Stop Me Before I Vote Again

"n the trade area, nothing spectacular; but of keen long-run impact, we need now to attack the relatively small, relatively skill-intensive service sector of our trading system: knock off our imports over the wires of the services of those Chindian cheaply-built skill types"

If I'm understanding you correctly, you want to halt the offshoring of the service sector, higher end stuff like law and engineering?

It seems like that just prolongs the worst of both worlds situation we have now, where unskilled workers get screwed by losing their job vs. cheap imported manufacturing products, but have to pay through the nose for their medical care (obviously this is more complicated than just the doctors union), legal bills, and any other protected high end services and non-tradeables. ((*) Why would we want to? -- Ed.)

I like Dean Baker's suggestion (which you seem to agree with) to force the doctors and lawyers into the race to the bottom by allowing a lot of skilled immigration, but I think that you both underestimate their ability to shut out the immigrants through various barriers to entry in the domestic system.

It's a big problem here in Canada, where we have a very open skill based immigration policy already. We have tons of skilled immigrants, but they are discriminated against and not allowed to practice here, so nobody sees the benefit of reduced costs for their services. Instead we have the best educated phd-bearing taxi drivers in the world.

This is one issue where I'm definitely on the side of "make things worse in order to make things better". I'd love to see all the lawyers and engineers competing with Indians from Bangalore, being disabused of their meritoid conceits. I love hearing silicon valley ex-libertarian software engineers cry about H1Bs. Fuck em. Learn what class you really belong to.

"Oh no, Paine! Once back behind a wall of protection, how then can we curb the runaway wage demands and education costs of our own home-grown skillheads?(*) ...Why would we want to? -- Ed "

Why would we want to?
Why would we want to !!!!!

in 5 little words.. just five little words...ladies and gentlemen
of the jury...father smith
unfrocks himself
and what do we find underneath
why an evil snickering
ultimately pusillanimous
merit class homunculus

what a slip up !!!

oh if only what's his name ...mongo
could pass thru here now
looking to swat me one for old times sake
and see ......this !!!

why if i had it ion my power i'd restrict our native born audit accounts
civil engineers
patent lawyers
radiologist
dish jugglers
to a virtual gulag
cuff em by those leg bracelets
you know the ones with the tracking device
on em
yup lash em to equally tracked lap top
or whatever principle tool of ignorance they use in their trade
and subject them to weed based diets
and isometric exercise regimens
and and waves of insurance salesmen

and he
our so called fearless leader
would have ...what ???
why he'd have them prosper
grow thick with trinkets
covort with call persons
rub elbows with sports stars

even as we mcjobbled toads
crushed under so many
sadistic corporate thumbs
hop about on short rounds
just because we never mastered
A SKILL !!!

Protecting the knowledge economy workers who were supposed to benefit from free trade after everyone else got screwed just validates all the bullshit arguments made by people like Laura Tyson.

Bailing out the meritoids to keep up the free trade in manufactured goods is like bailing out the banks to keep up the free market fiction. Just when Richard Florida is finally conceding that the knowledge economy nonsense is not a viable plan for the economy, you would be intervening in order to prop up the bad arguments.

comments crossed there

I think we are of a similar opinion, but that just makes your argument for protecting the meritoids all the more puzzling to me

fb my lamb
we have no disagreement here

of course we protect our wage class
and of course that is why
we reindustrialize

but the un-skilled service jobs
will still require an internal
organizational solution
fair trade can't help them
in fact it would only lift their cost of living
as of course would an end to
over the wire skill off shoring
--dean's point--
but we need an alliance here with the skill heads
we need to throw em a bone
get em on our side in the trade war
of course we'll double cross em with our
lady liberty immigration policy

here's the skinny

no skill jobs are all we need to organize for
lift these wages we lift the whole wage structure
immigration now looks to hurt the no skills
but that is because we have job rationing
impose hyper employment macro
a minimum wage tied to median productivity
hours celings and sha-zam !!

possible ??
of course

gonna happen ??
only in my manic dreams !!!!!

"Just when Richard Florida is finally conceding that the knowledge economy nonsense is not a viable plan for the economy, you would be intervening in order to prop up the bad arguments"

fb
like the shadow i must keep one step ahead

digest the whole scheme and you'll se oit has the fool proof stamp one finds on the bottom of all paine clan master plans

what did you fools think i was doinmg all those months i relieved you of the burden of my posts here??

deeply premeditated projects
unleashed on an unsuspecting merit world

no one expects ...
the cultural revolution

eh franky my boy ??

I'm reading, I'm re-reading, and I still don't see your point.

Throw them a bone? Like Obama playing nice with the bankers to get them onside?

No, fuck the meritoids. They need to be sent down and rusticated. Immigration won't do that.

"get em on our side in the trade war
of course we'll double cross em with our
lady liberty immigration policy"

TPTB knew they couldn't undermine the workers through immigration, so they did it through trade. IMO immigration has even less of a chance working vs. the merit guilds. I'd rather stick with what works

fb

we need a broad front we need to hook in the class that used to think there above this menace

hold your nose if you must
but this kos like gaggle can be mobilized once they understand the trade in services threat as a basis for common cause with industrial workers on this fair trade front
and those advocating
a reindustrialization movement

i've always felt dean the dream baited the merit class when he should have cried

your next doctor dumbo !!!
join us before your job too goes out
over the wires to wogville

---------------
as to the barriers to skilled immigrants believe me
when the coming systemic cost reduction pressures hit the private profit motives
once pass thru to the rubes is a no no
watch these barriers burst
but that gets ahead of the curve that's long run stuff
you gotta have the next move clear before you make the present move but you can leave it
in outline
for now a untited front with the fairly broad pack of non elite "professionals"

"Like Obama playing nice with the bankers to get them onside"
no that's not analogous the bankers are enemies of the people
merit farts are just petty bourgeois
specialized commodities
ripe for the skill stripper
and open scrap container

ripe to be proler-ized
because
"sorry no more skill m job n
ration cards left bub"

Yeah, maybe, Owen, but the meritoids have been getting sucked dry for a long time, and their resolve every electoral cycle is to support more and better vampires. When that fails them, as it always does, they slink over to the "decent middle ground" between the bugfuck nuts and batshit crazy neoliberals. They're as hopeless as the wingnuts. All that counts for them anymore is the fatuous satisfaction of feeling superior to the hysterical wingers.

"no that's not analogous"

fair enough

"ripe to be proler-ized
because
"sorry no more skill m job n
ration cards left bub""

I'd like to see that actually happen first, before the "united front"

"your next doctor dumbo !!!
join us before your job too goes out
over the wires to wogville"

Send it out. That way they have no choice but to join on equal footing. Consider it a teachable moment

"the fatuous satisfaction of feeling superior to the hysterical wingers."

do u think they see protectionism as wing nut kulack reaction??

i mean outside of the relative few
that have actually had their job out sourced

i know i'm ahead of the curve here
after all the old bobby reich line about skill aquisition is just now beginning to show
its fragile glass bottom

i guess i think about those chaps and chapettes that figure their
one of the 20% ers that has benefited by globalization
and remain one worlders

"Send it out. That way they have no choice but to join on equal footing. Consider it a teachable moment"
hmm
maybe you're right at least for now

they clearly need a good sample
of the process

i'm just keeping the lines open not closing em like baker by baiting em and calling them
the smug guild member
petty rent suckers they are

i'd also like to hammer
the skill producing factories
that cook with too much
liberal arts lard
when preparing a batch of marketable hu caps

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050402555_2.html

human light bulb al blinder back in 07
discovers new possibilities for off shoring
services thru the wire

"It's ... going to be large. How large? In some recent research, I estimated that 30 million to 40 million U.S. jobs are potentially offshorable. These include scientists, mathematicians and editors on the high end and telephone operators, clerks and typists on the low end. Obviously, not all of these jobs are going to India, China or elsewhere. But many will. "

that's about 1/3 of the entire job force
under direct threat
far beyond anything mere merchandise trade could threaten

indeed what will remain "untradeable"

the segmentaion of the globe into bordered zones creates an unlimited game board
for profit arbitrage

if the laputa corporations "have it their way
we will indeed have one of those french farces
with borders opening and closing
at the will of corporate types
like so many bed room doors

so far as i know
this remains largely unmodeled
my needs have been met by modifying the tariff
models for nation states "border tax
and /or quota auctions set for revenue max"
but assuming the corporations take all this "customes revenue" and this invisible "protection racket looks like
the 19th century liberal ideal
"free trade" because there are no
"gubmint" interventions
i can't see where this is too far off
but i've always lacked the faculty
for concentrated thinking
needed to put a really novel formalism together myself

i prefer to simply understand other folks formalisms --not very difficult in economics--
and destroy em as models of our "market system"
if they show signs of pro corporate class implications for "policy"

this too is easy because most economists start with a result and build backwards
result ??
well like:
"in this model of fiscal policy
the gubmint running a deficit
can only wreck the free market's "spontaneously optimal natural outcome"
or the gubmint is impotent to alter
the free market natural outcome
"in the long run"
or employment can not exceed some
"less then full upper bound "
without inflation running amok

or there is a "natural rate of interest "
and its optimal
like all other pure market action based outcomes there is a "natural rate of "growth"
a "natural rate of innovation"

unlike models of particles
in quantum chromo dynamics
the train of venal motivations
becomes fairly simple to spot
in economics

top dog neoclassical two part result

factors of production in a free market setting
receive their marginal productivity
and since we all know
"capital" itself
is a production factor ...

you get the meme ..eh ??

I knew you couldn't resist the hard line.

Offshoring will take care of the universities too. Students are pretty quick to figure out when the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow has disappeared. Just look at computer science

re: Blinder

yeah I saw that in Duy's peice this morning. It's pretty germane to the topic at hand.

I actually have a soft spot for old toaster head. He shows flashes of independent thinking here and there, and is actually quite friendly to the post-keynesians. He commissioned Lavoie to do the Canadian version of his text. His own version is probably the only textbook in the world that actually gets central banking and money supply right

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/07/push-back.html

over at thomaville
ther's a post up on this
i commennt on a patch out of that post:

the patch:

"Blinder views these jobs as very vulnerable to offshoring, suggesting a lack of comparative advantage. If Blinder is right, then America apparently has little left in the comparative advantage department"

my comment :

this is a very serious jumble up
in our pure models where the notion of comparative advantage "lives"
there can be no bordered trading area
without a comparative advantage

comparative advantage has a very clear special meaning
in trade theory models
however
the real systems of trade out there
correspond to these models ..not at all

to begin with as paul samuelson pointed out often enough
without full employment conditions across all production factors thru out all bordered regions
ricardo's theorems collapse
and openning up to second bests
is pretty much so far
openning up pandora's box

policy claims become a free for all where what else
might makes right

not to add confusion

but border effects are not simply generated by forex fiddles
we have corporate market segmentaion and price dispersion
that utilizes protections themselves as part of the asrbitrage game
oh these corporations
why if you didn't know any better
you'd think they invented
this damn trading system themselves

some time way back maybe
just b4 columbus or something

and as it developed and evolved
got gubmints to change the rules

you now on the fly
improvise then formalize then legalize

make the f'er up as you go along
fuck em if they can't take the jokes

fb

why the fuck don't you comment there
if you do
it's coming across like it ain't you

we need to gang fuck
some of dem fuddish shit holes
there at the thoma-tose comment stables

i'm tired of running the table on these benighted critters
most don't got the fee simple sense to know when i've
dropped all my called balls
in their called pockets

i need another top gun over there

so come out of the closet and start blazin away

"most don't got the fee simple sense to know when i've
dropped all my called balls
in their called pockets"

That's why I stopped. Thoma's bail out the bankers for the common good meme turned me off. If you recall I did stop back in to bash him for that a little while ago.

I might start again though. It seems like as good a platform as any for anonymous proselytizing.

I think you've gotten to most of the better commenters there, like "Patrick" and "nklein", but the big dog who you really need to tangle with is "Adam P". He's a real deal ivy phd NK top gun with live ammo experience.

The one bit that I don't understand is why you seem to like Bruce Wilder. The guy is a pompous idiot from what I can tell

example of broad frnot tactics fb
bw and rusty and several others are not the enemy
heel thoma is not tthe enemy

this adamp
why have i missed isolating him

will not in future missions

--------------
my daughter does agit prop research and dirty tricks for a union

she turned me on to the comment grapple as best way to reach folks

what i lack is a link back to models
that are
on line
entertainingly kool
open sourced
interactive etc etc

i'd especially like a site with models
some one could punk or pimp
but alas so far i haven't mobilized the necessary hu cap

yeah, flash models are much needed. there are a couple floating around but they leave much to be desired

Godley's models are available for free, but they are in Eviews format which is very clunky. It's not user friendly or teachable at all.

you might want to get in touch with this guy:

http://econviz.com/balance-sheet-visualizer.html

His stuff is still pretty wonky, but I imagine that that is the kind of thing that you are after

"she turned me on to the comment grapple as best way to reach folks"

Definitely true.. everyone reads comments, even if they pretend that they don't. Everyone googles themselves as well.

Up here in canuckistan the conservatives are relentless with the paid commenters. If you even look at the comments on a political newspaper article you would think that Canadians are 90% teabagger

by wonky I don't mean advanced economics... just messed up and wrong

that site fb is
utterly frightful
the soul behind it
no doubt
delightful

op -

do u think they see protectionism as wing nut kulack reaction??

I think they see it however their preferred pundit tells them to see it. For the Clintonoids (those who think Bill Clinton was heroic), Human Doll Reich will probably be their teacher, given Reich's deification under Slick Willie. For the Obamaphiles, they'll believe whomever Markos Zuniga, Arianna Huffington, "Digby" or Jane Hamsher tell them to believe.

The base problem here is ignorance, which leads to un-thinking (let alone critical thinking) acceptance of the shit-like dogma advanced by One's Chosen Expert.

The "knowledge economy" is as big a house of cards as the derivatives trade system. Sure, it can "grow" thanks to confidence scams of various types. Hell, organized "criminals" have run con games for centuries. I guess that makes them an "economy" of sorts, eh?

I'm just now catching up on this comment thread, and was delighted to see that Owen had fastened his fangs so eloquently into my editorial fetlock. It was like the old days -- hammer-and-tongs all night in the college snack bar.

There are skillheads and then there are skillheads. One important distinction is whether they have some guild apparatus limiting their numbers and keeping their price artificially high -- doctors and lawyers, for example.

My own area of the skillhead world -- which I call "Stupid Computer Tricks" -- doesn't have that sort of structure, and it has become proletarianized to a degree that surprises me, and might surprise Owen as well if he were au-fait with it.

Looking for work in this world, nowadays, for a long-in-the-tooth Norteamericano, is a newly Dickensian affair. So of course protectionism seems like a hell of a
good idea to me.

Now Owen doesn't seem to have any grudge aganst protectionism as such -- except insofar as it might move the wolf a few feet back from the door of skillheads like myself.

But really, some skillheads are a lot more like spot-welders than they are like lawyers. It's a broad category, skillheads -- maybe a little too broad. The 23-year-old guys from India who are my competition, these days, don't look much like rentiers. They look more like braceros.

Between Schuman's earlier comment and MJS' last one, I can see something that echoes what I know of IRL skillheads.

There's the old joke about how liberals are conservatives who haven't been mugged yet. Or, conversely, how conservatives are liberals who haven't had to spend a night in jail yet.

The difference between the smug, viciously optimistic assholes that Schuman (accurately) describes and the local version of MJS' "braceros" is more or less the difference between being one year out of a Very Expensive College and Ten Years out of same.

Or it could be, if I could just work out the snappy slogan for it properly.

MJS

I can't speak for Owen, but I think that this is a worthwhile distinction:

"There are skillheads and then there are skillheads. One important distinction is whether they have some guild apparatus limiting their numbers and keeping their price artificially high -- doctors and lawyers, for example."

The main reason that I am an advocate giving no quarter to the broad symbolic worker skillhead class is that the protections against internet outsourcing wouldn't distinguish between the guild members and the outsiders. Once the professionals and the professors are echoing this:

"Looking for work in this world, nowadays, for a long-in-the-tooth Norteamericano, is a newly Dickensian affair. So of course protectionism seems like a hell of a good idea to me."

then it's mission accomplished. I really don't wish anything worse upon the computer workers, who (like those in manufacturing) have already gotten worse than they deserve. I just want those higher up the 'value chain' to experience the same thing before we start calling for protection.

There is an interesting discord on display between MJS's feelings about protectionism and his earlier-expressed attitude concerning seniority, or so it seems to me. Protectionism, given the likely age of the usurping foreign hires, is a kind of seniority. No? 'Splain?

It's in discussions like these that I'm glad I take a nihilistic view of political economics to its logical conclusion - and simply chuck the bath, the bath water and the rented baby into the shit stream that runs down the middle of the Straße.

There seem to be a number of balls in the air here. Not sure I even know how many.

Is anybody objecting to 'protectionism' in general? By which I mean, would anybody in this conversation say that protectionism is bad, always and everywhere?

If not -- if we all agree that protectionism might be a good thing sometimes -- then it's a question of when and where. Presumably anybody who's not an absolutist on the subject would agree that protecting manufacturing jobs might be OK. Subsistence agriculture? Maybe even cubicle jobs -- help desk and customer service types. Am I on thin ice yet?

So where exactly do we draw the line, and why? I don't see upper-crust skillheads -- orthopedic surgeons, criminal defense lawyers -- much threatened by offshoring. It's not even completely clear to what extent offshoring is responsible for my own rather dire employment prospects these days, though I suspect it's part of the problem.

I'm as ignorant a a rat about economics, so I don't really know what it is that enables capital to practice cross-border labor-cost arbitrage. But I feel pretty sure that capital's ability to do that isn't a good thing for the rest of us, and more protectionism would tend to impede it, no?

And if that happened to be a good thing for people like me, well then, tough shit.

"Is anybody objecting to 'protectionism' in general?"

Nope. In an ideal world it wouldn't be needed, but right now it very much is.

"So where exactly do we draw the line, and why? I don't see upper-crust skillheads -- orthopedic surgeons, criminal defense lawyers -- much threatened by offshoring."

Surgeons, no, but that's not exactly a normal job in economic terms, hence the huge issue with healthcare.

Criminal defence lawyers are definitely threatened by internet offshoring. Obviously Sangeeta from Bangalore is not going to be arguing cases via GoToMeeting, but the majority of lawyers don't even argue cases in a court. If their jobs (writing up contracts for corporations, etc.) are offshored, then that puts downward pressure on the wages of all lawyers, because the newly unemployed corporate law lawyers would swarm criminal law.

The reason that Alan Blinder was shitting himself is because he realized 40 million more jobs were offshorable via the internet. That affects more than just those jobs. The disappearing factory jobs didn't just hit the factory workers. Those workers drove down the wages for all unskilled labour. This round of offshoring would drive down wages for all skilled labour.

At the higher end, look at a university chemistry prof. Obviously the job itself can't be offshored, but if all the private sector chemists lose their jobs, then there would be a whole lot of highly qualified unemployed chemists looking for teaching jobs, willing to take lower salaries. Also once the jobs disappear, students are also not going to be willing to pay as much for a chemistry degree, so the prof's salary would come under heavy pressure from both sides.

" I don't really know what it is that enables capital to practice cross-border labor-cost arbitrage."

Lack of capital controls and a wonky exchange rate system. That wasn't always the case (under Bretton Woods, WW2-1971).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

"I feel pretty sure that capital's ability to do that isn't a good thing for the rest of us, and more protectionism would tend to impede it, no?

And if that happened to be a good thing for people like me, well then, tough shit."

Yes. What I object to is the idea of protecting the "skillheads" using Owen's original proposal while leaving manufacturing workers unprotected. I doubt that the skillheads will be motivated by the demands of logical and ethical consistency to campaign to have manufacturing workers given the same protections. Once protected, I doubt that they would even think of themselves as being protected, but rather interpret their high wages as simply their reward for investing in credentials.

Random thoughts on job categories:

* 2.5 yrs ago I went to the ER with a ridiculously painful headache + other symptoms and one of the diagnostics they did was an MRI. I had to wait for 30 mins while the hospital's offshore MRI reading contractor (located in New Zealand, I kid you not) got around to my scan. Health care indeed is being "offshored."

* 15 yrs ago I was a corporate lawyer in a big law firm serving big corporations. For corporations doing business in highly regulated environments where the regulation is state-specific (i.e. insurance), multi-state surveys of state laws, regulations, AG opinions, admin hearing orders, etc are fairly commonplace as a piece of legal business for firms such as the one where I worked. Enterprising little snakes already had created business entities which competed with law firms for such broad-spectrum survey work. They would under-bid on the project contract, and staff the legal research and analysis portion with young lawyers who lacked the proper experience and wisdom to actually give good advice -- but in the bean counter's domain of the 90s corporate world, the lower cost beat the higher quality at least 50% of the time. At least.

* In the late 90s and early 00s I was an in-house lawyer for a legal malpractice insurance company and its subsequent changes. I restructured the entity to create a holding company system with a corporate parent, and the insurance company became one of several subsidiary entities in the system. One of the changes then underway in the law practice world was "multi-disciplinary practice" where law firms could have non-lawyer structures in which non-lawyers shared in legal work profits, and lawyers received non-legal work profits. The potential for offshoring is immense here.

The lines are blurred and it doesn't do well to talk about a particular line of work as being susceptible to offshoring or not.