You Can’t Replace the Desire for Economic Stability With iPads

The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

The debate over globalization, neoliberalism and the rise of the Thatcherite-Reaganite order never seems to end, but that’s appropriate given the stakes. Broadly expressed, this top-down policy consensus pushed by elite right-wing forces resulted in a shift from widespread protectionist policies (such as tariffs or quotas on imports and subsidies for domestic producers) to much lower barriers to economic activity across international borders. You can dress this up however you’d like, but the core appeal of this for the wealthy people and institutions that run our country is pretty simple: over centuries of struggle and at enormous human costs, American workers clawed out better working conditions, hours, protections and pay for themselves. And corporations and rich people would much prefer if that wasn’t true — they would like to be able to hire children to do dangerous work for pennies a day, thanks, for the sake of their stock price. Globalization allowed them to do an end run around the problem. If you can’t exploit labor in Wisconsin to the same degree that you used to, you might as well exploit powerless labor in Bangladesh.

The moral failure of all of this seems rather obvious to me. Yes, having any work at all helped destitute Bangladeshis crawl into a better rung of poverty, and I’ll address that below. I also am a really big fan of real globalization, which means tearing down borders in their entirety and along with them the structures that the rich and powerful have built to keep themselves rich and powerful. In the reality we have, though, globalization is nothing more than a race to the bottom for workers. That’s it, that’s what it is; it’s a way to essentially force all workers into a labor price competition that inevitably hurts workers in those places where better pay and conditions have been achieved through great struggle. Unionized factory in Pennsylvania in the 1970s that built durable goods, paid workers a living wage, and provided the kind of job security that enables community? Tear it down, send the work to dangerous factories in the Philippines that pay workers pennies, and then condescendingly tell anyone who objects that they’re economically illiterate. That’s the most common defense — that rather than representing a clash between fundamentally different values, this debate simply reflects dummy dumbheads who like workers against the glorious globalization master race. This has been Brad DeLong’s shtick since he was in the Clinton administration.

Matt Yglesias, today, conveniently explained that all people care about is being able to buy cheap plastic shit on Temu.

Beyond the market response, though, just as Democrats are saying in response to Trump, it turns out that people like cheap stuff!

Voters in New England don’t want higher taxes on their fuel oil. Parents don’t want to pay higher prices for berries imported from Mexico. For a very long time, overall inflation was consistently low and the price level for durable goods specifically was falling.

During that long stretch of falling durable goods prices that started in the mid-1990s, it was probably easy to talk yourself into the view that making toasters or fridges or furniture or tires cheaper wasn’t an important policy issue. But when inflation spiked, people got really mad! Nobody wants to pay more for tables.

Now my moral take on this is pretty plain, right? But Yglesias’ piece is about the political effects of globalization. And here’s where I think people like him and DeLong and Jon Chait and the whole neoliberal crew just consistently demonstrate a profound failure to understand basic human nature: most everyone cares more about the security, community, sense of purpose and structure of the jobs that were lost than they do about cheap tables. The whole neoliberal world has refused to believe that people want jobs that bring security and community more than they want to buy unnaturally cheap patio furniture at Target. But that is in fact true, and that’s why the postwar order is in slow-motion collapse. Trumpism is one part of that collapse, and of course Trumpism is also driven by various kinds of bigotry and (especially) intense hatred of the liberal elites who make up this country’s administrative class. The bigger picture is simple: Yglesias’ policy project cannot achieve durable political victory because that policy project destroys a beloved vision of American life.

To give Yglesias a bit of credit, he’s right to object to the way NAFTA has become a synecdoche for the entire sweeping set of policies that define the neoliberal turn. (A turn which actually really got going under Carter, not Reagan, though Reagan’s rhetoric epitomized it.) NAFTA was a very prominent policy fight and, crucially, was passed by a Democratic administration, which helped underline the degree to which American voters have had no real alternatives for many decades. NAFTA intensified globalization and became a core target of the labor movement because it so obviously demonstrated the basic siphoning of good jobs out of the country and into places where worse working conditions allowed corporations to scratch out more profits; you could quite easily track auto industry jobs moving from the States to Mexico. But, no, NAFTA didn’t create deindustrialization in the United States. It’s just one part of a large set of policies that more or less intentionally traded American middle-class prosperity for cheaper goods and higher profits.

Anyway, here’s Yglesias’ attempt to justify all of this:

But it is actually important to think clearly about what the counterfactual is here. If America refuses to allow foreign-made car parts into the midwestern supply chain, that isn’t only going to make cars more expensive, it’s going to specifically disadvantage the “Big Three” unionized car companies vis-a-vis non-union transplants in the Sunbelt. We’d see a smaller negative impact on employment in low-end products like metal casting, but probably a larger negative impact on employment higher up the value chain.

But beyond that, at a certain point, if American-made cars are systematically more expensive than cars made in Europe or Japan thanks to the protected home market, people are going to notice. Cars sold in Canada and Mexico will be shipped across the ocean rather than from the United States, not because of trade protection but because they’re cheaper. American living standards are going to be lower on average for teachers and nurses and waitresses and airline pilots and everyone else who doesn’t have a very specific tie to goods manufacturing.

You’ll notice that this does literally nothing to oppose the race-to-the-bottom narrative; indeed, in the piece writ large, Yglesias more or less accepts it. Here he’s saying that there’s just nothing to be done about it, I guess, because of international competition. But if we accept that as true, then there is no mechanism by which individual countries can ever secure lasting broad-based working conditions superior to those in the worst countries. Yglesias is directly endorsing a worldview that holds that American textile workers shouldn’t be able to fight for better labor conditions and wages than textile workers in El Salvador. If they do, they’re just creating “inefficiencies” which the market should exploit by putting them out of a job, sorry! Indeed, his piece has no plan whatsoever for the victims of deindustrialization. Despite a very clear-headed descriptions of these costs —

Suppose you live in a town where they used to do the metal casting to make the crankshaft for a car engine. But the plant closed because the factory that makes the crankshafts decided they could source the metal more cheaply from Mexico. You didn’t work in the factory, but your sister’s husband did and he got laid off. He got a new job eventually, but it paid less and the loss of status frustrated him. He started drinking too much, they split up, and he left the state to find better work elsewhere and isn’t around for your niece and nephew. The loss of the plant rocked your town’s tax base, and they had to close the library by your house.

Your view, obviously, is almost certainly going to be that this sucks, that NAFTA was a mistake and free trade and globalization are bad. If I tell you, “No, it’s good that manufactured goods got cheaper,” you’re going to think I’m an asshole.

He doesn’t actually have any plan whatsoever for what to do for your sister’s husband, or any of his co-workers, or for the librarians. … For a long time, he advocated for people to get geographically fixed service sector jobs, like being a yoga teacher. Aside from the fact that the wages in these jobs are generally really shitty, they’re also notoriously unstable forms of employment, often seasonal, subject to fickle managers who control a schedule, lacking in any clear or reliable wage growth or progression within a company, subject to routine layoffs, lacking in benefits. … And, crucially, they’re not jobs that tend to engender a lot of pride. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told by neoliberals that the demise of factory jobs is A-OK because they can get jobs at Starbucks. Hey, look, the wages aren’t that bad! To which I always ask, would you accept Starbucks as your terminal place of employment? Would you be willing to have that be your career destiny, to hope someday to be a shift manager at Target? Of course they wouldn’t, and yet they demand that people who grew up in towns with local industry that enabled generations to own homes and raise families just stop complaining. People in Vietnam went from hideously poor to slightly less hideously poor, after all! What are you, selfish?

And it’s here that I think that the privilege of the individual arguer really does matter. I just do. I think it’s hard for Yglesias to understand why it’s hard for an adult man to accept selling chicken nuggets for a living when his grandfather was the foreman at an auto plant. It’s just too far from his experience. He makes fun of longshoremen for the sin of (checks notes) securing a living wage for their families and decent benefits that allow them to have comfortable lives. The scandal! That good quality of life for working people should be the goal of any progressive, but Yglesias sees only inefficiencies, can’t appreciate the value of those lives. I just don’t think that anyone who has ever been terrified of how to pay the rent, or who has had to work a real job, would think that way.

It is, of course, easy to romanticize industrial jobs, and we shouldn’t. Factory work is hard, often monotonous and relatively dangerous. I’m much happier writing for a living than I would be working in a GM plant. We can be sure that many of the people who had the factory jobs I’m lionizing showed up to work every day grumbling, as almost everyone does. There’s exploitation in factories too. But the fact of the matter is that industrial work lends itself to unionization and unions powered 20th century American prosperity. Those jobs did not often include a great deal of room for career progression, but they did provide reliable and comprehensible salary steps that helped engender a sense of security and stability. They had consistent and regular hours that not only ensured a reliable income but also made it easier to plan childcare or personal interests. And, romanticized though it may be, there’s little question that most people think putting rivets into sheet metal is more dignified and purposeful than asking someone if they want a grande or a venti. You don’t have to take my word for it! There’s a vast underlying dissatisfaction with the entire American economic bargain, a dissatisfaction that goes far beyond deindustrialization but is well symbolized by shuttered factories in the Midwest — it’s a deep lack of belief in our country’s future that’s ultimately the product of the relentless tendency for the rich to get richer and richer.

About those poor Bangladeshis. I am, of course, glad that the poorest people in the world have gotten somewhat less poor in the past half-century. But the notion that they should convince us to drop our objections to globalization is based on several kinds of bad logic. It wasn’t the existence of Americans and Europeans and East Asians with good jobs that impoverished them, but the structure of capitalism and the dictates of imperialism, which in the postwar world were reconfigured from literal armed occupation to a complex series of international rules, deals and agreements that left Third World resources available to plunder by First World actors. A global system based on shared prosperity and mutual commitment to international development could raise living standards around the world and wouldn’t come with the side effect of horrible sweatshops and child labor. It’s simply a false choice to suggest that we can raise up the globally poor or maintain living standards for the developed world’s middle class.

And this becomes even more obvious if you observe the other end of the chart. It’s true that globalization has corresponded with growing incomes for the poorest and with stagnation or backsliding for the global upper-middle class, in which the American middle class resides. But it’s also true that this period has coincided with an incredible increase in the money flowing to the global 1%, wealth piling on top of wealth to a degree that’s arguably unprecedented in world history. Indeed, this is why globalization became a bipartisan consensus: because it benefited the plutocracy. The rich wanted more money, they saw that a lot of it was flowing to the poorer percentiles, so they captured the policy apparatus to make sure that the basic international system privileged their needs. And once we’re clear about that, we can understand why the choice was always so false. It was never the global poorest vs. the global middle class. It was always the wealthiest, entrenched and unaccountable, against all the rest of us.