The Wealth of Nations

The United States is, by all accounts, a very wealthy nation; having somewhere in the area of 30% of the world's monetary wealth, while only having somewhat less than 4.5% of the world's population. Of course, that wealth isn't particularly evenly distributed, but such is the way of things. The United States also has a pretty good natural resource base, although certain resources that are starting to become important to the modern economy are situated in other parts of the world.

And another thing that the United States has an abundance of is people. So many people, in fact, that there's no real need for all of them to be particularly productive. And that's starting to become a problem. I've droned on and on about the fact that the United States doesn't do a particularly good job of educating its citizens to take on jobs that require high levels of skill, when compared to other countries. Which is why the president of the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (commonly known simply as the United Auto Workers) is hoping that President Trump's tariff policies will convince (or coerce, as the case may be) automobile manufacturing companies to move production from other nations back to the United States.

But more broadly, the United States sees no real need to have people doing jobs that are highly suited to them, or to see to it that the workforce as a whole is highly skilled. High levels of unemployment are generally seen as bad for the economy as a whole, but companies are often encouraged to shed workers for any reason they can find, and while those workers are often exhorted to gain new skills and compete to re-enter the job market, the idea that the United States would be better off with people being not only gainfully employed by highly employable is less common than I would have thought it.

To the degree that controls on immigration are understood to be beneficial to American workers, they're designed to prevent competition from the poor, primarily from Latin America, for what is often low-skilled, demanding and/or dirty work; jobs that it it doesn't make sense to educate people for 13 years for. (Especially considering that many of the Americans one finds in such jobs dropped {or were taken} out of school long before that.)

I think that part of it is the idea that if people are kept hungry (figuratively or literally), they'll contribute more to society overall; people love to trot out stories of some or another poor person, who, by dint of hard work (and often, very carefully concealed good fortune) made the transition from rags to riches. Of course, survivorship bias is also hard at work here... people don't bother with the stories of those who can't find a way to make it big.

It's not a particularly efficient system; mainly because it doesn't need to be. The United States can afford to write off a pretty good proportion of the population,and has no compunctions about doing so. But ensuing that these people can be productive, and are putting their educations to the best use would do a lot for the country. Not only in terms of making it wealthier, but happier and more secure, too.

Sorrow

"I believe it was one of the former presidents [who] said, I pity the businessman that wants to make a coat so cheap that the person making the coat will starve in the process. I mean, that is sad," Fain said.
UAW President Shawn Fain explains why he supports Trump's tariffs

Here's what President Harrison is actually reputed to have said: "I pity that man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth shall starve in the process." It's not a huge difference, but it is one worth noting. Mr. Fain is arguing that the problem with the American economy is that wealthy business owners are seeking to drive down prices to make higher profits for themselves; while President Harrison was being critical of the public's willingness to beggar their neighbors in the pursuit of better material living standards for themselves.

There's always enough sadness to go around. Anyone who cannot either opt out of the need to sell their labor and/or the products of their labor or set the value of same is always going to be in precarious position in one way or another, because they depend on, but cannot control, the level of demand for the goods and services they provide. And when people have to compete for the opportunity to earn a livelihood, the loser is always likely to starve. Mr. Fain would rather than autoworkers in Mexico or Cambodia starve, because they can't be members of the UAW.

Mr. Fain makes the point that: "And it's infuriating that our livelihoods have been stripped from us for decades and no one's cared." This is about as close as Mr. Fain comes to pointing a finger at the public at large. And I think that he's right, mainly because the United States isn't really a society where people care for one another as much as they're angry about other people not caring about them.

I was chatting with co-workers today, and the fact that I don't have an Amazon Prime subscription came up. The fact of the matter is that I don't order from Amazon often enough for it to be worthwhile; I'd rather go to local businesses to get what I'm looking for, because there are services that I can get from them that I can't get from Amazon, and if the local stores go under, those services simply become unavailable. My coworkers pointed out the convenience of being able to go online and get whatever, but one of the things that Mr. Fain is railing against is that impulse to go for cheap and convenient, without thinking about the broader costs. Simply forcing people to pay more for cars, however, is not going to make American autoworkers more valuable to the rest of the public; they're simply going to lament the increase in prices, which they'll see as wholly unnecessary.

In the end, as I see it, the problem is one of education and perception. It doesn't make sense for a young person in the United States to compete with a young person in Mexico for factory work that either of them could do to a satisfactory level. What you end up with is jingoistic calls for the young Mexican to starve in the name of higher prices. The goal should be for the American to do work that requires the education and other resources that they have here that the young Mexican simply can't access. And that's where we're falling down.

And, while I'm at it, let me throw standards of living into the mix. Americans, like everyone else, I suspect, prefer to feel wealthy. And that means being able to access things at comparatively low prices, which creates pressure to lower labor costs. And businesses respond to that, although it's through greater automation more often than it is through offshoring. And that becomes a ratchet... when workers are scarce, employers will turn to automation, and they don't go back when unemployment rises.

In the end, the problems are things that tariffs cannot fix, because it wasn't a lack of tariffs that created them in the first place.

Cornered

Seen on the street while out doing some shopping. I have to give them credit for trying, even though it's something of a quixotic job, looking to drum up support for Republicans in the fairly Blue suburbs of Seattle. I found the smaller sign, the one titled "Save Washington" to be interesting. It alleges "corruption and bad policies." The second is a given; Democrats run the government at the state level, especially given the Republican drive to rid their party of moderates, and partisanship demands that all policies advanced by the other party be denounced as bad. The corruption charge is more interesting, although just as partisan. It shows how affective polarization is really setting in on the Republican side. To the best of my knowledge, no formal accusations, credible or not, of political corruption at the state level have been made recently. The Washington State Republican Party has made some allegations, but not of anything illegal.

In any event, the fact that it was only three people was somewhat telling, given the numbers at the Hands Off rallies around the area. I'd suggest different tactics, but since it's basically Trump or nothing, I don't think they'd listen to me.

Change of Pace

The most difficult thing about Nobody In Particular recently has been pushing back against my tendency to use the news of the day as my primary inspiration for topics. That was a more or less workable strategy for most of the past 18 years, but now that the news tends to be a breathless recitation of the things that the Trump Administration has done in the past 30 minutes, it's all become rather one-note.

But I think that I'm the odd person out in all of this. News media is a business, after all, and businesses are set up to cater to the desires of their customers. Not that for most news outlets, their audiences are the customers; that title belongs to the advertisers, but the overall effect is the same, everything becoming all Trump, all the time brings in attention, and that attention can hopefully be diverted towards purchasing some or another product (like those weird "Bunby" toys I keep seeing advertised with the generative automation created video loops). For all that it's called "doomscrolling," I think that more people actively like it than are willing to admit to it.

I suspect that part of it is the feeling (if not always the reality) of being informed. And I think that's what's starting to wear at me; I no longer feel that I'm informed. Sure the Trump Administration is doing all kinds of stuff that's going to have repercussions for years, if  not decades to come, but there's not really a whole lot to be done about it, and much of it comes down to small details of how the President is attempting to push the world into something that looks a lot more like what he wants it to look like; basically (as I see it) a slightly updated version of the 1950s, with substantially more of the United States openly forcing other nations to heel than was taking place at the time. While he's doing a bang-up job of shaking up a status quo that a lot of people felt wasn't working for them, and, frankly, was never going to work for them, I suspect that his random way of going about things isn't going to create the rising tide that he (sometimes) claims that it will. But this is the great thing about scapegoats, they mean never having to say that one has screwed up. And besides, the public has a short memory... the trash fire that was Donald Trump's first term was pretty much forgotten by this time last year; Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris were doomed by their own aggressively lackluster term in office, where they seemed to decide that doing nothing of importance to the public at large passed for a strategy.

In any event, I'm just going to have to find other things to pay attention to... and it's not like they aren't out there. It's just going to need a bit of looking. Because even though the Trump Administration dominates the domestic news market doesn't mean that they're the only game on Earth. But it may entail dialing back my news consumption for the time being, to focus on other things of interest.

Spring Blossoms

It's springtime, and I'm staying away from the news for a bit, so this evening, you get a flower picture.