I think that a voluntary democratic process tends to draw the participation of those interested in a subject and that tends to factor out the uninformed voter on most issues
Based on what I've read here on USMB, and assuming those posters vote, I don't believe that's so at all, but then again, maybe the "morons" who've made what are clearly uninformed/under-informed/misinformed remarks here on USMB don't actually vote. I don't know.
I think that a voluntary democratic process tends to draw the participation of those interested in a subject and that tends to factor out the uninformed voter on most issues,
Yes, well, I think quantum physics with its several ideas that defy common sense is interesting, and I'm interested init, but I don't have opinions about those theories that I'd vehemently share
and stand by. I don't because I know I'm under-informed about them, and I know I'm not willing to take the time to become well informed about them. In other words, I can tell when I should be seen and not heard.
There are also political topics that have the same characteristics for many people, yet those very same people refuse to recognize that and thus exercise the degree of restraint and intellectual integrity that calls for them to be seen and not heard. Yet folks will indeed walk their ignorant assess into a voting booth and make choices (
i.e., making themselves heard), largely because they can, when were they to have any intellectual integrity and respect for others, they would refrain from doing so.
the democratic process as a whole brings in more than enough people to get a multi-dimensional set of perspectives on these issues
It does, but some of those dimensions are irrelevant, yet we see them surfaced from all sorts of folks in the "peanut gallery."
as a policy fails to adapt to the changing circumstances and negatively impacts more people, the democratic process self corrects by bringing in more people who have ideas to correct it.
LOL. Well, the democratic process isn't exactly an efficient one, especially not the U.S.' form and practice of it.
Red:
Yes, when negative impacts occur, the thing to do is to determine what it be the actual cause of them, not the circumstantial and conveniently identifiable causes of them. Of course, doing that takes effort, and exposes one to the possibility of finding causes one doesn't like, and that in turn call one to invest even more effort into adjusting for them.
The matter of
job losses accruing from free trade is one such example that's widely discussed today. In one of your threads, you touch upon what is precisely the driving cause of those job losses: productivity growth resulting from technology advances. How does one know that the central determinant of manufacturing job losses accrue predominantly from technology advances and not from free trade?
Yes, in the wake of free trade jobs have ceased to exist, but that is a consequence of timing, not free trade. The thing is that upon the tech coming about that made it more cost effective to replace labor with capital made the existence of those jobs become economically/financially inefficient for producers. Look at when the Information Age came about and when it became financially feasible for producers to replace labor with capital (machines). You'll find that roughly the free trade agreements and "tech revolution" happened about the same time.
So when one considers the actual economics found at the links in the bulleted list above, one observes that it's the tech not the trade that drives the shift in manufacturers' demand for labor. That the tech came available at the same time free trade agreements did is just a matter of the two happening more or less concurrently. As a result of that overlap in timing, free trade has become the "whipping boy" of sorts, most likely because it's the easier thing to understand because:
- one need not consider multiple factors and isolate which one predominates,
- one can "happily" assume that the manufacturer has moved its facility abroad to access less costly labor and that the manufacturer produces its goods abroad in the same way it did before it moved.
A closer look at the matter reveals that, yes, the manufacturer does use less costly labor, but in addition the producer also implemented production technologies that even if the maker were to return its production operations to the U.S.,
all those jobs that folks lost would not return, but some of them would. Which ones? The jobs that haven't been replaced by technology, but many of those jobs aren't production floor jobs, even though some of them are.
Food Production Facility -- 21st Century
Automobile Production Facility -- 21st Century
General Motors Oldsmobile Facility -- 1973
And therein lies the problem with all the anti-free trade hoopla we hear bandied about by some of our would be or existing political leaders. Let's say that the U.S. imposes tariffs that drive manufacturers to reestablish production facilities in the U.S. When producers do so, there will be a boost in jobs, no doubt about that, but look at the photos above. How many people do you see in modern plants? How many jobs do you imagine will return, so to speak? Not nearly enough to satisfy people's demand for jobs.
So where will imposing the tariffs that may inspire (if the costs of returning surpass the costs of not returning, makers still won't return) the return of manufacturing that leave us? Well, we'll have employed about one to three hundred thousand people, and that's good, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the ~4M who lost their jobs. So what's the impact?
- Producers return, they implement even newer tech, thereby lowering the quantity of laborers they need (white and blue collar).
- Producers then incorporate the higher U.S. labor cost into their cost of goods/MSRP/selling price.
- Consumers/buyers pay higher prices for those goods than they would have paid for them absent the tariffs, thereby making smaller the bundle of goods their income can buy, assuming the buyers don't have effectively unlimited ability to spend, which is substantively what wealthy folks have now and will have then too. So the impact while noticeable to the wealthy won't alter their buying behavior, but it will without question affect the spending of people who have "typical" means.
So at that point, we have everyone paying higher prices and the vast majority of folks who lost their "good jobs" still not having found a new "good job." Where is the sense in that?
Let's now look at the quantity of folks who lost their "good jobs." As noted before, the quantity of people who lost those manufacturing jobs is about four million. The U.S. workforce is about 160 million. Do you honestly think the whole of the U.S. *(~250M folks over 16 years old) should pay higher prices for "stuff" just to put some several hundred thousand folks back to work at their "good jobs?" Just to illustrate the monetary effect of what the anti-free traders are proposing lets assume that each of those 250M people buys just one item (it doesn't matter which item of the many that would cost more) that costs fifty cents more because it's made domestically instead of abroad. That would be a total of $125M of additional spending. But of course the price differential won't be merely fifty cents because it's not just labor that costs more in the U.S., it's also land, insurance, and a host of other business costs.
Now I haven't precisely quantified the impact of the price increases, and more importantly, neither have any of the anti-free traders done so. But there are economists who have with regard to some industries and with regard to NAFTA, and without exception, they all find the same thing. The cost to the American people in higher prices paid as a result of not having free trade is higher than the cost to the American people of having those four million folks employed in jobs other than their now gone "good jobs."
I realize that's of little comfort to those four million people, but the macroeconomic reality is what it is, and, yes, those four million folks are the ones "caught in the crossfire," so to speak. I get that, but there is a solution to their problem and that solution is retraining them so they can perform and obtain the jobs that are available, the jobs that domestic employers have to go overseas to find folks to perform them, and the jobs that exist in what are now America's growth industries. And frankly, for all that folks don't like about Mr. Sanders, the one thing he's proposing that will make it possible for folks to do just that -- free (or nearly so) higher education -- is precisely that solution to the problem; moreover, it's a long term solution.
Well, come now. You've misrepresented the article you cited.
- Monkeys didn't make those choices.
- The point of comparison was index funds vs. randomly selected single stocks, not randomly ("monkey") selected specific stock choices vs. specific stock choices made by seasoned professionals.
Depends on how qualified they are and what profession. An evangelical physicist that believes in Theistic Evolution is just as good as any other physicist.
You've gotten yourself on a roll of making lame inferences, now, haven't you? LOL You know as well as I do that the point of my comment you've rebutted is that theistic teachings aren't appropriate to arriving at solutions for objectively observable dilemmas. And we both know you know that because you specifically focused in your reply on the physicist's being a physicist and you inferred that his/her evangelical leanings would (or rightly should) be secondary to their scientifically informed thinking re: physics.
And, just so you know, I giving you crap for that remark because you and I both know the "peanut gallery" here on USMB is large enough that some loon in it will seize on your comment and drive the the conversation off point. In an interpersonal conversation, I'd just chuckle when they did so and ignore them. Here, however, those people force one to deal with their "Tom foolery" to keep a discussion either legit or on topic, or worse, both.
We have watched American jobs get exported and undermined with bullshit free trade agreements that are not in any way actually 'free trade' at all....
we have hundreds of billions of US dollars in trade deficits, stagnant workers wages since 1970 and a vastly underperforming economy to show for it all....the successes were while we had huge tariffs and free homestead laws. Those last two we need to return to in a more modern form.
[See my discussion from the "red" comments above.]
Yes, we need to edumakate our voters much more better.
Agree. But the lion's share of the onus falls on the voter to accept the education offered. What do I mean by that? I mean that when one fails to master the concepts that are taught in schools and colleges, it really doesn't matter what amount or quality of teaching one is given. That is easily illustrated by every individual who one year in school (pick the grade level) are "C" students, and merely by shifting their focus, learning process and studying effort in the very next year become "A" students. I mean that for most folks, mastering "whatever" is a matter of will.
There are, of course, individuals who are exceptions to that, but those folks don't form or cause the bulk of the problems that can be corrected by "edumakation" and that we observe in our society. Those exceptional individuals rightly need and deserve one-off solutions/approaches.
the beauty of democracy is that it is a vast feed-back machine that helps the leadership elite to do their jobs and lead, IF they listen
Not all that feedback is worth listening to. That goes directly to this thread's topic. Part of what leaders in a republic, which is what the U.S. is, are paid to do is discern what is worth listening to and what is not and act accordingly. That there may be many people "griping" about "whatever" and wanting XYZ solution sometimes must be ignored by folks who truly are well informed enough to know that. By the same token, those well informed folks have an obligation to show the "hoi polloi" why and how what they want/propose is the wrong thing.
The "hoi polloi" have the responsibility, as noted just above, to actually listen and receive the enlightenment given and they have the responsibility for being intellectually honest with themselves when they in fact might not know as much as the experts who are trying to communicate to them why their thinking is amiss.
Unfortunately, our "edumakation" methods, to the extent that they are not Socratically performed, tacitly inspire a sense of intellectual infallibility by catechismally presenting answers rather than instilling intellectual integrity by teaching folks how to examine questions and critically find and evaluate the possible answers.
I think some people just want to get rid of the "status quo" and they see Trump as the ticket. I've actually talked to several people who are not 100% satisfied with Trump, but they see him as less "establishment" and not part of the cronyism of party politics.
There's plenty about the status quo that should be dispensed with. The problem I have with Trump is that he's not detailed much about how he'd do so and why we think he will in fact do as he suggests. I have no issue with his wanting to alter the status quo, it's the ways and means he'd use to do so that I need to understand so I can tell whether I agree with them.
As a specific example of what I mean, I want to understand why with his B.S. in economics he has come to think that every professional economist on the planet is wrong about the merits of free trade.
FWIW, I don't formally have a B.S. in econ, but I have a minor in it as a result of a interdisciplinary study program I pursued as an undergrad, and combined with the economics taken to obtain my MBA, I ended up with the equivalent of an undeclared major in econ. The consequence being I know quite well what Trump was taught in the course of getting his B.S. in economics and I know quite well what economics professionals, both in and out of academia, think on the matter. Donald Trump, myriad voters, and other politicians, not one of whom AFAIK is an economist, are the only folks who think free trade is a bad thing. Why the pols think that is obvious: enough voters -- the vast majority of whom also have zero training in economics -- think it so to get their votes, opposing free trade works or at least helps.
The instances of being economically ignorant are fewer now than than in the past, but the quantity still hasn't reached the critical mass it needs to in order to say most folks understand it.
(See also:
The Hot Major For Undergrads Is Economics)
I think some people just want to get rid of the "status quo" and they see Trump as the ticket. I've actually talked to several people who are not 100% satisfied with Trump, but they see him as less "establishment" and not part of the cronyism of party politics.
- I think seeking 100% satisfaction with a politician or policy option is an unrealistic thing to seek or expect.
- Being "establishment" or not isn't the thing that matters. What matters is the merit, based on the body of information available, of the person's positions, be the person "establishment," Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Communist, Socialist, etc. or not or some combo of those things.
'better the devil you know than the devil you don't'
I'm not totally sure of that, but to a point, sure. My take on that axiom is a bit more nuanced than is apparent on the fact of merely uttering it. I suspect that is so for you too.
