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WorldsStrongestNerd posted:This is end stage capitalism as predicted. The same highs and lows we have always had, except the cycle is faster and the high is a little less higher and the lows are a little lower each time. That or we're just in the bad part of a kondratieff wave.
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Jan 21, 2016 20:24
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That assumes that some kind of left liberal reformism is the only solution to the crisis. I find that plausible from an ethical standpoint but not necessarily an economic one. Could be that some authoritarian political system will stumble onto a workable economic formula for the 21st century. Stranger things have happened.
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Jan 21, 2016 21:06
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Ardennes posted:Well more technically it could possible be market socialist reformism as well. As for authoritarian governments figuring it out, I guess anything is possible but in all honesty the current crop of authoritarians seem primarily interested in maintaining power above all else and economic policy seems distant in the background. If anything these regimes often have to rely so much on nationalism and emotional appeals, because they don't really have much else to bring on the table. In theory why couldn't we have a society where most people live in favelas, scraping whatever meagre income they can get from black / grey market activity, while an ultra wealthy few live in hyper automated gated communities? That kind of society could conceivably continue to progress economically and technologically while just sort of leaving a large portion of humanity in the dust. One hopes such a situation would be politically unsustainable but economically I don't see why it couldn't function adequately.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:57
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MothraAttack posted:It's also useful to compare how much new growth has been created by China per annum (as opposed to the share it occupies globally) -- so much of the global post-recession recovery was driven by Chinese growth, as opposed to, say, European or emerging market growth. As such, a slowdown in China puts a firm dent in the global economy's "recovery." This is particularly true in Canada, which is one of the few countries that has supposedly had "robust" growth since the crash. Our exports sector became very reliant on China and depending on who you ask it may be that our exceptionally high real estate prices (which inflate the paper wealth and thus purchasing power of our extremely over leveraged middle class) are at least partially driven by Chinese families who are desperate to park their cash somewhere safe.
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Jan 23, 2016 18:08
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asdf32 posted:You have evidence that the U.S. is suffering from high savings rates? No you don't. Stop repeating fox-news-grade just-so stories. asdf32 posted:Yes he probably was. And it turns out that huffpost headline grabber is almost irrelevant because the figure is probably exaggerated and/or the money is actually being put to use and/or it's not bad if it is true. For example 3 trillion of really truly "hoarded' cash is sitting in foreign reserves (and more circulating black markets etc) and this is considered a great thing. If the rich actually have a few trillion more in Scroodge McDuck vaults that they don't want to spend that's good for the same exact reasons. 
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Jan 30, 2016 21:19
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Like any patriotic American MIGF doesn't slow down even a bit when he's caught spouting blatant falsehoods. 
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Jan 31, 2016 02:20
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icantfindaname posted:Constitutionally speaking most of them actually aren't. The UK is probably as old or older depending on when exactly you consider its 'constitution' and the modern system of Westminster parliamentary government established, but not by very much. The institution of Prime Minister only existed since the mid 1700s, and the concepts of a an institutionalized system of government vs opposition in parliament, and the modern electoral system only since the 1830s. Universal white male suffrage didn't occur in the US until around the 1820s. And really based on the way people here are defining constitutional orders it's not altogether clear to me that you could date the modern United States government as existing prior to the 1860s.
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Jan 31, 2016 19:53
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Munkeymon posted:There is a reason. Sharply increasing labor costs all at once would be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_(economics) and those are generally something you want to avoid or at least make as small as is feasible. The idealistic non-sense here is your asinine civics101 vision of US government and party politics where the only thing holding back the Democrats from implementing more substantive efforts to raise wages is because their constituents haven't been sufficiently vocal. The Democrats easily could have put more effort into passing card check legislation which the organized labour movement really wanted (and needed) to have implemented. Organized labour is a crucial democratic constituency, they are well organized enough to pass make their demands heard, and they were traditionally an instrumental part of the institutional support for the welfare state the the Democrats were intermittently constructing from the 1930s to the 1970s. One could make a similar point about charter schools. They are massively unpopular with key democratic constituents and if anything hurt the long term viability of the Democratic party by hurting teachers unions. We could go through a list of other policies like trade or entitlement reform where significant parts of the Democratic establishment commit time, energy and political capital to carry out policies that their core constituencies don't support or even actively oppose. Politicians are more concerned about their donors than their constituents, and on top of this they come from the same schools and they cycle in and out of the same workplaces as the ultra-wealthy lobbyist and business class so it's hardly surprising they broadly share the same economic vision and agenda. If you want to believe they're only opposed to the minimum wage out of technocratic concerns about creating an economic shock you can keep telling yourself that but they weirdly didn't seem all that concerned about the economic shock caused by trade deals they've supported. Why it's almost as though the Democrats selectively care about economic shocks that hurt large businesses while remaining largely indifferent toward policies which strip collective bargaining, throw people off welfare or otherwise strip away the economic and social rights that an older generation of liberals spend decades constructing.
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Aug 19, 2016 20:07
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asdf32 posted:If it's bad enough and goes on long enough people revolt. Republicans just told the establishment screw themselves complete with the establishment throwing a public hissyfit back. But, it turns out there was poo poo they can do when voters oust them and pick someone completely out of their control. Having money or control over media outlets or otherwise commanding influence is no guarantee of getting the outcomes that you expect. Being rich and powerful is sort of an entrance fee to US politics -- you won't have much influence without those things -- but it doesn't guarantee you'll get the outcomes you wanted. And even a seemingly stable situation like the GOP being dominated by an alliance of business money and Christian evangelism can blow apart very suddenly, which is what we've been watching since the end of the second Bush administration. This isn't a great analogy but you could compare money in politics to gravity. It exerts a constant and powerful pull over everything but under the right circumstances you can still get yourself into the air and even stay there for a while. Also, while Trump is a disaster for the GOP in the short term his success also reflects how effectively the political centre has been moved rightward since World War II. Behind the year-to-year struggle between the Republicans and Democrats or between workers and bosses there has also been a long running ideological contest over how capitalism and free enterprise are viewed by the public. Go back to the late 1940s and you'll find a business class that was exceedingly anxious about the perceived left-wing sentiments of the population. That anxiety reached a fever pitch in the 1970s when major business magnates started to think capitalism as a system might be in danger (however silly that fear seems in retrospect). A lot of resources have been invested in changing the broad ideological coordinates of American public life (I'm thinking here about major businesses hosting 'World Fairs' about the bright future capitalism would bring or business interests bankrolling Milton Friedman's TV show or numerous other examples of propagandizing outside the narrow realm of year-to-year electoral politics). This helps explain why the revolt against globalism and Wall Street among white blue collar Americans is being channeled into the doomed candidacy of a big business tycoon who promises to kick start the economy through deregulation. So while Trump is a short-term disaster for the GOP leadership, the fact that the revolt against the GOP establishment is taking this particular form is arguably a marker of their long term success. The white working class is safely isolated from the rest of the population and thus politically inert. The political operatives most dependent on the success of the GOP will suffer but the larger movement conservative project of destroying the labour movement and trying to shutdown any European-style social democratic policies continues to yield some success. Munkeymon posted:Yeah, people with money are overrepresented. No poo poo. Thanks for that insight. You accused someone else of being idealistic and then spouted this none-nonsensical civics 101 bullshit about how constituents just need to make their voices heard. And to try and make yourself sound smarter you dropped some references to avoiding economic shocks while conveniently ignoring that the Democratic party has been perfectly happy to ignore economic shocks that don't impact (or even assist) their donor base. The point isn't that the rich are over represented (though they are) but rather that how interest groups or political constituencies actually influence Washington is way more context dependent and complicated than the stupid-yet-condescending post you made would imply.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:59
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Munkeymon posted:I was basically describing lobbying - quite possibly one of the least idealistic activities in our system Did you lose track of your argument? You were responding to somebody who said the Democrats are ignoring fast food protesters by saying "constituents have to demand things of their representatives in government in order to get those things". So your suggestion is that fastfood protesters asking for a living wage should... hire their own lobbyists? Yeah, you're right, that doesn't sound idealistic at all. It just sounds straight up stupid. quote:I was also talking about lobbying local and state politicians, not nationally, and yeah, I was also being flip because "I don't see why we can't just increase the base cost of labor by 30%+ right loving now" is an absurd position economically and quite possibly politically suicidal, depending on the area. And to be clear, I'm just talking about the 'right loving now' part. Spread that out over a few years and it's a good idea whose time has hopefully come. And yet the Democrats have been extremely proud of Obamacare, which does dramatically change labour costs, and they also have supported free trade deals which effectively cut the cost of labour dramatically. So this idea that politicians will prudently avoid any kind of economic disruption is just wrong because in situations where it benefits the right people they're happy to play along. asdf32 posted:An alternative narrative: Economic fundamentals and the stranglehold on power white people had made 60's social welfare situation what it was. Both broke down. Civil rights made white people less inclined to support welfare that went to 'others' and simultaneously pushed them to ally with the right business elite while increasing foreign competition undermined the power of labor. There was a crisis in the 1970s, and it was certainly tied into white racial anxiety and increasing international competition, among other things. But the particular shape of the response of that crisis was in part dependent on power relations within society. Much in the way that the Russian revolution was a combination of a particular political tendency combinign with a particularly crisis-moment in history to produce a unique and contingent outcome (the USSR) which wasn't necessarily inevitable. In the case of the 1970s there was a pre-existing network of activists and donors that had come into existence in reaction to the New Deal and which had already made a conscious decision to take over the Republican Party and make it a vehicle for their movement. So while the particular historical forces you point out are obviously important to explaining what happens, that doesn't mean we should ignore the actions or statements of the specific people who were participating in that historical moment. Saying "Oh, race relations broke down in the USA and international competition increased" is not really an adequate explanation for neoliberalism / neoconservatism / whatever labels you want to apply to the political developments of the late 20th century. quote:That removes the human agency (business elite action) which is so often post-hoc in history and provides a more unifying explanation for why the rest of the western world is different than America. A large part of the reason is comparative lack of diversity encouraging voters to support high levels of social welfare. Business interests did mobilize though, and there are measurable impacts one can look at related to specific actions like electoral races, major labour disputes, etc. Like, you're free to type out a couple sentences making an unsupported assertion about how everything is determined without any human agency whatsoever if you like and I'm really not sure how to respond to a claim that is so sweeping and vague. Presumably we can agree that the events of the last 40 years weren't engineered single handedly by some sinister capable of rich-people Illuminati executing some kind of grand world conspiracy. But it's pretty hard to dispute that a specific movement with specific intentions arose and seized the moment that hte 1970s offered them, and used it to carry through their ideas, and central to their political project was a desire to destroy the labour movement and roll back the New Deal. And this isn't hypothetical, they were pretty open about what they wanted to do. Sure, they wouldn't have been able to do it without the breakdown of the liberal post-war order, but that doesn't mean that movement conservatism was just some epiphenomenon surfing on the wave of 1970s discontent. quote:Yes money in politics is like gravity and like gravity it's actually pretty boring. People in power....have power. You can take money out of the equation or change any law or legal structure you want but modern society will have individuals with power. People who are in charge of the military or the media or any large institution have 'currency' and motivation to use it to further their own interests. If I understand the implications of what you're saying correctly, then this is an incredibly silly position to adopt. There are clearly differences across time and space in terms of how widely political power and influence are distributed. You're basically saying "well if we can't remove 100% of inequality then there's no point trying to reduce the inequality that does exist" which is absurd and I think is a pretty clear example of motivated reasoning on your part. As you often do you start from the undefended assumption that we already live in the best possible world (I assume you wouldn't phrase it this way yourself but this is how it comes off). Also, as a sidebar: you seem to think I'm making some kind of simplistic claim like x dollars spent directly translates into y amount of political influence. That would obviously be wrong. I think the contingent flow of historical events plays a huge role in determining outcomes and any attempt to reduce politics to a simple model in which one factor determines another factor in a clean and mechanical way, like one ping pong ball hitting another, is a dangerous and usually foolhardy exercise. Actual politics and history is very messy and confused and even in a situation where money and power are strongly correlated the rich don't always get what they want. But that doesn't mean the converse -- the idea that money is irrelevant -- is true or even plausible sounding.
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Aug 24, 2016 21:23
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ok, sure. Get back to me when the entire elected federal government isn't run by millionaire and when the main activity of Congressmen isn't soliciting more donations and maybe we can talk about American democracy. Here's a pro-tip though. Most classical theorists of democracy would say that the point where the ruling class has bungled things so badly that wealthy demagogues start appearing and agitating against the system is generally not considered a sign of health in a Republic.
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Aug 27, 2016 16:59
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You're setting up this completely false binary, as though the only options on the spectrum are "some idealized utopia that will never happen" and "the exact conditions we're living in now". There's a spectrum of influence and power here which varies from country to country or across time. You're seemingly trying to pitch this debate at the most abstract and general level possible. As for what is to be done? That's a massive question. It may be that this is a tragedy rather than a dilemma. Vast, centuries long historical processes like the lifespan of a political system can't necessarily be fixed over night. But as long as we're diagnosing problems we should try to be clear and suggesting that Donald Trump is some kind of vindication of democracy is insane on so many levels. Especially since he's just a rival billionaire (well, "billionaire", his fortunes are exaggerated) riding high on a wave of apocalyptic racism and cultural despair. Broadly speaking though, just about every meaningfully democratic country in the 20th century had a powerful labour movement and some kind of populist political party (or at least faction within a political party) so the absence of those things is a plausible starting point for discussing what went wrong. Whether these conditions can be recreated is debatable but they provided a countervailing political influence which is sorely lacking at the moment.
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Aug 27, 2016 17:25
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You're describing a private organization's system for choosing it's candidate and using it as some kind of weird vindication of the entire US electoral system, which doesn't make any sense on multiple levels. And you're just straight up refusing to engage with the fact that with a few exceptions you basically can't be a politician on the national level in America unless you're already independently wealthy, or the fact that re-election usually hinges much more on how effectively you can fundraise than anything else. Or the fact that studies show the popular will of the bottom 50% of the population aren't reflected at all in government decisions. Or the fact that there's a massive imbalance of wealth where one percent of the population owns forty percent of the wealth. Your entire argument seems to amount to "this rich aren't literally all powerful, therefore how can you say democracy isn't flourishing?" which is such an insane standard I honestly can't take your position very seriously. Especially since Trump was only in a position to do what he did thanks to his private wealth.
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Aug 27, 2016 18:45
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You're speaking at a ridiculous level of abstraction where in one sweeping sentence you're comparing Ancient Athens, Ancient Rome, Eighteenth Century America and modern America. And your conclusion is "they all had inequalities of money and power, therefore money and power are irrelevant." Just like your case for the robust health of American democracy is entirely reducible to "one billioniare who most other billionaires disagree with was able to win the Republican primary, therefore money in politics is irrelevant". Or when I point out that the average elected officeholder in the federal government is a multimillionaire your only answer is that the average politician is always, on average, richer than the average person. That's an answer which is technically accurate in the most autistic way possible and completely ignores that while there's always some discrepancy, in most democratic societies it isn't anywhere close to as large as it is in the USA. There's a lot of evidence suggesting that the American political system isn't very responsive to popular pressure and anyone with eyes to see can recognize the impact that lobbying and corporate influence have had on how the American government functions in the last 40 years. If you want to keep making these extremely vague justifications of the situation you can go ahead but they just don't seem terribly convincing.
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Aug 27, 2016 19:59
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asdf32 posted:You're spinning age old realities in a narrative of decline. If you're going to carry on this ridiculous line of argument then it's on you to justify your positions. Literally anyone can see that the US government is differnet now than it was twenty or forty or one hundred years ago. If you want to argue everything is the exact same and that there's no difference in conditions then that's your argument to make. Literally any expert from any side of the political spectrum I can think of would agree that there have been huge changes in how power is exercised in Washington since the mid-20th century so you're going to have your work cut out for you but I look forward to seeing what you come up with. I realize you're never going to put the in the necessary effort to actually justify a completely ludicrous position such as the one you've staked out but that would be the necessary condition for this discussion to actually progress. You're the one who is going up against the received wisdom of literally everyone that US government and politics have changed over time in non-trivial ways. If you want to seriously argue that there's no meaningful differences between the current era and ancient Rome then that's on you to demonstrate. quote:Trump has raised and spent vastly less money than either Hillary Clinton or Obama (at this point in his campaign). Keep yelling 'billionaire'. It's scary. It completely misses the point. Trump just now caught Ben Carson in total spending this cycle and is still behind cruz. If your takeaway is to chalk up Trump's success to money he didn't spend you're delusional. Trump's entire "brand" is built on decades as a prominent and wealthy businessman. He didn't have to spend as much money in the primary as his opponents because he built his brand up over the last several decades. There's absolutely no reason to believe that some random yahoo with a 30,000 a year annual salary would have gotten anywhere peddling the same ideas. Trump was able to run a highly unconventional campaign precisely because he was already a known quantity and because he could lean heavily on his established brand as a tough businessman, something he largely established through his connections to reality television and the media. Your argument doesn't even stand up to the most basic critical thinking. You're blind if you think Trump's wealth is irrelevant to his success. And this argument is even dumber when we consider that Trump's opponents are by all accounts winning handily. So here we have a study by well regarded academics showing that the American political system is completely unresponsive to the political will of half the electorate and rather than acknowledging that study you're trying to fixate on a single unusual presidential race which doesn't even support your argument. And now you're demanding I provide what would essentially be a book-length thesis just to prove to you that there are significant differences between how political power and inequality operate in 16 AD and 2016 AD. Yeah, no thanks. If you're going to pursue these inane and silly arguments ("all societies have inequality therefore we can completely ignore inequality in our analysis!  ) then I'm honestly happy to let your arguments stand on your own because I'm pretty sure anyone lurking in the thread can decide for themselves why you're full of poo poo.quote:Cite it. Politicians have continued to get wealthier even as the net worth of the average US household stagnated or declined. This makes sense given that the average seat in the house costs more than a million to win and the average seat in the senate costs more than 10 million to win based on these 2012 figures. Also the net worth of politicians understates the extent to which their future incomes are based on speaking fees and lobbying gigs they get after leaving office. quote:And you think this is worse than when, pre-emancipation 19th century? The era before direct senate elections or women's suffrage? pre-civil rights 50's? When. Describe how reality and history match your narrative of american democratic decline (noting our sitting black middle class president about to be succeeded by the first women president (god willing)). America has never been a particularly democratic society, assuming we're measuring it by it's own self stated image of itself, but at least in the mid 20th century there were overlapping institutional arrangements which provided a very rough kind of balance between major interest groups in society, which was reflected by a much more even distribution of income. That system started breaking down thanks to a variety of factors including racial tension and heightened international competition, regulatory changes and campaign finance law changes. The result were a series of changes to how lobbying and fundraising in Washington worked. While this period of countervailing influence, in which consumer groups, activists, unionists, independent media, etc. provided a very rough and approximate check on the institutional power of the wealthy didn't last more than a few decades, and was deeply flawed at the best of times, it provided some outlets for reforming the system further. Various groups, including women, minorities, etc. began to take advantage of this relatively open period in politics and agitated for further reform. That heightened the general sense of crisis within the system (which was already being pushed to its limits by economic changes) and the result was a period of political instability during the 1970s and 1980s. That culminated in corporations taking a much greater and more direct interest in political outcomes and in lobbying. Again, there's some simplification going on here because this is such a massive historical process, but the end result was that from the 1970s onward there were explicit and conscious steps taken to deradicalize politics and to restore some stability to the system. This was made easier by changes that were already occuring in the economy and society at large. That combination of conscious effort and historical coincidence combined to produce the current, post 1980s era, which is itself now looking almost as unstable as the old system did when it broke down in the late 60s / early 70s. Articulating this at any length would take a lot of time and energy and I'm not really going to commit to that kind of major effort posting when you're making such unbelievably shallow and silly arguments to begin with. If you can't sharpen and specify your own arguments and offer something a bit less Panglossian than what you've served up so far then why would I waste my time writing up something you won't even both to read in any detail? If you can't even recognize that there are differences between now and the past (including the extreme past of thousands of years ago) then why should anyone try to explain complicated historical processes to you? You can't adopt an intentionally stupid attitude and then demand people invest huge amounts of time disproving completely asinine arguments that you put zero effort or thought into. Helsing fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Aug 29, 2016 |
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Aug 29, 2016 19:16
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Oracle posted:Mothers didn't hold jobs outside the home in appreciable numbers until the mid-late 70s/early 80s. You're confusing the white middle class with women in general.
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Dec 10, 2016 00:04
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Paradoxish posted:He's exaggerating a bit, but not that much: 25%-30% seems like an appreciable number, especially when you consider that those numbers aren't broken down by race. About 10% of the American population in 1950 were black so aggregating the labour force participation ratio of women in general can easily hide the actual experience of distinctive subgroups. The number of black mothers working outside the house was definitely higher than one in four.
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Dec 10, 2016 00:26
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Obstructionism is the only thing that stopped Obama from striking a "grand bargain" . He campaigned against the free trade deal with South Korea and attacked NAFTA in 2008 then pushed through the South Korea trade deal and used it as a model for pushing through the TPP -- which was also, ironically, probably only stopped thanks to GOP obstructionism. And good luck arguing that the Republican party somehow forced Obama to staff his economic team with Rubinites or his justice department with Wall Street hacks who wouldn't prosecute anyone. There's a very long list of terrible things Obama did that have absolutely nothing to do with obstructionism. Not to mention the fact he started his presidency with majorities in both houses of Congress. The reason that Obama kept negotiating with himself before even approaching the GOP isn't because the big mean Republicans strong armed them. He was using the GOP as an excuse to out maneuver the more liberal elements of his own party. I encourage people to read up on Obama's track record in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was being called out as a faker and sell-out by a lot of traditional voices on the left and within the black community and displayed a consistent instinct for neoliberal ideas. In fact Obama himself has been pretty candid about this at times and described himself as espousing ideas that would have placed him in the Republican party a couple decades ago. And the cherry on top is Obama and his people were in charge of the Democratic party as it was bleeding to death in state legislatures and Congress. Obama's people set the stage for the 2010 route and have only made things worse since then. Democrats need to stop blaming the GOP, Russia, the great unwashed masses, fake news, Fox, and basically everyone but themselves. Even the refrains about Hilary being an historically bad campaigner -- while true -- are off the mark. She was an expression of her party's internal rot, not the cause of it. In a more healthy political entity she never would have been nominated.
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Dec 31, 2016 23:16
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Arguably the sell out began earlier when the Democrats won in 2006 on a wave of anti-war anger, did nothing to stop the war, and then coalesced around a presidential candidate two years later whose bold foreign policy proposal was ramping up the troop presence in Afghanistan and expanding the war to Pakistan.
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Dec 31, 2016 23:26
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Look guys, I read Paul Krugman's blog every day and once time I even read a review of Thomas Pikety's Capital. And I'm here to tell you that the President isn't responsible for standing by while millions of people were kicked out of their homes thanks to fraudulent activity by the banks. I mean sure he could have intervened when the legal system started allowing companies to retroactively and fraudulently fill out paperwork establishing their claims over these homes and maybe he could have launched a few prosecutions but you see his highly accomplished economics team told him that would threaten the stability of the market so really his hands were tied and he just had to let millions of people lose their homes. And then he was forced to push through a bunch of awful trade deals that effectively give corporate tribunals a veto over national legislation. Sure almost the entire labour movement was united against the bill but I trust that the President had their best interests at heart. And hey, he slightly raised marignal tax rates. I mean sure he was trying to cut social security and he forced everyone to buy crapified insurance that in many cases had co-pays so high that people were still filing for bankruptcy when they got ill but you have to understand that passing a bill modeled on a plan from a conservative Republican think tank was actually a historic success. I mean, sure, the entire system has gone into a death spiral of withdrawing companies and rising premiums but no, I don't think that had anything to do with the Democrats losing in 2016. That was because of Russia! What's that you say? Obama oversaw a recovery that went almost exclusively to the 1%? But don't you see it's impossible to distribute gains from growth more evenly (let alone redistribute wealth) because ~*secular stagnation*~ ! Perhaps you'd understand if you had an e-mail notification coming to your phone every time Ezra Klein writes a new article.
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Jan 1, 2017 00:54
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SaTaMaS posted:In Canada, about 15% of bankruptcies are due to medical bills, while in the US, about 18%-25% of bankruptcies are due to medical bills quote:Medical bankruptcy: Fact or fiction? This woman is the President of a "think" tank that, by it's own description, "champions freedom, opportunity, and personal responsibility by advancing free-market policy ideas." It even has a "Laffer Center" named after Art loving Laffer, the genius behind Reagonomics. And that article you're citing leans heavily on a "study" by the Fraser Institute. And even that bullshit study, which is coming from an organization that can be expected to juke the stats in whatever way is necessary to reach it's desired conclusion, still has to essentially cheat by including the proviso that many of the medical bankruptcies among Canadian seniors are from problems their insurance doesn't actually cover. These are not objective or peer reviewed studies they are propaganda pieces produced by think tanks whose only reason for existence is to advance the agenda of the people and corporations who pay into their extremely opaque funding structures. Is there any reason that you would drop these links -- both of which you clearly pulled from the snopes article -- except to try and create the false impression that you did more research than a very cursory google search? Not only are you bolstering your argument in the most clumsy and stupid way possible, you're citing sources that make you sound like a blithering idiot. Next you're probably going to say Obama was in the right for trying to cut social security and then you'll cite Paul Ryan's economic plan. The actual study behind your claim is here. The first thing you read in the actual study is that this is still a contentious area of research with different researchers producing wildly different findings. Austin's particular findings are an outlier. Warren (writing before Obamacare was implemented) concluded the results were closer to 60%. In another study by Himmelston (2009) finds 62.1% of bankruptcies are medically caused. Other studies varied from the high teens to high twenties as percentages. In general these studies produce numbers that vary depending on methodology or on how you define the object of study.
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Jan 1, 2017 21:16
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One of the greatest problems with American medical care is not lack of insurance -- though that is certainly a huge problem, which Obamacare's crapified insurance plans often fail to rectify -- it's massively inflated costs. And Obamacare has failed to deal with that problem. This is one reason why we see people going bankrupt due to medical costs even in cases where they have insurance. Hell, the American government doesn't even allow itself to negotiate drug prices for medicare -- it's literally prohibited by law. If those kinds of bizzare regulations aren't a big flashign red light to you saying the system is fundamentally broken then I really don't know what to tell you. Not to mention the money that could be saved just by trimming administration costs. There is so much dead weight in the system and of course the Democrats had no interest in trying to get rid of it: quote:results
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Jan 1, 2017 21:32
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SaTaMaS posted:Yes the study says exactly what I quoted before, and that the 62.1% number is way off. The difference is the same as before - 62.1% is if you include every bankruptcy that included more than $1000 of medical bills, while 18% to 26% is bankruptcies that were primarily caused by medical bills. The second estimate is the less politically motivated one. It's hilarious that you're talking about "political motivation" when you just tried to pass off some garbage right wing think tanker's opinion piece of as a valid citation. These studies display a wide variety of results depending on the methodology used. You are cherry picking the study that best suits the argument you committed yourself to, despite showing no actual familiarity with the issue, and then claiming it's the best study because you're convinced anyone who disagrees with you must have a "political motivation". The fact these studies yield such wildly varying results is a sign that the data is extremely sensitive to methodology but there are good reasons to think in the case of medical care that a broader definition of medical caused bankrupcy is the right one because of how fundamentally disruptive a major illness is and also because the rest of the US safety net tends to be so paltry for people who lose their primary income. Further, in the US there are numerous and well researched reports of large numbers of people simply forgoing healthcare and working until they drop dead or literally cannot move because they cannot afford to lose their only income. If you want to whistle past the graveyard and keep citing garbage Fraser Institute studies as authoritative examples of how single payer health care doesn't provide far better protection from the economic hardship of illness than the American system then go ahead but anyone with eyes to see or the ability to read can see the ample evidence demonstrating how terrible the health outcomes of the US system are in financial terms: New York Times posted:In the new poll, conducted by The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly 20 percent of people under age 65 with health insurance nonetheless reported having problems paying their medical bills over the last year. By comparison, 53 percent of people without insurance said the same. Obamacare utterly fails to address this problem for much of the population. It's a lottery system where the quality of your care is dependent on where you live, and it leaves the most dysfunctional parts of the system untouched while downloading all the costs onto middle class consumers. Your insinuation that it's basically just as good as single payer is idiotic and even most of it's liberal defenders will admit the system was far from ideal.
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Jan 2, 2017 21:51
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Grouchio posted:Don't we have a healthcare thread somewhere in DnD? I'd like to talk about what happens step-by-step when China's market implodes. That's very hard to predict especially if you're only relying on publicly available knowledge, especially in regards to China. Most commentators seem to agree that things don't look very stable at the moment but trying to extrapolate a play-by-play breakdown of how things could go wrong or how bad the crash ends up being is extremely difficult.
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Jan 3, 2017 18:43
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Xae posted:By pushing more people into the individual market you lower the overall cost per person of the pool. I live in a country with universal healthcare but at the moment something I'm doing for work involves researching available insurance plans for small businesses / individuals and it's loving nightmarish. Health insurance is not the kind of thing that lends itself to market mechanisms, from what I've been told I gather research on how people pick between options in situations like this shows that even savvy and well educated professional types usually tend to choose plans based on arbitrary features like which option is listed first. This just isn't an area where market mechanisms operate well and trying to force a market solution merely worsens outcomes. The solution here is to expand medicare to cover everyone and then to start addressing the massive rent-seeking that lobbyist control of Washington has enabled. Trying to fine-tune the Rube-Golderberg machine that is the American medical insurance system is just a set-up for more failure. And that's without even getting into how totally politically unfeasible your plan is. Medicare for all is a long-shot but it's at least plausible you could sell Americans on switching into plan that most people are already familiar with. I think there'd be blood in the streets if you told people you were taking away their employer insurance plans and replacing it with whatever crapifeid options the Obamacare exchanges have left on offer.
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Jan 4, 2017 01:45
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Xae posted:The plans employers provide are subject to the same rules and regulations that the individual market is. My employer offers High Deductible health plans on Bronze, Silver and Gold which are nearly identical to what I can get in the exchange. The only difference is the ~$500 subsidy my employer provides. Wow, the industry that benefits the most from an extremely inefficient system is full of people who don't think the system should be abandoned. I'm shocked. quote:The key problem with American healthcare is that the care is too expensive, but people don't talk about how to get costs down, they talk about how to pay for it. Switching to a universal public system would be a massive cost saver and have the added benefit of freeing up economic resources that could be used more effectively elsewhere.
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Jan 4, 2017 03:34
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Xae posted:Feel free to address the point that Medicare reimburses at or below cost and shifting the entire population to it would put providers out of business instead of attempting to deflect. I'm sure that you also oppose the implementation of any kind of labour saving technology or international trade that potentially displaces workers as well. This is certainly not special pleading on behalf of your specific industry. After all, it's not as though the rest of the first world has managed to provide comparable or superior healthcare outcomes with lower spending through single payer systems. quote:Medicare's costs are rising almost as fast as Private Insurers costs. If you bother to inform yourself you will find that Medicare is driving a portion of the Private Sector costs because over time their payment schedule has been forced from slightly above cost to slightly below cost. This forces the private sector to subsidize Medicare. Medicaid is even worse and is very far below cost, the additional costs are again pushed to the private sector. What I really find interesting about this post is that from the beginning I've been very obviously focused on how prohibitively costly health care is for actual people, and yet you literally cannot conceive of anyone being concerned about anything except cost inflation. Here's a headline: the lack of adequate care and the financial burden the current system is placing on people is a far bigger issue than cost. The United States is at the epicenter of the wealthiest and most powerful global civilization that has ever existed. It is completely capable of providing decent and affordable healthcare to its population. Switching to a public system modeled on the Canadian single-payer insurance model or even the British system would save a lot of money that is wasted on administrative overhead in the current highly inefficient system. As far as reducing costs there are many options and all they require is the political will to implement them. Hey, I'm just spitballing here but perhaps it's time to let medical professionals enjoy the same stimulating blast of free trade that manufacturing workers have been enjoying since the 1980s. Crack down on unnecessary medical procedures, take a harder line in negotiations, purge the lobbyist parasites, and perhaps if the doctors kicks up a fuss bring in Chinese and Indian doctors to undercut their wages. asdf32 posted:"freeing up economic resources" means un-employing tons of people. I support reform because healthcare is an economic cancer and have no problems with a single payer system but under no circumstances can a large cost reduction be made to a system this large and it's worth it for everyone to remember this. Like any disruptive economic or regulatory change some people would stand to benefit and others would stand to lose, but in this case it would clearly be a net gain. I personally would like to see a much stronger safety net and an economic policy geared around ensuring people get and keep high wage jobs, even if they have to transition from industry to industry. But insofar as some economic disruption is necessary and inevitable I think it's loving hilarious when some neoliberal shithead singing the praises of the American healthcare system suddenly starts crying over job losses. quote:Also with respect to employer plans I tend to think it's worth reminding people of the arbitrary nature of the current system and employer healthcare is one place to point. Companies don't select people's housing or cars or anything else - they pay salaries. But when it comes to healthcare they make the choice. Recently at a company meeting my CEO explained how he had spent a ton of time personally researching healthcare because it was a top expense. It's weird and extremely inefficient for managers in random industries to be making healthcare choices for employees and companies don't actually want to be doing it. It's one of those examples of a historically arbitrary and path-dependent outcome that sort of made sense in the past (though even then it left a lot to be desired) and which now can literally only be justified by appealing to how disruptive it would be to change it. Even this thread's resident apologist cannot quite bring themselves to argue that the system is working fine -- all they seem capable of doing is insinuating that somehow any change would make it worse.
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Jan 4, 2017 19:11
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Doctors are actually a pretty good example of how "free" trade works in America. Right in the mid 1990s at the height of free trade mania and when other, especially blue collar, industries had been hit hard by economic changes, doctors and their organizations started freaking out about how the government was training too many physicians:quote:Doctors Assert There Are Too Many of Them So, of course, the government tightened licensing restrictions to reduce the supply of doctors and thus protect the wages of the existing physicians. By the exact same logic that justifies free trade in manufactured goods, this is a huge cost to the rest of the economy. If American doctors were compensated at the same rates as European doctors the result would be -- again, using the exact same logic that justifies gains from trade in other areas -- tens of billions of dollars saved every year. Indeed the cost savings would be much greater than many of the trade deals that are relentlessly advocated for by "free trade" advocates.
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Jan 4, 2017 19:45
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Xae posted:That is a non-sequitur if I ever saw one. Automation and Labor savings has gently caress all to do with the current clusterfuck. The point I was making is that workers get thrown out of their jobs all the time and I doubt you kick up much of a fuss when somebody's job gets shipped to China, meaning your impassioned defense of the industry you happen to work in comes off like special pleading. quote:And here is the backstory: This is a strange comment given I immediately outline other reforms that you agree would be beneficial. What you keep missing or refusing to acknowledge is that cost inflation is way less of an issue than lack of care. The United States is an extremely rich and productive society, there is no excuse for the inadequate and often ruinously expensive way it delivers healthcare to most of its citizens. This is a far more pressing issue to address than anything else. Subsequent reforms can deal with cost issues -- and frankly, those cost issues will be much easier to address if the political power of health insurers and providers is broken through government action. This isn't really an economic issues so much as it's a political one. The current system was created through lobbying and rent-seeking activity. Any viable solution will necessarily include curbing the political influence of the industries involved. quote:See these are good ideas because they address the core problem: The cost of providing care. Paying for care is ultimately secondary if it is affordable in the first place. Cracking down on the tech arms race is a huge one too. Hospitals are getting into dick measuring contests over technology and patients are demanding the latest and greatest things, particularly in imaging, even if they don't need it. You don't need a state of the art MRI scan for a routine broken bone, but you'll probably get one in the USA. As I said above, the issue is fundamentally political. And no, the cost of care is absolutely secondary to the need to provision care. "Curb costs and maybe the cost-savings will eventually trickle down to the populace" is not a sufficient solution and your insistence on caring more about the cost than about the fundamental need to give people decent healthcare is downright ghoulish. quote:Just nationalizing the payers is literally the dumbest thing you can do. It is the one thing worse than doing nothing. Because the only thing that happens is shifting a cost that is growing uncontrollably onto the public books. With no cost control and at the current growth rates Medical Care will be 30% of the US economy in 10 years. It is projected to start to drop in ~15 years due to "natural demographic changes". It will be something like 40-45% of the US economy at its height. Nobody has claimed that a unviersal and government provided health insurance system would be a panacea or that it's the only necessary reform. The point is only that it would be a massive improvement over the current system and would also make subsequent reforms far easier to pursue.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:23
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asdf32 posted:Well there is a huge difference between between cost cutting at the system level and a change from private employer based to private individual based policy. The second is disruptive in an administrative sense not an economic sense. Personally, given that single payer isn't on the horizon I think it would be smart reform in the right direction for a few reasons and should theoretically be feasible (though I don't see much movement in that direction). Simple, intuitive and compelling narratives like "let's give everyone access to this highly popular and efficient program so that they don't have to go bankrupt or forgo medical treatment when they get sick" is, in my opinion, a better strategy for mobilizing voters. It's far fetched at the moment but I think one thing that leftists and liberals in the US have lacked in recent years is a longer-term agenda or guiding ideology that goes beyond technocratic tinkering. Having a broadly understood goal like expanding health insurance to the masses rather than trying to force people through economic sanctions into a fundamentally broken market for health insurance is the way to go. As for subsidising employment that isn't the same as trying to keep every parasitic or inefficient job in the country frozen in place. You're right I'm being a bit flippant here but that's mostly because I assume that Xae's "won't somebody think of the jobs?!" argument isn't really in good faith and is, as I said above, just a form of special pleading that he wouldn't extend to other victims of economic change. quote:Bad policy but doctor salaries, even if inflated (it's not clear what the result of this was), are nothing in the context of the cost inflation we've seen. I wasn't suggesting doctor salaries are the main driver of healthcare costs. The point is more to illustrate how economic regulations are mostly driven by the power of various special interests and have only a very limited relationship to economic efficiency. We could have globalized the doctor's profession in much the same way that we've globalized manufacturing supply chains and the result would have been, by textbook economic theory, massive savings for the rest of the economy.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:31
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Ynglaur posted:Chill out. I fully understand the concept of, "Being the only payer lets you negotiate". I'm pushing back against some earlier posts that said, "Let's just get to single payer and somehow the costs will work themselves out." The costs won't work themselves out unless we do something about it (which might start with something like, "Let Medicare negotiate prices aggressively."). I don't claim to have every answer, but I do know that ignoring cost is rarely a good policy in the long-term. You're pretty obviously responding to my post -- or at least the straw man version of it -- where I argued that costs are far less of an issue than providing adequate care. What you're conveniently ignoring, since you didn't actually quote anything I said, is that in the same post I did agree costs are an issue that needs to be dealt with. I even suggested a theoretical interpretation of why costs are so high and outlined a couple policies that could hypothetically deal with rising costs. asdf32 posted:Maybe. As an aside the huge problem at the moment is that no one has faith in institutions of any kind including government. This is a fundamental problem for the left which equally argues that 'the system' is rigged. People are clearly buying that but government is part of 'the system' and being centralized is easier to demonize and fear. I think the center and left need to actively try to reconstruct faith in at least some institutions. Somehow. But I don't get the sense of this being the focus. For example I bet we're going to see more energy spent attacking Trump than defending the things he's trying to destroy. The "centre" isn't a coherent position, it's more of a rhetorical stance for defending the status quo, which is all but indefensible. And people didn't lose faith in the status quo because of a Russian mind virus or the meme magick of the internet. They lost faith because of repeated and highly visible failures. Domestic and foreign policy events that weren't supposed to happen have continued to happen year after year. There's absolutely no evidence, even after all these failures, that anyone within the "centre" actually recognizes or acknowledges their significant role in creating these situations. They are very much the problem and as long as they're allowed to keep running things they are going to continue screwing up and those screw ups are going to add fuel to the flames. I mean, what would your proposal actually look like in practice? I cannot imagine how "the left", whatever we want that to mean in this context, could do anything except discredit itself further by trying to restore people's "faith" in the status quo. If the establishment wants to restore faith they could take a page from the lessons of the 20th century. A strong political commitment to broadly shared prosperity, sharp limits on monopolies and oligopolies to prevent price gouging, ensuring an ample supply of good jobs and a strong distrust of finance and financial deregulation, those are some of the basic requirements for a system where people have faith in their government (notice I say they are necessary but not that they are sufficient, since other factors are required as well). There's zero evidence that the people benefiting from the status quo right now would ever tolerate those policies. quote:Still don't get why you think this is a worthwhile argument when healthcare is clearly local and it can't actually be globalized. What the hell are you talking about? It would not be difficult to either import medical experts or even to subsidize medical tourism and fly people out to approved clinics in other countries where care is less expensive. A throw away line about how "healthcare is local" is not a substitute for making an actual argument.
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Jan 8, 2017 20:23
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StabbinHobo posted:a literal real estate developer with literally the ceo of the worlds largest corporation in his top spot He included some neat Easter eggs though. For instance, if we still reckoned time using the Republican calendar that was introduced at the height of the French Revolution (with everything reorganized on a decimal system with one hundred minutes in an hour and ten hours in a day and ten newly named months per year, etc.) then Trump's election occurred on the 18th of Brumaire, the same day that Napoleon Bonaparte first seized power in 1799.
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Jan 8, 2017 20:46
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Now that we're properly into 2017 it might not be a bad idea to start a new thread that can at least act as an aggregator for whatever bad pieces of economic news is cropping up around the world.
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Jan 9, 2017 17:41
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Xae posted:Child mortality != Infant mortality. Here's a CDC study which specifically uses standardizing measures and the US is still among the worst ranked in the OECD. International Comparisons of Infant Mortality and Related Factors: United States and Europe, 2010, pg. 2 posted:In the United States and most European countries, no gestational 
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Jan 9, 2017 20:50
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We're now at the point in the argument when the defender of America's private healthcare system will start implying that the American population is uniquely unhealthy and a lack of personal responsibility is the primary driver of the difference in health outcomes.
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Jan 9, 2017 21:18
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asdf32 posted:The center is the idea that compromise is legitimate and/or that sometimes better results come from it. It used to manifest as, for example, candidates talking about how they can "work across the isle" which is a sentiment on the decline. This is a rather hoary and cliched way of defining the "centre". What does it look like in practice for someone to adopt and defend this view, and are you seriously arguing (as seems to be your implication) that any defense of a government program or indeed democracy itself can only be channeled through "centrism"? The closest thing to a concrete example of how this would play out is implying in your last post that the left somehow bears some responsibility for Trump because they tend to share his sentiment that "the system is rigged". So your suggesting the left just drop that critique so it can make mealy mouthed civics 101 homilies to the importance of compromise? quote:Yes it would be, at least compared to all the other things that we collectively call globalization. Why? Given the vast sums of political capital that were expended to clear the way for major trade deals why do you think it's somehow prohibitive for the government to bring in foreign trained doctors or to subsidize medical tourism for patients? You're not even making an argument here you're just stubbornly repeating "it just is!"
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Jan 10, 2017 17:51
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asdf32 posted:Yes partly because it was poorly written but partly because that's the reality. And the important thing I left out is that the legitimacy of a 'center' is fundamental to a functioning democracy. And it takes a culture among the representatives and support from their voters to allow that to happen. Both things which are currently breaking down. Centrism didn't lose legitimacy because people said nasty things about it. It lost legitimacy because it was the expression of a corrupt and sclerotic system that was incapable of reforming itself even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it was failing. This seems to be completely absent from your analysis. quote:The left needs to support the things that the left needs to support and that includes many aspects of what fall under the 'status quo'. That's simply true but also when faith in everything falls apart I think the left loses to the right and I think that's what's parly on display across the US and Europe now. This is all so reductive and simplistic that I don't even know where to begin formulating a response. Has it occured to you that supposedly centre-left politicians supporting financial deregulation, and then responding to a massive finanical crisis by imposing government austerity measures, probably played a much larger role in the rise of political extremist groups? Your entire post is written as though objective reality doesn't exist and the only thing that influences political trends is what people say rather than what they do. Left-wingers correctly criticizing the massive failures of the status quo is not what lead to Donald Trump or the rise of right-wing extremists in Europe. quote:Globalization means importing iPhones from China not importing chinese people to make phones. Pretending those are basically the same things is a weird mistake. Give me a loving break. How can you make such sloppy arguments in good conscience? You're not in any way responding to the substance of what I said, you're trying to redefine a word so you can win the argument on the narrowest possible grounds. I've pointed out that, if the political will existed, the US could realize billions of dollars of savings by either sending people abroad for treatment or bringing in more foreign doctors. The truth or falsity of that statement in no way hinges on how you define the term "globalization". This is such a slimy attempt at a response that word's almost fail me. You haven't in any way challenged the substance of my claim you've tried to define it out of existence. It's even more egregious because you're using a definition of globalization that you seem to have invented just to win this argument. Here's a summary from an IMF document that I found with about two seconds of googling. It's very much a pro-globalization document so I can't imagine you'll object to its ideological tilt: quote:II. What is Globalization? The reason that trade in medical care isn't globalized but manufacturing is has more to do with politics than logistics. If the stated reasons for reducing trade and investment barriers in manufacturing were followed to their logical conclusion then our policy makers would be dedicating time and effort to reducing doctors salaries through foreign competition. The logistical hurdles are nowhere near great enough to explain why this hasn't happened. The clear explanation -- as illustrated by that story I posted up thread -- is political, not technocratic. Because, as uncomfortable as it might make you to acknowledge this, political power and conflicts between domestic interest groups (such as capital vs. organizd labour) are a fundamental part of the calculus surrounding which industries have been most exposed to international competition. No, they are not the only factor, and yes logistics (such as the rise of containerization) play a role here, but you consistently try to write as though domestic political struggles between special interests isn't absolutely crucial for understanding how globalization plays out in practice.
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Jan 12, 2017 21:17
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asdf32 posted:So where exactly do you factor voters into your equation. Some center left politicians supported deregulation and all republicans basically support it and voters keep sending republicans into office in big numbers. Can I say Trump again? Why does it seem like you compare the system to your personal ideas of success and keep score based on that? If voters don't want single payer healthcare and the system doesn't deliver it that should be scored as a democratic success, not a systemic failure. I know from our past discussions that your position here stems from a tautological definition of American democracy in which you assume that elections are accurate reflections of what voters want because otherwise they'd elect someone else. This despite a substantial body of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, showing deep and pervasive dissatisfaction with government and with both political parties. The full answer to your question would be a monograph length essay (at minimum) on the role large investors play in the political process, the extent to which voters are forced to choose between two extremely narrow ranges of options (neither of which actually disagrees on the fundamentals of the economic system), etc. One recent study which I know that you're aware of concludes, on the basis of extensive comparisons between the expressed preferences of voters at difference income levels, that: "the preferences of economic elites have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do." This wikipedia page on the so called "Investor Theory of Politics", which was coined by politician scientist Tom Fergusson, offers a reasonably good theoretical framework for understanding how this situation develops. Obviously there's a lot of cultural baggage here. You can't really discuss the rise of New Right ideology or neoliberalism in the late 20th century without going into the role of race, crime, Vietnam, generational change, etc. And voters have made plenty of decisions to enthusiastically support right-wing figures like Reagan (even if his popularity is massively exaggerated in retrospect compared to what it was at the time). The US electorate is certainly not secretly yearning for socialism, even if a lot of individual social democratic policies poll extremely well. Indeed to a large degree the evidence suggests the underlying desires of voters are somewhat contradictory and incoherent. But the really obvious reality here is that overall voters and their preferences aren't what drives policy making. Voters are obstacles to be dealt with on the road to power, and they're made significantly easier to deal with when both parties have to cater to the same basic pool of large political investors. Political disagreements are safely displaced to 'safe' issues which won't threaten the parasitic layer of lobbyists and special interests that run the country. There are specific situations where organized blocks of voters are able to press their demands more forcefully onto the system and get some kind of response. Life isn't a computer game where everyone always plays out their assigned role. There are unexpected upsets or disruptions and the people who run society are fallible humans who make mistakes or strategic oversights, which is how you can end up with a widely disliked figure like Trump winning an election he wasn't supposed to win. The claim here isn't that monied interests are omnipotent or that the US ruling class is monolithic and has no internal divisions that sometimes result in very real competition. But facile civics 101 models of the government in which political parties are just vote-maximizing efforts that cleanly replicate the desires of the "median voter" and produce an outcome based on that median voters policy preferences are an absolutely worthless way to interpret election results. quote:And that source goes on to describe how the term was invented in the 70's to describe how technology allowed increased trade and capital flows. U.S. immigration by percentage peaked around the 20's. Flows of humans have been larger in the past and the fact is that immigration hasn't been a dominant factor compared to trade in recent economic trends. Look, this is just ridiculous. You're completely ignoring anything I say and repeating these "just so" stories. You don't have to agree with my arguments but you need to at least demonstrate you've read the words I wrote and took them into account before crafting a response. Everything you've written here could have just as easily been written by you had you not read any of my arguments. I posted an article in this very thread describing how right at the height of free trade mania in the 1990s there was a lobbying move by American doctors to limit the influx of foreign trained doctors, a move explicitly prompted by a desire to prevent an "over supply" of doctors that they feared would reduce their wages. You also haven't addressed why the government couldn't just subsidize medical tourism to certified foreign clinics. Yes there would be barriers to entry here but they are far from insurmountable and would indeed be comparable to the similar technical and legal barriers to trade in goods and services that had to be overcome before modern supply chains could be internationalized to the extent that they are today. If you want to have a debate about globalization and the technical constraints on it and what the root drivers of American trade policy are (special interest lobbying vs. technical and structural constraints, or however you want to frame it) then that's great. I enjoy debates that force me to reconsider my positions or to arrange my own thoughts into arguments. But that's not what's happening here. Replying to you feels, frankly, like a big waste of time because your responses almost never seem to reply to anything specific I've said. Your just making the same bald assertion again and again. You don't really listen to what other people say and then integrate it into your future arguments, you wait for your turn to speak and then proceed as though you didn't listen to a single thing the other person said.
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Jan 15, 2017 20:23
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Uranium Phoenix posted:You could at least pretend to read the article and report I linked. Reducing these incredible complicated world-historic processes down to a couple abstract numbers and then using them to prove that progress happens either because of or "in spite of" globalization seems like a dubious exercise. I think it's fair to point out that trade flows end can end up extracting significant amounts of wealth from already poor countries but trying to say that development in, say, China, is happening despite globalization is a bit of a reach. It's fair to say globalization doesn't work in the way it's commonly presented, that the most successful economies don't follow the advice laid out by the so-called "Washington Consensus", or to point out that global growth rates have actually been lower in much of the world since the 1980s, but I don't think you can completely dismiss the exchange of technology, movement of factories or the opening of first world markets. If we broadly define globalization to refer to the process of greater global economic interchange and trade then I don't see how you can fully explain the growth of various Asian economies without reference to their trade with other parts of the world. Your argument might apply more directly to some other countries but at least in the case of a large country like China it sure seems as though they were able to bring in huge flows of investment and technology that they wouldn't have otherwise had access to had they tried to finance their growth exclusively through their own national economy. One might also argue that at least to some extent the pressure to sell in foreign markets is part of what helped Asian development strategies excel whereas a lot of Latin American import-substitution strategies under performed expectations, at least in part because companies had captive domestic markets and friendly governments which reduced pressure to develop globally competitive products.
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Jan 16, 2017 19:59
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Yeah only peaceful and egalitarian democracies ever have a thriving cultural scene.
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Jan 19, 2017 22:54
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