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Are retail jobs going the way of farming and manufacturing?

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Dick Whitman, May 23, 2013.

  1. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    "Human capital" equals euphemism. I see you've read your 1984 and taken the wrong message from it. My point is, employ our poor first before we give a shit about the Bangladeshis. The businesses that move to Bangladesh don't give a shit about the Bangladeshis in a meaningful way, other than as widg....er, "human capital." And I see you've embraced the Raguvian "government as sinners/business as saints" tack at the end there.
     
  2. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    First of all, I don't much care about whether businesses "give a shit about the Bangladeshis in a meaningful way." Not in this context. They're running a business.

    Second, we should give a shit about the Bangladeshis BECAUSE we want to help our own poor. Cheaper production equals cheaper goods equals a higher standard of living for low-income Americans. This is a global economy, which is a good thing, and it's time we got used to it.
     
  3. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    Look, this is very easy to see on a micro-level. The story here comes out of my experience, but it generalizes easily.

    Once upon a time, in another life and another state, your humble correspondent got a contract to produce some tooling for a big manufacturer. This tooling went through hell when it was being used, so my customer went through a lot of it. As I recall, the order was for something like 30 units a week. Now, this tooling had to be made very, very precisely (it was used in the production of automobile steering components). When we first started producing this, our more skilled and expensive workers (i.e., my father and I) would work 25 or 30 hours to get a batch of this tooling out. Over time, however, we figured out how to do things cheaper. We made a few specialized tools. We came up with some soldering techniques that were perfect for this product. Anyway, after about a year of making these things, we had it worked out such that we only needed 4 or 5 hours from my father or me, and the rest of the work could be done by our least skilled employee. (My father and I, we earned something like $20 an hour back then; our least-skilled workers made about $8 an hour).

    Now, if you adopt the perspective of the prompt of this thread, this was a bad thing. We had work that would support a good paycheck (for the area and the time) devolving into work that wouldn't support such a good paycheck. But that's entirely the wrong way to read it. Because what we really saw was a constant level of economic output -- 30 of these buggy little buggers a week -- being produced with less- and less-scarce resources. Meaning that the scarcer resource (high-precision tool-making skill) could be allocated more appropriately (i.e., to the production of MORE outputs).

    This happened in agriculture. It's been happening in manufacturing. It's beginning to happen in retailing. It is a sign of progress, and that's really not open to serious argument.
     
  4. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Good regulations are good. Bad regulations are bad.
     
  5. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    Yeah, Dick, it's fine for a business to do anything to better its bottom line. I get the benighted amorality of the Fuck American Workers Theory. And, you moron, producing cheaper goods elsewhere doesn't give lower-income Americans the wherewithal to buy said goods.

    And quant, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
     
  6. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Right. The only real argument is how to re-allocate these resources, primarily through re-training since these aren't transferable skills. And, of course, how best to financially bridge the workers' transition from a dying industry, through re-training, and onto the next career.
     
  7. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Yes, it does. Long-term, it absolutely does. This is exactly what happened as a result of the industrial revolution.
     
  8. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    No it doesn't
     
  9. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Maybe Wal-Mart should just pay its workers to dig a bunch of holes on its property, then fill them back in.

    That's as effective of a use of labor as paying American labor to do what Bangladeshi labor could do for pennies on the dollar.
     
  10. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    No, have Americans do what the Bangledeshis do. I'd take Americans being able to put food on the table over keeping the flow of iPads going as strong as mathematically possible. That digging holes argument, BTW, was also extreme and silly the first 99 times you put it forth.
     
  11. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    Well, d_w1, you strike me as a decent enough fellow (and I think the Astros made out like bandits when they traded you for Bouton so many years ago), so don't take this wrong. But "agree to disagree" really doesn't work here. The argument you're making is categorically unsupportable. Please ... trust me. I blather on about a lot of stuff on this site, but this particular topic, it's in my wheelhouse.
     
  12. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    Ah, "appeal to authority." Got it.
     
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