It might well be, I'm no expert in international trade -- so post some alternate figures.
i don't know where you get your figures -- i mean, seriously!!! these numbers are so far off the mark as to make me question your veracity/sanity -- but i will respond later this evening
Like I said, they came from an economics textbook that was near to hand --
Principles of Economics by Prof Timothy Taylor, editor of the
Journal of Economic Perspectives. I'm quoting them in good faith, and the text book was recommended by Brad DeLong, so you can at least rest assured that Prof Taylor is not a rabid right winger. In any case, I don't know what's so hard to believe about those figures.
US manufacturing is hugely productive: "In 2005, the U.S. manufacturing sector, in terms of GDP, was close to $1.5 trillion.... More goods are made in the United States today than at any time in U.S. history. If U.S. manufacturing was a country by itself, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world." The point is, regardless as to the amounts of manufactures imported or exported, that banning trade will cripple US industries.
also, i am not advocating total autarky -- obviously usa would need to import oil and other commodities.
No, of course you're not advocating
total autarky -- that would be ridiculous!
however, i think that the current paradigm, under which usa imports cheap manufactured goods and articles, and cheap component parts, from the export-led economies of the far east, where the workers are practically slaves, is IMMORAL and UNSUSTAINABLE
Agreed -- it's absolutely immoral the way we choose to purchase cheaper products from people in dire need of access to wealthier markets. What we really need to do is close them off permanently from these sources of income and then tell their (autocratic, kleptocratic) governments to figure it out instead.
i am for global economic development, lifting billions out of poverty, etc -- it all sounds so nice in the abstract! -- and certainly this is the neo-liberal rhetoric, which has proven so effective in swaying people over the last three decades or so --
but there has got to be a better way to achieve economic growth -- if growth is indeed the goal -- and that is by DEMAND-LED growth -- i.e., a quasi-socialist model in which workers are paid much higher wages than they are now relative to management/ownership
Back to the nonsense. We've had a hundred year experiment with socialism -- it seems a monstrous waste of life, but there it is -- and if socialism was a better way to achieve economic growth then we would be able to see it in the dynamic economies of socialist states. "We will crush you!" So prove it -- show me an example of a succcessful socialist economy, and explain to me why the critiques of socialism (themselves almost a hundred years old) that proved so fatal to Marxian economics (as a sub-discipline of economics) no longer apply.
I'm baffled by your suggestion of "DEMAND-LED growth". Perhaps you could explain a bit more. If, for instance, you were to raise the minimum wage, you would simply reduce the labour force relative to the rise in wages, pushing the most unskilled workers out of the market. You would make US firms less efficient, and therefore, although I guess it means little to you, make US firms less competitive.
And I'm still interested in what the economists you put forward as supporting your arguments (Setser -- who sits on the CFR, FFS -- and Roubini) think about socialism and autarky. I'm not particularly well up on either, but I'm willing to bet that they're not nearly so myopic.
and this in turn implies closed markets -- whether limited to one continental nation, such as the usa, or a wider market limited to nations that have attained the same level of development, like japan, west europe, canada, usa, australia
If you had faith in closed markets then you would follow the idea to its logical conclusion and make everything yourself, which is a nonsense. International trade is an extension of the division of labour.
china and other parts of the world need to develop by paying their workers more, and then selling goods to their workers, not by destroying the american economy
*sighs*
How the fuck are they going to do that?
