most of it in low GPD/capita countries. europe and NA make up more than half the world economy, add in japan and AU/NZ and you have nearly 2/3 of the world economy with stagnant or declining working age population.

/actually AU/NZ are doing quite ok but that's mostly because of immigration, so you're missing those people in other countries. incidentally these two are outgrowing most of the other western countries.

I have similar sentiments. A lot of the arguments made in this thread are going to be experiences from people who have worked closely with the trades or blue-collar industries (I have similar thoughts from my experiences with the oil and gas industry) versus people who are far removed from that and only see the lower prices.

Also, a lot of our current trade policies were either relics of the cold war to get countries to ally with us against the Soviets, or made during the Clinton era to bail out countries that were going through major recessions, like Japan and Mexico, or for currying favor with the newly formed EU which was though to become the next big powerhouse. However, those countries no longer need our charity and the scheme of allowing them to tariff us while refraining from tariffing them back ought to end.

Here's some reading on the topic:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/t...-in-the-1990s/

Sure. I've seen trade presented this way before.

I expect some criticisms of US trade policy towards China are warranted along the lines you present. But both here and also with this:

You seem to be oversimplifying the questions to the point of obvious absurdity. Trade is only one factor in GDP growth (or economic growth in general), both for China and for other countries as well. So presenting a simple GDP growth chart seems like a very silly way to attempt to falsify the theory of comparative advantage.

The same kind of problem applies here, except I'm not even entirely sure what you are trying to argue. I think you're trying to argue that we should see slower population growth globally given the truth of the claim that "free trade improves the global economy", because of the well known negative correlation between economic development and fertility, but that is pretty obviously trying to make too much of too little and too imprecise of data. I think the answer to the question is "sure, why not?" I don't have any reason to expect a correlation between trade policy and population growth to be so significant as to be meaningful when looking at a chart of population growth by continent/region.

Note that I also expect that the statement "free trade improves the global economy" is at least too simplistic (even if roughly true as an historical statement) and that the details of trade agreements matter, as with China and the US. I expect that other economic factors matter as much or more than trade. I also think that "free trade" agreements negotiated mostly to benefit wealthier countries like the US may or may not always actually be as beneficial to developing countries or "the global economy" as advertised, or may not be as beneficial as they could be. But I'm sure we can find analyses of the impact of free trade agreements that use better data than population growth charts.

Maybe the article chytry linked is flawed despite being convincingly written, but this type of argument isn't even that. Of course it's also probably not necessary to disprove the entire general value of free trade in order to try to defend Trump's specific actions, and I think a more specific argument is likely to be more compelling.

Cheap labor is a pretty big competitive advantage and mobilizing/incentivizing a billion people to be economically productive is a huge boon to growth. That and tech advancements are the primary drivers of growth and the developed world has absorbed most of the gains from the former. A greater proportion of working age people is a small issue relative to the gains you see from transitioning from a simple farming culture to a country that can produce goods that are in demand from a world with deep pockets at a significantly lower cost (partly from shirking IP laws partly from dirt cheap labor).

We see protectionism associated with growth because it’s a symptom of having something worth protecting.

This is exactly my point. Why has economic growth declined when a billion+ people over Asia - dwarfing the US and Europe and several billion peripherally - became economically productive, and a whole economy rose from near nothing to equal the US?

This is simply wrong. From 1995 to 2018 we had an explosion of computing, automation, new materials, new medicines, cellphones and their ecosystems, the entire Internet and networking infrastructures, and all the huge productivity advantages these provide.
Exactly!!! Why has global economic growth slowed down, then? The world had a higher growth rate when the US/Europe were the engines of economic growth. Add China and a billion+ people over Asia, India, Brazil, etc, AND global trades explosions, and the global overall growth rate slows down. You're making my argument for me.

As for the argument that "you would expect lower growth rates", economist consensus disagrees. They have horribly misjudged Western growth. Why?



What is it that economists are failing so horribly to understand? They have the same working age population and productivity data as we do, and consider it far more rigorously. Yet their models fail. Why?



Given economic predictions, your assertions that we should expect slower growth because of population dynamics seems completely at odds with the consensus, which considers this data much more deeply than we do. So try again. Why has global growth failed so badly? Why has it slowed down so much?

And I wanna be really clear here... I'm not TS's normal audience. I sincerely disagree with him about all sorts of political ****. I even think he has a dangerous tendency towards racism lol. FFS we only recently got him to stop calling people cucks.

This issue right here he's actually pretty close to 100% right about. At some point we need to stop treating the Chinese like they are acting in good faith. People acting in good faith don't act like they have.

I'm actually pro the end of the American empire. I think we are getting robbed by the whole world on defense, healthcare, and trade. The sooner we unwind the whole thing the better off we'll be. It's not sustainable. We spent enough money to rebuild all of our infrastructure and upgrade public education on Iraq and Afghanistan. We are never going to see that money again, but I'm going to be paying for it for the rest of my life. When I'm feeling depressed it makes ME want to immigrate to some stable country where my taxes are at least returned to the population in the form of actual services. This doesn't even get into how I feel about funding our current criminal justice system.

EDIT: Interestingly I also give nukes existing 100% of the credit for the era of peace we've supposedly presided over since the end of WW2. Near as I can tell we've swiped right on every remotely justifiable war since the end of WW2.

This is off topic but this is happening live right now, just screenshotted it.

Denis Rodman in a Make America Great Again hat with a PotCoin.com shirt - whose sponsorship he mentioned live on air - is being interviewed as an expert on CNN because Donald Trump - who is president by the way - is meeting Kim Jong Un.



Go back 5 years and tell me this is real life.

I've basically decided that the events of the last 2 years are proof that this is all a simulation and someone dragged Donald Trumps face and dropped it on the White House to see what would happen.

World GDP _is_ growing for one. Maybe not at the rates some expected, and i can't defend any particular estimate (and i doubt the people who made them had a high degree of confidence in their accuracy), but why are we using that as the standard? Growth isn't an inevitability and the fact that the rate it's growing at is less than it was in previous generations doesn't suggest that something is awry.

I also suspect that a lot of growth we'd expect to see from tech is understated by things that we're now able to get at close to no cost because the tech isn't patented (or patent-able under current laws). The internet has improved peoples lives immensely but a lot of the benefits we derive from it arent monetized. If people had to pay royalties for every piece of tech that enhanced their lives life would be significantly more expensive, people would work a lot harder to pay for it, and the numbers would be beefed up significantly. In effect GDP is going down as a consequent of specific types of technological improvements despite them clearly making peoples lives better.

I mean think about the effect of importing a garage door versus manufacturing it here just on transportation spend.

The locally manufactured door 2-3 incoming shipments of materials for every outgoing shipment of product, and the step up the supply chain has the same ratio creating things like steel coils and door panels. By the time it reaches a distribution center it's responsible for a solid month of work for the combined truckers of America.

An imported load hits the port, is drayed to a warehouse where it's prepped for shipment to the DC, and then it's shipped to the DC. If that's 33% it's because the DC is on the East coast.

Losing the jobs is only OK if you are getting jobs from their side in return. There are two currencies being traded here, and fiat currency is probably the less important of the two. If there aren't actual productivity gains from a trade it probably shouldn't occur since it will probably waste transportation resources.

It is completely fine to have them employ a bunch of white collar American service workers in exchange for us employing their factory workers. It's the net decent jobs that matters.

Do you also protect against technology and forbid people to use anything that replaces workers? It would be just as effective in creating jobs, just as costly to the rest of society, and the jobs you get would be subject to the same basic market pressures as any industry meaning that they wouldn't carry some sick premium above and beyond what you can get applying your efforts elsewhere.

The number of jobs you'd have to bring back to have a significant impact on prevailing wages would be enormous. The corresponding costs to consumers would be crippling. Taxing the winners from trade and slanting the tax rates in favor of low income workers is no more of a redistribution of wealth than erecting those barriers to trade and is much more efficient in the technical sense.

To the chinese (and the arguments for the US protecting specific industries) it's more about control/autonomy than jobs.

Of course not. For starters productivity gains (this is tech advancement by another name in most cases) typically do not result in lost net decent jobs. If one country has a real comparative advantage in making something, even through cheap labor, it's completely fine for trade to commence... But if that country won't take your goods and services in exchange the trade is massively toxic for the side that isn't getting their stuff bought.

The Chinese haven't been in any danger of allowing free trade. They've had incredibly protectionist policies this entire time, but we've allowed it because for geopolitical reasons. I think those reasons are in no danger of being sufficient, and in fact are a major reason why our political system is such a mess right now.

It's virtually impossible to tell our people that the sky is green (free trade is good for you!!! even though it isn't actually free trade!!!) for 30 years without them getting angry at the whole system. Get them sufficiently angry and they start looking for things that are genuinely different. I actually think Obama benefited from this deep public resentment in 2008 and 2012 as much as Trump did in 2016. You know people want something different when they elect first a black guy and then a cheeto that played a billionaire on TV badly.

because if you remove your tariffs but your trading partner leaves massive subsidies for their producers in place its not free trade.

there are other factors to consider, like national security. there are industries where you don't want to be fully dependant on other countries. so you subsidize your own producers to keep them and their know-how around. obviously agriculture comes to mind, but there are others.

/you would obviously consider how reliable your trade partners are when weighing those factors. i'd argue trump's america isn't being viewed as the most reliable right now.

I highly disagree with the notion in this thread that if one country is able to freely export while protecting against imports that it will be better off than true free trade. Input costs would skyrocket and they would be unable to produce enough to meet their own demands and the demands of exporting. Especially since the world isn't two countries and there are other countries engaging in free trade that country wouldn't be able to be competitive anymore with their exports.
Also, the country engaging in protectionism wouldn't be incentivized to improve/innovate their product/process and would fall further behind the rest of the world.

I mean, China disproves your notion fully. Also, the idea isn't being fully protectionist as in not importing anything. The idea is protect the industries you want to grow at the expense of other countries. If you can access their markets while they can't access yours, that is a huge boon for local producers.

This is a silly notion. What if the product process is already worked out and it's purely a war on who buys what? This is true of most products.

For two, there's plenty of incentive to improve and innovate from internal competition. Even beyond that, to sell in external markets, you must compete with external suppliers. So protectionism doesn't affect that at all for most classes of goods.

The fake news has given you a fake view of protectionism it seems. It's a huge positive as long as the other market leaves their country open while you close yours strategically, or use it as leverage to extract 50% ownership of foreign companies who want to enter.

Imagine how much wealthier the US would be if the US adopted China's policy - that those companies wanting access to the US market must build a factory in America, give the US government 50% ownership, and pass along all their IP - which the US then gives to its own 100% American companies to compete. All that German and Korean IP from Germans and Koreans wanting to sell here would be pretty great.

You're definitely wrong about this. Believe it or not when you take Canada, Mexico, and the US you have access to fairly competitive raw materials prices and manufacturing at whatever scale you want particularly once shipping costs are considered.

That last paragraph is why I'm super irritated that Trump has done anything but shower love on Canada and Mexico. Those relationships are pretty freaking close to true free trade and we're all benefiting from it a lot.

EDIT: You need to understand that nobody here is ****ting on free trade. Free trade is a two way street. One way streets are very good for screwer and very bad for the screwee. The lie (which I was fed ad nauseum in undergrad econ) is that one way streets are good for the receiver.

Yes, of course you guys disagree with my statement since I was disagreeing with your statements on that particular matter.
With regards to incentive- things can always be made relatively cheaper with regards to supply chain and production. If there isn't much competition often worker's salaries and pension plans will inflate (obv not the case in China- but in may in the future as their general wealth improves)

China's currency manipulation also gives it a huge export advantage by devaluing its own yuan ¥

This.

What they gain from having exclusive rights to their domestic buyers comes directly out of the pockets of people who're buying domestically; if the domestic producers could satisfy the entirety of the demand without the equilibrium price going up nobody would be buying from foreign producers in the first place.

Foreign producers lose from lower volume of sale too but it's not like any side is walking with big bags of money from the arrangement.




Specifically wrt auto manufactures which is what i asusume you're referring to, the net result is not an immediate win for either side. What the chinese government gains in ownership/tax perks is directly proportional to what the chinese consumers lose.

The long term issue for car companies is that they're each "selling" their tech know-how to companies that have huge labor cost advantages, but that's something they could've done with or without a protectionist policy. There're a lot of ways they could have effectively bought that knowledge/tech.

Factories, infrastructure and knowhow are enduring wealth. All Chinese are better off from China's cheating.

China has $3 trillion in foreign currency and walk away with $500 billion of net inflows plus maybe the same again in yearly added wealth from tech transfers. That's a big bag of money where I'm from. Add to that now owning an economy maybe half as big in meaningful terms as the US, from practically noting - itself probably worth tens of trillions - and your assertion that no one is walking away with big bags of money is loopy.

No it isn't. Apply a little first principles thinking rather than your models. What the Chinese government gains is factories and knowhow for making cars, as well as 50% share of what would be foreign-sent profits, in perpetuity. This is an enormous amount of value. It's not like the Chinese pay more for home grown cars than Americans pay. No consumers are losing. China overall is winning out of this deal.

No, there aren't, or they wouldn't be doing it. You operate on a lot of assumptions that aren't real. I'm not sure you realize what's involved in production, or how hard it is, or how much knowhow it takes, how many decades of trial and error and the slow development of a complex ecosystem to support it. The best in the world crush the second best (look at what the Japanese did to US car companies), and they don't give away their advantage without being forced to, particularly to sheltered competitors. Boeing for example has avoided China for years because it knows the enormous cost of giving up knowhow.

US corporations would have never become so successful without China. Also, no other large country has benefited from globalization more than the US. The world is flooded with US products, but of course a lot of them are at least partially made outside the US.

They didn't do anything about IP theft when China was much weaker, but this is also exaggerated. For example, they are still years behind in chips and have to develop their own tech. And it's not like they can just flood the drugs market with copies of patented drugs either.

And if we want to talk how much are certain advantages worth, how much does the US benefit from English being a world language? That alone exceeds a lot of the perceived grievances.

Another unsupported generalization that's parroted all the time.

Unless you actually have some evidence.