Benedict Arnold
Aug. 16th, 2004 07:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kirisutogomenI don't hate America. I don't hate Americans, whether blue-collar or white-collar, or studded leather bondage collar. I think people should have jobs, and that these jobs should be challenging and interesting, making the best use of talent, skills, and education.
I also think that trying to foment artificial class warfare by portraying the principal providers of employment in America as rapacious exploiters of a helpless middle class is craven demagoguery of the worst kind. Businesses provide jobs, pay people for their labor, both here and in other countries. Americans are no more deserving of jobs than people in other countries, Freedom is inherently good, and also happens to be the most efficient mechanism we have for allocating resources, especially the contributions of individuals to the greater welfare of mankind.
There's been a lot of noise recently about offshoring, the practice of companies hiring foreign workers to do work that previously had been done by Americans. Not all of this offshoring involves the elimination of jobs in America, but I believe that people use the term to refer to both relocating existing jobs elsewhere and creating new jobs in other countries which could have been created here. I submit that this practice is constructive, and beneficial both to Americans and to foreigners, who are often in more dire economic circumstances that most Americans. I also believe that free trade is fundamentally morally superior, as well as efficient, and that "fair trade" is an arrogant, xenophobic concept that reflects at best abject ignorance and more often base, spiteful bitterness.
Offshoring is essentially not that big a deal. There are not millions of jobs flooding out of the country all of a sudden. Economic conditions have not changed so rapidly that it is now of exceptional advantage to lay off Americans in droves and hire foreign workers en masse. Relative productivity changes fairly gradually, trade rules are altered in a sluggish, halting manner, many jobs are repatriated after companies expereince degraded performance from offshored positions, and plenty of employment is being shifted into America from other countries.
Many, many jobs simply cannot be done remotely. How would you offshore school teachers, nurses, concierges, limo drivers, blackjack dealers, personal trainers, bartenders, or real estate agents?
Certainly rich world employees are paid quite a bit more than those in developing nations. They are also several times more productive at most occupations. Superior education, massive investment in infrastructure such as road networks and electricity distribution, and a great deal of past capital investment in plant and equipment mean that an individual American can produce substantially more than a handful of Mexican or Chinese workers. Relative productivity does change over time, and to some extent relative wages will adjust to compensate. If South Koreans' productivity relative to Americans increases over time (as it has), the relatively low wages of South Koreans will increase faster than those of Americans (as they have). The incentive to employ a greater proportion of South Koreans will increase at the margin, for those jobs where the comparative profitability was previously on the knife edge. There is a one-off expenditure associated with relocating jobs, so there won't be a lot of frantic switching back and forth.
Companies such as Dell attempted to transfer some fairly low-skilled service jobs, such as front-line routine customer service, to India, a country with low wages, a supply of well-educated people, and lots of English-speakers. Despite those characteristics, Dell and others chose to move those positions back to the US. A variety of problems such as accent difficulties and time zone differences made the India option the worse choice.
Mercedes, BMW, and Honda have discovered that it is more profitable to employ American auto workers than German or Japanese ones manufacturing cars both for the American market and for export. Plants in America manufacture "European" cars and export them to Europe.
Much of the recent whining about offshoring has been triggered by a perception that it is no longer merely manufacturing jobs that are being transferred overseas, but that now relatively skilled white-collar jobs are being "exported". Why is this of more concern? Are we claiming that unemployment among the lower classes isn't a serious problem, but that once job market transformations affect our more educated, highly-compensated Americans it is now a problem worth paying attention to? Not that I admit that there is any validity to this idea of "exporting" jobs, but even if it were true, how do the self-appointed champions of the people justify being more concerned about the conditions of the wealthier?
A more fundamental lie is that there is some sort of jobs deficit, that there are a fixed number of jobs to go around and that we are in some sense exporting some of these jobs. This is known as the "lump of labor" fallacy, and has been recognized as spurious for nearly two hundred years. Yet idiots continue to promote this ridiculous idea. Simply put, as GDP increases over time, we're doing more stuff. We may being doing different stuff, but it's more valuable stuff than we used to be doing. Some companies may employ fewer people, but others employ more. Our population continues to increase, and our employment rate is not decreasing (in fact, it's increasing over the long haul).
A particularly offensive notion is the idea that is being energetically asserted by John Kerry, when he calls companies and their management "Benedict Arnolds" for offshoring. Fulfilling their duties to their employers (the shareholders) by providing employment for people in other countries, usually people who are painfully impoverished by our standards, contributing to a more efficient allocation of human capital in America, and allowing for potentially substantially reduced costs to American consumers is apparently treason against the Republic. Treason is punishable by death. Treason is one of the worst crimes we have. Are going to send our employers to the electric chair? Shall we round up the vicious enemies of global poverty and put them in concentration camps, or show mercy and simply lock them up for life? Presumably Kerry's wife will be the first up against the wall. Heinz operates 57 of its 79 factories and employs 72% of its workforce outside the US.
I'm not thrilled about the job the President has done in his first term. But I wouldn't vote for Kerry even if you put a gun to my head.
I also think that trying to foment artificial class warfare by portraying the principal providers of employment in America as rapacious exploiters of a helpless middle class is craven demagoguery of the worst kind. Businesses provide jobs, pay people for their labor, both here and in other countries. Americans are no more deserving of jobs than people in other countries, Freedom is inherently good, and also happens to be the most efficient mechanism we have for allocating resources, especially the contributions of individuals to the greater welfare of mankind.
There's been a lot of noise recently about offshoring, the practice of companies hiring foreign workers to do work that previously had been done by Americans. Not all of this offshoring involves the elimination of jobs in America, but I believe that people use the term to refer to both relocating existing jobs elsewhere and creating new jobs in other countries which could have been created here. I submit that this practice is constructive, and beneficial both to Americans and to foreigners, who are often in more dire economic circumstances that most Americans. I also believe that free trade is fundamentally morally superior, as well as efficient, and that "fair trade" is an arrogant, xenophobic concept that reflects at best abject ignorance and more often base, spiteful bitterness.
Offshoring is essentially not that big a deal. There are not millions of jobs flooding out of the country all of a sudden. Economic conditions have not changed so rapidly that it is now of exceptional advantage to lay off Americans in droves and hire foreign workers en masse. Relative productivity changes fairly gradually, trade rules are altered in a sluggish, halting manner, many jobs are repatriated after companies expereince degraded performance from offshored positions, and plenty of employment is being shifted into America from other countries.
Many, many jobs simply cannot be done remotely. How would you offshore school teachers, nurses, concierges, limo drivers, blackjack dealers, personal trainers, bartenders, or real estate agents?
Certainly rich world employees are paid quite a bit more than those in developing nations. They are also several times more productive at most occupations. Superior education, massive investment in infrastructure such as road networks and electricity distribution, and a great deal of past capital investment in plant and equipment mean that an individual American can produce substantially more than a handful of Mexican or Chinese workers. Relative productivity does change over time, and to some extent relative wages will adjust to compensate. If South Koreans' productivity relative to Americans increases over time (as it has), the relatively low wages of South Koreans will increase faster than those of Americans (as they have). The incentive to employ a greater proportion of South Koreans will increase at the margin, for those jobs where the comparative profitability was previously on the knife edge. There is a one-off expenditure associated with relocating jobs, so there won't be a lot of frantic switching back and forth.
Companies such as Dell attempted to transfer some fairly low-skilled service jobs, such as front-line routine customer service, to India, a country with low wages, a supply of well-educated people, and lots of English-speakers. Despite those characteristics, Dell and others chose to move those positions back to the US. A variety of problems such as accent difficulties and time zone differences made the India option the worse choice.
Mercedes, BMW, and Honda have discovered that it is more profitable to employ American auto workers than German or Japanese ones manufacturing cars both for the American market and for export. Plants in America manufacture "European" cars and export them to Europe.
Much of the recent whining about offshoring has been triggered by a perception that it is no longer merely manufacturing jobs that are being transferred overseas, but that now relatively skilled white-collar jobs are being "exported". Why is this of more concern? Are we claiming that unemployment among the lower classes isn't a serious problem, but that once job market transformations affect our more educated, highly-compensated Americans it is now a problem worth paying attention to? Not that I admit that there is any validity to this idea of "exporting" jobs, but even if it were true, how do the self-appointed champions of the people justify being more concerned about the conditions of the wealthier?
A more fundamental lie is that there is some sort of jobs deficit, that there are a fixed number of jobs to go around and that we are in some sense exporting some of these jobs. This is known as the "lump of labor" fallacy, and has been recognized as spurious for nearly two hundred years. Yet idiots continue to promote this ridiculous idea. Simply put, as GDP increases over time, we're doing more stuff. We may being doing different stuff, but it's more valuable stuff than we used to be doing. Some companies may employ fewer people, but others employ more. Our population continues to increase, and our employment rate is not decreasing (in fact, it's increasing over the long haul).
A particularly offensive notion is the idea that is being energetically asserted by John Kerry, when he calls companies and their management "Benedict Arnolds" for offshoring. Fulfilling their duties to their employers (the shareholders) by providing employment for people in other countries, usually people who are painfully impoverished by our standards, contributing to a more efficient allocation of human capital in America, and allowing for potentially substantially reduced costs to American consumers is apparently treason against the Republic. Treason is punishable by death. Treason is one of the worst crimes we have. Are going to send our employers to the electric chair? Shall we round up the vicious enemies of global poverty and put them in concentration camps, or show mercy and simply lock them up for life? Presumably Kerry's wife will be the first up against the wall. Heinz operates 57 of its 79 factories and employs 72% of its workforce outside the US.
I'm not thrilled about the job the President has done in his first term. But I wouldn't vote for Kerry even if you put a gun to my head.
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hey
Date: 2004-08-18 05:04 am (UTC)Of course, the peasant and I don't live on the same river. But we do live on the same planet, so if I want to make it worth his while to leave the rainforest alone to soak up carbon out of the atmosphere, I'd better hire him to take care of the rainforest for me. If I want China to not pump so much greenhouse gas into the sky, I'd better pay them for that, too. The Kyoto solution of ignoring what poor countries do doesn't work as well.
There's actually a working example or two of this. There's a bunch of peasants in Indonesia who are getting paid by some NGO to protect part of an orangutan habitat. They get paid collectively, and only if zero trees get cut down. They also don't get paid if orangutan meat or babies ("pets") show up in a local marketplace.
The result has been that there's been very effective cooperation within the community. No one wants to be the guy who had any forest cut down near his home. No one wants to be the guy who let poachers in, or out. Where there had been essentially no enforcement of poaching laws, soon any poachers who go near the forest mysteriously turned up dead. All the remaining poachers seem to have moved to some other line of work.