(What’s Left of) Our Economy: When Industries Disappear

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apparel, big government, Breitbart.com, conservatves, embroidery, Frances Martel, Immigration, labor unions, manufacturing, New Jersey, skills, textiles, Union City, unions, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Until I read Frances Martel’s “Hanging by a Thread,” I used to think of Union City as little more than one of those bleak-looking smallish northern New Jersey municipalities the Amtrak trains pass through on their way between New York City and points south.  How wrong I was!  And for such wide-ranging policy and political reasons!  

Not that you can’t simply enjoy her long feature for Breitbart.com for the fascinating descriptions of what makes her hometown special geologically (e.g., it sits on lots of Manhattan bedrock-like granite, good for supporting factories with heavy machines and multistory housing) and demographically (because it developed fairly late in the 19^th century, its population was always dominated by immigrants).

Clearly important as well is Martel’s main theme – how manufacturing built solid prosperity for Union City from the get-go, and how its demise, due to developments like (but not restricted to) offshoring-obsessed U.S. trade policies helped bring punishingly hard times. (Full disclosure: Martel interviewed me for the article, and quoted me quite generously.)

But if you’re thinking this is only an article for trade and/or manufacturing mavens, or for New Jersey history aficionadoes, you’re sorely mistaken. For along the way, “Hanging by a Thread” offers important insights into how these closely related subjects profoundly affect many of the nation’s other major issues and challenges.

For example, Martel offers a novel twist on the notion that the United States welcomed so many immigrants so consistently (though not always) from the mid-19^th century onwards in particular because of its urgent need for unskilled labor. No doubt most of the newcomers were poorly educated. But as “Hanging” makes clear, industry during this period used lots of complicated machinery, including the embroidery sector that became concentrated in Union City.

As Union City’s official historian told Martel, many of its first immigrants came from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and other parts of Europe with major textile industries, and brought with them extensive experience working with such devices that employers clearly found valuable.

Since skills (of different kinds, of course) remain so crucial to economic success today, Union City’s past raises the question of whether – as Open Borders advocates seem to believe – the United States today should indiscriminately welcome immigrants regardless of skill levels and gainful employability.

Two other messages coming through loud and clear from Martel’s research and analysis are especially important for conservatives to heed. The first has to do with unions. Martel’s parents were hard-line anti-communists who fled Castro’s Cuba, and her mother worked in apparel. The author explains that these arrangements were seen as “a critical part of the factory ecosystem.” The following exchange, with her mother speaking first, makes the point vividly:

“‘I have always had a good union. It works, I think. It works to have a union because without a union, in a private place, you’re screwed,’ she told me.

“‘You don’t feel that there is a conflict between that and being a capitalist?’” I asked…..

“‘No. What? Being a capitalist? No,’ she replied, with confusion. ‘No, that has nothing to do with socialism, it’s just so that the worker has someone to defend them. If you don’t have a job, they can fire you whenever. That’s not fair. To throw you out for no reason, it’s unfair ifyou are working well.’”

Martel’s second message for conservatives actually echoes a point I’ve made before (e.g., here): The more enthusiastically traditional free trade policies are pursued by American leaders, the bigger government’s going to get. But as Martel makes clear, these approaches to the global economy are bound to generate needs that far exceed the kinds of welfare state benefits (ranging from income support to heavily subsidized healthcare) used to keep living standards above third world levels (or at least try to do so).

As the Union City example shows, relentless globalization can also turbocharge government’s role in economic development itself. The author explains that, since 2000, Union City Mayor Bob Stack (a big-city machine politician if ever there was one)

“took the reins on the eve of the guillotine falling on embroidery and has taken to meticulously rebuilding the identity of the city. He tore down Roosevelt Stadium, the sports venue at the heart of the city, to build a new Union City High School – with a stadium on the roof. Union City previously boasted two high schools, one for Union Hill and one for West Hoboken, that Stack turned into middle schools. He built parks in honor of the city’s Cuban, Colombian, and Dominican populations, and an ‘International Park.’ Seemingly every other street has a water park open in the summer for children to play in – the biggest, Firefighters’ Memorial Park, boasts an Olympic-sized swimming pool. His administration also refurbished the downtown library into the Musto Cultural Center and built its replacement, the library at José Martí Middle School (which his administration also built), in the shadow of what was once St. Michael’s monastery, an imposing Catholic historic site that now houses a Korean Presbyterian congregation.”

In other words, Union City realistically recognized the choices before it, and rejected “the option much of the Rust Belt took: do nothing, abandon ship, hope the invisible hand swoops in before you hit the concrete.” As a result (and also because of its proximity to New York City), it’s more than avoided the ghost town fates of counterparts like Gary, Indiana, Youngstown, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: An Empty Obama UN Farewell

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assimilation, education, geopolitics, global integration, globalization, international law, international norms, Islam, labor standards, Middle East, Muslims, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, radical Islam, reeducation, refugees, skills, sovereignty, TPP, Trade, trade enforcement, training, Trans-Pacific Partnership, UN, United Nations

National leaders’ speeches to each year’ UN General Assembly – even those by American presidents – are rarely more than meaningless boilerplate or cynical bloviating. But President Obama’s address to the organization yesterday – as with some of its predecessors – is worth examining in detail both because it was his last, and because Mr. Obama clearly views such occasions as opportunities to push U.S. and international public opinion in fundamentally new directions where they urgently need to head.

In yesterday’s case, the president saw his mission as justifying his belief that Americans in particular need to reject temptations to turn inward from the world’s troubles, and more completely embrace forces that inexorably are tightening international integration economically and even in term of national security.

To be fair to Mr. Obama, he sought to offer “broad strokes those areas where I believe we must do better together” rather than “a detailed policy blueprint.” But even given this caveat, what’s most striking is how many of the big, tough questions he (eloquently) dodges.

Here’s the president’s main premise and conclusion:

“…I believe that at this moment we all face a choice. We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration. Or we can retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.

“I want to suggest to you today that we must go forward, and not backward. I believe that as imperfect as they are, the principles of open markets and accountable governance, of democracy and human rights and international law that we have forged remain the firmest foundation for human progress in this century.”

This passage makes clear that Mr. Obama doesn’t buy my thesis that the United States is geopolitically secure and economically self-sufficient enough in reality and potential to thrive however chaotic the rest of the world. Nor does he believe the converse – that the security and prosperity the nation has enjoyed throughout its history has first and foremost stemmed from its own location, and from its ability to capitalize on its inherent advantages and strengths, not from cooperating or integrating with the rest of the world.

The president’s contention that “the world is too small for us to simply be able to build a wall and prevent it from affecting our own societies” rings true for most countries – even assuming that he doesn’t really think that this stark choice is the only alternative to complete openness to global developments and commerce and populations and authority, however promising or threatening. But he seems oblivious to America’s “exceptionalism” geopolitically and economically.

Even if I’m wrong, however, and even accepting Mr. Obama’s “broad strokes” objectives, this lengthy presidential address gives national leaders and their citizens almost no useful insights on how countries can achieve his goals. Here are just two examples:

The president recognizes the need to make the global economy “work better for all people and not just for those at the top.” But given the trade deals he himself has sought, how can worker rights be strengthened “so they can organize into independent unions and earn a living wage”? The president insisted again that his Pacific Rim trade deal points the way. But as I’ve noted, the immense scale of factory complexes even in smallish third world countries like Vietnam makes the necessary outside monitoring and enforcement impossible.

Similarly, no one can argue with Mr. Obama’s recommendation to invest “in our people — their skills, their education, their capacity to take an idea and turn it into a business.” But as I documented more than a decade ago in my The Race to the Bottom, governments the world over, including in the very low-wage developing world, recognize the importance of improving their populations’ skill and education levels. In addition, multinational corporations can make workers productive even in these very low-income countries – and continue paying them peanuts compared with wages in more developed countries. Why should anyone expect his recommendation to give workers in America a leg up?

It’s easy to sympathize with the president’s call “to open our hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home.” Who in principle is opposed to aiding “men and women and children who, through no fault of their own, have had to flee everything that they know, everything that they love,…”?

But as Mr. Obama indirectly admitted, many of these refugees come from a part of the world where “religion leads us to persecute those of another faith…[to] jail or beat people who are gay…[and to] prevent girls from going to school….” He also described the Middle East as a place where too often the “public space” is narrowed “to the mosque.”

It was encouraging to see him recognize the legitimacy – though perhaps not the necessity – of insisting “that refugees who come to our countries have to do more to adapt to the customs and conventions of the communities that are now providing them a home.” But is he blithely assuming success? And it was less encouraging to see him ignore the excruciatingly difficult challenge of adequately vetting migrants from war-torn and chaotic countries.

Finally, on the political side of integration, the president seems to lack the courage of his convictions. For despite his high regard for international law, and support for America “giving up some freedom of action” and “binding ourselves to international rules,” he also specified that these were long-term objectives – presumably with little relevance in the here and now. Indeed, Mr. Obama also argued that, even way down the road, the United States wouldn’t be “giving up our ability to protect ourselves or pursue our core interests….”

So it sounds like he’d relegate even future international law-obeying to situations that really don’t matter. Which is fine. But how that gets us to a more secure world is anyone’s guess.

It’s true that Mr. Obama will be leaving office soon, and that his thoughts no longer matter critically. But at the same time, American leaders have been speaking in these lofty globalist terms for decades. If the president is indeed right about global integration and the future, what a shame that he didn’t make more progress in bringing these ideas down to earth.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Fixing the Schools is No Substitute for Realistic Trade Policies

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education, free trade agreements, Gary Pisano, Harvard Business School, industrial commons, innovation, Obama, offshoring, productivity, Ricardo Hausmann, skills, Trade, Willy Shih, workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Let’s start off with a confession: I’ve long considered as among the worst kind of fakeonomics the idea that fixing America’s schools could solve the problems created for U.S. workers – and by extension the entire economy – by standard trade liberalization policies.

At the very least, its supporters never managed to explain exactly how this could be done, a pretty conspicuous shortcoming given the decades of unsuccessful efforts to solve the nation’s education problems. At the worst, as I documented in my book The Race to the Bottom, the education cheerleaders ignored the determination of most other countries, especially the increasing potent trade competitors of low-income Asia, to push their own workers steadily up the knowledge and skills ladders – while at the same time still generating huge labor surpluses that would long keep their workers orders of magnitude cheaper than Americans.

Since my book came out more than a decade ago, even more evidence has come out revealing the folly of trusting solely or even mainly in education to strengthen the workforce’s – and therefore the nation’s – ability to deal with heightened foreign competition. In particular, jobs even in high tech services and the professions became just as vulnerable to offshoring as positions in labor-intensive manufacturing. And largely as a result, real wages for college-educated Americans have been sagging in real terms since the Great Recession began into the current recovery.

In particular because trade enthusiasts – including President Obama – are still peddling this position, it’s great to see signs that major economists are starting to agree. Take the latest column for the Project Syndicate website by Ricardo Hausmann. A former chief economist at the Inter-American Development Bank who now teaches at Harvard, Hausmann has spotlighted research showing that education per se has failed to pay significant dividends – either in terms of economic growth or of broad-based inclusive growth – not only throughout the high-income world, but in developing countries as well. Especially stunning are the figures he cites for China, which is widely considered a classic example of how prioritizing rigorous schooling could work miracles even for the world’s largest national concentration of poor people. (India now enjoys this dubious distinction.)

But for me, the most eye-opening and potentially important aspect of Hausmann’s article is his recognition that better schooling is especially marginal to improving workforce skills. In his words:

“Most of the skills that a labor force possesses were acquired on the job. What a society knows how to do is known mainly in its firms, not in its schools. At most modern firms, fewer than 15% of the positions are open for entry-level workers, meaning that employers demand something that the education system cannot – and is not expected – to provide.”

It’s a fancy way of expressing a reality long known in American manufacturing circles (at least those not dominated by offshoring interests): “The best kind of job training is a job.”

As Hausmann emphasizes, improving education should be a core priority of any society that values success and material well-being – not to mention wisdom and culture. But it’s no substitute as an engine of sustainable prosperity for what Harvard Business School professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih have dubbed the “industrial commons” – that great and intricate network of productive and innovative capabilities and assets, human and otherwise, that recent history teaches can be threatened via negligent trade policies no matter how excellent a nation’s schools become.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Vital but Missing Voice on Urban Poverty

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African Americans, Baltimore, crime, education, Ferguson, infrastructure, inner cities, Jobs, manufacturing, poverty, skills, Trade, unemployment, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Quick – does the name William Julius Wilson mean anything to you? It sure as heck should, especially if you’re concerned about the inner-city black neighborhood woes that have burst into the headlines since Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson shot unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown last August.

Wilson is a Harvard University sociologist who wrote a landmark 1996 book that shed crucial light on modern urban poverty and its origins. The title said it all: When Work Disappears. It was widely praised and pretty widely discussed when it first came out, but gradually faded into the background, where it seems to have stayed despite the front page news seemingly continually generated these days from places like Ferguson and West Baltimore. I myself had forgotten about it till I saw the paperback at a book sale last weekend.

I haven’t gotten very far into When Work Disappears but its main theme should be powerfully shaping the U.S. public debate over fixing what’s wrong with huge swathes of black urban America. According to Wilson (writing before the two recessions that have struck so far in the twenty-first century, not to mention the financial crisis):

“For the first time in the twentieth century most adults in many inner-city neighborhoods are not working in a typical week. The disappearance of work has adversely affected not only individuals, families, and neighborhoods, but the social life of the city at large as well. Inner-city joblessness is a severe problem that is often overlooked or obscured when the focus is placed mainly on poverty and its consequences. Despite increases in the concentration of poverty since 1970, inner cities have always featured high levels of poverty, but the current levels of joblessness in some neighborhoods are unprecedented.

“The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods – crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on – are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.”

Further, Wilson cited “the increased internationalization” of the U.S. economy as one engine of this joblessness, and to underscore this point, noted that “Of the changes in the economy that have adversely affected low-skilled African-American workers, perhaps the most significant have been those in the manufacturing sector.” Of course, manufacturing is the economy’s most trade-intensive sector.

To be sure, Wilson doesn’t seem to have recommended any trade policy changes to fix these problems, preferring to focus instead on a raft of domestic policy responses like better job training, more family-friendly benefits for workers, a greater Earned Income Tax Credit, and more infrastructure programs (an idea that I’ve endorsed). In these respects, the 1996-vintage Wilson sounds a lot like President Obama during his years in the White House. Indeed, in a conference on poverty held two weeks ago in the wake of the Baltimore riots, Mr. Obama mentioned Wilson and touted the potential of these programs to heal inner cities.

Yet Wilson was writing when the current era of U.S. trade policy, launched with the negotiations to create the North American Free Trade Agreement, was just beginning. So he couldn’t have known that such purely domestic policy fixes have failed. President Obama, however, keeps pushing more of the same on the trade side despite the devastating impact on the inner city as well as on the economy as a whole – and insists that there’s no contradiction.  According to the president, what he has re-labeled “21st century trade agreements” are “as important to helping the middle class get ahead in this new economy as things like job training, and higher education, and affordable health care. They’re all part of a package.” What’s his excuse?

Just as important, however, where has William Julius Wilson been over the last year as Americans have struggled with these issues?  His insights are needed now more than ever.