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The exporting of American jobs, revisited
In his blog Insults Unpunished, Robert Prather writes a pro free trade post. He says:
When this country was founded 19 out of 20 people worked in agriculture. By the middle of the 19th century employment in agriculture had decreased to half of the work force and the country was richer. Today, employment in agriculture has dropped to less than 3% of the work force and we are richer still. Why? Temporary unemployment and dynamic labor markets. Labor is freed for other pursuits and the total product of the economy increases.
The problem for the United States, not addressed by Mr. Prather, is that free trade will cause the economy of the planet as a whole to increase. But how will the United States fare?
As I've written before, the ease in which jobs can be exported today, because of technology, is unprecedented in the history of economics. This will cause all wages throughout the planet to equalize. This will be of great benefit to a country like India, but it will painful to the United States.
Most jobs involving what I consider to be "real work" will be moved overseas, and the only jobs left here will be marketing and sales, services that cannot be performed overseas (such as cooking food), and ownership of capital (making money from already having money).
The United States' only source of continued wealth is our huge stockpile of capital. As Gordon Gekko said in the movie Wall Street, we will no longer create, we will only own (he said something similar to that, anyway).
posted Monday, December 01, 2003
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