http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-costanza10mar10,0,5656929.story

I do agree with you that outsourcing COULD be a GREAT thing for the world. But for that to happen, we need to impose better conditions and wages for workers in the U.S., and extend that standard to include any imported products as well. A living wage law in the U.S. that also bans imports on products made by people who are not paid a living wage where they live would make a huge difference all over the world. The economic adjustment would be severe at first, but business will never just stop in its tracks, so recovery would happen quickly.

Exactly.

“They” have been trying to sell the “change is good” mantra for at least 15 years now, probably a lot longer. But you know, people were awake. They sort of noticed that most of the changes they were forced to embrace involved stagnant or falling wages, increased workloads, unpredictable layoffs, etc.

In the long run, we are told, things will be better. How long is that run, and will there be stability at the end of that time?

The art of the con artist is to offer something of less substance in exchange for something of real substance, while still making the lesser item look better than what’s being given up.

The offered item, the bait, can be misrepresented or non-existent, but often it is merely distant in likelihood, in physical distance, or in time. “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” And this works, but it doesn’t work very well if the sucker has been waiting 15 years for the carrot to come over the horizon.

Noni

The report that was the base of the msnbc article you link to does not account for immigration. Moreover, (and despite that fact) the family incomes of those men is still higher because women’s earnings have increased so much.

A better report (by the same organization) that directly links parents and children found that for every group, except for about 20% of blacks (a potentially important exception), children’s family incomes were substantially higher than those of their parents. (And yes this accounts for inflation).

Roger

As a pundit, there’s no cost to this silly performance about how global economic change will net benefit most people. God, how utilitarians are smug fucks.

All of us pre-rich (to borrow David Brooks term for the poor) can enjoy vicariously the joys the new crop of billionaires as recently announced by Forbes. Billionaires in Mexico, Nigeria, India, China, Moscow! At 23 the Facebook founder is a billionaire!

That the global economic system has produced so many billionaires a good thing?

As a social scientist, you ought to know that economic change always involves uneven costs and benefits. And as for the long-term…well..

You have to have a lot of familiarity with the old quip attributed to John Maynard Keynes. In response to the economic orthodoxy in the 1930s that optimistically chimed that economic problems were temporary and in the long run economic equilibrium would mean prosperity. Keynes replied that in the long run we’re all dead.

There’s a lot of churning occurring because of corporate globalization and it doesn’t take Durkheim’s ghost or even Marx’s spectre to remind us that such constant churning will have it’s own consequences, regardless of whether the long-run could produce benefits.

Do you seriously see global corporate capitalism eventually showering the billions of humans with prosperity. China is dumping nearly a billion people into the global labor supply.

I wish our politicians could be sober about the coming prospects and indicate how we’re going to be shepherded through the coming turbulence.

Instead you want politicians to tell voters to enjoy the bubbles!

Ugh…

Almost every group you can think of (i.e. cut the data by age, sex, race, various levels of geography, etc) has done better, in absolute terms, than a generation ago.

Uh, no.
For example, men in the 30′s make 12.5 LESS than men in their thirties made in the 1970′s.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18868904/

Perhaps you don’t now how to adjust for inflation?

I guess I’m an older experience anchor for the team … but I don’t see new kids being hired here for future growth.

The thing is, I can see engineering rapidly moving toward a “world rate.” Graduates of good schools (be they in the US or China or Russia) will make more similar wages.

That is more fair, and more humane, but … there is no avoiding the fact that you are changing the equation for future “skills graduates” in America … just as in the past we changed the equation for union factory workers.

I’m not sure how you’re measuring this, but it would be hard to call recent experience in America “decline”. Almost every group you can think of (i.e. cut the data by age, sex, race, various levels of geography, etc) has done better, in absolute terms, than a generation ago. Spend some time at the BLS looking at data, if you don’t believe me. Here’s a chart from infoplease.

And why should only American welfare matter? Shouldn’t it matter that globalization has lifted billions (that’s a ‘b’) out of extreme poverty? (Just look at the recent experience in India and China if you don’t believe me.)

Figures collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis suggest the multinational sector has in some ways been a drag on the U.S. economy since 2000. From 2000 to 2005, the last year for which full data are available, U.S. multinationals cut more than 2 million jobs at home, even as employment in the rest of the private sector grew—and there’s no sign the trend has significantly reversed. The U.S. operations of foreign multinationals also shrank over the five-year stretch, dropping 500,000 jobs as foreign investors cut costs and sold off U.S. companies. Toyota, perhaps the most successful foreign company in the U.S., added all of 9,000 jobs in the states between 2000 and 2007.

Note that MNC’s have hired more abroad than they have cut here. So there is growth under globalization, but at the expense of the American worker.

Methinks the happy talk should be scrapped in favor of serious grappling with American decline.