it’s not easy to untangle the effects of one agreement from another. besides nafta there’s cafta, there’s job retraining, there’s y2k, there’s moore’s law, there’s 20k new programmer grads per year, there’s an explosion of computers in banking and trading, and new copyright enforcement for software concepts. it hit all at the same time.
but if you want an example, i worked at a company selling copiers to mexico in ‘97. i was documenting an oracle application for customer management. my job didn’t exist the previous summer.
I don’t want an example. This is 100% in good faith: It seems to me like NAFTA would have had very little impact on the tech boom of the late 90s. I think Mexico was a very small percentage of the market and certainly NAFTA wasn’t 100% of the reason there was an IT market in Mexico. I’m not just trying to argue because it aligns with my point. I’ll be happy to concede some things (like it didn’t destroy manufacturing in the US - though it certainly had some effect), but not this. If it matters to you, I think this definitely calls for some specific, non-anecdotal support.
i concede that mexico didn’t buy tens of millions of tech because of nafta, and i can’t find a chart for something that specific from the 90s. and i wouldn’t trust it without confirmation either.
my point is that increased trade with mexico generated more domestic demand for tech. everything that experienced growth would be using it.
but i also didn’t claim nafta was 100% the reason.
This is a very interesting post, and I am aware that the slave owning men that drafted the constitution were not concerned with the interests of slaves when it was drafted. Although, it’s interesting that you mention women, because that leads me to believe that, in your somewhat justifiable cynicism, you may have unwittingly given up the game in a way that makes NAFTA not so insidious as you ascribe.
Although women were not at the bargaining table, and certainly their rights were of no direct consequence to the men sitting at it, would it not be fair to say that many of the words put to paper in Philadelphia did in theory and ultimately in fact benefit women, albeit indirectly? Would the suffragette movement have been so bold had freedom so speak out against government not been inscribed in the first amendment? Would they have eventually secured (of course decades later, but nonetheless) the right to vote, and other rights over time, belatedly of course, but nonetheless, had the first amendment been written to only benefit the wealthy and powerful slave holding men at the table? If these men in Philadelphia in 1789 had been so smart, then certainly they could have codified in law that women could never interfere with their manly business could they not? If they were so self-interestedly evil and cunning as you ascribe could they not have precluded the very possibility of slaves ever being made free? Of course they could have. And of course they didn’t.
I see NAFTA in much the same way. You suggest that the absence of labor at the bargaining table precludes the consideration of the coincident rights of workers or anyone not of the powerful landed class. It is certainly true that those who drafted NAFTA could have drafted a document that would have relegated the rights of those not at the table to dust. But they didn’t. Even if it wasn’t intended to do so directly, NAFTA unequivocally created more jobs than existed before it. And yet no labor groups were at the table. It is certainly curious.
You don’t just get to say “unequivocally” and that makes it true. The analysis of NAFTA on the whole is mixed, but what is generally agreed on is that it wasn’t that large of an overall impact.
This is the wiki on it and lol that all you want, but it’s better than just asserting unequivocality.
The economic impacts of NAFTA have been modest. In a 2015 report, the Congressional Research Service summarized multiple studies as follows: “In reality, NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters. The net overall effect of NAFTA on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest, primarily because trade with Canada and Mexico accounts for a small percentage of U.S. GDP. However, there were worker and firm adjustment costs as the three countries adjusted to more open trade and investment among their economies.”[1]
In a 2003 report, the Congressional Budget Office wrote: “CBO estimates that the increased trade resulting from NAFTA has probably increased U.S. gross domestic product, but by a very small amount—probably a few billion dollars or less, or a few hundredths of a percent.” CBO estimated that NAFTA added $10.3 billion to exports and $9.4 billion to imports in 2001.[2] For scale, that was roughly 10% of the trade activity with Mexico in that year.[3]
Several other studies discussed below argue that impacts on particular U.S. industries were more significant and that the U.S. labor movement was weakened by opening trade with Mexico, a lower wage country.
It did have significant effects in some ways and some of those effects were offsetting. And “more jobs” is not the same as “good jobs”. What NAFTA did do was effect people unequally. It was best for the large industries and some of that did trickle down. But it was worst for the very poorest working people, hundreds of thousands of indigenous people, who got their land stolen and became refugees.
How about a cost-benefit analysis of the trail of tears? Boon for the US economy?
So 4000 people died in the Trail of Tears. I was wondering how many people have died on the passage from Mexico to the US. The first estimate I see is 10000, but what strikes me first is the year they picked to start the estimate.
The group Border Angels estimates that since 1994, about 10,000 people have died in their attempt to cross border.
This line of thinking may mean little to people who care more about decreasing inequality than they do about raising absolute value for everyone in a way that preserves inequality.
Along these lines, I was wondering what people thought about the following:
Let’s say M4A actually ends up costing way more than the projections from non-partisan think tanks, and it would require a pretty hefty middle class tax cut. Would its current proponents still support it?
I think they probably would, because the support is more normative than utilitarian, but it is interesting how much of the public sell and discussion is based on more favorable economic outlooks and the downside estimates aren’t gamed out as often.
It only took over a hundred years and a Constitutional amendment for women to get the right to vote. And the Suffragettes were mocked, arrested, and vilified when they tried to exercise their First Amendment rights.
And the original Constitution only counted slaves as 3/5 a person (and they were only counted at all in order to give more political power in the electoral college and Congress to states with lots of slaves). All it took for them to attain a better legal status was a few generations, a civil war, and, oh, some more constitutional amendments.
But, please, tell me more about how the Founding Fathers were really looking out for these marginalized groups and didn’t write the Constitution in ways that prevented true equality. They might not have pushed every available edge, but they still rigged the game.
That was literally Mystery’s thesis. I made it very clear in my post, that the white male slaveowners weren’t writing the document to empower poor black women.
That self-interested parties at these stakes do not make mistakes, intentionally or otherwise, that could redound to the benefit of parties not at the table.
I doubt he was saying that the self-interested parties are perfect and think of every conceivable outcome. They are self interested but that doesn’t mean their execution leads to the most beneficial outcome. You seem to think this is because they are considerate of others not at the table instead of leaks in their strategy and execution?
Wait, do you think the founding fathers could have done all those things you mentioned and didn’t do them because they wanted oppressed groups to have an out in the future?
That was not the point I was making. Re-reading your response to my longer post, I now “get” why you made the points that you did, even though I think your points are off the mark and I disagree them.
As to both questions, mystery was pretty clear these guys aren’t prone to moronic leaks which impair their self-interest. Seems like precluding the powerless from gain is a pretty big leak to fail to plug up. Like even a dumb guy like me could figure out how to draft a bill of rights that didn’t give common idiots rights.
I’m not sure why you characterize them as moronic leaks, I don’t think it’s moronic to have blind spots and not conceive every possible outcome. They also can’t foresee every possible way that their tools can be used against them where they can prevent every outcome.
Also seems like a good way to preclude the powerless from gain is by giving them enough scraps where enough people are comfortable that there aren’t massive uprisings.
Under mystery’s framework it is absolutely moronic for the smartest guys in the room to not include a slavery clause and actually include a due process clause in the founding document.