Austerity measures have they ever saved an economy?

Which parts of medicine are a service? I am suggesting that for parts of medicine that you will call a service, an analogous legal service can be presented that should also be considered a service by any reasonable definition. Yet according to you, legal services must be considered manufacturing because legal opinons are printed on paper.In particular, I gave the examples of a doctor providing a medical prognosis for a disease and an attorney providing a legal opinion regarding the outcome of a law suit. By any reasonable definition, the providing of such opinions is properly characterized as services. Yet, you want to consider the lawyer's work to be manufacturing paper work. I think it is pretty clear that I have no issue with the idea that only some jobs are offshorable. My issue is with the idea that we can identify service jobs as being those jobs which are not offshorable. Some service jobs are off shorable, and it is only by an unjustifiable stretch of imagination that you can characterize such jobs as being properly thought of as manufacturing jobs. Of course. That statement is very nearly a tautology. Jobs that must be done here, must be done here. You seem to have forgotten your position that offshorable=manufacturing and non-offshorable=service jobs. That's the sole point I am challenging here. I don't know how to point out the object of our disagreement more clearly.I'll take one more shot at it. Flipping burgers is a service job by everyone's definition except yours. But further, we agree that burger flipping is not offshorable. Yet you now admit that cooking hamburgers is manufacturing. That admission is not consistent with your statement in message 90: In fact there is global competition for some service jobs. For example product service desk support is a sevice and it is off shoreable. There is of course no global competion for jobs that are impractical to perform abroad. But the latter statement is merely a tautology.Trying to define service jobs such that they constitute all of the non-offshorable jobs does not work for any purpose except covering up your error in message 90.

I think you took that position because you made an explicit statement to that effect. How do you manage to avoid acknowledging that despite the fact that I quoted your statement from Message 90. How does the above statement not require that service jobs are not offshorable? What was the point of trying to define lawyering as "manufacturing" legal paper if not to show that lawyering was not an example of a service job that could be exported. If your point was to show that service jobs were not menial, then why wouldn't examples such as lawyer, doctor, and Indian Chief make your point?You don't have to own up to your error, because I'm going to let you off the hook after this post, regardless of what rebuttal you make. Feel free to cast an aspersion or two.Edited by NoNukes, : Fix link

Absolutely. I'll give two reasons1. Despite your claim to the contrary, the remaining portions of the sentence and paragraph do not, in my opinion, limit the scope of jobs that you refer to as service jobs. You merely talked about service jobs vs. manufacturing jobs of the type Phat wants. I did not remove any context from your statement that affected the point I chose to address.2. Whatever doubt might remained about point 1, should have been cleared up in your response to my post in which I explicitly stated that I was questioning your definition of service jobs. I gave a number of examples of exportable service jobs. Your response was to indicate that all of my examples as manufacturing jobs. I found your characterization of my examples incorrect, with the example of providing a legal opinion as manufacturing being particularly egregious. There is no reason to characterize a medical opinion as a service and a legal opinion as manufacturing. Yet one is exportable while the other isn't.In other words, your response to my post confirms that you were indeed defining service jobs as being a type of non-exportable job. In subsequent posts, I even pointed out that I had no issue with the fact that offshoring resistant jobs did exist, and that my only qualm was with your definition of service jobs.You eventually did indicate that you didn't mean any such thing, but only while saying that you had never said it in the first place. If there was a misunderstanding you share in the blame for it.

Dupe removedEdited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

So in your view, generating and mailing a legal or medical opinion is manufacturing?Let's just say that such a definition is unconventional and a bit silly.

Seriously, crashfrog? You must have known this motive impuging was wrong when you posted it. It is apparent that I consider lawyering to be a well paying, service sector job.I've worked as a grocery bagger, naval officer, and safety testing engineer among other things, all of which were service positions that paid somewhere between poor and very well Only grocery bagging was menial.The office of the President of the United States is a service position. The idea that all service jobs are menial, low paying and/or disfavored is quite silly. I don't hold that opinion.While there may be jobs were the distinction between service and manufacturing is unclear (perhaps programmer is among them), the fact is that we already know what types of work constitutes service jobs. And the fact that we can mail paper work documenting the work we do does not make the work manufacturing. And here you repeat the mistake that you deny ever making. You are attempting to make the classification of service vs. manufacturing a proxy for what jobs are non-exportable vs exportable by using a ridiculous definition for service jobs. We already have a definition for service sector. We don't need a new one in order to avoid Phat's distaste for service jobs. The service sector includes lots of great jobs. Surgery is a service. So is Yoga instruction.But perhaps Phat is not in position to take such a job. And there are plenty of low paying service sector jobs. It seems that a good portion of the new work opportunites are for lower paying jobs. It might be legitimate to complain about that.Some service jobs, like lawyering and product saftey testing, are exportable because nobody cares where the service is performed as long as the results are communicated to them. There is no need to pretend that the paper on which the results are printed is the actual producrt. Similarly, we don't need to pretend that a janitor is manufacturing clean floors either.

I can agree with that. But not with the rest of your post. First, some service jobs are exportable. But let's ignore those for now.But most of the exportable service jobs would not be exported here until are labor costs are lowered to below foreign labor costs. More likely, if more jobs were exportable, then we'd just lose the rest of the jobs here.You didn't actually say how exportable service jobs would be beneficial. Perhaps you might expand on this thought?

You said that non-exportable service jobs were a problem because their non-exportable nature creates a trade imbalance. I am not convinced that such is true. The trade imbalance was created by the jobs, service or otherwise, that were exported, and not by the jobs that remain here.I'm asking that you explain how the non-exportability of service jobs creates a trade imbalance. Perhaps you believe that someone would export such jobs to us despite the fact that there wouldn't be any cost savings in doing so. I don't see how that could be true.

I agree. Certainly programming, engineering consulting, and some legal work are currently being out sourced to India to the disappointement of many people who are employed in these areas. But the characterization of these jobs is manufacturing or service is secondary. I hope I haven't disrailed the discussion.Crashfrog's characterization still irks me though...Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Yes, you did say those things, but you also said this: I'm asking you to describe how it would be more convenient if service jobs could be exported. But getting you to do so seems to be impossible.

Jon, this makes no sense to me. Let's use grocery bagging as an example, non-exportable service job. The output of grocery bagging is a bunch of bagged groceries that belong to the person who purchased them. The energy is supplied by the baggers labor.Even if it were possible to export bagging to other countries, who outside of this country would want to pay a US bagger $7.25 or more an hour?

Isn't it a bit silly to complain about that? Those jobs exists because we require them to be performed. The jobs that produce things that can be sold overseas are surely also exportable. So it occurs to me that the blaming anything but exportable jobs for the trade balance is without merit.Surely Jon meant something else.

Nobody is arguing that there is no growing trade imbalance. What I am questioning is your analysis of the cause, and your nice maps and graphs don't shed any light on that. All that's necessary for a trade imbalance is we keep buying goods elsewhere, but elsewhere isn't buying our stuff for one reason or another.I don't think it makes sense to blame jobs that inherently cannot produce anything exportable, yet must be done. The blame lies elsewhere. Yes, we have to clean our own streets, but isn't a bit silly to say that the fact that U.S. street cleaners' efforts cannot clean the streets in China is adding to the trade imbalance.

Nobody is arguing that there is no growing trade imbalance. What I am questioning is your analysis of the cause, and your nice maps and graphs don't shed any light on that. All that's necessary for a trade imbalance is we keep buying goods elsewhere, but elsewhere isn't buying our stuff for one reason or another.I don't think it makes sense to blame jobs that inherently cannot produce anything exportable, yet must be done. The blame lies elsewhere. Yes, we have to clean our own streets, but isn't a bit silly to say that the fact that U.S. street cleaners' efforts cannot clean the streets in China is adding to the trade imbalance.

I understand the appeal of this idea, but it seems incredibly naive.Being conscious of where things come from is not all that helpful. Americans are actually incapable of making some products here. Not building products here means not participating in the innovation and process improvements that come with managing the day to day operations of a factory. As a result, nobody in the US can make memory chips that compete in density and capacity with foreign made chips. Essentially nobody outside of Korea and Japan is capable of making an LCD or Plasma screen TV that works as well as those on the market without infringing US patents. It is essentially impossible to find a US made modern coffee maker. And electing to disrespect patent law would touch off a response abroad that would kill off the few segments of US manufacturing that are currently successful at exporting stuff.On top of that, outside of making foreign products illegal to purchase in the US, it's not realistic to ask people who are strapped for cash to stop buying foreign products. Adding tarrifs again is just going to result in reprisals against US manufacturers.