Depends on where you draw the line on the working class; if anything the working class worldwide has exploded as more people have left poverty in the past 20 years than in the past 100.
Presumably "the US working class". Globalization has enriched the wealthiest Americans and the global poor at the expense of working Americans, and that's a pretty awful charity program IMO.
Why? National mutual self-interest is probably the single most long-term stable and historically workable approach to foreign policy, economics, and so forth that I can think of.
It's not an approach to the world. The US government isn't a beneficient association that is organized to make things better for people in other countries at the expense of US citizens -- it's not an aid organization or a charity or something like that. The interests of non-citizens don't have any representation in it (it's like every other government in that regard) -- it's just the wrong organization to do something like that.
In 100 years we’ll say the same thing when Planet Earth says “it’s not our responsibility to promote the interests of the Mars people”. People just inherently suck.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing for Americans to do things for other people in a way that costs them something, even something considerable; but it is certainly strange for their government to do so by moving jobs abroad and otherwise promoting the interests of the working class of other countries as the comment I was replying to mentions.
Think about this: countries when during elections riot on the streets happen, the incumbing foment a civil war and refuse to admit he's lost the elections, are usually bombed by USA.
They usually are not bombed by the USA. Most countries sort out their own affairs in these kinds of things (witness Brazil) -- in the absence of extended disorder and open warfare.
They didn't need to, they have their men there and hid many former Nazi officials
> The 1964 Brazilian coup d'état (Portuguese: Golpe de estado no Brasil em 1964 or, more colloquially, golpe de 64) was a series of events in Brazil from March 31 to April 1 that led to the overthrow of President João Goulart by members of the Brazilian Armed Forces, supported by the United States government.The coup put an end to the government of Goulart (also known as 'Jango'), a member of the Brazilian Labour Party [...] although a moderate nationalist, Goulart was accused of being a communist by right-wing militants, he was unable to take office [...] The coup brought to Brazil a military regime politically aligned to the interests of the United States government. This regime lasted until 1985, when Neves was indirectly elected the first civilian president of Brazil since the 1960 elections.
The usual same old story.
It's the same thing they did to Lula.
But you're right, bombed was an exaggeration on my part, they usually invade or send weapons and cavalry
I suggest they stop meddling with other nations internal affairs and stop complaining if large parts of the world are challenging their self appointed role of hegemonic country and are calling them out for their past crimes
Colonization through military power is not hegemony, is tyranny
Yes but we have to decide if they are the only ones that matter.
Is it right, or wise in the long term, to use our position of power to stop the growth of wealth in non-developed countries? On the other hand, do we have any sort of obligation to elevate the standards of living of people in non-developed countries, especially when it may impact the standards of people living in our borders?
There is a moral question to be answered, especially given our purported system of values and the way in which the wealthy and wealthy countries came to be as such.
I'm not staking out a position or trying to shame anyone. I'm just saying I think it is the underlying question we should be thinking about to decide how we judge globalization and its effects.
Globalization is good in the aggregate but it does affect negatively some communities. The solution is not to stop globalization but to implement public policies to counter the negative effects.
Outsourcing manufacturing from a country with labor and environmental regulations to a place where they treat workers like slaves and treat the environment like a trash can would be an example.
Saying it’s immoral is one thing that I can agree with. But that’s different than objectively showing how it makes their lives worse. I’m looking for actual metrics like a decline in life expectancy, income, etc.
Just to be clear I’m not on one side or the other because I’m relatively ignorant on the topic. Just looking for evidence
Losing your job because it was outsourced is pretty objectively bad. You can go try to find another job in the same industry but all the competing companies are going to be looking at doing the same thing because they have to compete on margins and their competition just reduced their labor cost by a factor of 2 to 10.
I don't know what evidence for this would look like except for all the goods that are manufactured overseas that used to be manufactured domestically. I'm not making a statistical argument. I'm making an argument based on life experience and inference. Although life expectancy in the US is declining. Wages are stagnant but that's an aggregate over the population. If a 30-year-old worker loses their job and an 18-year-old worker gets hired in a different industry for the same "real wage" then that looks like no change from the perspective of population statistics.
Yes, but that’s talking to the original point I thought you were attempting to refute. I think there’s a lot of case to be made that globalization is a net negative for US workers, but the point being made was that it may also be a net positive for non-US workers. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed your comments about exporting pollution etc. was that it was a net negative in the non-US as well
I think its bad for Earthlings because it pollutes the planet and its bad for the people who lost their jobs because they can maybe afford to replace their consumer goods with crap made overseas but not save for retirement and its bad for the people overseas because they work in factories with no labor protections to make stuff for people in other countries that they cannot themselves afford. I think the whole thing is bad but inevitable.
It makes their lives worse because it puts the workers in competition with workers in those other countries.
Since you asked for metrics, here is a site for working remotely as a freelancer [1]. You'll quickly notice the pay rates are abysmal. $7/hr for a three.js developer. $250 (or lower, possibly as low s $30) to make a fully functional & tested app on android+iphone (would normally take an entire dev team probably well over 1 or 2 weeks).
These are rates below minimum wage for highly technical skills.
This is even more true for hardware too but it's hard to quantify, because e.g. you can't just compare the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Shenzhen with the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Cleveland, because Cleveland doesn't manufacture capacitors.
However, I do have some data (though it's not the most sophisticatedly obtained). Sticking with capacitors as a benchmark, I was expecting there to be 0 US companies manufacturing capacitors, but apparently there are 7 [2]. In contrast, there are apparently 228 Chinese companies manufacturing capacitors [3].
All of this is just to say it's pretty clear that globalization has moved these jobs overseas (and significantly dropped the market rate for those who remain local).
I agree with this but think it misses the actual point. To paraphrase a popular pundit, “People need to realize that things that are bad for the US may not be bad for the world.”
To clarify the point, the US largely rode a post-WW2 manufacturing boom for a couple generations where the relative quality of life for US citizens disproportionately outpaced other countries. Globalization has started to erase that disparity. So while it’s bad for the US middle and working classes it’s largely benefited pulling people out of poverty for other nations, exemplified by China. The irony is that much of this is driven by the US’s addiction to cheap shit.
I’m only saying the above because I think people are confusing the discussion, not because I think that it’s the best long term strategy
I do think it's benefited other nations, but -- getting more into personal opinion -- I also think the "help other nations" argument is mostly used to justify cheapening wages. If companies were paying foreign workers the same rates that they would have paid US workers I'd be more empathetic to the argument. But something about the fact that the top 90th percentile of Americans has seen huge gains in the last 40 years, while the middle to bottom percentile has seen neutral or losses [1] raises flags to me that the push towards globalization was selfishly motivated. I know it's a huge inference to say the stagnating wages are caused by globalization, but realistically I would say it's the combination of outsourced labor/manufacturing, immigration, rise of women in the workforce, rise of minorities in the workforce, and automation. Most of these are positive changes, but I still think the average blue collar worker suffered a cost that the hyper-wealthy elite did not, so at the moment I don't see the push for globalization as a very selfless initiative.
Yes, 100%. I don’t think it was an altruistic motive on either side. The US was acting on behalf of the monied interests and counties like China were acting to become a more dominant economy on the world stage. The fact that it lifted so many out of poverty was a by-product. What I think will be interesting is how China handles a burgeoning middle class that may want a more freedoms as their numbers grow
