Austerity measures have they ever saved an economy?

Yes, the purpose of the advertising is to artificially increase demand for a product independent of the dictates of the free market.Isn't that what I said?Jon

But, of course, that's not at all what we have. The marketing strategies of large corporations like Coca Cola aren't simply 'telling people about your product', it is full-out in-your-face constant harassment.I am shocked that an intelligent person would deny that large corporations employ predatory advertising techniques above and beyond the normals of human interactions.It's pretty clear that corporate marketing reeks of greedfilth.Jon

The definition of 'service jobs' seems to be quite a tricky thing to nail down.But I don't think we need to agree on exactly what constitutes a 'service job' in order to agree on what kinds of jobs are liable to being offshored and which ones aren't.Now, obviously, there are some pretty serious and lasting impacts on an economy and its people when the primary form of employment shifts to service jobs and away from manufacturing and agricultural/extraction jobs. For one, as convenient as it is that many service jobs cannot be offshored, it is also inconvenient that service jobs cannot be exported.An economy saturated with service jobs will very likely run a trade deficit. Is this good? Is this bad? Those are questions that we in the first world, as a set of nations moving toward being more and more reliant on service jobs, really need to be asking.And we need to be coming up with some pretty solid answers too.Jon

Because I don't think most service jobs are exportable. As for the ones that are, those are of further concern because exportable = outsourcable. If we can export it, so can they.The real issue with this, of course, is that building an economy on top of a very large service sector, relying on jobs that are mostly not exportable (at least not reasonably with available technologies) runs the risk of a trade deficit, one; and, two, the large numbers of closed factories and the high dependence on foreign goods is a serious threat to national security not just because it leaves us open to the whims of others but because, once their resources are no longer so affordable, we are left with nothing but rundown factories, mines, etc. into which we must invest greatly before being able to continue producing the necessary goods ourselves.But there is a way out.

I never said there was a problem with service jobs. What I said was "building an economy on top of a very large service sector, relying on jobs that are mostly not exportable (at least not reasonably with available technologies) runs the risk of a trade deficit" (Message 133) and that "there are some pretty serious and lasting impacts on an economy and its people when the primary form of employment shifts to service jobs and away from manufacturing and agricultural/extraction jobs" (Message 121). Which is what I've said. Their non-exportability doesn't cause the imbalance, it just makes it worse, because so long as we are primarily engaged in the production of non-exportable services, we can never hope to regain the balance and settle the trade deficit.The problem is that our economy has been moving away from the production of exportable goods in favor of the production of non-exportable services; and this, obviously, runs the risk of creating a trade deficit.Jon

I thought that was pretty obvious in what I said, but I'll repeat myself and then explain myself:

quote:

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Jon in Message 137:

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Their non-exportability doesn't cause the imbalance, it just makes it worse, because so long as we are primarily engaged in the production of non-exportable services, we can never hope to regain the balance and settle the trade deficit.

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The products of non-exportable service jobs (services) cannot be exported to offset a trade imbalance. So as nice as it is that we don't soon have to worry about retail clerk positions being outsourced, it is also a bummer that we cannot export their product to settle the deficit.On a further note, I'd argue that running a trade deficit is more detrimental than the comfort of knowing certain jobs cannot be outsourced, since goods are at the heart of meaningful economic transactions, not services.Man cannot live on legal advice alone!Jon

That's an additional point beyond the one I am making, which is that the very nature of many services makes them difficult to export.But apparently I haven't been articulating it very well, so hopefully Perdition's explanation will be of some help.Jon

What the hell is this, then? Or this (blue = service)?

They specifically show that the United States is suffering from a trade deficit, that the U.S.'s primary output (the thing that contributes most to its GDP) is 'services', and that the production of services is also what the majority of labor in the U.S. is used for. I am not sure where you got this notion that I am 'blaming' some set of jobs or downplaying their significance in an economy. Actually, necessary service jobs contribute nothing to the problem. What is problematic is that we have decided to divert a large number of labor resources away from the production of tangible, tradable goods and into the production of unnecessary, leach services, such as business 'services', financial 'services', and, yes, legal 'services'.Go Figure!

Even when produced overseas by an American company, it still affects the trade deficit.Part of the money you spend on a pair of fluffy handcuffs goes to Sam Billionaire, the all-American jerkoff who fired 100 hard-working Americans just to save five cents a day making sex toys in India instead of Oregon. But plenty of it goes to the workers in India who assembled the stuff, and the workers in India who mined the metal, and the workers in India who cleared the forest where the metal was to be mined... and so on.As is the case with imports, when you buy the product, no matter who owns the company. And that's something worth looking into. But I don't think we'll find that our trade deficit is just a matter of funny definitions that disappears once we go the way of Webster. There really is a deficit because we really are importing more than we're exporting.JonEdited by Jon, : , → .

We should be able to manufacture everything we need right here, with some exceptions. For those things that we simply have to import, it is not unreasonable to come up with some things that we can also export.I don't see why we, as a people, need to just bend over and take it in the ass just because it's cheaper for some companies to manufacture things in another country.Do we really want Sam Billionaire deciding our fate?Jon

What does it matter?

I'm not sure why that's a problem. Certainly you aren't suggesting that Americans are incapable of building their own factories, right? Sure, if you just blindly buy stuff. But that doesn't have to be the case. Consumers can be more conscious of where the stuff they buy gets made and by whom. That's certainly a big problem, yes. But I don't see that changing anytime soon. We need to find ways to make the best with what we've got.Jon

Wait a sec... hold up...Are you saying... ? Could it be... ?I'll be damned! Patents actually do stifle innovation!I knew you'd come around. It took a completely unrelated thread to make it happen; but I knew you'd come around.Jon