Notice_the_nose’s Reviews > The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America's Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era > Status Update
Notice_the_nose
is on page 84 of 352
In a world of unregulated free trade, American CEOs, like their British predecessors in the nineteenth century, were convinced they could not fail to win every time. Similarly, American labor also thought it would be a big winner because it was far and away the world’s most productive workforce. Thus by 1950, after nearly a century and a half, Alexander Hamilton was out, and Adam Smith and David Ricardo were in.
— Apr 23, 2025 12:35PM
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Notice_the_nose
is on page 213 of 352
Similarly, in 1995, Ford Motor Company CEO Alex Trotman said: “Ford isn’t even an American company, strictly speaking. We’re global. We’re investing all over the world. Our managers are multinational. We teach them to think and act globally.” In 2006, Cisco CEO John Chambers went even further in saying: “What we are trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company.”
— Apr 24, 2025 12:35PM
Notice_the_nose
is on page 187 of 352
The Economic Policy Institute reckons that the annual earnings of all workers without a college degree (the vast bulk of the workforce) are $1,400 less than they would have been without globalization. University of Maryland economist Peter Morici argues that globalization has cost the United States $1.5 trillion over the past ten years.
— Apr 24, 2025 12:00PM
Notice_the_nose
is on page 187 of 352
No one knows, in fact, what the full impact of globalization has been on the United States over the past sixty years, as there has been no truly comprehensive analysis. But a good case can be made that the gains have not been great and that there may well have been a net loss.
— Apr 24, 2025 12:00PM
Notice_the_nose
is on page 186 of 352
But the biggest things are economies of scale and relative worker productivity. Major import penetration of the U.S. market means foreign producers are gaining economies of scale and the worker productivity that goes with them while U.S.-based producers are losing both. Since relative productivity largely, determines wages, this kind of shift means downward pressure on wages.
— Apr 24, 2025 11:56AM
Notice_the_nose
is on page 142 of 352
Not surprisingly, the offshoring of U.S.-based production accelerated greatly as a flood of American companies opened up shop in China, and U.S. manufacturing fell to about 11 percent of GDP. Consequently, the trade (current account) deficit ballooned to $696 billion, or nearly 7 percent of GDP.
— Apr 24, 2025 02:38AM
Notice_the_nose
is on page 140 of 352
But the U.S. Census Bureau reported that, on average, in normal years 52 percent of job losers who are eventually reemployed take a substantial pay cut. Indeed, McKinsey itself had done another study in 2003 which showed that only 36 percent of those displaced got new jobs at equal pay, while 25 percent took pay cuts of as much as 30 percent.
— Apr 24, 2025 02:31AM
Notice_the_nose
is on page 136 of 352
The result of these developments has been the current hybrid global economic structure in which the world is half free trade and half neomercantilist. This flat world is tilted so as to slide production and provision of tradable goods and services and the jobs attached to them away from the economies of economic orthodoxy to those of neomercantilism.
— Apr 24, 2025 02:24AM
Notice_the_nose
is on page 136 of 352
Americans had been reassured over and over that their economy was moving to “higher ground,” where there would be better jobs in sophisticated services, design, investment banking, high technology, and R&D. That comforting mantra now began to sound a bit hollow as GE, IBM, and a host of others outsourced more and ‘more of this kind of higher-level work to Asia.
— Apr 24, 2025 02:23AM
Notice_the_nose
is on page 122 of 352
According to the efficient-market theory, this whole experience should not have happened. Indeed, by definition, bubbles could not occur under the theory because the market price is always correct and instantly adjusts correctly to new information. The sudden deflation suggested missed signals or irrational expectations. This was one of the first signs of possible flaws in the theory.
— Apr 24, 2025 01:59AM
Notice_the_nose
is on page 114 of 352
Institutionally, substantively, and structurally, the WTO revolutionized both the concept and the administration of the world economy. Of the two key new elements, the most important was compulsory dispute settlement—a term that sounds like bureaucratese, but is a requirement that essentially cut the United States off at the knees and made the WTO perhaps the most powerful international governing body.
— Apr 24, 2025 01:46AM