way. Perhaps, by creating managerial systems that can attach a number to anything, we have mathematized our thinking. Perhaps we have always had the urge toward ordinal rankings. In any case, I don’t know how one decides that job loss is of less importance than the capacity to rebuild. Job loss has its impact every day. The capacity to rebuild may never be called upon. On the other hand, if we do someday face the need to rebuild on an emergency basis, the ability to do so would sure be handy. How do we even make a comparison between the everyday and the millenial?
So again, I don’t disagree that the issue you raise is important. I just think it is a mistake, both intellectual and practical, to diminish one problem in order to elevate another.
We trained men and women in uniform to sit next to locked buttons deep underground in bunkers, ready to destroy the world, but have never called on them to do so. We don’t need many of them, but we have decided we need a few. We pay to have the the people in uniform do nothing, merely to be ready.
Now, Noni asks if we should find a way to train and pay people to do other tasks we may never need them to do, just in case. The ability to whip up a giant electric motor involves fewer terrors than the ability to whip up destruction, but the motors are no good without the transformers, and the transformers are no good without…who knows? How do we decide what kind of “just in case” sub-economy to create? What do we need? Where do we stop? The military makes decisions like that by identifying specific tasks that it wants to be able to undertake. Conventional war on 2 1/2 fronts. Mutual assured destruction. Then, over and over, they end up finding that the tasks for which they have prepared are not the tasks they are called on to perform.
We tell ourselves that we make economic decisions through the operation of the market. That is a gross simplification in reality, but that’s the model. The market doesn’t do what Noni thinks we need done. An alternative would be a command model, like in the military. We have such institutions, standing ready for disaster. Ask the residence of the Gulf Coast if they like the result. And we actually use those institutions. How do we arrange for the maintenance of skills meant to serve an economic purpose, when those skills are not used for an economic purpose? How do we know which skills to choose? How do we know when we have enough? How do we know when to change the skill set we maintain?
Are we going to ask large numbers of workers to train for skills far more complex than sitting next to a button, knowing they may never have to use those skill? Real skill is acquired by doing. Are we going to arrange for people to spend a career doing something they know serves no purpose? Will we offer them suicide prevention and substance abuse counseling?
I didn’t know Noni was a Motor Gal. I think the way it works nowadays is we will still be able to buy large power equipment from General Electric…..we just won’t know where in the world it comes from.
On an off topic issue I just came across a post at NC:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/12/auerbackwray-liberals-need-not-fear-obamas-tax-deal-why-a-payroll-tax-holiday-actually-helps-support-tomorrows-retirees.html
This is from our Big Guy MMT friends and they apply their theoretical, philosophical, and political science prowess to show how the payroll tax cuts are a Godsend for the Social Security program.
Thought Dan may like to take a look at it and see if it deserves cross posting here so our experts can peruse this work and maybe give their inputs.
Might even be fun.
Noni,
If those jobs/skills were truly non replicable, we would not have lost them in the first place, now would we?
The true “trace element” of the US, that which makes us uniquely dynamic, is FREEDOM.
kharris: “An alternative would be a command model, like in the military. We have such institutions, standing ready for disaster. Ask the residence of the Gulf Coast if they like the result.”
I think that they would have liked the result much better under any administration including FEMA before Bush II. Bush actually weakened FEMA, on ideological grounds. Compare the “helluva job” that FEMA did in response to Katrina with the gov’t response to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. There was no FEMA, but military and other Federal gov’t officials broke the letter of the law by exceeding their authority, in order to speed aid to the stricken city. The fault is not in our institutions, but in ourselves. (An overstatement, OC, but it echoes Shakespeare. ;))
kharris
be patient with me. i am not disagreeing with you in an important way. but noni’s use of “not primarily” was more of a rhetorical devise than any serious effort to rank order the problems we face.
You would be right that it would be stupid to get into an argument about which is more important, though one could speculate that if we still had the know how we could re create the jobs over a weekend. once we have exported the know how it will be hard to recover it.
this does not seem to be one of the things that economists take into consideration when they tell sophomores about the win win of “free trade.”
kharris
“they also serve who only stand and wait.”
don’t tell me that cop eating a donut is “doing nothing.”
meanwhile of course we do not need to create a shadow economy in waiting. we just need to stop exporting our industrial base.
Sammy’s battlecry
“pffreedom” while he sells himself and his children into slavery.
Noni,
Back in the day when I had a job, we were rehabilitating large windtunnels at NASA. We found that large motor manufacturing was not done in the US. Same with transformers and other types of large industrial equipment. Some of our sources were in Japan, good stuff by the way, and Europe. It was interesting that the electronics and computers that these suppiers provided came from the US.
This highlights one of our problems with military equipment. We need to spend large amounts just to keep our hardware and wetware up to date. The equipment has no currrent use as there is no indentified threat but the tools needed to produce the stuff needs to be supported unless Christ returns and there is universal peace.
Cdric
okay. i read it. and while proudly not an expert i can tell a pigs grunt from a farmer’s checkbook.
or, god save us from our intellectuals.
the essay in question makes a number of wildly improbably claims on the way to easing our fears about a 16% reduction in SS financing. mostly they pretend that money is not real. well, in a sense it is not, but it is the way humans have evolved of keeping track of their promises to each other (some of their promises). The infinite supply of government money that the authors propose will take the place of the payroll tax would be, at the least, hard to administer, as there would be no way to discriminate among the many claims… or pathetic requests… for the limited amount of goods and services that the money was supposed to keep track of.
but here i am sounding like an intellectual. brrrrrrp.
sammy’s battle cry for “pfffreeedom!”
as he sells himself and his children into slavery.
every con since the beginning of time has begun by giving the rube a shiny piece of something and telling him “there’s more where that came from.” all you have to do is demonstrate your trust by lending us your life savings.
there is no need to create a shadow economy in waiting. just stop exporting our industrial base. something that comes from the “rational” decision of grabbing for the near term bottom line with no consideration for collateral damage.
Wrong model. Cops, when properly deployed, deter crime even while eating donuts. Cops also act on a regular basis. Noni has suggested making sure we have skills that might be needed to rebuild an economy, or part of it. The anecdote she offered suggests we may need to keep things or the skills to build things, even if it is not economic to do so. Your answer is to sweep all that aside. You have changed the story. I offered the nuke story rather than the cop story for a reason. Within your three lines, you have been incoherent, moving from “stand and wait” in the first line to suggesting with “we do not need to create a shadow economy” that there won’t be any standing and waiting.
Even so, you have ended up by suggesting a command model – state intervention to prevent some forms of trade – laid on top of a market model. And with the imposition of a command model, you still have to solve all the problems that a command model brings with it.
Now,
cedric
i read it. and while proudly not an expert i can tell a pigs grunt from a farmer’s checkbook.
god save us from our intellectuals.
the authors make a number of wild claims on the way to reassuring us that the loss of 16% of SS funding is nothing to worry about.
basically they don’t think money is real. but money is the way we have evolved to keep track of our promises to each other regarding work and exchange of goods and services. the infinite supply of government money which they imagine is going to take the place of SS taxes would be, at the least, hard to administer. As the claims, and pathetic requests, for it would vastly exceed the supply of goods and services that an all too finite earth, and workers, would be able to produce.
but here i am sounding like an intellectual. brrrrp.
sammy’s battle cry for “pfffreedom!”
as he sells himself and his children into slavery.
Min,I think I already answered, and Rdan says the Kit is messed up, so many there is going to be another answer here soon, but…having already written too much in response to this, here’s more.
The problem Noni raises is one which suggests a command model as a solution. Command models have problems. Market models have problems, and one of them is that markets do not address the sort of problem Noni has raised. If they did, the problem would already be solved, right?
Noni has raised a non-market problem – what happens when you need things right now that the market only provides in a year and a half? What happens if insurance doesn’t answer the problem. For instance, if a money payment won’t make a generator materialized, and there is sustemic harm as a result? I go out of business because you don’t provide power, but you don’t care because you’re already out of business? Noni’s answer is to lay in the necessary skills, even if we don’t use them. Another would be to stockpile strategic necessities.
Either way, we need to plan. We don’t do that well. We humans don’t prepare for disaster all that well, and we obsess about the wrong risks. So if we are going to expend resources on issues that are best addressed through a command model, we ought to do a decent risk assessment first. If there are things way more likely to screw us than Noni’s technological skills problem, then Noni’s problem should wait till we deal with higher risk issues. Once we get to Noni’s issue, we need to figure out what to do. Do we need motors, skills, skills and motors? Which skills and which technologies do we need to address?
I think this exercise has been done – by the Pentagon in preperation for a nuclear exchange. The one’s of which I am aware would be outdated by now. No provision was made for my MP3 player, access to medical marijuana or Netflix. Command models need to be updated. War games are needed to keep the command model well oiled.
The residents of the Gulf didn’t like the result because nobody was working the model.
Sammy, remember the song Bobby McGee? “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” The economic situation in this country gives the line of that song new meaning. Nancy Ortiz
DD,
You have pointed out one of the little refinements that had to be made in trade theory along the way. Why are we buying things from the Swiss in the same industrial code as things we sell to Swiss? What happened to specialization and comparative advantage? A theoretical fix was made in response to reality, but the reality is we trade similar goods and components of goods that we will eventually consume for the finished products. Eventually, the result of the pattern will be that we don’t produce large chunks of the stuff we need – and neither do the Swiss.
I’d like to remind Sammy of the line from “Bobby McGee.” “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Well, pretty soon we’re gonna be free alright because we’re ending up with nothing or close enough to be a problem. NancyO
I was trying to figure out how I missed the original discussion, when I realized it happened over two years ago. I read that whole thread, and it’s full of great stuff. What resurrected it all now?
Cheers!
JzB
And when I posted that, it looked like there was only one comment here.
JS-kit roolz!
JzB
Here’s an interesting look at the past 200 years of technological/economic history. Very interesting.
For, MG, this in some ways wxplains my views: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
Here’s an interesting look at the past 200 years of technological/economic history. Very interesting.
For, MG, this in some ways explains my views: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
Coberly,
promises of efficiency from a command economy structure = shiny pieces of something
trust demonstrated by lending life savings = trust demonstrated by giving up private property
I have been out slogging through -20 snow all day, since my garaged, plugged in car inexplicably wouldn’t start (arggh.) This included rising at 6 am and ushering an elderly friend to a specialist and home again, chugging home on the bus to take care of the dogs, and then catching another bus to go to a job interview in the windswept waste beyond the football stadium — and another one to get home again. Once I finish this comment, I’m off to find a toddy and/or hot bathtub. (Thanks for the tiny violin accompaniament, guys.)
To answer the last question first, what prompted this reposting was my feeling that it was a point needing to be looked at again, and writing a new post seemed redundant. We’ve grabbed onto trends like lean-and-mean, just-in-time, and training people strictly to the needs of the workplace – with no guarantee that workplace will need them in return. Choices provide resiliency, and nations need resilient people.
Kharris, I never proposed dead-ending a segment of the population into archaic jobs. But an awful lot of people adore archaic jobs and spend their off-time perfecting them. I know blacksmiths, brewers, chain mail makers, glassworkers, spinners and weavers and scads of other skilled craftspeople. It’s a pity that these people have to work days at fast food joints or doing other things that bore them to tears. A trifle of sponsorship would go a long way.
Too, I’m of the opinion that every citizen should have three skills or professions — certainly more than one, and in different fields like writing, carpentry, and governance. We have shifted our population into a brittle model where the collapse of one industry can leave a large segment of the population with nothing to do, and nothing to be proud of. Every additional skill offers people another handhold.
Finally, speaking of brittleness, I must mention that though efficiency is a virtue in business, it is a flaw in governance. Governance needs waste, replication, it needs to be messy. It needs to have the reserves to undertake hasty action, it needs the reserves that allow slow contemplation.
If a business fails through being too brittle, it’s learned a lesson (as have those observing its fall.) A government must never be in a situation where a single supply chain or skill set could bring it down.
Noni
still loves Jane Jacobs
kharris:
“The residents of the Gulf didn’t like the result because nobody was working the model.”
I think that going into the specifics of Katrina would take us too far from Noni’s point. Yes, there was too little attention to the long run problems for New Orleans. For instance, the levees were supposedly capable of handling Katrina, but they failed. The destruction of the wetlands caused problems along the coast. And so on. But in addition, the immediate response was worse than pathetic. In part it was because of indecision in the days before the storm hit the coast. But in part it was because Bush had purposely reduced the capability of FEMA in the name of small gov’t. Ironically, that produced a worse result than when we actually had a smaller gov’t, a century before.
coberly: “the essay in question makes a number of wildly improbably claims on the way to easing our fears about a 16% reduction in SS financing. mostly they pretend that money is not real.”
Sorry, maybe I am supposed to know this. But from what I have heard, the reduced revenue from FICA is supposed to be made up **immediately**. The trust fund will have the same amount in it as though the full FICA taxes had been paid. Is that not so? Thanks. 🙂
Noni Mausa: “Too, I’m of the opinion that every citizen should have three skills or professions — certainly more than one, and in different fields like writing, carpentry, and governance. We have shifted our population into a brittle model where the collapse of one industry can leave a large segment of the population with nothing to do, and nothing to be proud of. Every additional skill offers people another handhold.”
Peter Drucker recommended changing careers every 15 years. Whatever the virtue of that idea for the individual, it would give people in their 50s a variety of skills to call upon, and reduce the brittleness of the economy.
kharris
can’t walk and chew gum at the same time?
we already have a “command model.” it’s called “law.” and congress and the constitution and all that neithr do we need to conduct a study to establish priorities. a natioin of 300 million can do more than one thing at once. it can do contradictory things at once, just like mother nature, to see which one works out in the end.
i mentioned the cops because you said the nuclear workers weren’t doing anything. if they were showing up to work and watching for blinking red lights they were doing something.
don’t be in a rush to accuse me of being incoherent because you can’t connect the dots.
min
made up from the general budget? the one in deficit? so we go deeper in debt in order to turn social security into welfare. if the workers aren’t paying for their benefits, then the taxpayers are.
i suppose i have to wait to see how this works out politically, but meanwhile it is the stupidest move i have seen in fifty years of watching congress.
or let me put it this way… when you cut 16% of the dedicated revenue of a program, you have made a 16% reduction in its financing… however you make it up.
poppies
who the hell is suggesting giving up private property?
Min
i have had more than three “careers,” but you remind me of something. When the retirement age is 69 we are going to have a lot of engineers with hardening of the brain arteries. Should be fun to watch.
Drucker
like so many, throws around words as if the things they stand for have no real weight.
kind of like Orszag’s “balanced approach”, as if money measured everything of importance.
FYI, our old chief engineer always said it took 7 years to train a large motor or generator design engineer, and that was after getting a 4 year EE degree. Then he was only talking about the electromagnetic design. We had another MSME in charge of figuring out how to keep our 5000HP 3600rpm motors that were the size of a van from shaking themselves and the driven equipment apart.
People really don’t want to have to change carrees like this like changing your underwear.
There was a time in the United States when being self-reliant as a nation had real meaning. That effort extended beyond existing commerical interests as there were and still are huge warehouses full of equipment set aside to support emergency production of final goods to support the nation during wartime.
I’ll focus on the simple fact that the United States has continued to lose, as a nation, many industrial capabilities starting with tool and die manufacturing. The list goes from there and it’s a list that is growing.
If the nation has to recover some of its lost industrial capabilities, the population should be aware of the lead times involved. That’s about fifteen years in the case of tool and die from start to finish including the advanced training to redevelop that skill base. Fifteen years.
It’s always easy to say that the self-reliant days are over and the U.S. is interdependent on all sorts of other nations for whatever goods and services. Yeah, well, maybe that’s not so damned smart. A future economic and/or military conflict may prove that point. And let’s not pretend that can not happen because it can.
I recommend that everyone read Energy Secretary Chu’s speech of 29 November. That’s a good wake up call. Perhaps it can serve as a 101 primer for avoiding what is likely to follow if the national leadership doesn’t get the ship turned before we strike the iceberg.
Secretary Chu: China’s Clean Energy Successes Represent a New “Sputnik moment” for America
At National Press Club, Energy Secretary Says Innovation is Key to America’s Economic Competitiveness
U.S. Department of Energy
November 29, 2010
http://www.energy.gov/news/9829.htm
*speech link at the bottom of the article.
MG
much as you might hate it, I agree with you. except
I don’t know what Chu said, and I am not likely to look it up (slow modem), so hear my plea:
tell us what he said.
besides being kind to old modem folks, the translation of his ideas into your words will sharpen all our focus on just what you mean.
Funny thing is Alexander Hamilton understood this. It’s what won the Civil War for the North, and the Republican Party understood it throughout the great American rise to power. They only stopped understanding it when enough of them were rich enough to see the advantages of “free trade.”
Even I used to see the advantages of free trade when they showed me the math in that famous Econ 101. Took me years and years to see what they left out.
And, for those with only one finger to count on, let me assert that I still believe in “free trade,” but I also believe in a national industrial policy… funny how i can hold two contradictory ideas in mind at the same time.
Somehow the terms “free trade” and “balanced trade” got substituted over the centuries. Merry ‘ol England realized they were never going to grow tea or peppercorn successfully, so they focused on shipbuilding as an industry. Then their trading partners needed something in return from England. England exported “governance”….well, maybe this is a bad example, but you probably get what I mean…
OK I won’t rush….Yep, you’re incoherent. You excused your incoherence by claiming the dots connect when they don’t. You are just coughing up folksie crap, rather than actually making a point. You have made it clear that you don’t actually understand the discussion – “cops” and “law” when cops and law are not germain to the issue that’s been raised.
I believe in being clear, so I’ll try here. You have called me a racist, a sexist and a variety of other things in service of arguing against points I’ve made, while failing either to show that I’m a racist or a sexist, or showing that the point I’ve made is mistaken. You’re an ad mominem guy at heart and in other ways as well an intellectual cheat. You’ve made an enemy of me. If you intend to engage me in discussion, you have no reason to expect I’ll tolerate the least nonsense from you.
Noni,
You may not be proposing hiving off part of the workforce for dead end functions, but that is clearlly one way that what you are asking for would work. Now, is there another way? You think we should all have multiple skills, but (settting aside discussions of whether we actually do already) how do you make that happen? Absent means to a solution, we don’t get very far. Absent means, we are having an interesting but ultimately sterile disucssion. Do you have means in mind?
I still think that the country lost it’s labor force of bright workers during the Vietnam war. How so? They were the ones who were called up to fight. The result of the vacumn left behind was filled with the 4 F rejects & the too busy to serve the country types, which then hitched a ride on the coat tails of the various politicians to where today, those same people have wrought the situation we live in. Granted, the defination is of craftsmen, but in this case, what they created is anything but craftsmanship. I supose one could consider greed, contemp for the law, looting, fraudulent behavior, anti-social beliefs, screw your neighbor, etc. as being virtues, but without dissing anyone, it seems that drinking the koolaid has taken its toll.
Merit Badges.
No, really. Grownup versions of skill collections, perhaps good for tax deductions or citizen reward programs or something. You could end up with a chest full of medals.
Extra points for necessary skills that people find less fun, like sewer repair or Customer Service. The chain mail guy would still be on his own.
Or they went to Canada.
kharris
i have never called you a racist or a sexist. it’s not the kind of thing i do. you have me confused with someone else.
i have challenged your logic on occasion because you are so rigid about it.
as for the cops.. the parallel with the nuclear trigger folks is exact. your point about the nukers is that we were paying them to do nothing. we were paying them to stand and wait, or sit and watch.
i am sorry you don’t get the points i try to make. i think your anger has something to do with your rigidity. if that is ad hominem, make the best of it.
Norman
I’m curious to know where you came up with the idea that the “brightest” went to fight in Viet Nam. I’m not suggesting that Nam vets are any less intelligent than the general population, but I’d question your assumption of above average brightness. Keep in mind that they are the one’s who couldn’t find an acceptable deferment. Also, I don’t recall any local draft boards at that time, yes I’m old enough to remember such details, using IQ as a determining basis for the call up letter. I don’t know the stats, but I’d guess that the average military recruit is now, and had been then, little different from his cohorts in the general population. Of course this leaves out the truly unfit and disabled.
MG said, “I’ll focus on the simple fact that the United States has continued to lose, as a nation, many industrial capabilities starting with tool and die manufacturing. The list goes from there and it’s a list that is growing. “
I’d be the first to applaud the return of a manufacturing base to this country”s economy, You’ve left out of your description any reference as to cause of the disappearance of that base. I believe that the past four decades of capital chasing cheap (read exploited) labor is a major contributing factor. So long as it is easy for cap;ital to move across borders it will likely continue to chase ever more exploited labor at the expense of our economy. In addition I well remember reading news articles, when journalists were actually practicing their trade, describing how the US government was offering guarantees to protect that capital as it chased labor across the globe. I’d guess that Tricky Dick and Kissinger (remember Peter Peterson got his start with the two of them) “opening” China had something to do with the resulting demise of the US economy.
coberly,
The link takes you to an article in html. You will have no problem pulling that up.
coberly,
The link takes you to a well written summary article in html. You will have no problem pulling that up.
Actually, Japan got there first in the 60s. Then Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia followed Japan’s “Asian Export Model”. China finally saw the light a bit later.
Then most of US and Euro biz, whom were happy domestics, learned from the Japanese Invasion that you have to play the game globally to survive. The rest is history.
MG
i would have great difficulty pulling it up. Slow modem, as I said. Meanwhile, I still believe… went to an old fashioned English class… that your comment profits from being self contained. You are forced to look at what you are citing and extract the relevant points and rephrase them. The the rest of us get to respond to what you think and not just add another magazine article to our collection of waiting room reading.
Cedric
you make it sound as if it was all just fair competition. But when your comparative advantage is organ-donor labor your competitors can’t compete unless they they impose some kind of “fair trade” tariff. Which of course we were all taught as sophomores was what caused the great depression.
be a little careful with this. as far as i can tell the japanese competed on the basis of a superior product. might be true of some of the others you mention, but one can’t argue that the chinese stuff we buy today is superior… it’s just cheap… and it’s cheap because American capital is happy to pay organ-donor wages w/o noticing that the capacity of their home market to actually buy stuff is eroding. I guess they figure that in the order of time, they will become rich Chinese capitalists and expoit cheap American labor.
I’m going back in time to the 70s here. The Japanese were cheap. Then they get better. That’s how it works. You get the biz, then you work on improving the product. They got better first in industrial products, cars second, if you recall the old Jap econo-boxes.
By the late 70s we were treated to almost monthly mag articles about how Japanese management was so superior to US management, and we deserved to die. The Japanese were “long term investors of capital” and leading edge in industrial processes. They didn’t mention Japan paid $5/hr and the US was 15/hr (ave union pay). They didn’t mention high inflation in the US caused interest rates to approach 20%, which makes ROI calcs on capital investment strogly indicate-Don’t do it! Meanwhile the BOJ and japanese stock market was giving away free money in Japan. We also didn’t hear that Europe was screaming too. (I did, I have relatives in Germany, and also new some people working for German, Swiss and British companies)
As we progressed thru the 80s, domestic companies started to realize they needed to go south, or to Mexico, or to somewhere in Asia to compete. The timing and where depended on the industry. In my first industry, GE was by far the largest US manufacturer. They started first with offshoring.
Then we got the Plaza Accord in 1985. That helped by doubling the price of the yen. But then Korea and other Asian Tigers started coming in. China was starting to enter industrial markets during the end of the 80s.
I didn’t mean to make it sound fair, by any means.
Cedric
don’t know if this thread is still live, but
you may well be right, but my memory is a little different. Japanese products were “cheap” in the fifties. but by the sixties they made high quality cameras, and i think they beat us on transistor radios. by the seventies they were building better cars than Americans. certainly better than the Brits. and only VW could compare on quality and price. I don’t know for sure the dates, but I think we imposed a tariff, or they agreed to a quota to give Detroit a chance to compete, but Detroit kept building oversize junk.. which of course is what a lot of Americans wanted… but not enough. The rest of us bought well built… Japanese and German… cheap or expensive if we could afford it.
like i say, my memory may not be accurate… but the general impression I had of the times was that Japanese built quality and Detroit built high powered junk. And, of course, Japan had an industrial policy. We did too, but ours was… give the big donors whatever they ask for.
GE went south in the sixties looking for cheap non union labor. They also preferred women, who work cheaper. That’s Southern USA, y’all.