The trade is mutually beneficial; it's not a zero-sum game that necessarily has winners and losers.
From the trade, we in the USA get cheaper products and low-cost loans/investment.
We then enact counter-productive feel-good policies that make us less competitive:
- employment-depressing labor rules (ranging from minimum wages to complex and expensive mandates)
- corporate welfare (including bailouts)
- subsidies for politically-popular activities (like home ownership and acquisition of often-superfluous academic credentials)
These choices are not the fault of the Chinese. At worst, because our trade with the Chinese makes us wealthier, we can then afford to make bigger mistakes elsewhere before correcting course. We spend the surpluses from trade on our anti-competitive policy luxuries.
"Winning" won't require getting tough on the Chinese, but getting tough on ourselves.
The benefits are very short-term at the cost of long-term benefits, though. We get cheap products now, at the cost of losing our ability to produce them. There are wide ranges of products now that the U.S. no longer knows how to manufacture. Even if we wanted to build factories to produce stuff again, we no longer know how, unless China were willing to lend us experts. And there's an even bigger range of things that would take us 5-10 years to ramp up if we really needed to make them again.
Basically we traded owning our own production for renting production from overseas. Renting often has lower immediate costs but higher long-term costs (and less freedom).
More likely, Chinese leadership has its own set of problems and what happens to the US is tangential, at most just another factor to consider in complex calculations. They are probably indifferent about whether some particular policy of theirs is "creating" or "destroying" jobs in the US, as long as it has its desired domestic effect. That's a completely different thing from a "war" with its focus on the other side and emphasis on "winning" against the other side. Attitudes like yours are knee-jerk, populist, and likely to make the world a worse place than it already is in the future.
Looking like a duck and quacking like a duck doesn't depend on your silly definition of "war." What China is effectively doing is waging war on the US. Whether we wake up to this fact or not will determine whether the US becomes a nation of the rich in fortified castles sitting amongst the poor and desperate, or whether we return to the American Dream.
The US wins economically as the Chinese middle-class grows. What products do you think they will buy when their wages increase - a knock-off phone in Hong Kong or the iPhone 5 or 6?
The market for American goods increases as the Chinese middle class grows. Chinese consumers don't prefer cheap knockoffs, they buy them because they can't afford the most expensive genuine article. Look at the Chinese market for luxury cars as an example of what will happen with increasing speed: http://magazine.wsj.com/features/the-state-of-luxury/cars/
Granted, US car makers aren't in great shape right now, but other industries can take advantage of the Chinese appetite for luxury consumer goods (electronics, cosmetics etc). The elecronics may be manufactured in China, but the profit margins are mainly with the US companies who designed and developed them.
Savvy US companies can sell their goods in increasing volume due to the larger overall global market. Many US multinationals make large chunks of their profit overseas, yet you don't hear people saying the US should enter into trade wars with South America, Europe or Australia.
* cheap products for consumers = higher standard of living.
IIRC, consumer products are about 18% of a typical household budget. Housing, healthcare, and education are the majority.
For the millions now with ZERO income, even Chinese-made Wal*Mart crap is unaffordable. Yet the unionized workers of the 1950s - 1970's somehow purchased cars, household products, and clothing like domestically-made Levis blue jeans WITHOUT slave labor from repressive countries and without borrowing trillions fro those same countries.
I will gladly trade somewhat higher consumer prices for confidence that I will be employable in safe conditions at a middle-class wage for the duration of my normal working life.
And I'm very pro-manufacturing: but the environmental externalities must be mitigated and properly priced: my health is very valuable to me, even if there's no clear market price for it.
Yet the unionized workers of the 1950s - 1970's somehow purchased cars, household products, and clothing like domestically-made Levis blue jeans WITHOUT slave labor from repressive countries and without borrowing trillions fro those same countries.
That was only possible because that time period was a window in which our technological superiority made it possible to provide the average working man with that standard of living. That period is coming quickly to a close.
Uh, no. Aside from petroleum issues, it was a SUSTAINABLE CLOSED SYSTEM of trade among similarly-developed countries with similar standards. This could continue even if innovation had suddenly stopped in 1985.
Far more sustainable than the present, which involves unsustainable personal debts, unsustainable trade deficits, and unsustainable federal borrowing.
But please note that CENTRAL POINT OF THE ARTICLE explains WHY our technological superiority lessened, rather than moving exponentially further ahead.
Uh, no. Aside from petroleum issues, it was a SUSTAINABLE CLOSED SYSTEM of trade among similarly-developed countries with similar standards. This could continue even if innovation had suddenly stopped in 1985.
It's only a closed system if you ignore the resources and cheap bottom-tier labor the first world extracted from the third world at a fraction of their potential value. The U.S. in particular was very active in this time period propping up puppet regimes around the third world in order to get cheap access to their raw materials and labor. The world has never been a closed system.
"High labor prices" = "High wages." THIS MEANS YOU!
Unless you are worth >$10M, are retired, or live off a trust fund, admit that you're labor not capital: just like highly paid executives, surgeons, and name-brand attorneys are more "labor:" they generate more earned income than asset income.
Go ahead: pull out your 2009 tax return: is the "income from wages, tips, and salaries" greater than the "interest income" and appreciation on your house (ha ha!)? Then you care about WAGES. Stop pretending like you're a Rockefeller: you're not. And your doctor / lawyer / professors / boss aren't either.
(If you persist in an unjustified obsession with your assets, HIGHER WAGES are what will drive housing prices up in the long run...compare incomes and housing prices in Palo Alto and Lubbock, TX, and HIGHER WAGES and GROWING MANUFACTURING will help your stock portfolio: do you really want to see GE and Boeing follow GM into bankruptcy?)
Aaronontheweb, why wait for government action? Come work at my apartment TOMORROW 16 hours/day for $0.20/hr. I'll try to find a way for you to inhale some heavy metals and asbestos while you work. Imagine the fun of trying to predict whether you will be functionally retarded or die of painful cancer first. Either way, you will die painfully, because I do NOT provide health insurance.
Seriously: How did we get from "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to "drive down everyone's quality life to match the world's most miserable and backward countries?"
Aside from technology that hadn't been invented yet, people in the West lived did very well in the late 20th century. Most people who bothered to show up for work had a balanced diet, adequate medical care, and usually a car. And they somehow managed to do it without rampant workplace death, child labor, or rendering the ecosystem uninhabitable for decades[1]. They even had fundamental civil rights like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.
[1] Aside from notable exceptions like Love Canal, etc. But I see that as largely the result of ignorance; we now have a better understanding of the impacts of our behavior on the place we LIVE.
This post is silly. No one is forced to work at an unsafe job for any given wage. The job of the government should not be to say "you can only work for this long, for this wage, under these conditions." Shouldn't that question be up to the would-be employee?
And you're not as clever as you think bringing up asbestos. You're far more likely to die in a fire because your building had its asbestos replaced with shitty fireproofing than from the cancer that asbestos can cause.
We all need income to SURVIVE, and indeed FORCED to take the market wage for our labor. The question is whether the market wage will tend toward "Modern Western Wage" or "Communist Slave Wage." Current trade and industrial policies favor the latter.
But the government cannot, by fiat, deem that people should make "Modern Western Wage" because some people's work is not worth that much. Forcing wages to be at that level causes more problems than it solves (i.e. massive offshoring). Minimum wage laws, workplace safety laws, environmental standards, etc, all raise the cost of doing business and make it so only people whose work is worth "Modern Western Wage" can be employed.
The whole point is that "Current trade and industrial policies" favor the former ("Modern Western Wage"), not the latter, which is what is causing the problems in the US. Did you read the article?
Is there a reason why you chose to pivot to this extreme immediately after all I did was argue to attack things that result in high labor costs for domestic manufacturing, or are you just an unserious hyperbolic reactionary by nature?
No comment on whether the $1M AUD goal is reasonable (other than you have to start where YOU are and don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good). But, since you mentioned your age and other posters are also commenting on it:
1. Ignore those who say "don't be so serious at 20." You're VERY WISE to consider the path that you're on: you're not going to magically become experienced when you reach a certain age, and it's a competitive job market, and brutally so for the younger and less experienced. You're facing the classic dilemma of how to get enough experience to be employable...one which I'm also struggling with and I'm older than you. I wonder if some of the "superstars" in your program had parents or older siblings who were in software, to provide them with "tribal knowledge" and connections.
Anyway, it's your life, and I commend you for examining its direction so that you can do something about it.
2. Consider reading "Seasons of a Man's Life" by Levinson. It starts very slowly, and is somewhat dated (life today is a little more flexible and fluid, but not that much), but it's an interesting guide to the different stages of adult life. Again, if you're like me, you had some idea of what was expected of you in childhood and teens (Prepare For University!), but not so much after that. It turns out that for most of us, life is both richer and less predictable than "secondary school, university, job, marriage, gold watch retirement, death."
Newspapers' role in cheering on, validating, and accelerating the Trillion Dollar Housing Bubble helped seal their death warrant. In addition (especially in this case), many "reporters" functioned merely as stenographers for interested parties ("Home prices remain fundamentally strong, according to the National Association of Realtors).
It was especially obvious when I found well-informed Web sites blogs that would intelligently dissect and contradict the bad "reporting" on the subject.
My point with this submission was to show that the unasked for advice that webby people always seem to be giving newspapers: "focus on your core strength, in depth reporting and expertise" isn't actually a new concept at all. Here's a major metropolitan daily basing an ad campaign around "Take an expert with you." I found that a little surprising.
For me the death-knell of mainstream media credibility was their role in cheering on, validating and accelerating the illegal, appalling and abysmal invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Edit: I'd love to know why someone downvoted this comment.
Let me preface this by saying I didn't vote you down (Not the right karma threshold, and I wouldn't bother to do so either). Furthermore, I agree with your sentiment, although I disagree with the premise; that people stopped trusting newspapers over Iraq. Why not over Viet Nam?
That said - partisan, knee-jerk analysis on HN will only lead to HN being another Digg (with people only reading stories that reinforce preconceptions and congregating around certain users).
In the end, if you express an opinion that isn't based on data, and doesn't have anything else about how you reached the opinion, you will probably be modded down by someone.
It wasn't just housing, or housing plus the war. It was pretty much everything.
Newspapers have always gotten a lot of content from press releases. Now that we can those from the source, and we can easily get things from other sources, few people are willing to pay for press releases on newsprint.
The spirit of volunteerism and innovation that you admire is impractical when managers define the employee's primary responsibilities in a way that requires unpaid overtime every week.
You're absolutely right, I've even heard of people receiving negative performance reviews because they spent a little unauthorized time at work creating something that improved the productivity of the entire staff by a measurable dollar amount. There will always be companies that shoot themselves in the foot.
Security prices have two basic outcomes: "up" and "down." Usually they fluctuate, so almost any call will "eventually" be proven correct. Sporting events are also mostly binary outcomes, so "the Cubs will reach the World Series" will probably be right if given 200 years.
But with technology predictions, there's an almost infinite set of outcomes, so being right in direction but not timing is significant. For instance, someone who says "Little Rock, Arkansas will win the Super Bowl within 5 years" will look pretty smart even if it takes 6 years for Little Rock to (very unexpectedly) get an NFL franchise and 9 years to reach the Super Bowl.
Granted, technology predictors can use also use some tricks to narrow the possibility space in their favor.
