There were a lot of economics bloggers on OpenLeft, so let's hope they come to The Economic Populist.
In the interim I'm looking into restructuring the site since the "forums" are basically not true forums, because we've become such a news source primarily.
Working on it, but you might go over to Open Left, see what's happening, invite those to come over here.
Shrugs shoulders. Firstly labor advantages exclusive in China are about 10%-20%, that's not he main reason for the exodus and why currency manipulation is such an issue.
Secondly, India is cheap labor.
Thirdly, without a strong manufacturing sector, you basically do not have a 1st world economy, so "oh well", doesn't work out too well. Manufacturing spawns innovation, not the other way around and spawns all sorts of economic growth. R&D, on the other hand does not scale, it does not produce the level of jobs required for 300+ million people.
Is this coming from some corporate lobbyist white paper?
These Indian companies are really in the business of selling visas to desperate employees. India is a corrupt slum. The reasons for people wanting to escape are valid. However, when they arrive, they merely take advantage of the liberal laws of their new hosts, bring in their huge families, and very quickly replicate in the local community all the awful things they were trying to move away from. In fact, they werent trying to move away, they merely wanted to be at the top of the dung heap, not the bottom. So they replicate the dung heap, slums and all, then put themselves as they overseer. I T companies can recruit employees in India with the promise of a visa, but then they proceed to tie them to the company at low salaries, in effect making the employees pay a heavy price for the visas. The Indian execs and management all want to flee India, so of course they arrange their own visas. In years to come, when our children look around, they will wonder what the heck we were thinking allowing these people to colonize us. When they move into politics, we will really reap the whirlwind. They are racist, and from what I have seen very work shy, but able to play the system and take advantage of every rule.
Again, there is a REASON I put the basic GDP equation first and foremost in these overviews. That reason is to show that imports are SUBTRACTED. GDP, as I state the definition again, is DOMESTIC product.
To understand GDP and what it actually measures, one needs to start with that basic equation.
It would really help if people would read the post and say what they do not understand about it. That will help me write better to find out where the bottlenecks are.
If you read the post, you will see, clearly, imports are subtracted from GDP and you will see how the trade deficit affects GDP. What is reported quarterly is the change in GDP.
What is incorrect seems to be you not getting the original post, that GDP does NOT contain imports by definition.
One can argue some of the nuances on this fact, I keep pointing to phantom GDP in particular, but first and foremost, one needs to get that basic equation down on the definition of the economic metric GDP.
I, too, have concerns about off-shoring our jobs, but cost of labor is the single most important factor. Cheaper labor means cheaper goods, but you're right to be worried about who's going pay for these goods, cheaper or otherwise, if the middle class keeps getting squeezed. But even if our middle class was doing great, we'd still buy cheap goods and for our domestic manufacturers to compete with goods from China and India (from whom we import those cheap goods). Domestic companies have to reduce the cost of manufacturing to compete in domestic markets and the easiest way to do that is to use cheaper labor and that means off-shoring jobs.
I am convinced that our manufacturing base -- once the bedrock of our growing economy -- is shifting to developing economies in Asia, Africa and South America. Advanced economies like ours has to shift to a technology-based economy that demands more education and skill of its labor force. In other words, this is the product of that paradoxical concept, "creative destruction."
This may not be popular but I am convinced it's reality. Fighting to hold on to a manufacturing base that has already gone will only delay the process of moving forward. Our advanced economy demands more.
Robert Oak, I am not writing that “post production costs”, (i.e. the distribution, handling, retailing, repairing or otherwise supporting an existing product) do not contribute to the nation’s GDP.
What I’m stating is that other than international shipping costs, “post production costs” are similar for similar domestic or imported products. Imported products do not contribute ADDITIONALY more than a similar domestic product’s “post production costs” to USA’s GDP.
It’s not my economic logic but my English grammar that’s incorrect.
Due to choosing an imported rather than domestic product we reduced our GDP by the price of the particular product at U.S. port of entry. We also denied ourselves of other costs that were directly or indirectly due to the particular product’s productions but they were not reflected within the price of the product at U.S. port of entry. All of these prices contributed to the producing nations’ GDP.
but the BLS will claim offshore outsourcing is not negatively impacting productivity, but that's kind of a secondary calculation.
For the record, read the offshore outsourcing blog post rant by me. I quote a really good post and link to it about how wrong BLS 10 year job growth and contraction projections have been. Then, look at the great "jobs of the future" and they are saying it again, STEM, I.T. will be the huge growth jobs, but their total numbers in many categories have declined, there literally is a glut of PhDs, and to make matters worse, they count foreign guest workers in those occupational categories and unemployment rates.
It's very tough to get a concrete answer but those trying to deny offshore outsourcing isn't having a negative effect must not get out much. Proving it is is a whole other ball game.
Robert Oak and Sonny Clark, thank you both for responding to my message. I too often fear that this entire portion of the forest has been falling but extremely few of us hear it.
I agree there are many, many different ways to introduce tariffs de facto but an Import Certificate, (i.e. IC) policy’s superior to all other existing or proposed trade policies I’ve encountered. This is a proposal of a market (rather than government) driven policy that grants government no policy discretion.
Unlike tariffs, it rewards exporters of USA goods thus indirectly but effectively subsidizing exports of such goods. The increased cost to USA purchasers of foreign goods are directly related to IC’s open global market values. The decreased cost of USA goods to foreign purchasers are inversely related to IC’s market values.
Our nation is not experiencing an era of political harmony and conciliation but I believe this superior trade policy rather than tariffs would be more politically acceptable.
It's clear, from the report and the graphs imports are a subtraction in the GDP equation. What you are not understanding is I"m talking about retail trade, so truckers moving the stuff around, the sales clerk selling the cheap Chinese made Walmart toy, they do add to GDP, because that is domestic activity.
Ya all, when in doubt, look at the equation and the breakdown. There is a reason I write up these overviews starting with it, to make it clear what component does what in gross domestic production. It's very clear imports are subtracted and via the BOP which is before price indexes, does try to take into account any partial domestic production or "double counting".
I did not say "how much", obviously there is no comparison vs. durable manufacturing production of domestic goods.
Robert Oak, you wrote, “there is an entire industry unloading containers and moving them around the U.S.” but loading domestic goods and moving them around the U.S. similarly contribute to USA’s GDP”.
It is only prior to imported goods entering the USA or domestic goods reaching their producers’ shipping platform that there’s aggregate economically meaningful differences between them”.
Their differences are all due to their source production and those differences account for their differing affect upon our GDP. The production of import goods (to the extent that that USA Labor or goods, or components did not contribute to the creation of those goods), contribute nothing to USA’s GDP.
There must be some in, say, Luxor or Alexandria who would agree with you. On this more fortunate shore, no one who bases public policy on the self-adulating myths of this Exile Glitterata is worthy of such honor as a presidential medal -- but consider the source. After all, it seemed a reward for services rendered, or perhaps a consolation prize (consider the case of Robert McNamara, who was decorated and then fired).
The "technology advances" argument is always one that makes me bristle.
I have worked in the automation industry for the last 15 years. If automation were the primary culprit in the precipitous loss of plants over the last decade - 53,000+ closed plants according to a recent Ian Fletcher article, one would think the automation industry would be booming. Of course it is not, and has never fully recovered from the '01 recession. Sales of industrial robots and automated machine tools has been down in the range of 20 to 40% over the last several years according to Industry Week. Much of the lost mfg capacity has occured among small machine shops, custom machine builders, component manufacturers - all users of automation technology and of course among the largest consumers of automation techology - auto makers and auto parts suppliers.
There are two primary problems with the automation argument - the first is there have been no major advances or breakthroughs in mfg technology that can account for the job and plant losses. Robots, controls and machine tools have seen only incremental improvements over the last 20 years - these are mature technologies. And while its true that automation can eliminate some grunt labor production jobs, jobs are also created in higher skill areas programming, setting up, maintaining and operating this complex machinery
The other problem is that automation must have high volume repetitive production to justify its costs. Often the bean counters will make the determination that it is more profitable to offshore to a cheap labor, lax regulatory country than it is to invest millions in automation. High volume production indutries have been the most vulnerable to offhsoring.
I have asked proponents of the automation/technology argument to point to a single breakthrough technology that can account for the major loss of industry over the last decade - so far nothing but crickets.
Tell those town, state and fed officials. Stop speaking Chinese and kissing Chinese's ass. Enough! Chinese government do not respect Chinese people in China. They are not capable to respect our Americans and our country.
in reading on the Internets everyone is piling on ADP as being bogus. Now hold on there ya all, it's the methodology that is of interest. Remember, the BLS is bogus too, by refusing to give immigration status of workers and counting foreign guest workers, which can bias, then to find those who are not officially counted is a true mathematical exercise, instead of being reflected in the headline buzz numbers. Additionally, if a PhD takes a job at Walmart, that person is no longer unemployed expert in their field, instead a Walmart worker, i.e, retail trade.
So, who's biasing who here? Bottom line the American public and those who watch this stuff would like more detailed and accurate statistics on the American workforce it seems and the current point of wrath is the ADP.
is how Numerian basically moves to philosophy, whereas the real point of the crisis was derivatives. The report touches upon that but not enough and doesn't seem to point out these things are built with faulty mathematics, I mean from the basics, CDO and one cannot even validate them computationally, it's impossible.
That said, I did not even read the GOP dissents the minute I saw them trying to claim deregulation isn't a problem. That's clearly BS.
What irks me is how we know Democrats come up corrupt and lacking, as if it's even possible, we get pure economic fiction from GOP. I mean how did any of these people graduate from college they are so dead wrong? Or did they go to Spin School?
Angelites was a rare honest politician in Sacramento. He is saying "let the facts speak for themselves". He feels he has compiled a large accurate record. The commission had the usual GOP spinners who wrote dissents and as usual blamed poor people and the government. Even if the report simply collects the facts for history, that is an accomplishment in this era of massive uncontrolled greed.
First, the housing bubble was "only" the straw that finally broke the camel's back. Our economy was already on shaky ground and crumbling beneath our feet long before 2008, or 2007. Secondly, why would anyone expect moral and ethical conduct from anyone in Washington, especially those given a task to uncover possible wrong-doing? Remember, The Washington Brotherhood is a family, much like the Mafia.
"IF" our economy had been rock solid, self-supporting, and moving forward, the housing bubble would have had minimal damaging effect. The damaging greed of banksters can be traced back to the beginning of the "credit card" scam, and even before that. Also, Washington supports those that support Washington. In other words, "White Collar" crime is swept under the rug if it involves those that are closely connected to the influential and power brokers.
One would have to have been comatose for the past sixty years not to realize the games played by those entrusted with the well-being of this nation and her citizens. The real shock would be "IF" we were told the truth concerning matters of the government. Corruption, wrong-doing, greed, self-service, and one-upsmanship basically characterizes those that falsely claim to represent the citizens of this once great nation. Never be surprised by hints and stories of foul play and dereliction of duty concerning the activities in Washington.
They have no state income tax and otherwise low taxes. That puts them in a drastically different position than California don't you think?
Oh and $25 billion over 2 years versus $25 billion over 18 months is NOT the same quite obviously.
This is a real bummer, Openleft is/was a great political blog, but it looks like they are moving on.
news here.
There were a lot of economics bloggers on OpenLeft, so let's hope they come to The Economic Populist.
In the interim I'm looking into restructuring the site since the "forums" are basically not true forums, because we've become such a news source primarily.
Working on it, but you might go over to Open Left, see what's happening, invite those to come over here.
Shrugs shoulders. Firstly labor advantages exclusive in China are about 10%-20%, that's not he main reason for the exodus and why currency manipulation is such an issue.
Secondly, India is cheap labor.
Thirdly, without a strong manufacturing sector, you basically do not have a 1st world economy, so "oh well", doesn't work out too well. Manufacturing spawns innovation, not the other way around and spawns all sorts of economic growth. R&D, on the other hand does not scale, it does not produce the level of jobs required for 300+ million people.
Is this coming from some corporate lobbyist white paper?
These Indian companies are really in the business of selling visas to desperate employees. India is a corrupt slum. The reasons for people wanting to escape are valid. However, when they arrive, they merely take advantage of the liberal laws of their new hosts, bring in their huge families, and very quickly replicate in the local community all the awful things they were trying to move away from. In fact, they werent trying to move away, they merely wanted to be at the top of the dung heap, not the bottom. So they replicate the dung heap, slums and all, then put themselves as they overseer. I T companies can recruit employees in India with the promise of a visa, but then they proceed to tie them to the company at low salaries, in effect making the employees pay a heavy price for the visas. The Indian execs and management all want to flee India, so of course they arrange their own visas. In years to come, when our children look around, they will wonder what the heck we were thinking allowing these people to colonize us. When they move into politics, we will really reap the whirlwind. They are racist, and from what I have seen very work shy, but able to play the system and take advantage of every rule.
Again, there is a REASON I put the basic GDP equation first and foremost in these overviews. That reason is to show that imports are SUBTRACTED. GDP, as I state the definition again, is DOMESTIC product.
To understand GDP and what it actually measures, one needs to start with that basic equation.
It would really help if people would read the post and say what they do not understand about it. That will help me write better to find out where the bottlenecks are.
If you read the post, you will see, clearly, imports are subtracted from GDP and you will see how the trade deficit affects GDP. What is reported quarterly is the change in GDP.
What is incorrect seems to be you not getting the original post, that GDP does NOT contain imports by definition.
One can argue some of the nuances on this fact, I keep pointing to phantom GDP in particular, but first and foremost, one needs to get that basic equation down on the definition of the economic metric GDP.
I, too, have concerns about off-shoring our jobs, but cost of labor is the single most important factor. Cheaper labor means cheaper goods, but you're right to be worried about who's going pay for these goods, cheaper or otherwise, if the middle class keeps getting squeezed. But even if our middle class was doing great, we'd still buy cheap goods and for our domestic manufacturers to compete with goods from China and India (from whom we import those cheap goods). Domestic companies have to reduce the cost of manufacturing to compete in domestic markets and the easiest way to do that is to use cheaper labor and that means off-shoring jobs.
I am convinced that our manufacturing base -- once the bedrock of our growing economy -- is shifting to developing economies in Asia, Africa and South America. Advanced economies like ours has to shift to a technology-based economy that demands more education and skill of its labor force. In other words, this is the product of that paradoxical concept, "creative destruction."
This may not be popular but I am convinced it's reality. Fighting to hold on to a manufacturing base that has already gone will only delay the process of moving forward. Our advanced economy demands more.
Robert Oak, I am not writing that “post production costs”, (i.e. the distribution, handling, retailing, repairing or otherwise supporting an existing product) do not contribute to the nation’s GDP.
What I’m stating is that other than international shipping costs, “post production costs” are similar for similar domestic or imported products. Imported products do not contribute ADDITIONALY more than a similar domestic product’s “post production costs” to USA’s GDP.
It’s not my economic logic but my English grammar that’s incorrect.
Due to choosing an imported rather than domestic product we reduced our GDP by the price of the particular product at U.S. port of entry. We also denied ourselves of other costs that were directly or indirectly due to the particular product’s productions but they were not reflected within the price of the product at U.S. port of entry. All of these prices contributed to the producing nations’ GDP.
Respectfully, Supposn
but the BLS will claim offshore outsourcing is not negatively impacting productivity, but that's kind of a secondary calculation.
For the record, read the offshore outsourcing blog post rant by me. I quote a really good post and link to it about how wrong BLS 10 year job growth and contraction projections have been. Then, look at the great "jobs of the future" and they are saying it again, STEM, I.T. will be the huge growth jobs, but their total numbers in many categories have declined, there literally is a glut of PhDs, and to make matters worse, they count foreign guest workers in those occupational categories and unemployment rates.
It's very tough to get a concrete answer but those trying to deny offshore outsourcing isn't having a negative effect must not get out much. Proving it is is a whole other ball game.
Robert Oak and Sonny Clark, thank you both for responding to my message. I too often fear that this entire portion of the forest has been falling but extremely few of us hear it.
I agree there are many, many different ways to introduce tariffs de facto but an Import Certificate, (i.e. IC) policy’s superior to all other existing or proposed trade policies I’ve encountered. This is a proposal of a market (rather than government) driven policy that grants government no policy discretion.
Unlike tariffs, it rewards exporters of USA goods thus indirectly but effectively subsidizing exports of such goods. The increased cost to USA purchasers of foreign goods are directly related to IC’s open global market values. The decreased cost of USA goods to foreign purchasers are inversely related to IC’s market values.
Our nation is not experiencing an era of political harmony and conciliation but I believe this superior trade policy rather than tariffs would be more politically acceptable.
Respectfully, Supposn
It's clear, from the report and the graphs imports are a subtraction in the GDP equation. What you are not understanding is I"m talking about retail trade, so truckers moving the stuff around, the sales clerk selling the cheap Chinese made Walmart toy, they do add to GDP, because that is domestic activity.
Ya all, when in doubt, look at the equation and the breakdown. There is a reason I write up these overviews starting with it, to make it clear what component does what in gross domestic production. It's very clear imports are subtracted and via the BOP which is before price indexes, does try to take into account any partial domestic production or "double counting".
I did not say "how much", obviously there is no comparison vs. durable manufacturing production of domestic goods.
Robert Oak, you wrote, “there is an entire industry unloading containers and moving them around the U.S.” but loading domestic goods and moving them around the U.S. similarly contribute to USA’s GDP”.
It is only prior to imported goods entering the USA or domestic goods reaching their producers’ shipping platform that there’s aggregate economically meaningful differences between them”.
Their differences are all due to their source production and those differences account for their differing affect upon our GDP. The production of import goods (to the extent that that USA Labor or goods, or components did not contribute to the creation of those goods), contribute nothing to USA’s GDP.
Respectfully, Supposn
There must be some in, say, Luxor or Alexandria who would agree with you. On this more fortunate shore, no one who bases public policy on the self-adulating myths of this Exile Glitterata is worthy of such honor as a presidential medal -- but consider the source. After all, it seemed a reward for services rendered, or perhaps a consolation prize (consider the case of Robert McNamara, who was decorated and then fired).
The "technology advances" argument is always one that makes me bristle.
I have worked in the automation industry for the last 15 years. If automation were the primary culprit in the precipitous loss of plants over the last decade - 53,000+ closed plants according to a recent Ian Fletcher article, one would think the automation industry would be booming. Of course it is not, and has never fully recovered from the '01 recession. Sales of industrial robots and automated machine tools has been down in the range of 20 to 40% over the last several years according to Industry Week. Much of the lost mfg capacity has occured among small machine shops, custom machine builders, component manufacturers - all users of automation technology and of course among the largest consumers of automation techology - auto makers and auto parts suppliers.
There are two primary problems with the automation argument - the first is there have been no major advances or breakthroughs in mfg technology that can account for the job and plant losses. Robots, controls and machine tools have seen only incremental improvements over the last 20 years - these are mature technologies. And while its true that automation can eliminate some grunt labor production jobs, jobs are also created in higher skill areas programming, setting up, maintaining and operating this complex machinery
The other problem is that automation must have high volume repetitive production to justify its costs. Often the bean counters will make the determination that it is more profitable to offshore to a cheap labor, lax regulatory country than it is to invest millions in automation. High volume production indutries have been the most vulnerable to offhsoring.
I have asked proponents of the automation/technology argument to point to a single breakthrough technology that can account for the major loss of industry over the last decade - so far nothing but crickets.
Tell those town, state and fed officials. Stop speaking Chinese and kissing Chinese's ass. Enough! Chinese government do not respect Chinese people in China. They are not capable to respect our Americans and our country.
in reading on the Internets everyone is piling on ADP as being bogus. Now hold on there ya all, it's the methodology that is of interest. Remember, the BLS is bogus too, by refusing to give immigration status of workers and counting foreign guest workers, which can bias, then to find those who are not officially counted is a true mathematical exercise, instead of being reflected in the headline buzz numbers. Additionally, if a PhD takes a job at Walmart, that person is no longer unemployed expert in their field, instead a Walmart worker, i.e, retail trade.
So, who's biasing who here? Bottom line the American public and those who watch this stuff would like more detailed and accurate statistics on the American workforce it seems and the current point of wrath is the ADP.
Just reported via Zerohedge, here.
Notice how more and more people are having to resort to watching Al Jazeera to get any real news.
That's how bad our cable news and reporters have become.
is how Numerian basically moves to philosophy, whereas the real point of the crisis was derivatives. The report touches upon that but not enough and doesn't seem to point out these things are built with faulty mathematics, I mean from the basics, CDO and one cannot even validate them computationally, it's impossible.
That said, I did not even read the GOP dissents the minute I saw them trying to claim deregulation isn't a problem. That's clearly BS.
What irks me is how we know Democrats come up corrupt and lacking, as if it's even possible, we get pure economic fiction from GOP. I mean how did any of these people graduate from college they are so dead wrong? Or did they go to Spin School?
Angelites was a rare honest politician in Sacramento. He is saying "let the facts speak for themselves". He feels he has compiled a large accurate record. The commission had the usual GOP spinners who wrote dissents and as usual blamed poor people and the government. Even if the report simply collects the facts for history, that is an accomplishment in this era of massive uncontrolled greed.
First, the housing bubble was "only" the straw that finally broke the camel's back. Our economy was already on shaky ground and crumbling beneath our feet long before 2008, or 2007. Secondly, why would anyone expect moral and ethical conduct from anyone in Washington, especially those given a task to uncover possible wrong-doing? Remember, The Washington Brotherhood is a family, much like the Mafia.
"IF" our economy had been rock solid, self-supporting, and moving forward, the housing bubble would have had minimal damaging effect. The damaging greed of banksters can be traced back to the beginning of the "credit card" scam, and even before that. Also, Washington supports those that support Washington. In other words, "White Collar" crime is swept under the rug if it involves those that are closely connected to the influential and power brokers.
One would have to have been comatose for the past sixty years not to realize the games played by those entrusted with the well-being of this nation and her citizens. The real shock would be "IF" we were told the truth concerning matters of the government. Corruption, wrong-doing, greed, self-service, and one-upsmanship basically characterizes those that falsely claim to represent the citizens of this once great nation. Never be surprised by hints and stories of foul play and dereliction of duty concerning the activities in Washington.
Rubbish....not even worthy any serious intellectual inquiry. There is already a massive body of knowledge that takes Rand's ideas apart.
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