Made In Elsewhere

Offshoring of labor, for all that it aggrieves the people who lose their livelihoods, has enabled business to remain in labor-intensive enterprises while, at the same time, putting downward pressure on costs. And, perhaps more importantly, it has allowed the public to purchase the trappings of affluence at a lower cost than they would otherwise. This isn't to say that it's necessarily a good thing, or that everyone should support the practice, but it is somewhat worthwhile to understand why it happens as often as it does.

This movement of jobs to places where the same work can be done for lower wages is a product of our own desire to buy things cheaply and/or see corporate profitability (and thus, stock prices) continuously rise. In effect, we've been importing poverty in the name of increasing our overall standard of living and corporate balance sheets. This, like the paradox of thrift, is simply another manifestation of the fact that our current economy is set up in such a way that what's best for any given individual can be bad for the group. While many people might not like what is happening, there isn't a broadly-shared idea of what should be happening, and the status quo (as unappealing as it may be) tends to be everyone's second choice.

Part of the problem is the parochial way in which lawmakers tend to see the world. While we might prefer the Congress act for the long-term good of the nation as a whole, the individual states and districts that Senators and Representatives are answerable to are primarily concerned with themselves, and the "National interest over Local interests" constituency isn't yet large enough to be able to elect/defeat candidates for national office on its own. (It is also very divided, as people tend to be more interested in targeting programs that benefit someone else, while seeing those things that benefit them as beneficial for everyone.)

Additionally, large American businesses typically seem to work in what could be described as profit preservation mode, eschewing risky creative ventures in favor of creating circumstances that seek to guarantee a certain level of profitability (including importing poverty). And while a number of people talk a big game about how "small businesses will save the world," policy tends to favor large businesses, which use the clout provided by their size to hold off smaller competitors. (Think about how things might be different if the individual brands that made up General Motors and Chrysler were still independent companies [I'm not an old man, and I remember when there were four big Detroit automakers.], and if banks weren't routinely allowed to buy up their failing competitors.)

This leaves us with a situation in which a number of factors routinely conspire to move work away from the United States, with its relatively high expectations for the standard of living that work, even relatively low-skilled work, should provide, and to nations for which wages that we would consider too low to be workable are a step up the food chain. And as high-speed communications and global supply chains make the world seem ever-smaller, the number of jobs that it will make sense to move elsewhere will increase. (If Africa, as a continent, ever manages to settle things down enough that it's "safe" to move large-scale employment projects there, we're likely to see another round of large-scale offshoring, as companies move to take advantage of the large labor force of poor people that will be made available.)

To a degree, we shouldn't care that other parts of the world are willing to perform low-skilled labor more cheaply than what would be a living wage in the United States. Last I looked we were supposed to have an educational system that was the envy of every other nation on the planet - do we really have a good reason to be squabbling with China over manufacturing jobs that don't even require a high-school education? (Of course, in this respect, it would be helpful to actually consider a high-school education to be, well, education. And for the most part we don't.)


Fighting to save industries that can be sited more cheaply somewhere else is a loser's game, that only works to the degree that a national economy can more or less achieve autarky. We're better off creating new industries, and letting companies arise, live and die in a way that creates technological and labor churn that creates new engines for growth and recurring labor shortages that make it worthwhile for the labor market to stay up on the latest tech. When some poor country somewhere decides that they want to spend their time making t-shirts or ball-bearings, we should be rushing to offload that sort of busy work to them, so that we put the best-educated labor force in the world to work on things that actually require the education that we spent so much on. Of course, this may mean altering our education system. While there seems to be an emphasis on well-rounded citizenship as a goal of education, it seems to me that a certain basic skills set is also a useful component. To be sure, the goal should not be to allow companies to offload their basic training costs onto the public (although that may have to be part of it), but rather to understand what basic skills will be needed in the overall economy by the time students graduate. This is, of course, a taller order than I'm making it out to be - if predicting the future were easy, we'd live in a much different world. But if we're effectively going to mandate that everyone spend a dozen years in school, we may as well do what we can to make that investment pay off for us.

This alone won't solve the problem. It is, after all, a very deep problem. And if we can't manage to create and maintain a constant demand for local labor to supply the good and services we need, we'll simply wind up in the same position down the road. But our current responses to living in a worldwide labor market are dysfunctional. So sticking with them won't do us any good, either.

Hidden Stories

I tend to be suspicious of claims that the "Mainstream Media" colludes to broadly spike stories that are of particular interest to groups that see themselves as marginalized, in part because of that very marginalized status. A couple of days ago, I came across a breathless denunciation of the media for not widely disseminating the story of a Black lesbian who had been murdered. While it was a fairly heartbreaking case, in its details, that's all it was - yet another in a sad litany of violent crimes that happen all day, every day, across the United States. While it was the sort of thing that one might expect would headline the local news, it was difficult to see what a national audience would have found interesting about it.

And this is something that I commonly see in stories that people hold up as being covered up by the national media establishment. While they may be of intense interest to people in certain communities, they're often not much different than a thousand other stories that no-one outside of the local area in which they occurred ever hear about. There's nothing particularly unreasonable about the idea that news outlets will carry the stories that people find important, even if it's sometimes unrealistic. But in an attention economy, attention is valuable because it's limited. You could read about murders all day long and still be hard pressed to keep up with all of them. And there are other things that happen in the world that people are interested in.

The desire of the marginalized to have their stories, and their concerns, presented to the public at large is sensible. And who better to do that than media organizations that have built up large audiences over the years? But there is a degree to which this becomes an abdication of responsibility. The best way to ensure that a story is heard is to tell people yourselves, and that means competing with the other ways in which they can spend their time. Which is often a difficult and thankless task. But it's a necessary one, if for no other reason than it leads to an understanding of what people's concerns and priorities are.

Plots

So the latest pastime of the chattering classes is speculation about just how unfit for office President Trump is. But while it might be a satisfying hobby, it's not a very useful one at this point.

President Trump can be seen as a reaction to some or all of the eight years that preceded his election, just as President Obama can be seen as a reaction to some or all of the eight years before him. And the people who drove that reaction are going to be very unhappy with things if a way is found to remove President Trump from office. In her Slate column, Dahlia Lithwick points out that the cooperation of Republican members of Congress would be needed, and that it likely isn't forthcoming. And while true, I think that this does sort of look past some people who really do matter in all of this, and that's the Republican electorate.

Regardless of how bad one thinks that President Trump's tenure will be (or already has been) for the nation as a whole, the fact of the matter remains that he was elevated to that office by people who felt that he was their best option. They seem him as someone who is on their side, and are likely to regard a serious move against him as a move against themselves and their interests (even if they don't conflate those interests with those of the nation as a whole). They would have no reason to support a move to oust President Trump from office, and every reason to effectively double down on crisis mode - and it was putting these people into a crisis that lead to President Trump's election in the first place. Any expectation that they're not going to see it as a coup is misguided.

And it's in that sense that the arguing that President Trump is unfit, whether it comes from Left, Right or Center is counterproductive, because it reinforces the paranoid worldview that many Trump voters espoused - that they live in a world governed by élites, who are not only unaccountable to them, but are hatefully plotting against their rights and interests in order to unfairly increase their own power and wealth. One of the ideas that Candidate Trump put forward that resonated with them is the idea that their woes are not the result of changes in the world around them, but were specifically engineered to disempower and impoverish them. And I would be unsurprised to learn that they already regard talk of impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment as yet more élite engineering of events.

And this is where the partisanship of Congressional Republicans comes into play. Given that, for better or for worse, they've hitched their wagons to Donald Trump's star, they have nothing to gain by siding with their political adversaries to oust him. And so all of the talk of President Trump's possible unfitness for office is just that - talk. And it's talk that feeds a serious rift in the nation, rather than bridging it.

Choicies

Many families in the [Down syndrome] community are concerned about recent reports from Iceland that the genetic disorder has come close to being eradicated there through prenatal testing and pregnancy termination, says Heather Sachs. She's the policy and advocacy director for the National Down Syndrome Congress, and the mother of a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome.

"It hurts, especially when you have family members with Down syndrome who are very much integral parts of their families," Sachs says.
Down Syndrome Families Divided Over Abortion Ban

One of the things that I've noticed about broader American culture is the habit, although maybe "tendency" is a better word, to see rejection when other people make different choices. If people in Iceland have determined that Down Syndrome is something that they'd rather not deal with, I'm not sure how being hurt by that makes any sense. I understand that for people in the United States who have children with Down Syndrome, it feels as if Icelanders are saying that those children aren't valuable, but what they're really saying is that they have a different set of priorities, and that they would rather devote their resources to something else.

I think that part of it comes down to the outsourcing of choices, in a way that leads people to see whatever path they've chosen as not simply the correct one for them, but the Right Thing To Do overall. And I suspect that this makes challenges to that feel more personal than perhaps they would, otherwise.

The Lost

"Whatever happened to 'Bumvertising'?" I wonder. For those of you who have no idea of what I'm talking about, a Seattle businessman hit on the idea of giving panhandlers a sign advertising his business to hold, along with their own. For this, he handed over a free lunch, and between one and five dollars. The story (and the resulting teapot tempest that masqueraded as a controversy) first broke in 2005 on the national news cycle (ABC, the Daily Show, and others picked it up and ran with it), and there hasn't been much about it since then.

So much of our news a flash in the pan these days that there are all sorts of stories like this wandering the back woods of the Internet. Like the story out of Canada that nearly every pedophile that the Toronto police nabbed between 2001 and 2005 was "a hardcore Trekkie." Now you see it, now you don't. Where do they go? Every so often, you come across an interesting story, and then can go back a few months later and get the newest update. But many of them fade in perpetual obscurity as the latest Lindsay Lohan meltdown or wannabe terrorist plot grabs the headlines by the neck.

I can see this trackless graveyard, littered with the tombstones of old stories that seemed to fade away before coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Occasionally I wander through there, drawn by something that caught my interest years ago, before being filed away in Limbo. One of these days, maybe I'll stumble across another mourner, and I'll ask them who, if anyone, cares for all of the lonely graves.