Are we the baddies?

Globalisation is the key to further growth in the world, free trade is a must, to lift peoples living standard everywhere instead of throwing in a lot of AID to different countries.

Halch said:

I'm not smart enough to give answers to such questions. There are so many differences even within small countries that I think the working scene will always be ever-changing and ever exploitable.

I think that here making the wages "fair" has developed a hole that is being filled with cheap labor. As a worker thought, I've moved around enough after better pay to not mind it.

Still, for personal feelings, I wouldn't mind globalization being more limited.

For the latter question, at this moment it seems too utopistic to me. If such a thing would happen things would have started to adapt long before it came to that point I guess?

Edit: Also, for the picture. You might devalue local wages, but for the ones getting the wage we see as "cheap", it would still be creating jobs and increasing their livelihood somewhat where they live right?

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I agree with what you're saying. Very measured response. I just don't know about the moral aspect of it i guess or the intelligence of it. We are driving foreign countries with out demand of and indulgence of cheap labour/goods. Yes, in doing so, we grow their economies but we are also damaging our economy. Take Canada as an example. 40% of our economy is rooted in real estate...basically building to house the increasing number of immigrants. We have a tiny manufacturing base. We basically don't produce anything for export except wood, grains and oil (sort of). Meanwhile we have 6 million. Native Canadians semi removed from the economy.

It seems to me we are reaching a weird tipping point at which it could all collapse.

LemonAcid said:

Idk do you want us to be buddies?

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...I do like the hats. Baddies always have cool hats

paydette said:

I agree with what you're saying. Very measured response. I just don't know about the moral aspect of it i guess or the intelligence of it. We are driving foreign countries with out demand of and indulgence of cheap labour/goods. Yes, in doing so, we grow their economies but we are also damaging our economy. Take Canada as an example. 40% of our economy is rooted in real estate...basically building to house the increasing number of immigrants. We have a tiny manufacturing base. We basically don't produce anything for export except wood, grains and oil (sort of). Meanwhile we have 6 million. Native Canadians semi removed from the economy.

It seems to me we are reaching a weird tipping point at which it could all collapse.

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All I can say is that maybe we're at the gates of change. All of this is relatively new I guess so it's hard to say what will happen. Things adapt.

Personally, I think that the meaning of business would be bringing wealth to the people running it. For example, here there are lots of talks about how businesses should be more socially responsible. Hire local people, provide jobs and sometimes it sounds like people would want the politicians to maim the businesses to work like that. To me it seems like it would kill a lot of will to try, I wouldn't if there is no profit.

As long there is a force that wants to profit and push forward, there will be solutions to all kinds of problems.

While writing this, I think I'd like to think about this whole thing in tiers or something. Let's say tier 1 is your nation, tier 2 your geographic location in your country, and tier 3 your city. Your business might have some effect in tier 3, make a few jobs, and bring some tax income to your city. If you want to give something back, you could create a few jobs at your local level when you have sufficient income from the business? Before you get to that level, it's not much use to think about who you enable with a paycheck.

Now as I think about this more, depending on the business type, there are also the people who spent money on your business. I guess part of the responsibility should belong to them as well. I work at construction and there is constant competition with the people who use foreign workforce and those who use locally. At the end of the day, it's the person who orders the job who decides if they want to use the local workforce or foreign.

These are just some random thoughts of a person who hasn't ever studied or thought about this much so don't shoot me.

paydette said:

But the first issue you missed... should we curb the effects of globalization? Should we continue to export low level tasks when we have a sizeable domestic population that cannot do high level tasks?

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Globalization lifts more people up, and will lead to industries such as tourism growing which has spin-off jobs from it. It wasn't that long ago that a tourist from china was a rarity, now after their economy expanded so much due to exporting to the west, more and more are able to afford to travel abroad.

paydette said:

I was arguing that everything "socially concerned" people care about (the environment, fair wages, etc.) can be improved by promoting localization and limiting globalization.

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I want you to imagine a well-off village in the flatland for which now we make it impossible to hire people outside of to do any work. You are also not allowed to import farm/animal products (since a village can't possibly produce TVs, we'll let them import those for our example).

Now, ponder it a bit and let me know what you think - 2 years from now, will the total wealth* of the village go UP or DOWN?

* Note that wealth is measured by "stuff you want that you also happen to actually have" (money is a proxy metric for that purpose).

I was called out for being "part of the problem" since I use foreign VAs, etc.

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Huge red-flag of disrespect towards you. What kind of friend does that? You should downgrade that person to your acquaintance-only list.