I'll limit my commentary on this article for now to a few simple observations:
PHOENIX (Reuters) - Sheridan Bailey is offering workers $20 an hour to raise the steel building frames that are giving the U.S. city of Phoenix a taller skyline. Only thing is, he can't find any.
"When we advertise, people don't show up, or if they do, they are not qualified," said Bailey, the chief executive officer of Ironco Enterprises. ...
If you look at that article, do you notice just how much coverage is given to the arguments of those opposed to this so-called reform:
"Opponents of the Washington bill from both main parties argue that it rewards law breakers and takes jobs away from U.S.-born workers -- an assertion disputed by both the government and many employers."
Yes, that's right - less than a sentence is given to even mentioning their views, and no space at all to the arguments they offer in support of those views. The views of that side are alluded to, attacks on those views described, and their responses never heard. This article is an editorial masquerading as a newsstory, editorializing in support of a position that one would need a well developed case of amnesia to take seriously. The implication of the article would seem to be that "unskilled" labor can not be had for love or money in the United States because the illegal immigrants won't be given amnesty, and that labor is holding all of the cards when time comes for negotiations.
Really? The very fact that an article that discusses the alleged difficulties in finding unskilled labor begins with a discussion of the difficulties somebody was having in finding "qualified" construction workers to build him a few skyscapers in Phoenix might tell one a little about the attitude that went into writing this article. Boy and girls - quick show of hands: how many of you would have any business being on such a construction site? These are, in fact, highly skilled positions, involving the doing of work that is highly dangerous, in a job market that is, reportedly, doing far better than that of the majority of cities in the US:
Having been there in the last few years, I can certainly report that the place looked like it was doing a lot better than, say, Chicago. So, in an article that poses as a fairminded portrayal of the impact of the proposed "immigration reform" (read: amnesty program for illegal aliens), one finds the author not only beginning with a mention of somebody's difficulties in hiring skilled labor - making the whole illustration an exercise in bait and switch - but the author (Tim Gaynor) cites an off-point example that isn't even typical of its class of off-point examples. Think, for a second, about just how much fun it would not be, to be out in the sun, next to a blowtorch, in the middle of a Phoenix summer afternoon. I was out there in January, and we all needed water and shade. I can only imagine what the place must be like in August, and there are no air conditioners up on a scaffold.
One then has the least representative example of a job position imaginable being offered as an illustration of a direction that the entire economy is supposely moving in, with the poor, helpless hapless employer powerless to find help, no matter how much he bows and scrapes before the mighty worker. Really? That's funny, because just a short while back, Yahoo jobs ran this article
in which an employee whose ideas were being plagiarized by his supervisor was warned to not complain to the higher ups about this clear breach of professional ethics, because of the consequences for his career, and was told to soft pedal his complaint. Just how radically empowered did that employee sound. As for the difficulties employers have in filling skilled positions, as I mentioned in a past blog post, one can easily find employers making their own problems in this area,
and a good deal of this "we need more people" complaining, when the spin is removed, translates into "we don't have labor so flat on its back that as we capriciously destroy employee's lives, we find the people we're destroying to be quite as easily replacable as we had hoped they would be". Raising the question, seldom if ever addressed, of exactly how aiding in the disempowerment and economic ruination of the American workforce became a legitimate function of the government in Washington which, for the sake of what some would call "the free market", is being seriously asked to interfere in that market in order to secure an advantage for its wealthiest participants at the expense of its least wealthy. Doing this being referred to as - and I have to muffle a laugh as I write this - progressive politics. So I guess it's irony all around?
The usual excuse offered for calling this roundabout attempt to steal from the poor and give to the rich "progressive" is to say that globalization is the only route to alleviating third world poverty, but that's a baldfaced lie. Back when Russia was the country of the hour to discuss and tarriffs were still with us, I mentioned a possible alternative
and this being the 90s, got treated to the contribution of yet another netizen who decided to make his own reality as he tried to deny the existence of the tolerance problem for Russian-made parts, illustrating why Usenet became as useless for serious discussions as it remains to this day - discussions there become unrooted from anything external to themselves, it seems. But the argument, as unfashionable as it has been for all this time, remains in place, and the basic idea I advanced back then was hardly original with me. The idea goes back at least as far as the Marshall Plan when, wonder of wonders, governmental activism in the economy not only produced positive results, but brought us most of the wealthy economies of Western Europe, whose countries, in the post-WWII devastation, had attained third world status. Yes, where there is a will, poor countries can be helped to become wealthy countries, very often on a very reasonable timetable. But that's the thing - these days, even among supposed liberals, there really is no will to do so.
Bills like this are not about Jose, the brilliant chemical engineer from Sao Paulo whose contributions aren't going to be known of by humanity, purely because he didn't grown up in the Hamptons - though maybe they are a little bit about Fred, the equally brilliant chemical engineer from Englewood whose career is about to suffer the same fate as Jose's, for the same reason. Bills like this are about Consuela the housekeeper, whose presence in this country is vital, lest her trust fund baby employer discover that he has to do his own dishes and mow his own glass. They're about that mouthy garment worker Luigi who - can you imagine this - actually wants to go home at night before he physically collapses, wants to earn enough to reliably put food on his family's table and hey, wouldn't mind at all if his children saw him often enough to know who he was. They're about that blowhard John who pulls down a luxurious $6/hour in a poultry processing plant, and is still whining about how his buddy lost a hand at work, and thinks that those antiquated worker safety regulations ought to be adhered to or worse - expanded! I mean, my G-d, it's like those people expect ... to be treated like people.
That's the thing - by and large, for the last few decades, being treated on the job like you're a human being has gone from being something viewed as being more or less a given, to being seen as a privilege that has become harder and harder to win. Make the job search enough of a cattle call, and employers won't have to give it out to those among the hoi polloi at all and kids - the hoi polloi is you and me, for the most part, no matter how hard we work and no matter how much we know and can do. The very rich may be able to buy the newspaper coverage they want, but they can't buy our gullibility unless we're foolish enough to offer it to those whose ill intentions haven't only been out in the open for all to see for decades, but in so many ways been advertised in a haughtly, sneering tone directed toward those in the lower orders, who've been told to accept the inescapability of their station in life, and then told to forget what they heard earlier when all of a sudden, the powerful aren't looking invinciable any more.
The real question is, will the rest of us be stupid enough to agree to do so?
In the above post, I leave an obvious question unaddressed, at least one obvious to anybody familiar with the distinction between "necessity" and "sufficiency". While globalization may be unnecessary for the ending of poverty in the Third World, as historical experience in Western Europe suggests, and indeed may not prove particularly helpful as the fiasco that is the post-Cold War non-development of Eastern Europe would imply, is it compatible with that goal?
As I will argue, the answer to that question is a clear, unequivocal "no". Globalization is a recipe for disaster, not just for the First World nations it will impoverish, but for the Third World nations which, having made the Faustian bargain of destroying much, most or even all of their traditional cultures in exchange for wealth, will be deprived in the end of the very prize they have sacrificed all to get. The reward for all the sacrifice, if it is pursued without yielding indefinitely, will in the end be something not seen in recorded history: a global dark age, mankind's legacy of cultural and material wealth squandered for the sake of allowing the overindulged few to take that overindulgence to levels never seen and barely imagined before in the very short run, as the common man works for his own destruction, guided by the delusion that he will be one of the lucky few, and so need not worry about the fate of the trampled upon many in the brave new world he is helping to make through the aquiescence he offers to what is becoming the status quo. One is reminded of the old saying "those whom the gods would destroy, first they make blind".
Let us consider the logic of the situation, one we are called on to accept as being necessary for the greater good, historically inevitable, and ultimately desirable for all, this position being defended in part with the glib claim that "it (the cost of labor) will all balance out in the end". Where does such confidence come from? Neoconservative political dogma, as I describe in the introduction to the Halls of Eternal Disbelief
in combination with something that, as a teacher, I've been all too familiar with for all too long. I'm reminded of the confrontations I had with some of the undergrads I taught who would turn in answer sets and exams with the right answers, but with work that was completely wrong. We, as graders, weren't completely in the dark as to where those mysteriously correct answers were coming from - the students were resourceful when it came to cheating off of each other, and very determined to uphold their imagined right to do so. I still remember one frat boy in particular who, during a midterm, would loudly shuffle his feet between one and four times every time he wrote down an answer. The midterm was multiple choice and guess how many answers each question had on it? Yet he grew quite angry when I told him to stop doing that, and saw support in this from the instructor and his fellow students. The prevailing view of what education was supposed to be experienced a sea change from the time I began as a Freshman in undergrad, myself, to when I completed my coursework in grad school, the pursuit of understanding being replaced by an attempt to purchase the credibility that previous generations had sought to earn. Our new generation was actually angered by the suggestion that education should involve taking the time to learn and understand the arguments that lead to the conclusions; it simply wished to memorize and regurgiate the "right" answers, an attitude that helped pave the way for the simplemindedness of political correctness that followed in the next few years.
The problem with the "wisdom through regurgitation" approach is that an argument is only as relevant to reality as the assumptions underlying it, and sometimes, in real life, the world changes and our assumptions break down, leaving those who learn the answers without the reasons without any idea as to how to adapt their ideas in light of the new reality, or even the faintest notion that they might need to do so.
What our glib labor market optimists did was take that old supply and demand argument for not placing price controls on commodities and treat labor as a commodity - and let's ponder, some time, the thought that somebody could take a look at that one, simplistic argument and think that it would answer all questions for all time in a subject.
Common sense should tell one that the argument will break down very easily when applied to labor. The unsold surplus grain feels no despair on being left unsold, and would be unable to respond to such despair even were it to feel such, but the unemployed laborer may very well be starving, will certainly be conscious of his despair and fully able to respond to it. The farmer, facing the bulk of unsold grain, may put it in a silo or shrug off the loss greatly disappointed, but he will not lose sleep and night thinking of how much of its life it is missing out on, nor will the grain protest his callousness toward its inanimate sorrows; the involuntarily idled laborer, on the other hand, can not possibly be compensated for the loss of the years when he is involuntarily idled, even if he should survive for unlike the grain or machine parts or whatever else is being stockpiled, he must consume in relative bulk in order to survive and remain part of the supply, and he will very much care about whether or not he does so; people are not commodities, and the supply of people will not, in general, respond to supply and demand as if they were such.
Why not? In part, perhaps, because you won't see two unsold carboretors getting bored while they've waiting to be sold, getting it on and creating a small litter of little carboretors; human beings, when idled and bored, often will tend to reproduce, with economically perverse results. Let us consider the labor glut in a population so increased as to lead to mass starvation. Were the standard supply-and- demand curve argument from first year microeconomics to hold with the universal inevitability that some want it to, applying to labor as if it were a commodity, then as population went up, decreasing the market value of the labor produced by population growth, the birthrate would drop. Yet historically, this has not been the case. Why?
Because in the financially stressed states in which such overpopulation has occured, social services have been absent for obvious financial reasons - the government in such a state lacks the funds to provide for all it would provide for, were it even to care about its disadvantaged. Those who reach old age without living offspring to provide for them in a country with nothing akin to social security are condemned to starvation. To have offspring in abundance is to have a better change at seeing more financial support when one is too old to work, and the greater the abundance, the greater one's own chances, as the one producing the offspring.
Here's where the perversity enters the picture: As the country becomes more overpopulated and more impoverished, the earnings per citizen will go down, resulting in the need for more surviving offspring to provide for one's own retirement, and the death rate will go up (as life becomes harder and medical care scarcer), resulting in a need to have even more young offspring in the beginning, per needed surviving adult offsping to be found at the end of one's own life. For a country whose population has outstripped its ability to provide, precisely when humanitarian concerns should lead one to wish for a decrease in the birth rate, the population will soar instead, because the individual's best interests and those of the society in which he dwells will be radically at odds with each other.
What the population explosion is producing, at that point, is an externality, and even in Microeconomics 100 one does learn that no market remedy is to be found for those. But remembering that would require that one stayed awake in class and, as I've noted, doing so went out of fashion at about the same time that the frat houses went back into style.
The circumstances described are not difficult to find in the Third World; starving masses are to be found throughout, even in countries that may seem underpopulated on paper, as is the case with most of the nations of subsaharan Africa. A population of five million may seem low, but for a low technology country, it may be rather high. Remember that during the Middle Ages, when England enjoyed a higher level of technology than many of the countries in question did prior to their respective European conquests, London had only a few tens of thousands of residents. What constitutes "overpopulation" is a product not only of the land area and natural resources of a country - the immutable realities nature gives it - but of its technology, of what the people have the ability to do with what nature has given them.
But if the people, as individuals, are given strong disincentives that persuade them to not develop the skills that allow them to develop and sustain the technologies that make wealth possible through the effective use of the resources nature gives them, what happens to the effective carrying capacity of the land?
Quite obviously, it is going to be lower than it would otherwise have been, producing starvation where there might have been plenty. But this is exactly what is going to happen for reasons that should become obvious, if one follows the notion of outsourcing to its logical conclusion.
One outsources work to another country because, post exchange rate, labor is cheaper there; one sees a bleeding of jobs, then, from hard currency countries to soft currency countries. But what is going to happen as work and relative prosperity come to a once low wage, soft currency country? One need not guess, because it has already begun to happen to places like Mexico. The currency of the country in question will become harder, labor will not be as cheap after exchange rates are factored in, and what outsourcing gave, outsourcing will take away, most likely with disturbing speed. The Third World scientist or engineer, who went through so much to become what he was, is rewarded with a career that may be briefer than his time in school, and sooner or later the kids in or approaching their time in the University will notice this. From the start of undergrad to the end of a PhD program is unlikely to be less than a decade; for whom is going through that for a career that will last - maybe eight years at the outside - going to be a good deal? Especially if globalization puts the lovable companies we're already familiar with in the United States in charge of a globalized economy, as those bangalored residents of Bangalore now find themselves in the hopeless world of the overqualified, refused even the low wage employment that will remain.
In the end, nobody will study these subjects anywhere, because one will have to be insane to do so. Think of the condequences of creating a world in which nobody understands any technical subject on a professional level, because nobody will want to learn it on such a level, or dare to. What does one get out of creating such a truly post- technological world?
The question answers itself: a dark age. A global dark age, and that's something more than a little bit different, because in every other dark age man has seen, there has always been a place that was not affected, a place where civilization lingered. Civilization never really vanished, it just moved from place to place, but in this scenario, it ends up falling everywhere, simultaneously. No place will be left for civilization to spread out from.
I have argued, at the beginning of this string of posts, that compassion for the unfortunates of the Third World does not mandate outsourcing, globalization or open borders. Now we begin to see that said consideration doesn't even allow these, because in the long run they would serve to wipe out all hope for those these policies would supposedly help, eventually even reducing the upper classes overly well served in the beginning to a destitution they'll probably we astonished by; to have everything in a world that has nothing is a meager blessing.
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