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American Jobs: Worth More Than Chinese Jobs?
Ricochet member Pascal takes on Katherine Mangu-Ward, who’s blogging at Megan’s.
Published in GeneralKMW: If anything, jobs are likely to be gained when an industry moves to China, where more aspects of the manufacturing and assembly process are done by hand. They just won’t be created here. If that’s your focus, you have to make the case that American jobs are intrinsically better or more valuable than Chinese jobs. Talking about American jobs lost to trade is like giving casualty stats for a war and only counting dead U.S. soldiers. It’s inaccurate, and it reveals a skewed, provincial view of the world.
Pascal: Well actually if you’re American, an American job is worth more than a Chinese job. There’s nothing wrong for a citizen or a politician of a country to pursue his own national interest. […] Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t an argument against free trade. I’m incredibly in favor of free trade. But from an American policy perspective, the argument would be which policy is better for America, not which policy is better for China.
Hey, thanks for the nod!
Internet serendipity at its best.
By the way (sorry for double commenting), I discovered @kmanguward because she’s been guest-blogging at Megan’s and found her writings to be near-universally great, despite this one dig. This piece highlighting the surprising similarities between the Taliban and Brooklyn moms is particularly enjoyable. http://bit.ly/coEO7v
Well,Pascal-Emmanuel, I’ll take your word for it that Mangu-Ward’s writing is usually “great,” because that little snippet above doesn’t make her sound all that bright. It’s a reductive, semantic, and ultimately childish argument that she’s making. I mean, yes, yes, “jobs” are “jobs,” and in the fullness of the universe’s time and space, it doesn’t really matter if the jobs are Chinese or American. I mean, eventually, the sun is going to explode anyway, right? But seen from a more granular perspective — say, taking in the last 1000 years and projecting out to the next 200 — we’re in a competitive world where it does matter, a lot, who gets the jobs and who doesn’t. Her comparison to war casualties is the kind of hyperargument that teenagers engage in. A better, smarter, more useful comparison would be: when Coke sells more drinks that Pepsi, does Pepsi say, “Oh well, no biggie. As long as people are buying sugary drinks, we’re all winners?” No. They redouble their competitive efforts and try to claw back some market share. “Skewed,” “provincial?” How about: living in the real world, in 2010?