This overview explains itself from the BLS. It's just a matter of you all looking over the occupational statistics, plus going to the links to help you navigate through the BLS site on occupation. It's very seriously depressing, but also take a look at their overall tables. The next time you hear something that sounds like fiction about jobs, check out these occupational numbers for it puts occupations in scale. For example, 71k computer hardware engineers is simply a drop in the bucket in terms of America's jobs crisis and claiming growing those jobs (of course they want to fill them with foreigners) is oh so critical, think about the scale. Are 100 more computer engineers gonna scale and hire 1 million advanced skilled manufacturing workers (or train those additional 1 million in advanced skilled manufacturing?) No, not when MNCs insist on manufacturing in China it doesn't.
Additionally, check out the salaries and compare those to skills, the level of difficulty on some of these jobs. Take again computer hardware design. That is one tough skill and many who have degrees in the topic simply cannot master processor design, it's just highly complex. Yet their salaries are matching other skills areas which take less raw brain muscle and training. That shows some labor arbitrage for that result to happen to lower wages overall. In other words, the damn BLS again counts foreign guest workers as US workers and it seriously over inflates the occupational statistics and distorts the opportunities for Americans.
I'm just using one example but use these occupational statistics as a reality check against the pundit rhetoric and jobs propaganda you hear spewed about. Also, if you hear lobbyists screaming "shortage" yet overall wages are static or lower, that's an indication of labor arbitrage. If there really was a shortage wages would go through the roof as employers bid up wages in trying to retain those skills areas.
Walmart is able to undercut small businesses partly because the tax payer subsidizes a substantial portion of the firm's costs. A 2004 study by UC Berkley found that the state of California was spending $86 million annually subsidizing the retailer. Most of this cost was in the form of aid to the retailer's under-paid and under-employed workforce. If you consider the opportunity cost of this lost tax revenue and the other costs, Walmart is the most expensive retailer around. You could even say that the retailer is a giant welfare program for the Waltons.
The hits just keep on coming. ZeroHedge has an interesting post on why operation twist will not be extended. There simply are not enough long term Treasuries to buy, about a 2-3 month supply.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the largest U.S. bank, will pay $20 million to resolve a U.S. regulator’s claims that the firm mishandled customer funds from Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEHMQ) from 2006 to 2008.
Remember we have an incredible scandal going on at the moment where MF Global used customer money to make JPMorgan Chase margin calls due to their irresponsible derivatives trading in sovereign bonds, CDSes.
Wal-Mart has created tens of thousands of jobs in Northwest Arkansas. This includes both direct hires and employees of vendors who set up satellite offices in Bentonville. Do your studies take into account all the jobs created in this region?
Surely it's a good thing that a historically disadvantaged region of the country is booming with jobs?
the race to the bottom plus Walmart wiped out, I don't know the total but it's at least in the thousands of Mom & Pop small businesses across the U.S. Small independent hardware stores, dime stores, gardening stores, pet stores and so on and beyond what that did to small businesses, it also severely limited product choice. Walmart can literally make or break a wholesaler and manufacturer and many times did. Squeezing them to every 1/10th of a cent to the point they either went out of business or moved manufacturing to China in order to survive at all.
In 2010 the Dallas Fed also published pure propaganda on foreign STEM workers. It's astounding how U.S. STEM workers are dismissed & ignored as a complete waste, a talent loss, for America. In other words, the job loss, the career loss, the income loss and most importantly, the innovation loss from global labor arbitrage, STEM worker displacement, age discrimination, sex discrimination and so on is completely ignored.
They count foreign guest workers, and never count the massive number of America workers who were forced out of their careers, forced to train their replacements and denied opportunity, career. Viola, of course things come up rosy when one ignores half of an equation.
So, this is again, a cherry picking situation in reports, gotta read the fine print from these people.
The real news here is a Federal Reserve regional branch published a strong manifesto that TBTF needs to end. While it's true and obvious, usually the only ones who say that are people like us, the financial/economics sites, independent on the press and government and groups like OWS.
Thanks very much for this very important information! I'll see if I can wake some people up with this as to what the critical issues really are, for America today.
I'd say my favorite was Google tap too. Anyone with a background in R&D should be rolling on the floor with these, but I think technology is now incorporated into everyone's daily life, most people are gonna get it.
I cannot tell you how many meetings and situations where presentations are about on this level and people are SERIOUS!
I'm thrilled Moog got into the mix (he he).
I don't think I've personally laughed out loud to that extent in a while and we know I put together those economic funnies collections, so I look over a lot of funny stuff!
I was wondering why site traffic was so down and no comments, only to discover the comment posting was broken on the site! Sorry about that. I'm working on fixing it as I type and I'm trying something new to make anonymous comments easier, yet keep out the spambots (they attack any site ad nauseum). I thought maybe this post had laid a big egg, and I was thinking bummer because I had such fun with it.
I mean come on, it's going over a week where "the lottery" is front page news. That is simply obscene, it's gambling, it's not a story and I think ever day there is a drawing somewhere for a multi-million dollar lottery. They somehow tapped into America's gambling addiction and put the crowd, in masse, in mass hysteria.
It makes sense. Speak binary to binary machines. It's all binary anyway. Ask any YinYang!
FCC never should have removed Morse proficiency from Ham Radio licenses! But that won't be much of a problem -- kids will catch up in no time. It's the new texting.
"Wheat from shaft" -- that's EP's mission statement alright, in plain old English!
BTW: when I suggest that "cognitive dissonance between ITIF's support for outsourcing versus ITIF's support for domestic manufacturing is an expression of the underlying contradictions of the WTO world-system," I don't have such a huge ego as to suppose that I know some great secret that the ITIF guys do not know. But, like everyone, they may very well have blind spots or biases in the world views through which they perceive reality.
The major bias of ITIF, and also World Bank and many others, is easily seen in their avoidance of the word "protectionism" (unless used pejoratively). By contrast, what EP promotes is employment for Americans -- policies deliberately targeting that goal. But the objective of employment for Americans in America lies squarely within the heart and soul of the protectionist approach to political economics.
These ITIF guys would run from the room if caught on camera advocating anything like protectionism or anything related to the word 'protectionist'. That would spell the end of their pending grant proposals! But, why would anyone be opposed to protectionism? -- especially in a country with a defense budget like ours?
When Atkinson urges "Fight systemic neo-mercantilism," he could say that he is seeking a more pure globalism, not advocating protectionism. The problem is that there's no separating mercantilism and protectionism!
What Clausewitz actually said was this --
"War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means." -- Karl von Clausewitz
In the same way, neo-mercantilism is not a phenomenon independent of protectionism, it is the continuation of protectionism by other means.
It's past time for politicians, think-tankers, MSM and the working people of America to acknowledge that reality. Tell it like it is! In plain old English!
I found this going backwards. As you are aware, I often overview the BLS labor productivity, international capital flying around the globe from domestic MNCs, pick the GDP report apart to the point I probably turn off most of the audience here and so on.
Well, I've had real trouble with productivity reports in particular as well as implicit price deflators. So, I was looking around the Internets and came across this research and lo behold found some meaty work.
I've been saying for some time if people want more accurate government statistics they should write their Congress reps to get more funding and also require additional data points, a huge one which doesn't jive with Dem party leadership is immigration status of workers.
Well, one of the points in Q&A is about the BLS/BEA data metrics, these very issues and the lack of funding additionally to add more granularity to the stats.
Well, bottom line, their work jives with what I've dug up myself, so I wanted to amplify this. Something is simply "wrong with this picture" to see a $300B trade deficit with China alone (yearly), 33% of jobs lost in manufacturing when the overall population has grown by ?? 14% or something like that, wages repressed, income repressed, labor participation rates for ages 25-54 plummet, lost manufacturing raw capacity...an Indian BPO industry that's something like 9% of their GDP and the list goes on and on, yet magically, none of this shows up in the GDI/GDP/productivity/international capital flows stats?
I'm not saying we'd see 50%, 40% or even 30% value added lost by offshore outsourcing, but something is wrong with this picture to not capture this in productivity, offshore outsourcing.
Anywho, if they are typical Dems they will rail against offshore outsourcing all the while encouraging the dual, insourcing through foreign guest worker Visas. The H-1B isn't called the offshore outsourcing Visa for nothing!
But bottom line this work, just focusing on this, looks solid. The rest of what these cats do, well, I don't know I'm just not that familiar but I can give this word of caution. I cherry pick and read each paper, each result and take it piecemeal. I have to. Case in point Heritage foundation has some great, accurate work on Chinese currency manipulation. If you want to read some pure fiction, read their agenda on Medicare as an example.
Wheat from shaft.
You know here at EP we ain't into putting up no damn economic fiction spin just cause some corporate lobbyists or lobbyist front group wants it so. We ain't into that corporate, political, philosophical agenda those cats pay the big bucks for. ;)
Robert Oak asks: "Why would the ITIF promote more U.S. STEM labor arbitrage and worker displacement [while also advocating support for U.S. domestic manufacturing]?"
Here's something very interesting from Atkinson's closing remarks -- "Fight systemic neo-mercantilism around the globe!" But then I have to wonder what is meant by 'fighting systemic neo-mercantilism'. Probably, it's a coded reference to the laudable and almost successful effort by the Senate late last year to enact legislation defending against China's currency manipulation ... but let me explain my question about the meaning of 'fighting systemic neo-mercantilism' ...
The second speaker, who followed Atkinson, brings up the point that economic measurements are still nation-based. He (second speaker) goes on to explain that the "data and narrative" we have been relying on is "just not right" -- because we should be measuring (and narrating) the global economy, not the national economy. I find a certain cognitive dissonance here between the idea that national economic numbers are beside the point and Atkinson's urging a fight against systemic neo-mercantilism ... but maybe I have the wrong impression of what it means to 'fight systemic neo-mercantilism'.
To me, with an America First outlook, to fight systemic neo-mercantilism would be to fight for fundamental reform of the WTO. Looking at the other side of the same coin, to fight systemic neo-mercantilism would be for USA to find a way to become successful (that is, to survive as a democratic nation) in the neo-mercantilist world-system.
But someone else might say, no, the idea is to forget about national interests, forget about nation-based democracy, forget about all that ... USA policy should be directed toward somehow forcing all nations to abandon anything that resembles protectionism. Have I shifted the discussion from 'mercantilism' to 'protectionism'? I don't think it's really a shift at all: to paraphrase von Clausewitz, mercantilism is the extension of protectionism by other means.
I suggest that cognitive dissonance between ITIF's support for outsourcing versus ITIF's support for domestic manufacturing is an expression of the underlying contradictions of the WTO world-system -- especially respecting national democracies (and those represent, after all, the only democracy that may possibly exist in the world today).
In short, these guys are corporatist globalists grappling with the fundamental tension or contradiction between the necessity for democratic institutions to control the destructive tendencies of global corporatism versus structural limitations of the existing WTO world system. That world system, lest we forget, was promulgated on the premise that nation-states would "wither away" under the dictatorship of the corporations -- not unlike the Marxists of old (also globalists) who confidently predicted the same thing, but under the dictatorship of the international proletariat!
Back in 2003, there was considerable talk in the blogosphere about the 'real' reason for the Afghan adventure was that someone (Big Oil?) would stand to make a killing from a North-South pipeline through Afghanistan, connecting central Asia energy resources to some seaport in Pakistan (and also into India).
IMO, the supposed North-South pipeline was a beard for the actual concern (for USA national/global interests/security), which was or is the prospect of China constructing an East-West pipeline and otherwise bringing Iran within their central Asia infrastructure. (I assume Iran-centered PNAC Doctrine analysis of Iraq/Afghanistan War.) Of course, preventing the China venture and constructing the North-South pipeline could be seen as two sides of a single coin. Russia clearly fits into the picture, but it's unclear exactly how or on which side.
According to Ian Bremmer, China has a great advantage over USA because, unlike the American people, the Chinese people are not crazy. By way of illustrating his point, Bremmer notes that on visits to China, he has never spoken to anyone who doesn't believe in evolution or global warming, whereas he has found climate skepticism and lip-service to anti-evolution views common among the American people and even in the USA ruling elite.
Bremmer appeared on the NPR show, 'Intelligence Squared', which currently features a debate on this question: 'Does China Do Capitalism Better Than America?'
Two guys on each side, with little or no attempt at an agreement on whether either country is "doing capitalism" or on what "capitalism" is or should be ... but whatever capitalism really is, two guys said China does it better, and two said no they don't.
On the pro-China side, there appeared to be an attempt to include both a 'liberal' and a 'conservative'. There was Orville Schell representing (IMO) the view of the Council on Foreign Relations, of which Schell is a member. Then there was Peter Schiff, who was Ron Paul's economic adviser in 2008. Maybe Schiff would be better described as anti-USA than as pro-China, although he would claim that he is pro-USA in such views as that minimum wage laws are a pernicious feature of USA economy, the root cause of unemployment. (China has been undertaking minimum wage reforms for a few years now, so how Schiff's view of that issue relates to the debate question was unclear.)
On the con side of the question, there wasn't really any conservative or liberal -- rather, we had two interesting and rational views presented. It's not surprising that, based on audience response, the con side won by a landslide.
There was Minxin Pei, born in China and a professor at Claremont McKenna College. Pei is author of the book, China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy.
Then there was Ian Bremmer, who has a doctoral degree in political science from Stanford and teaches at Columbia. Bremmer is founder and president of Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm. He has written several books, including the bestseller The End of the Free Market and The J Curve. Bremmer's next book, Every Nation for Itself, is to be available soon.
I am giving NPR good marks for this show. They managed to maintain the NPR approach to the problems of bias by including a 'liberal' and a 'conservative' but put them where they belong -- on the same side. Then they actually went on to present two interesting and rational views, not clearly identifiable as 'liberal' or 'conservative'.
Bremmer more than once made his point that the American people and their elected representatives are ... like ... certifiable (my choice of words). As a risk analyst trying to evaluate issues presented by Numerian in recent blog, 'Ben Bernanke Runs Out of Options', Bremmer finds wide-spread irrationality to be troubling.
This overview explains itself from the BLS. It's just a matter of you all looking over the occupational statistics, plus going to the links to help you navigate through the BLS site on occupation. It's very seriously depressing, but also take a look at their overall tables. The next time you hear something that sounds like fiction about jobs, check out these occupational numbers for it puts occupations in scale. For example, 71k computer hardware engineers is simply a drop in the bucket in terms of America's jobs crisis and claiming growing those jobs (of course they want to fill them with foreigners) is oh so critical, think about the scale. Are 100 more computer engineers gonna scale and hire 1 million advanced skilled manufacturing workers (or train those additional 1 million in advanced skilled manufacturing?) No, not when MNCs insist on manufacturing in China it doesn't.
Additionally, check out the salaries and compare those to skills, the level of difficulty on some of these jobs. Take again computer hardware design. That is one tough skill and many who have degrees in the topic simply cannot master processor design, it's just highly complex. Yet their salaries are matching other skills areas which take less raw brain muscle and training. That shows some labor arbitrage for that result to happen to lower wages overall. In other words, the damn BLS again counts foreign guest workers as US workers and it seriously over inflates the occupational statistics and distorts the opportunities for Americans.
I'm just using one example but use these occupational statistics as a reality check against the pundit rhetoric and jobs propaganda you hear spewed about. Also, if you hear lobbyists screaming "shortage" yet overall wages are static or lower, that's an indication of labor arbitrage. If there really was a shortage wages would go through the roof as employers bid up wages in trying to retain those skills areas.
Walmart is able to undercut small businesses partly because the tax payer subsidizes a substantial portion of the firm's costs. A 2004 study by UC Berkley found that the state of California was spending $86 million annually subsidizing the retailer. Most of this cost was in the form of aid to the retailer's under-paid and under-employed workforce. If you consider the opportunity cost of this lost tax revenue and the other costs, Walmart is the most expensive retailer around. You could even say that the retailer is a giant welfare program for the Waltons.
and so we should disregard all the good jobs in both mfg and retail that is displaced in other parts of the country like the norhteast?
give me the numbers?
i bet they don't work out all that well with Wal-mart demanding all of its' suppliers shift from US manufacturing to chinese manufacturing
but... i could be wrong but i doubt it
The hits just keep on coming. ZeroHedge has an interesting post on why operation twist will not be extended. There simply are not enough long term Treasuries to buy, about a 2-3 month supply.
Here we go, yet another major outrage and another slap on the wrist, pay to play fine.
Bloomberg:
Remember we have an incredible scandal going on at the moment where MF Global used customer money to make JPMorgan Chase margin calls due to their irresponsible derivatives trading in sovereign bonds, CDSes.
Wal-Mart has created tens of thousands of jobs in Northwest Arkansas. This includes both direct hires and employees of vendors who set up satellite offices in Bentonville. Do your studies take into account all the jobs created in this region?
Surely it's a good thing that a historically disadvantaged region of the country is booming with jobs?
Astounding how Wall Street wants their fix. Was it hedge fund herion or market morphine the Dallas Fed Pres. called it?
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the race to the bottom plus Walmart wiped out, I don't know the total but it's at least in the thousands of Mom & Pop small businesses across the U.S. Small independent hardware stores, dime stores, gardening stores, pet stores and so on and beyond what that did to small businesses, it also severely limited product choice. Walmart can literally make or break a wholesaler and manufacturer and many times did. Squeezing them to every 1/10th of a cent to the point they either went out of business or moved manufacturing to China in order to survive at all.
In 2010 the Dallas Fed also published pure propaganda on foreign STEM workers. It's astounding how U.S. STEM workers are dismissed & ignored as a complete waste, a talent loss, for America. In other words, the job loss, the career loss, the income loss and most importantly, the innovation loss from global labor arbitrage, STEM worker displacement, age discrimination, sex discrimination and so on is completely ignored.
They count foreign guest workers, and never count the massive number of America workers who were forced out of their careers, forced to train their replacements and denied opportunity, career. Viola, of course things come up rosy when one ignores half of an equation.
So, this is again, a cherry picking situation in reports, gotta read the fine print from these people.
The real news here is a Federal Reserve regional branch published a strong manifesto that TBTF needs to end. While it's true and obvious, usually the only ones who say that are people like us, the financial/economics sites, independent on the press and government and groups like OWS.
Thanks very much for this very important information! I'll see if I can wake some people up with this as to what the critical issues really are, for America today.
Great link to Dallas Federal Reserve Bank annual reports webpage. The complete PDF is well worth downloading.
simple. hire americans means more jobs for americans and more output for America. America is Americans.
I'd say my favorite was Google tap too. Anyone with a background in R&D should be rolling on the floor with these, but I think technology is now incorporated into everyone's daily life, most people are gonna get it.
I cannot tell you how many meetings and situations where presentations are about on this level and people are SERIOUS!
I'm thrilled Moog got into the mix (he he).
I don't think I've personally laughed out loud to that extent in a while and we know I put together those economic funnies collections, so I look over a lot of funny stuff!
I was wondering why site traffic was so down and no comments, only to discover the comment posting was broken on the site! Sorry about that. I'm working on fixing it as I type and I'm trying something new to make anonymous comments easier, yet keep out the spambots (they attack any site ad nauseum). I thought maybe this post had laid a big egg, and I was thinking bummer because I had such fun with it.
I mean come on, it's going over a week where "the lottery" is front page news. That is simply obscene, it's gambling, it's not a story and I think ever day there is a drawing somewhere for a multi-million dollar lottery. They somehow tapped into America's gambling addiction and put the crowd, in masse, in mass hysteria.
My favorite is Gmail tap. CQ
I have to take it seriously! QRZ
It makes sense. Speak binary to binary machines. It's all binary anyway. Ask any YinYang!
FCC never should have removed Morse proficiency from Ham Radio licenses! But that won't be much of a problem -- kids will catch up in no time. It's the new texting.
"Wheat from shaft" -- that's EP's mission statement alright, in plain old English!
BTW: when I suggest that "cognitive dissonance between ITIF's support for outsourcing versus ITIF's support for domestic manufacturing is an expression of the underlying contradictions of the WTO world-system," I don't have such a huge ego as to suppose that I know some great secret that the ITIF guys do not know. But, like everyone, they may very well have blind spots or biases in the world views through which they perceive reality.
The major bias of ITIF, and also World Bank and many others, is easily seen in their avoidance of the word "protectionism" (unless used pejoratively). By contrast, what EP promotes is employment for Americans -- policies deliberately targeting that goal. But the objective of employment for Americans in America lies squarely within the heart and soul of the protectionist approach to political economics.
These ITIF guys would run from the room if caught on camera advocating anything like protectionism or anything related to the word 'protectionist'. That would spell the end of their pending grant proposals! But, why would anyone be opposed to protectionism? -- especially in a country with a defense budget like ours?
When Atkinson urges "Fight systemic neo-mercantilism," he could say that he is seeking a more pure globalism, not advocating protectionism. The problem is that there's no separating mercantilism and protectionism!
What Clausewitz actually said was this --
In the same way, neo-mercantilism is not a phenomenon independent of protectionism, it is the continuation of protectionism by other means.
It's past time for politicians, think-tankers, MSM and the working people of America to acknowledge that reality. Tell it like it is! In plain old English!
I found this going backwards. As you are aware, I often overview the BLS labor productivity, international capital flying around the globe from domestic MNCs, pick the GDP report apart to the point I probably turn off most of the audience here and so on.
Well, I've had real trouble with productivity reports in particular as well as implicit price deflators. So, I was looking around the Internets and came across this research and lo behold found some meaty work.
I've been saying for some time if people want more accurate government statistics they should write their Congress reps to get more funding and also require additional data points, a huge one which doesn't jive with Dem party leadership is immigration status of workers.
Well, one of the points in Q&A is about the BLS/BEA data metrics, these very issues and the lack of funding additionally to add more granularity to the stats.
Well, bottom line, their work jives with what I've dug up myself, so I wanted to amplify this. Something is simply "wrong with this picture" to see a $300B trade deficit with China alone (yearly), 33% of jobs lost in manufacturing when the overall population has grown by ?? 14% or something like that, wages repressed, income repressed, labor participation rates for ages 25-54 plummet, lost manufacturing raw capacity...an Indian BPO industry that's something like 9% of their GDP and the list goes on and on, yet magically, none of this shows up in the GDI/GDP/productivity/international capital flows stats?
I'm not saying we'd see 50%, 40% or even 30% value added lost by offshore outsourcing, but something is wrong with this picture to not capture this in productivity, offshore outsourcing.
Anywho, if they are typical Dems they will rail against offshore outsourcing all the while encouraging the dual, insourcing through foreign guest worker Visas. The H-1B isn't called the offshore outsourcing Visa for nothing!
But bottom line this work, just focusing on this, looks solid. The rest of what these cats do, well, I don't know I'm just not that familiar but I can give this word of caution. I cherry pick and read each paper, each result and take it piecemeal. I have to. Case in point Heritage foundation has some great, accurate work on Chinese currency manipulation. If you want to read some pure fiction, read their agenda on Medicare as an example.
Wheat from shaft.
You know here at EP we ain't into putting up no damn economic fiction spin just cause some corporate lobbyists or lobbyist front group wants it so. We ain't into that corporate, political, philosophical agenda those cats pay the big bucks for. ;)
I loved this FNM! But it does raise questions ...
Robert Oak asks: "Why would the ITIF promote more U.S. STEM labor arbitrage and worker displacement [while also advocating support for U.S. domestic manufacturing]?"
Here's something very interesting from Atkinson's closing remarks -- "Fight systemic neo-mercantilism around the globe!" But then I have to wonder what is meant by 'fighting systemic neo-mercantilism'. Probably, it's a coded reference to the laudable and almost successful effort by the Senate late last year to enact legislation defending against China's currency manipulation ... but let me explain my question about the meaning of 'fighting systemic neo-mercantilism' ...
The second speaker, who followed Atkinson, brings up the point that economic measurements are still nation-based. He (second speaker) goes on to explain that the "data and narrative" we have been relying on is "just not right" -- because we should be measuring (and narrating) the global economy, not the national economy. I find a certain cognitive dissonance here between the idea that national economic numbers are beside the point and Atkinson's urging a fight against systemic neo-mercantilism ... but maybe I have the wrong impression of what it means to 'fight systemic neo-mercantilism'.
To me, with an America First outlook, to fight systemic neo-mercantilism would be to fight for fundamental reform of the WTO. Looking at the other side of the same coin, to fight systemic neo-mercantilism would be for USA to find a way to become successful (that is, to survive as a democratic nation) in the neo-mercantilist world-system.
But someone else might say, no, the idea is to forget about national interests, forget about nation-based democracy, forget about all that ... USA policy should be directed toward somehow forcing all nations to abandon anything that resembles protectionism. Have I shifted the discussion from 'mercantilism' to 'protectionism'? I don't think it's really a shift at all: to paraphrase von Clausewitz, mercantilism is the extension of protectionism by other means.
I suggest that cognitive dissonance between ITIF's support for outsourcing versus ITIF's support for domestic manufacturing is an expression of the underlying contradictions of the WTO world-system -- especially respecting national democracies (and those represent, after all, the only democracy that may possibly exist in the world today).
In short, these guys are corporatist globalists grappling with the fundamental tension or contradiction between the necessity for democratic institutions to control the destructive tendencies of global corporatism versus structural limitations of the existing WTO world system. That world system, lest we forget, was promulgated on the premise that nation-states would "wither away" under the dictatorship of the corporations -- not unlike the Marxists of old (also globalists) who confidently predicted the same thing, but under the dictatorship of the international proletariat!
This is somewhat related but it just shows the crisis point going on with identity theft and credit card fraud/breaking in problems.
Cyber theives broke into the credit card data processing center, the motherlode of numbers.
Back in 2003, there was considerable talk in the blogosphere about the 'real' reason for the Afghan adventure was that someone (Big Oil?) would stand to make a killing from a North-South pipeline through Afghanistan, connecting central Asia energy resources to some seaport in Pakistan (and also into India).
IMO, the supposed North-South pipeline was a beard for the actual concern (for USA national/global interests/security), which was or is the prospect of China constructing an East-West pipeline and otherwise bringing Iran within their central Asia infrastructure. (I assume Iran-centered PNAC Doctrine analysis of Iraq/Afghanistan War.) Of course, preventing the China venture and constructing the North-South pipeline could be seen as two sides of a single coin. Russia clearly fits into the picture, but it's unclear exactly how or on which side.
According to Ian Bremmer, China has a great advantage over USA because, unlike the American people, the Chinese people are not crazy. By way of illustrating his point, Bremmer notes that on visits to China, he has never spoken to anyone who doesn't believe in evolution or global warming, whereas he has found climate skepticism and lip-service to anti-evolution views common among the American people and even in the USA ruling elite.
Bremmer appeared on the NPR show, 'Intelligence Squared', which currently features a debate on this question: 'Does China Do Capitalism Better Than America?'
Two guys on each side, with little or no attempt at an agreement on whether either country is "doing capitalism" or on what "capitalism" is or should be ... but whatever capitalism really is, two guys said China does it better, and two said no they don't.
On the pro-China side, there appeared to be an attempt to include both a 'liberal' and a 'conservative'. There was Orville Schell representing (IMO) the view of the Council on Foreign Relations, of which Schell is a member. Then there was Peter Schiff, who was Ron Paul's economic adviser in 2008. Maybe Schiff would be better described as anti-USA than as pro-China, although he would claim that he is pro-USA in such views as that minimum wage laws are a pernicious feature of USA economy, the root cause of unemployment. (China has been undertaking minimum wage reforms for a few years now, so how Schiff's view of that issue relates to the debate question was unclear.)
On the con side of the question, there wasn't really any conservative or liberal -- rather, we had two interesting and rational views presented. It's not surprising that, based on audience response, the con side won by a landslide.
There was Minxin Pei, born in China and a professor at Claremont McKenna College. Pei is author of the book, China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy.
Then there was Ian Bremmer, who has a doctoral degree in political science from Stanford and teaches at Columbia. Bremmer is founder and president of Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm. He has written several books, including the bestseller The End of the Free Market and The J Curve. Bremmer's next book, Every Nation for Itself, is to be available soon.
I am giving NPR good marks for this show. They managed to maintain the NPR approach to the problems of bias by including a 'liberal' and a 'conservative' but put them where they belong -- on the same side. Then they actually went on to present two interesting and rational views, not clearly identifiable as 'liberal' or 'conservative'.
Bremmer more than once made his point that the American people and their elected representatives are ... like ... certifiable (my choice of words). As a risk analyst trying to evaluate issues presented by Numerian in recent blog, 'Ben Bernanke Runs Out of Options', Bremmer finds wide-spread irrationality to be troubling.
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