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Thanks.

   

Avro

I apologize if you thought I was being arrogant going "HO-HA!" The tone of that post was meant to be good natured ribbing. Or trash talk like on the basketball court. I wasn't intending to be malicious.

   

What about livelihoods? People who work in the labour industries being exported should have no trouble picking up another trade. This might not be totally unrelated, but I heard that, in 10 years, Alberta has the potential to emply every engineer (or maybe it was only civil engineers, I'm not sure) in Canada. These are in resource based industries that can't be exported, and the numbers must be comparable in other labour sectors.

   

The engineering reference was to show the huge demand for (albeit, skilled) labour which is already here. Engineers are part and parcel with most industries, so the number of other jobs that are going to be available in Canada will likely be overwhelming. As far as the unskilled labour being lost, while it's unfortunate for the individuals who won't be able to make the switch, doing away with the low-value operations is a good thing.

As for the jab at engineers, you're talking to one who shovelled concrete all summer and built two houses on his time off, so don't think we're all a bunch of office-sitting nancy boys

   

Yeah, there's plenty of 'those guys', so I understand the stereotypes. Kind of like the guys in a concrete course I took who designed a 6ft beam with 3-45M bars (that's three bars with a diameter of about 1 3/4"... waaay too much steel) anyway, when it came time to actually build the beams, the looks on their face when they realized what they'd ordered was priceless.

This is pretty far off topic... the point was that there'll be a lot of better jobs being created through getting rid of the low-end ones (someone needs to put all that engineering to use), and that means less chance of today's generation worrying about paying off their morgages at 50.

   

   

China is 1.3 Billion, of those only 3.5 million are of the slave labour class. Imagine working 6 days a week and 18 hour days for less than a dollar a day. How is that not going to make a major impact? Canada did not have 3.5 million slaves.

Slavery today


Not even the US had that many slaves so saying China is having growing pains (and btw China's version of Asian Flu will kill us all) and that there is a growing middle class in China is side stepping. This IS a major point of political but also economic contention. This is why we can not compete, they cheat! The solution is not to ignore the problem and move on to high end manufacturing, they are eating us alive.



U.S. job losses due to Gulf Coast hurricanes total 478,000

Table A-12. Alternative measures of labor underutilization



That is the real unemployment rate in the US most are not counted because they have stopped looking but it has not been going down and the hurricanes have done long term damage to the unemployment rate as it will take months to recover and some will not return at all.



US exports are $795 billion while imports are $1.476 trillion. The US trade deficit is $60 Billion. China is 13.8% of the trade with the US 2nd only to Canada. The US imbalance is teetering on the brink and it is still taking in more than it puts out. No matter how pretty a picture you paint the US is still losing the trade war by over half a trillion a year. Simply put the US needs the world more than the world needs the US. Add to all of this a shrinking dollar and massive debt and you have a real danger.



Or stop trading on the slave labour market. America needs the world and that addiction has it hooked on slavery. That is a road to ruin and the illusion of a high end product line saving the day is an illusion when nearly 80% of the US economy is service based.

By 2010, Chinese universities will graduate more students with science and engineering doctorates than their US counterparts; India will also gain ground

The number of incoming college freshmen who chose computer science as a major fell more than 60 percent between 2000 and 2004, says a report from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA earlier this year.

The US is putting all its eggs in one high tech basket and it is a gamble while industries that were the bread and butter, the auto and airlines, are being hacked to pieces and gutted. Those we US jobs with US benefits, gone! There is no replacement in the tech field large enough to take up the slack now and in the future the opportunites will go to the markets that will have the educated to supply the demand and the US is coming up short.

   

That should read a Keynesian and a libertarian.

The scourge returns

GM and Ford in need of a big overhaul

   

3.5 million / 1.3 billion = 0.27% of the population.

That's not to excuse the practice. However, the reason why factories are moving offshore isn't because of 0.27% of the population. They may be "cheating" - Microsoft would tell you that they are considering how much of their software is pirated over there - but if it were about slave labour as you contend, companies would have moved factories to Africa and the Middle East a long time ago. Of course they're not doing that. The reasons why companies are moving to China are the same reason why they went to Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.



The stream of numbers you have quoted is known as the augmented rate of unemployment. But ever country has this. You are seeing it being reported in the US, that's all.

If you want to look at data for unemployment based on standardized methodologies, the OECD website provides those numbers for you.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/41/13/18595359.pdf

August unemployment in the OECD.

Canada 6.8%
US 4.9%
Japan 4.3%
France 9.6%
Germany 9.6%
UK 4.6%

So all those numbers would be higher if you used the same methodologies as the US does for the augmented unemployment rate.

Another way to look at the labour market is labour workforce participation. You can see that it has held pretty steady the past 15-20 years.

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseea1.txt

Percentage of the population participating in the labour force

1970 - 60.4%
1975 - 61.2%
1980 - 63.8%
1985 - 64.8%
1990 - 66.5%
1995 - 66.6%
2000 - 67.1%
2004 - 66.0%


Percentage of the population employed

1970 - 57.4%
1975 - 56.1%
1980 - 59.2%
1985 - 60.1%
1990 - 62.8%
1995 - 62.9%
2000 - 64.4%
2004 - 62.3%



Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I had to highlight that statement. To frame trade as "war" is incorrect Scape. Economists certainly do not view it that way. Trade is mutually beneficial. To say that exports are inherently better than imports is a mercantilist view of the world. It certainly has not been born out be recent history. Japan and Germany run fairly substantial trade surpluses with the US but their economies have stagnated the past 15 years. Again, I am worried about the trade deficit as how it relates to the dollar and interest rates. But that is a function of how monetary and fiscal policy has been run in the United States this decade, not because of trade.



You bet. So we better get cracking. If we don't, we will lose our competitive edge. It is in the highest technology areas in which we must maintain our edge. If not, then it doesn't matter how many manufacturing jobs we try to protect.



Scape, of course that's going to happen. The teleconomy went through what can only be described as a depression in that industry. Anyone driving the San Jose/San Francisco corridor the past 5 years could tell you that. The technology Bubble economy lead to massive overcapacity, and when it burst, that capacity had to be taken out. I would be more concerned if the number of students had increased since that means the adjustments that had to occur weren't happening. But that will right itself. Besides, as one knowledgeable individual said to me, technology has shifted from information technology to biotechnology. Has there been a jump in biology majors over that time period?



What is occuring is a natural progression of the economy. In the United States, agriculture accounted for 70% of all jobs in 1800. Today its 3%. When manufacturing was growing in America, more ancilliary jobs were created to support that infrastructure. Same as today. The US is a huge, dynamic economy accounting for nearly 40% of global production. There is no one basket.

   

That should read a Keynesian and a libertarian.

Toro is hardly a Keynesian, and if you think you're a libertarian, you're quite mistaken.

   

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