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The American working class is materially richer than the working class in every other developed country bar a handful of microstates (many of them beneficiaries of extreme commodity wealth coupled with a low population). Even those countries often have lower consumption per capita than the US. America is not poor, the average working American is not poor. The things that are expensive in America, like healthcare and education, are in substantial part expensive because of protectionism, regulation or extremely high domestic salaries.
The problems America faces compared to those countries - a feral, mentally ill violent homeless population, disgusting and unusable public transport, high crime rates, a ridiculously inefficient and expensive healthcare system, mass illegal immigration across the southern border, and an inability to build almost anything - are not the consequence of a free-trade-based economic policy. Many countries trade relatively freely (certainly with lower tariffs on the entire world than those just implemented) without them. Many are very civilized places and have service-based economies.
Downtown Philadelphia isn’t a dump because of trade policy. The Tenderloin in SF isn’t a dump because of trade policy. People don’t choose to avoid the LA subway because of trade policy. (In fact big coastal American cities are some of the most prosperous places in the entire world). New railroads aren’t not being built because of trade policy. Wokeness wasn’t imported to America but exported by it. The problem isn’t the policy, but the people and their incentives. People don’t overdose in tiny midwestern towns because the factory jobs went (in fact, speak to many factory owners still there and they’ll tell you they struggle to find workers who will show up, pass a drug test and work a normal 8 hour shift even for wages that are the envy of the world).
Let’s just be honest. This is happening because Donald Trump read or learned about trade deficits sometime in the 1970s and decided, personally, that any imbalance is a “bad deal”, and this is a man who sees everything in life in terms of deals. Over the last 8 years he went from outsider to king of the GOP and is now surrounded by advisors who know that the only consequence of disagreeing with him on this is getting replaced by someone who knows when to stay quiet. On abortion, on immigration, on tax, on trans rights, Trump is malleable. On trade, he’s not. This is what he really believes, and he will stake his presidency on it.
There is likely some level of economic damage that would cause Trump to rethink this, but it’s much worse than a lot of people think.
I think that the decline of blue collar work has caused or at least exacerbated many of our social problems. The reason that jobs you can get right out of college suck for a lot of people (tech is at the moment, an exception) is the absolute glut of college graduates. But why? Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree? What other options are there? So off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off. Why is there so much homelessness? The good paying jobs aren’t there. Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs. Basically our economy only works if you’re one of the elite who can manage to get a STEM degree, do all of the unpaid internships and build a good GitHub. The rest will probably struggle to reach such milestones as “paying for rent and groceries on one paycheck without 6 roommates”.
Whether tariffs will fix it, I don’t know. But the economy is hollowed out and importing more workers when those at home can’t afford food and rent, so why not try it?
Closer to 60%.
Not so; if you actually graduate, college makes financial sense for most degrees. It is perhaps true that there is some counterfactual world where you could get all the benefit and none of the cost, but we don't live there.
There's so much visible homelessness because we no longer allow police or security guards to beat the homeless back to the margins. And because we spend so much effort trying to keep them alive.
This is less true than it once was. More true than directly before the big runup to the GFC, but note that was already well after free trade policies and even longer after the rust belt.
Does anyone know what ended up happening to the kids Peter Thiel paid off to not go to college?
They did very well. Many founders, people who work for Thiel, some VCs. But he wasn’t picking the median college student, he was picking very intelligent kids who were skipping Stanford or MIT comp sci. They would have done well regardless.
Right, but I think "they would have done well regardless" implies that whatever value lies in a degree comes from filtering, so there is something to the original claim "so off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off".
Though I suppose to get a proper answer to the question, he should have randomly denied, but kept track of, half of them.
The go-getter smooth-talking company-founder types with at least slightly better than average intelligence are always going to succeed. Sometimes they'll fail big time but unless in doing so they seriously piss off the government or organized crime or the wrong nerd they'll bounce back up. They're just a completely invalid sample because their success is overdetermined.
A more typical programmer type will, unless they start out in a massively successful startup, be handicapped throughout much of their career by the lack of a degree -- their resume won't get past mindless filters. In good times they'll be underpaid for their skill level, in bad times unemployed.
The people getting "I went to college" degrees will do even worse, either working at a much crappier category of job or being unemployed much more often.
Scientific types will of course be completely unable to get a job in their field without a degree, and probably an advanced degree; when I was in college it was said that a B.S. in chemistry qualified you to wash glassware.
I admit I don't have an RCT of any of this, however.
N=1, but it's not all that bad. I probably got stuck in some filters, but I was never unemployed, and if these "average salary stats" websites are to be trusted, I wasn't underpaid either.
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