Steve Faktor Profile picture
Aug 13, 2019 12 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Thread on some thoughts on @ewarren's plan to demand poor countries meet labor & environmental standards to trade with the US & on @Noahpinion's critique.

1) Yes, Clinton-era free trade agreements caused a multi-decade job bleed from the US, especially in manufacturing
2) Free trade generally benefits lower cost providers. Therefore, a net positive for emerging nations.

3) There are things we could have done to phase in free trade deals, like boost investment & re-training in other industries, to limit the downsides. But hindsight is 20/20.
4) While ALL consumers benefit from lower prices from free trade & much smaller groups of workers benefit from protectionism, it's the job of a nation's leaders to balance the two. That did not happen here. The digital boom abandoned the analog workers of exported industries.
5) All leaders have a fiduciary duty to their citizens first. But that can be interpreted differently & vary by whether they're thinking short- or long-term. In some cases, short election cycles incentivize bad decisions for that reason.
6) It's not constructive to re-litigate the past. We need to deal with reality. @ewarren proposes demanding a higher bar for trading with the US, which will likely make it difficult for some countries to meet, raising their costs & making domestic production more competitive.
7) This would drive higher consumer costs in the short-term but incentivize faster automation in the long-term (a bit like minimum wage does), potentially leapfrogging foreign development altogether. That means poor economies won't get their chance to get richer via labor.
8) The result will be a faster, JOBLESS domestication of global industries. When manufacturing "comes back", it will not employ any of the forgotten high-school grads and blue collar workers that currently favor it.

9) The biggest implication is we're speeding towards GLOBAL REDISTRIBUTION of goods & profits, as well as pressure to sustain other industries who's labor quotient (and costs) are also dropping. (I laid out the full argument in 'Inequality We Trust')
ideafaktory.com/7-inequality-t…
10) WHATEVER we decide, #9 is INEVITABLE. ALL industries will require fewer workers w/different skills & the conversation will quickly shift away from trade to sustaining & incentivizing populations sans-market rate salaries. #UBI is one (flawed) option:
11) We are a few decades from truly confronting the complexity of maintaining personal freedoms, innovation/entrepreneurship, mass underemployed populations & global distribution of goods, free from Orwellian control of centralized government or corporate authority.
12) In the meantime, I support a different approach to upgrading other nations. In my plan, trade is an incentive not a contingency. Read it here: ideafaktory.com/UNPrime
Elizabeth Warren's demand that trading partners comply with labor & environmental standards might sound radical, but it's only a speed bump to the inevitable. Here's why...

ideafaktory.com/trade

#economics #jobs #future #trade

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More from @ideafaktory

Apr 2, 2023
Interesting thread breaking down Twitter's algorithm.
The Twitter Homogenization

Knowing what Twitter's algorithm likes & doesn't will make users please/game it, the way students do teachers for grades, TV execs select programming, & how SEO & clickbait work.

Algorithmic speech is not free speech, even when transparent.
Liv ur life, peepz. If hiphoptimizing the Twitterz be that impotent to you, you did it wrongsies.

Read 4 tweets
Feb 28, 2023
The Productivity Paradox

Much of "productivity" is *theft of productivity* from others.

Productive legislators, content creators, game developers, lawyers, influencers, marketers, athletes, divert time & attention from others' productivity to casual consumption or admin.
The question is what are we optimizing for?

If it's jobs, then loss of productivity creates a need for more workers.

If it's personal satisfaction, you'd want as much focus as possible.

If it's economic strength, productivity must focus on exportable categories/activities.
The productivity paradox would be moot if it were purely market driven & benign. It's neither.

We're making conscious choices to regulate, incentivize, or ignore countless addictions, powerful technologies & rapacious partisans, who don't have our best interests at heart.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 16, 2023
The Great Replacement?

I thought this would go away. It hasn't. A quick thread on what I think is really happening, from an Economics POV.

Start w/this post. Like most scoring systems, it's highly subjective & suggests a misguided interpretation of what's happening today.
1/
The Great Replacement Theory came to light in the US in Charlottesville, where white supremacists chanted "The Jews will not replace us" & other variants.

What they were alluding to is a conspiracy that Jews (who they think run everything) want to replace whites w/minorities.
2/
These white nationalists are mis/re-interpreting:
—the US constitution, which despite our failures to live up to its ideas—was never about "blood & soil", like many European ethnostates
—the prescriptiveness of French philosopher Camus's Great Replacement theory
3/
Read 22 tweets
Feb 4, 2023
I'm reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Have to admit, it's taking a toll on me.

If even ½ is true (based on history, I'd bet it is), it's hard not to feel powerless & cynical in the shadow of immense soulless forces behind global exploitation & our simplistic narratives. Image
The more I think about Confessions of an Economic Hitman, the more naive cryptocurrency becomes.

In a world where we use dollar-debt to control third world nations, thinking we'd just surrender that power because libertarian tech bros want to get rich is so preposterous.
How the west controls the third world.

Good summation of the core premise of "Confessions of an Economic Hitman". amzn.to/3Ygcl4n
The details only make it darker.

As the CEO of Blackrock explains, the last thing markets want is democracy:
Read 4 tweets
Jan 8, 2023
The re-education of Jordan Peterson by Canada, like that of Jack Ma by China is a state taming forces that threaten its power.

The civic variant of forced apologies by employees whose cultural transgressions threaten revenues.

Compliance is the great societal stabilizer.
There is no due process here. Only the thinnest veil of fairness. Decisions have been made in closed rooms. Capitulation & compliance are non-negotiable.

Ironically, it's far kinder than more brutal regimes, where oligarchs rain down from the sky.
Funny thing about state control in "democracies" is it's stealthy...until it isn't.

And when it does assert its power, every failsafe falls silent.

Assange disappears for a decade

Congress become $100+ millionaires

Pfizer buys media

Blank checks for foreign wars

Not a peep.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 5, 2023
How I'd save Bed, Bath & Beyond🧵

First, a reality check:

1) There is no market for selling commodities inside of buildings. This has been true for small businesses killed by giant chains. It's now true for chains. Experience is inferior, data-poor, too expensive vs. online.
2) There is no middle. The population is bifurcating -> upper middle class & sub-middle class. Like Macy's, malls, or The Gap, the middle is dwindling. Especially, when it's non-specialized, undifferentiated. The numbers back that:

3) To succeed, three realities must be embraced: passionate niches, experiences & impermanence. I'll bucket my ideas this way.

A. Passionate niches
BB&B has several great assets: brand recognition, national physical footprint, supply chain, product categories that can be complex
Read 10 tweets

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