Are retail jobs going the way of farming and manufacturing?

Seems to imply pretty strongly that the West should and will always be ahead.

If unlimited wants and needs can be satisfied, then what you need to satisfy them must then be limitless.

Also, if you could attempt to prove how any Bangladeshi gains have come out of Western living standards, I'd be curious to see it. You argue that Western living standards benefit from cheaper goods, etc., but then you argue that living standards are a zero-sum game. I'm sure there's a 1,000-word explanation for why that's not a glaring contradiction, though.

 

Ragu,
Is increased standard of living a zero-sum game? Maybe in the short run (he takes my job and I don't have a job). But in the long run, increased standards of living across the globe mean more people who can afford XBoxes, iPods, or Fords, right?

 

Thank you for this ... I was out when that was posted. And the answer is a resounding NO! This statement:

... is simply incorrect.

 

I was vowing to stay away from this celebration of people as widgets, but....really, Quant? People being at sustenance wages is hunky dory when in service of the economic machine? Even if you seem to be positing a system in which fewer people will be able to afford what the machine produces? And the concern here for the well-being of the Bangladeshis as opposed to that of our poor would be unprecedented but for George Harrison.

And this concept of zero-sum is total B.S. Hell, the proliferation of the Internet has created opportunities and needs out of nowhere that don't take away from other things. Most every new discovery or innovation does this.

 

I thought this was going to be about people losing limbs in the cash register.

 

Re the original link: How many people thought a retail job was going to be the way to sustain a lifestyle? That would seem to be a miscalculation on the worker's part, far more than the old agricultural and especially manufacturing jobs. I can't think of a time that working retail was really a "career" per se in the first place.

 

Yeah, Dixie, where's Upton Sinclair when you need him?

 

The trick is for the govt that is going to do the stimulating to find jobs that add value to the economy - and infrastructure improvements are not necessarily the way to do that. In the 2009 stimulus, money was allocated for "shovel-ready" projects to fix roads and bridges etc. Yes, they needed fixing, but paying people to do those jobs did not create anything new after the fixes were done. The fact that stretches of Interstate highways had fewer potholes, nicer bridges and better road shoulders did not create any new industries.

In the Depression, FDR created the TVA. I don't care if you like the TVA or don't, the TVA did two things simultaneously:

1. It provided jobs to people who did not have jobs in the mid-south.

2. When it was finished it created a whole new class of customers for other industries like light-bulgs and washing machines because it created hundreds of thousands of new homes wired for electricity.

The TVA had a lasting economic effect; fixing a bridge that is deteriorating has much less of an economic effect. What was lacking in the 2009 stimulus was enough spending on things that would create new industries. The idea was there with the "Green Jobs" and things like that. The problem is that more of those expenditures have evolved to dead-end failures than have evolved to huge new industries. That is the challenge for anyone designing a govt stimulus...

 

Now that's progress!

 

That depends on which half of them never got started.

 

Your two paragraphs seem to contradict each other, philosophically. Or at least seem to arise out of different points on the spectrum.

So, to begin with, this isn't about "people as widgets." Well, not in a perjorative way. The economics term is "human capital." People in Bangladesh, at this point in time, have one export to sell: Cheap labor. So they sell that. The collapse wasn't about low wages, it was about lax and unenforced safety regulations. Low wages are fine. They are better than no wages. And although 21 cents a day or an hour or whatever it is sounds bad to us, it's pretty arrogant to impose our lifestyle vision on Bangladeshis. Not to mention that the cost of untradable goods - child care, public transportation, and so forth - is presumably much cheaper there than here. Selling cheap labor, as Bangladesh does now, is what China and its fellow "Asian tigers" did to begin to pull themselves from third-world status.

But then you move onto the second paragraph, where you argue that this isn't a zero-sum game. First of all, Ragu agrees. That's kind of the point. Second of all, that contradicts your first point, kind of. We don't benefit from Bangladesh's low-wage labor, while Bangladesh suffers. Everybody gains. Economics are not zero-sum.

There are a lot of Africans who would love to work in a low wages garment factory, if only their corrupt goverment officials didn't make them fill out 3,000 forms and move 2,000 bribes in order to get started.