I remember the mantra of some in the tech field of "no problem - just learn to code" when blue collar jobs in the manufacturing in the US was on the wane as production moved to cheaper locations overseas.
I think that is a good point to bring up, but it is orthogonal.
Production moving overseas is not the same as technological advancement. One can be against outsourcing but in favor of domestic technological progress.
It is in fact the same from the economic point if view.
You are replacing labor input with capital input, whether it's buying a machine or offshoring the work. Workers offshore can be thought of as a machine.
Not that it's bad either way! But the labor economics are the same.
It's exactly the same. It was a sudden upheaval of the established way to make a living. Not even very sudden. And responded to in the usual low-thought primary manner (except for a few places like Denmark). Few frames got broken, but lots of strikes no doubt contributed to accelerate the process even in cases where it shouldn't have been economically optimal.
We all want our cheap TV's at Walmart but sadly people in general don't think of the bigger consequences of wanting low bargain basement prices for consumer good or paying low to little tax.
Yet they complain about joblessness and how the education system and their neighborhood/towns are going to the balls.
You really think that the savings will actually be passed onto the consumer rather than the company gobbling up that extra value? Also, if taxes are lowered on businesses, the tax burden will be passed to the working poor/middle class.
> You really think that the savings will actually be passed onto the consumer rather than the company gobbling up that extra value?
Absolutely yes. Compare gas prices in countries with high taxes on gas and countries with low taxes on gas. Compare products that are subject to vice taxes. It is not hypothetical, it's reality.
> Also, if taxes are lowered on businesses, the tax burden will be passed to the working poor/middle class.
All taxes on businesses are passed onto the consumers already. For businesses that sell products and services that everybody uses, that means the taxes are passed on the working poor and middle class. The only way to have taxes explicitly excluding the poor and middle class is to have tariffs on luxury goods, and maybe vice taxes since those products are not essential.
There's no doubt that many company owners would try to use any tax reduction to make more profit for themselves, but that leaves space for competitors to take market share.
Woah woah woah buddy you’ve got that completely backwards. Journalists started that whole learn to code bullshit and then got justly lampooned about it when there were a bunch of media lay offs afterwards. It was a huge meme a while back so I’m not sure how you missed it.
Hu? The "learn to code" was not coming from the tech field itself (programmers know that coding is hard and FAANG are not hiring coal miners), but used as a dig against out-of-touch journalists who wrote articles like that:
> Biden said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience.
It turns out manufacturing is actually doing fine in the US as an industry. Just very different and probably employing higher skilled machinists (and at CNC machines).
But meanwhile Denmark has been making a go at a constructive, thought out, response. Perhaps let's look at how that works - who retrains for what? (Which I don't know in detail.)
