This assumes a couple of things: 1. That you will consistently have cycles of "good times" and "bad times". 2. That you will know when you are having a good time or a bad time.
If you master #2 in particular, you will be a very rich man. This is analogous to "timing the market" in investing, and it is a very difficult art.
it has done nothing of significant value for the citizens here.
That's a bold claim. I recognize that a significant portion of the population has fallen out (down) of the middle class, and I fully agree that we need to address that as a major problem. At the same time, you seem to be ignoring the roughly half of the middle class that has moved up into "upper middle". The typical H1B position is not going to someone who has fallen out of the middle class - it's going to someone who has a good technical education with modern skills. Those people are not the ones struggling at the moment.
If you allow a glut of cheap semi-slave Indian labor to enter the market
We are talking about an almost paltry number of people (less than 100,000 per year in a country of 160,000,000 workers. I think I could argue that H1B does not even have a statistical significance, but we are arguing on ideology, so lets have at it.
So here's the problem. You have signed a trade agreement which allows free movement of goods and free movement of capital. Capital that would normally have been spent domestically moves outside, and in exchange we get goods. But what happens to the workers who once made those goods? They certainly can't go to India to pursue those jobs. And Indians in sweatshop jobs can't say "screw this" and move to a nice US factory. We have artificially created an imbalance, and it is screwing with the free market. H1B is certainly not the only way to fix this (in fact, as I point out above it probably is not even having a significant effect) - but it is better than doing nothing. I think free trade is probably better for everyone in the long run, but I strongly feel that these agreements need to take into account things like ecological protections and worker standards. But I digress...
you're essentially advocating for the circumstances to push the middle class towards the lowest common denominator.
No, that's how you are framing my argument. My goal is to keep the US economy dynamic, competitive, and efficient so that it continues to punch above its weight and raises the standard of living for all.
I don't have statistics, and so I only have my personal experience to draw from. The H1Bs at this company make around the same amount as the native engineers and they live in typical suburban apartment complexes. H1Bs are college educated, by definition.
I would think it self-evident, but OK. From here you can see that H1B candidates all but certainly have at least a bachelor's degree.
Requirement 2 - Your job must qualify as a specialty occupation by meeting one of the following criteria:
A bachelor’s degree or higher degree or its equivalent is normally the minimum requirement for the particular position;
The degree requirement is common for this position in the industry, or the job is so complex or unique that it can only be performed by someone with at least a bachelor's degree in a field related to the position;
The employer normally requires a degree or its equivalent for the position; or
The nature of the specific duties is so specialized and complex that the knowledge required to perform the duties is usually associated with the attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree.
So that means that they have a bachelors or higher at a percentage of near 100%. Compare that to the US population at large, which has a rate of around 32%. They are objectively more educated than the US population at large.
Intelligence? It might be more speculative. But, controversy recognized, there does appear to be a correlation between education and cognitive skills.
Yes, remittances are common here as well. Nonetheless, they have to eat, and they have to live somewhere. They are still spending money. The service industries are not going to suffer when headcount gets higher.
While I follow your argument, and even agree with much of it, I don't agree that the solution is to forbid immigration. The unhappy people who are "stuck" here can be dealt with in other ways. In particular, the assumption that they are (a) willing and (b) able is too simplistic. They might be willing but unable due to a poor skill set. They might be unwilling to relocate.
If we were running with high unemployment, I'd be more apt to agree. But compare the US to historical norms or the norms of other developed countries and this is not the case. I'm aware that there are tons of out-of-work factory workers not counted because they have "given up". But I don't think they meet your criteria of willing and able. I'm all for funding programs which give these people training and even help with relocation - but let's be honest about the prospects of people suddenly gaining study skills in their mid-50s. For the most part, these people are not in competition with H1Bs.
As for the service economy angle - the restaurants and other services don't really care if their income is coming from H1B holders or natives. As long as the job remains in the USA, they will get their money.
I think it might be a reference to heroin, but it's hard to tell since so many plant-derived compounds are alkaloids (including caffeine and nicotine).
Yes, IP protection is another annoyance of mine. I'm not as anti-patent as I am anti-copyright because of the duration, but there is definitely room for improvement there. It is indeed free trade for goods and to some extent services - but copyright is still a government-granted monopoly.
I agree with you - breaking promises is not moral. I also think you did the prudent thing because governments don't exactly follow the path of morality. If your union really cared about workers rather than about their own power, they would have pushed to have cash rather than promises. If they want an annuity, push for an annuity. Instead they went for easy and now their membership is at the mercy of politicians.
Now, this is entirely hypothetical but it is something to consider
Even your _very_ hypothetical scenario is not very scary: 1. The timeframe for your doomsday scenario is generational. Plenty of time to react and adapt. 2. India finding a firm enough economic footing to lure back workers would be FANTASTIC for US workers. If we stay competitive via open trade and open borders, then salaries going up in India would push salaries up here as well. A market the size of India would be make a great trading partner, capable of buying our competitive goods and services. 3. Indian workers have babies. Those babies are Americans. There certainly are worse things than babies raised by parents with an emphasis on education. Your "foreign resource" has thus become a domestic one.
I think we might be talking past one another. I agree with you and when I say "free market" I do not mean one without regulation - I mean one without an active attempt to tinker. You are absolutely right - regulations are important to set up the ground rules.
With all of that said, some rules are terrible. A "free market" needs to have free movement of goods, free movement of capital, and free movement of labor (among other things). We sign up for trade agreements which allow free movement of goods and capital, but totally ignore labor. I don't think this is an acceptable form of intervention. If we're going to go for free trade, we need to take a stab at fixing the free movement of labor imbalance. There are a number of ways to attack this, but I think an obvious one would be to allow labor to have the freedom to move:)
You can't go backward and change the terms of someone's past employment by taking away the future they were working toward all along.
Perhaps morally you can't, but they've been screwing workers for years by under-funding the pensions and now they are using that as leverage to actually reduce what was promised. This is a very morally hazardous situation that I wish we would fix. I don't think it is fair to promise something today with the assumption that a future generation will pick up the tab. It's not fair to the workers and not fair to the future generation.
Your "superiors" are "management" or the company and they are not your fellow employees.
The fact that this makes sense to you illustrates what is wrong with unions. Everyone has a superior at a company except the big boss man at the very top. A worker bee that just happens to be superior to a union worker bee does not necessarily deserve union harassment just because of a single personality conflict.
Unfortunately there are unconstitutional laws in the U.S. ("Right to Work" laws) which have gutted most Unions.
How in the world is it "unconstitutional" to simply prevent unions from compelling people to join? I'd actually think that compelling people to join an organization would be the riskier constitutional bit.
Funnily enough at the same time wages have gone down.
Other things correlate, too. Like free trade agreements and automation.
Yes, well, like I said, I do see the need for "ideal" unions. But as they exist right now, I don't see the cost/benefit ratio being in favor of society. I think banning lobbying by corporations and unions would go a long way towards removing some of the corruption.
No, I'm going with "free market" economics as a solution. That means no more "free trade" deals that don't take into account the lack of free movement of labor. I suspect we are aligned more than you think. At no point did I say anything about supply-side, demand-side, trickle-down, or otherwise. Quite the opposite - trying to monkey around with a complex process that we don't understand is going to lead to inefficiencies (i.e. lower economic growth). I think the vanishing middle class is a huge problem and I support efforts to get it back. But xenophobia is not the answer - all it will do is stifle economic growth, ultimately making those on the bottom suffer even more.
You are right in that I have no idea what percentage of unions are rotten. I can only tell you that all of my experiences have been pretty poor. My wife's hospital had a strike. These are nurses, not iron workers. Tires were slashed, threats of violence were made, etc. The scabs were better nurses, by most accounts. The nurses were already the highest paid in the metro area. The hospital was (and is) bleeding money due to its role in a poor area. The only reason the strike was "resolved" is because the bought politicians leaned on the hospital.
My friend runs a small iron working shop - just him and a few long-time employees with benefits. He's had rocks through his window and his equipment is regularly vandalized.
Locally, the iron workers union burned down a church that was under construction by non-union labor.
Attempts to reform public schools are repeatedly thwarted by public teachers unions. Attempts to get rid of morally objectionable public pensions fail across the board at the hand of public unions.
In NYC, the grossly-overpaid TWU went on strike illegally in a city that is 95% dependent on transit.
Have you ever been written up for a bullshit "grievance" by dozens of cliquey union members because you said something unpleasant to one of the other members? That's fun to be on the receiving end of.
I'm sorry, I do recognize the historical importance of unions, and I do think workers need to be organized. I just don't think the current thing we call a "union" is terribly beneficial to society. Its mostly a semi-governmental bureaucracy at this stage. I'm glad it served you well, but I have not had nice interactions.
I'm advocating the complete opposite - letting the market take care of more of the economic "planning". Throttling the workforce at the borders is "running the country like a company", not advocating for letting the market be the market. If you want worker protections, fine - implement worker protections. But when the market wants more workers, why restrict the market? That's trying to engineer something that is very complex and poorly understood.
No, Japanese unions do not behave like their American counterparts. You should read about the 1980s when GM set up a partnership with Toyota in California to produce the Nova (and later Geos). I believe this is the plant Tesla operates out of. The corporate culture of GM was so rotten that they could not grasp Toyota's methodology, and the GM union was so rotten that they could not work with management in the same way.
You should also study the Japanese economy, because it looks very much like what a culture concerned about keeping foreigners out looks like. Holding it up as a shining example of economic success is kind of hilarious.
The part your missing is the feedback loop of 1. attracting the smartest people in the world, 2. smartest people in the world creating success, 3. success leading to wealth creation, 4. wealth attracts more smart people.
Somewhere in that loop, even the rotten boats with holes in the bottom somehow manage to get a big-screen TV and an iPhone.
We have a very real problem with a shrinking middle class - in particular the half that is going down rather than up. And despite the effect of automation, I do think that free trade and capital outflow is partially responsible for this loss. But the reason for that is that a free market needs free movement of labor - not just free movement of goods and capital. Restricting labor is not good for us, because it interferes with the free market. A country with a freer market is going to out-compete the countries with more restrictive markets - so build a border wall at your peril.
has been one of the most successful propaganda campaigns
The unions do most of the advertising all by themselves. At some point in history, they went from being the victims to the bullies, and they lost popular support. Even without the violence, anyone who has had to work with a union finds the process maddening. When you read about the sickening attitude of both management and labor in the 80s within the auto industry, it makes you wonder how we stayed on top as long as we did. Unions have become just another bureaucracy that people have to deal with. We really need to reduce the influence of both corporations and unions on government (a la Citizen's United).
Slashdot Mirror
This assumes a couple of things:
1. That you will consistently have cycles of "good times" and "bad times".
2. That you will know when you are having a good time or a bad time.
If you master #2 in particular, you will be a very rich man. This is analogous to "timing the market" in investing, and it is a very difficult art.
it has done nothing of significant value for the citizens here.
That's a bold claim. I recognize that a significant portion of the population has fallen out (down) of the middle class, and I fully agree that we need to address that as a major problem. At the same time, you seem to be ignoring the roughly half of the middle class that has moved up into "upper middle". The typical H1B position is not going to someone who has fallen out of the middle class - it's going to someone who has a good technical education with modern skills. Those people are not the ones struggling at the moment.
If you allow a glut of cheap semi-slave Indian labor to enter the market
We are talking about an almost paltry number of people (less than 100,000 per year in a country of 160,000,000 workers. I think I could argue that H1B does not even have a statistical significance, but we are arguing on ideology, so lets have at it.
So here's the problem. You have signed a trade agreement which allows free movement of goods and free movement of capital. Capital that would normally have been spent domestically moves outside, and in exchange we get goods. But what happens to the workers who once made those goods? They certainly can't go to India to pursue those jobs. And Indians in sweatshop jobs can't say "screw this" and move to a nice US factory. We have artificially created an imbalance, and it is screwing with the free market. H1B is certainly not the only way to fix this (in fact, as I point out above it probably is not even having a significant effect) - but it is better than doing nothing. I think free trade is probably better for everyone in the long run, but I strongly feel that these agreements need to take into account things like ecological protections and worker standards. But I digress...
you're essentially advocating for the circumstances to push the middle class towards the lowest common denominator.
No, that's how you are framing my argument. My goal is to keep the US economy dynamic, competitive, and efficient so that it continues to punch above its weight and raises the standard of living for all.
I don't have statistics, and so I only have my personal experience to draw from. The H1Bs at this company make around the same amount as the native engineers and they live in typical suburban apartment complexes. H1Bs are college educated, by definition.
I would think it self-evident, but OK. From here you can see that H1B candidates all but certainly have at least a bachelor's degree.
So that means that they have a bachelors or higher at a percentage of near 100%. Compare that to the US population at large, which has a rate of around 32%. They are objectively more educated than the US population at large.
Intelligence? It might be more speculative. But, controversy recognized, there does appear to be a correlation between education and cognitive skills.
Yes, remittances are common here as well. Nonetheless, they have to eat, and they have to live somewhere. They are still spending money. The service industries are not going to suffer when headcount gets higher.
While I follow your argument, and even agree with much of it, I don't agree that the solution is to forbid immigration. The unhappy people who are "stuck" here can be dealt with in other ways. In particular, the assumption that they are (a) willing and (b) able is too simplistic. They might be willing but unable due to a poor skill set. They might be unwilling to relocate.
If we were running with high unemployment, I'd be more apt to agree. But compare the US to historical norms or the norms of other developed countries and this is not the case. I'm aware that there are tons of out-of-work factory workers not counted because they have "given up". But I don't think they meet your criteria of willing and able. I'm all for funding programs which give these people training and even help with relocation - but let's be honest about the prospects of people suddenly gaining study skills in their mid-50s. For the most part, these people are not in competition with H1Bs.
As for the service economy angle - the restaurants and other services don't really care if their income is coming from H1B holders or natives. As long as the job remains in the USA, they will get their money.
I'm slow.
Ohhhhh, nevermind - it's a quote from a book: "The Space Merchant" by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth.
I think it might be a reference to heroin, but it's hard to tell since so many plant-derived compounds are alkaloids (including caffeine and nicotine).
Yes, IP protection is another annoyance of mine. I'm not as anti-patent as I am anti-copyright because of the duration, but there is definitely room for improvement there. It is indeed free trade for goods and to some extent services - but copyright is still a government-granted monopoly.
I agree with you - breaking promises is not moral. I also think you did the prudent thing because governments don't exactly follow the path of morality. If your union really cared about workers rather than about their own power, they would have pushed to have cash rather than promises. If they want an annuity, push for an annuity. Instead they went for easy and now their membership is at the mercy of politicians.
Now, this is entirely hypothetical but it is something to consider
Even your _very_ hypothetical scenario is not very scary:
1. The timeframe for your doomsday scenario is generational. Plenty of time to react and adapt.
2. India finding a firm enough economic footing to lure back workers would be FANTASTIC for US workers. If we stay competitive via open trade and open borders, then salaries going up in India would push salaries up here as well. A market the size of India would be make a great trading partner, capable of buying our competitive goods and services.
3. Indian workers have babies. Those babies are Americans. There certainly are worse things than babies raised by parents with an emphasis on education. Your "foreign resource" has thus become a domestic one.
I'm sorry, but anyone who qualifies for an H1B is statistically above average in education, if not intelligence.
Further, wealth creation and opportunity are not mutually exclusive and I advocate both.
I think we might be talking past one another. I agree with you and when I say "free market" I do not mean one without regulation - I mean one without an active attempt to tinker. You are absolutely right - regulations are important to set up the ground rules.
With all of that said, some rules are terrible. A "free market" needs to have free movement of goods, free movement of capital, and free movement of labor (among other things). We sign up for trade agreements which allow free movement of goods and capital, but totally ignore labor. I don't think this is an acceptable form of intervention. If we're going to go for free trade, we need to take a stab at fixing the free movement of labor imbalance. There are a number of ways to attack this, but I think an obvious one would be to allow labor to have the freedom to move :)
You can't go backward and change the terms of someone's past employment by taking away the future they were working toward all along.
Perhaps morally you can't, but they've been screwing workers for years by under-funding the pensions and now they are using that as leverage to actually reduce what was promised. This is a very morally hazardous situation that I wish we would fix. I don't think it is fair to promise something today with the assumption that a future generation will pick up the tab. It's not fair to the workers and not fair to the future generation.
Your "superiors" are "management" or the company and they are not your fellow employees.
The fact that this makes sense to you illustrates what is wrong with unions. Everyone has a superior at a company except the big boss man at the very top. A worker bee that just happens to be superior to a union worker bee does not necessarily deserve union harassment just because of a single personality conflict.
Unfortunately there are unconstitutional laws in the U.S. ("Right to Work" laws) which have gutted most Unions.
How in the world is it "unconstitutional" to simply prevent unions from compelling people to join? I'd actually think that compelling people to join an organization would be the riskier constitutional bit.
Funnily enough at the same time wages have gone down.
Other things correlate, too. Like free trade agreements and automation.
Yes, well, like I said, I do see the need for "ideal" unions. But as they exist right now, I don't see the cost/benefit ratio being in favor of society. I think banning lobbying by corporations and unions would go a long way towards removing some of the corruption.
"Fellow employees" apparently don't include your superiors? Otherwise a grievance can most certainly include the name of the person who "wronged" you.
No, I'm going with "free market" economics as a solution. That means no more "free trade" deals that don't take into account the lack of free movement of labor. I suspect we are aligned more than you think. At no point did I say anything about supply-side, demand-side, trickle-down, or otherwise. Quite the opposite - trying to monkey around with a complex process that we don't understand is going to lead to inefficiencies (i.e. lower economic growth). I think the vanishing middle class is a huge problem and I support efforts to get it back. But xenophobia is not the answer - all it will do is stifle economic growth, ultimately making those on the bottom suffer even more.
You are right in that I have no idea what percentage of unions are rotten. I can only tell you that all of my experiences have been pretty poor. My wife's hospital had a strike. These are nurses, not iron workers. Tires were slashed, threats of violence were made, etc. The scabs were better nurses, by most accounts. The nurses were already the highest paid in the metro area. The hospital was (and is) bleeding money due to its role in a poor area. The only reason the strike was "resolved" is because the bought politicians leaned on the hospital.
My friend runs a small iron working shop - just him and a few long-time employees with benefits. He's had rocks through his window and his equipment is regularly vandalized.
Locally, the iron workers union burned down a church that was under construction by non-union labor.
Attempts to reform public schools are repeatedly thwarted by public teachers unions. Attempts to get rid of morally objectionable public pensions fail across the board at the hand of public unions.
In NYC, the grossly-overpaid TWU went on strike illegally in a city that is 95% dependent on transit.
Have you ever been written up for a bullshit "grievance" by dozens of cliquey union members because you said something unpleasant to one of the other members? That's fun to be on the receiving end of.
I'm sorry, I do recognize the historical importance of unions, and I do think workers need to be organized. I just don't think the current thing we call a "union" is terribly beneficial to society. Its mostly a semi-governmental bureaucracy at this stage. I'm glad it served you well, but I have not had nice interactions.
I'm advocating the complete opposite - letting the market take care of more of the economic "planning". Throttling the workforce at the borders is "running the country like a company", not advocating for letting the market be the market. If you want worker protections, fine - implement worker protections. But when the market wants more workers, why restrict the market? That's trying to engineer something that is very complex and poorly understood.
No, Japanese unions do not behave like their American counterparts. You should read about the 1980s when GM set up a partnership with Toyota in California to produce the Nova (and later Geos). I believe this is the plant Tesla operates out of. The corporate culture of GM was so rotten that they could not grasp Toyota's methodology, and the GM union was so rotten that they could not work with management in the same way.
You should also study the Japanese economy, because it looks very much like what a culture concerned about keeping foreigners out looks like. Holding it up as a shining example of economic success is kind of hilarious.
The part your missing is the feedback loop of 1. attracting the smartest people in the world, 2. smartest people in the world creating success, 3. success leading to wealth creation, 4. wealth attracts more smart people.
Somewhere in that loop, even the rotten boats with holes in the bottom somehow manage to get a big-screen TV and an iPhone.
We have a very real problem with a shrinking middle class - in particular the half that is going down rather than up. And despite the effect of automation, I do think that free trade and capital outflow is partially responsible for this loss. But the reason for that is that a free market needs free movement of labor - not just free movement of goods and capital. Restricting labor is not good for us, because it interferes with the free market. A country with a freer market is going to out-compete the countries with more restrictive markets - so build a border wall at your peril.
has been one of the most successful propaganda campaigns
The unions do most of the advertising all by themselves. At some point in history, they went from being the victims to the bullies, and they lost popular support. Even without the violence, anyone who has had to work with a union finds the process maddening. When you read about the sickening attitude of both management and labor in the 80s within the auto industry, it makes you wonder how we stayed on top as long as we did. Unions have become just another bureaucracy that people have to deal with. We really need to reduce the influence of both corporations and unions on government (a la Citizen's United).
That's high-tech! It's got a low-pass filter for a penis.