People are not a burden, nor are they a job taken. See Detroit, MI. The continuous arrival of automotive jobseekers over 100 years ago didn’t shrink work options for those already there, rather they expanded them. And for obvious reasons.
The more people working together, the more those same people are specialized. To be specialized is to be more productive, which means specialization is the path to surging demand for all manner of things unrelated to one’s specialty. That’s why the instigator of Detroit’s expansion (the rise of the automobile industry) occurred in concert with jobs for all sorts of specialties unrelated to cars.
What was true then is true today. The inflow of humans into Silicon Valley isn’t a threat for those already there, rather the work divided is the path to soaring production, the effect of which is people employed in all sorts of ways, most of them not technological.
The unrelenting truth about human beings as life and work-enhancing additions to global betterment requires routine stating as “globalization” dangerously takes a beating in traditional media. Consider a new book by Washington Post reporter David Lynch. Titled “The World’s Worst Bet,” Lynch’s aim is to show what he deems the downside of globalization.
Except that there’s no such thing. That’s not denial as much as it is common sense. Work divided doesn’t suddenly lose its genius when those dividing up the work are in different countries. What works brilliantly locally works even better the greater number of hands and machines at work together.
What you’ve just read is not theoretical. While Lynch is trying to indict globalization and promoters of same (think Bill Clinton, among others) as the architects of a prosperous concept that left some behind, reality tells us something quite different.
See the explosion of imports into the U.S. that globalization dissenters point to as evidence of its downside. The problem for the dissenters is that they can’t have it both ways. The surging imports have been an effect of surging production.
Contra globalization’s critics, and Donald Trump most famously, imports are the surest, most inarguable sign of prosperity in the world. Nothing else comes close, simply because no one makes it a priority to export goods and services to locales that are in decline.
In short, soaring imports are but a mirror of soaring exports. Yes, globalization has logically lifted the productivity of the American people to levels that greatly exceeded the relative autarky that prevailed before.
If it were true that globalization had an American downside, then it would also be true that the alleged downside would have revealed itself via reduced inflows of foreign goods and services into the country (the United States) that had most availed itself of the worldwide division of labor. Quite the opposite. Imports yet again mirror exports.
Which calls for a rethink of Lynch’s thesis about a “gamble” that “went wrong," along with less certitude about what motivated and motivates the Trump voter in the first place. As evidenced by the abundance of foreign plenty into the U.S. since the 1990s, Americans are thriving. Which is just a speculation that the appeal of Trump is much less about ideology and “policy” than is often assumed.
That’s because people aren’t hurt economically by other people. At the same time, some just refuse to avail themselves of opportunity created by the division of labor among people. Importantly, the latter is not a fault of collaboration as much as it’s a fault of individual error that no public policy can solve.
