[quote=KSMountain][quote=AN]Jp and car might feel forced, because they’re ok with paying more for American made. However, the majority of the buying public disagree. I know I do. The majority of the stuff that are disposable, the cheaper the better. I guess when you’re the minority, it does feel forced.[/quote]
I’m afraid this is closer to reality, CAR and jp.
I’m continually amazed at how the US consumer will *choose* crap if it is cheaper. Not just in products, but even the food they put in their bodies. We have to admit that the companies selling the cheapest crap are often the most successful.
Consider the trend in airlines: people *chose*, voluntarily, to frequent the lowest cost option, regardless of impairment to other aspects of the experience. Their *choices* led to the success, and now the utter predominance, of the low cost model. Now look what it’s evolved to. And where are we headed? Would folks tolerate cramming double the people in the plane, maybe having to stand the whole way, with no A/C, if the price were cut in half? You betcha. They’d lap it up. That’s probably a billion dollar business idea right there…
One other point about manufacturing jobs: there is a LOT of automation and robotics being used to make almost everything, all over the world. If you aren’t exposed to it you might not realize how pervasive automation has become, worldwide. In the factories in many of these “third world” countries, the workers are often running automated machines and computers. Boring yes, dangerous, not so much. But the broader point is that it is taking fewer and fewer people to make and run things. Certainly this applies to electronics and biomed manufacturing, automotive, etc. Even farming. Even the military.
These jobs you bemoan CAR, many of them would not come back even if offshoring were reversed.
I think really we’re in the middle of another industrial revolution kind of shift – in the short term – disruption. In the longer term, it’s unclear to me what 6 (or 9) billion people are going to be doing for work. I think it’s clear that for many it will be a different *kind* of work than was going on 40 or even 20 years ago.
This is already a long post, but if you accept that technology is, on its own, increasingly bifurcating the workforce into high-end and low-end jobs, then it seems that the middle-class will continue to shrink and income “inequality” will continue to rise, and perhaps this isn’t all due to greed or misguided policies, but is a consequence of our current phase of technological and social evolution.[/quote]
Just the excuse I need to buy those prime steaks at Costco rather than the choice.
