All Around the World

"Mexican manufacturing doesn't harm US workers"

It's a simple enough statement; designed to be a debunking of a common myth that Americans hold about Mexico. It's been a bone of contention for some time, generally split down ideological lines, as part of the growing tension over globalism. I found it in a BBC "Viewpoint" piece penned by the Council on Foreign Relations' Shannon O'Neil. In the end, though, it was unconvincing, mainly because in the end, the defense of it that Ms. O'Neil puts forward somewhat misstates the concerns that people have.

It isn't that globalization doesn't lead some jobs to foreign lands. It does. But by expanding abroad, companies become more competitive, supporting and creating jobs at home.
[...]
A study by two Harvard business professors and a University of Michigan colleague shows that for every 10 people hired overseas by American corporations, two new jobs are created in the United States.

I don't think that Americans are so uncharitable or paranoid as to feel that the very fact that someone in Mexico has a job is a threat to them. They're concerned because they don't understand American companies to be expanding operations into Mexico - they understand companies to be moving operations, and the work that makes them possible, to Mexico. If a corporation creates 10 new jobs overseas, which in turn creates two new jobs here, you could make the case that one of the Americans who didn't get a job because it was created in Mexico was harmed by that fact, but it will be a somewhat tenuous argument for many, as the understanding of harm has to become fairly broad. But when 10 jobs move from the United States to Mexico, while two replacements are created here, it's a net loss of 8 jobs, and people are likely to see the persons who jobs have been moved as having been directly harmed in the bargain. And this doesn't account for the fact that two new domestic jobs are likely to require different skills than those that moved.

In my own experience, what many Americans are concerned about is being caught in a race to the bottom with the world's poor, where the cost of being unwilling to work for third-world poverty wages is having no wages at all. Casting them as fearing harm from globalization leading some jobs to foreign lands rather than to their doorstep mischaracterizes both their worries and themselves.

Generally speaking, it's difficult to make the point that changes in the employment market driven by globalization are a good thing for the "high-wage" workers who find themselves being undercut by workers in nations with favorable exchange rates, lower standards of living, or both. (Note however that globalization being driven by the employment market can be viewed as a cause for celebration.)

Roll Out the Barrel

In everything, you have bad apples. This is just one bad apple at this time that - you know, that's cast a very negative situation on all police officers.
Charleston County Councilman Teddie Pryor Sr.
S.C. Shooting: Isolated Incident Or Symptom Of Bigger Problems?

I had been expecting a bad apple comment to surface in the context of the shooting of Walter Scott, because, as National Public Radio's Geoff Nunberg once pointed out:

Back then, nobody ever talked about "just a few bad apples" or "only a few rotten apples" — the whole point was that even one was enough to taint the group. These days, those are the phrases people use to imply that some misdeeds were an isolated incident — a couple of rogue cops, a handful of unprincipled loan officers, two or three sociopathic soldiers. Then there's the version that goes, "There are always going to be a few bad apples." That's a counsel of moral realism: as in, there's evil in the world; get over it.
Bad Apple Proverbs: There's One In Every Bunch

The two conflicting meanings of bad apples, as an infectious blight that ruined everything with its poisonous influence (the original meaning) or as wrongheaded individuals who aren't indicative of greater issues, both miss the point in this case. In the current usage, calling someone a bad apple is basically scapegoating them - making them out to be the source of the problem. Throw them under the bus, and everything's fine. And the binary condition that's often suggested, that a person is either "good" or "bad," plays into this. When we call someone out as a bad apple, and especially when we're intending to say that they don't reflect the rest of us, we're separating them from us. We're placing them on the other side of a line that we've drawn in our heads.

But this isn't the way people work. Simply calling out Officer Michael Slager as a violent, racist, bad cop doesn't automagically make anyone who isn't Michael Slager into a peaceful, egalitarian, upstanding citizen. There is a continuum of attitudes and behaviors that each of us lives on, and there isn't an objective bright line of a propensity to answer difficulties with force that makes one "violent," a willingness to judge based on appearances that makes one a "racist" or a level of disrespect for the rules that makes one "bad." But despite the fact that few people would be able to describe such lines to you (and perhaps even fewer would agree on where they would be drawn) it's easy to fall back into the old habit of taking someone who's clearly beyond the pale (or was at least caught on video acting that way) and using the fact that they must be on the wrong side of the line to decide that the rest of us are on the correct side of it.

It makes for a much neater, and more predictable, world, but it blinds us to the way the world around us really works.

Leveling the Field

I was listening to Marketplace in the car on my way to work this morning, when a story came on about Streit’s matzo factory, a New York business that plans to relocate out of a space that it has occupied for the past century. One of the interesting tidbits of data from the story was the fact that Streit’s holds about a 40% share of the domestic matzo market. But they’d like to both expand and modernize their business, and so they’re moving to a new space.

Nothing out of the ordinary there. What struck me was this rationale for the move from Aaron Gross, one of the people who runs the business: “We know how to work in four tenement buildings. We know how to load on the street. We know how to do all this stuff. But, the fact that our competitors don’t have to do it, puts us at an unfair disadvantage.”

I find this interesting because it seemed so out of place. The fact that Streit’s has been using the same building “after nearly a century” counts as an unfair disadvantage? What’s so unfair about it?

My own suspicion is “nothing.” It’s just that businesspoeple can become accustomed to describing any of the pressures that their businesses face as “unfair.” It’s the sort of thing that you hear quite often, although I will admit that this is the first time that I’ve ever heard a businessperson describe their own facility as constituting an unfair disadvantage. Part of me thinks that this is part and parcel of businesses working with governments to alter the conditions of business - the best way to lobby for a tax break or other benefit is to describe the status quo as unfair. And like anything else, if you do something long enough, it starts to seep into other parts of life.

The Return of Spring

It's been coming and going, but decided to drop in again this morning.

Safety In Numbers

I haven't really been following the flap about Trevor Noah. To me, it's just another in a long series of teapot tempests that are quite literally sound and fury signifying nothing. But an acquaintance excerpted an article from Time Magazine where the author offers Americans the choice of either being addicted to taking offense or being "the most hypersensitive group of whining milksops ever assembled under one flag."

But he makes an interesting point about comedy in the piece, and since that was the part that stood out for me, I want to quote it at length, to capture its context.

The image people have of comedians staring defiantly over a stationary line of good taste is simply inaccurate. We don’t approach this line, put our toes over it arrogantly and then scamper back to safety. The line doesn’t exist. The correct image for people to have is one of a circle, with a comedian standing in the middle of it, surrounded by a myriad of races, religions, social beliefs, sacred cows and political ideologies. And in these groups are endless numbers of sub groups and personal boundaries. There is simply no way to consistently do the type of comedy that addresses these things without upsetting somebody. No matter which direction you turn to aim the joke, someone is getting hit. And while the person who has been hit jumps up and down and exaggerates their injuries, everyone else in the circle is telling them to shut up and learn to take a joke. Until they themselves get hit.
Jim Norton: Trevor Noah Isn’t the Problem. You Are.

While it seems to me that Mr. Norton is keen to indict people (other than himself, that is) for being willing to "jump up and down and exaggerate their injuries," he's strangely silent on the other factor that he notes - that "everyone else in the circle is telling them to shut up and learn to take a joke." Earlier in the piece, he had made the following observation:

[Trevor Noah] also neglected to take into account that Western culture as a whole has become an increasingly reactionary mob of self-centered narcissists who all have their own personal lines drawn in the sand. A comedian is fine unless he crosses their particular line, which, of course, in the mind of a self-centered narcissist, is the only line that matters.

While I understand his anger at what he perceives as America's love affair with "[b]eing outraged and upset and feeling bullied or offended," he's curiously silent about our habit of simply ignoring what happens to others, as long as it doesn't happen to us. Having read his piece, the issue seems less a national hypersensitivity than a national lack of empathy. If people can't be bothered to look after those in their midst who understand themselves as being injured is it any wonder that the response is to shout louder?

Yes, comforting people after trivial injuries or assuring them they will be alright after a minor wound is tiresome and feels like we're coddling people who should really be able to stand up for themselves. But it's by teaching people how to judge the extent of their hurts that they learn to understand what they can take and what really spells trouble for them. Especially when there's a history involved. I haven't read any of the Tweets that Noah is being called out for, but I understand that they're being seen in some circles as anti-Semitic and sexist. Now, I'm not a particularly astute student of history, but I seem to recall some rather high-profile instance of Jews and women being left out in the cold while the situation around them escalated. Sure those things were in the past, but once bitten, twice shy, and as I recall it, those were some serious bites.

The answer to the issue is not simply expecting people to suffer in silence, but to support them, stand them back up and demonstrate that we have confidence in their ability to take the hit, even when it seems serious. And to let them know that when things more serious than jokes are being flung around, that we won't abandon them to the hope that if we do, the only blood spilled with be theirs.