I posted a position on Brigade, and then felt like I didn't have a clear enough idea of what I wanted to back it up. Or that it was too complicated, and not something easily explained. (Even though there's no limit on text in the explanation for your position. It's still not right to write pages of material explaining. And it seems too much like a monologue).
The position was this:
Globalization causes upheaval, but we can have policies to ease the transition and the endstate could be good
Someone asked what those policies should be. I was thinking about what we'd discussed in my class on globalization (back when getting my MPA). It's a complicated topic, and a complicated process. It doesn't seem to be happening steadily, either. We grow more interconnected, trade grows more entwined, and then we get a recession or financial catastrophe. Off-shoring becomes re-shoring, or on-shoring, or whatever the term used was.
I was fascinated by the notion of a Ricardian system. One where the comparative advantage dictated where businesses were built. Build a factory near the best location to ship raw materials, or best location to ship to your market, or both. Build distribution centers near the roads and airports that will take your product to your customers...where depends on how many you want to build. (Only one in the continental US? You probably want to build somewhere close to where ours is. :) Two? Three? You'd split up the locations to better cover a specific region.)
Getting there from here is daunting, though. Would it mean giving up national sovereignty? I think that's the big question, and fear. Does it mean giving up our identity?
What about currency? Would we be faced with a crisis, like the Greeks with the euro?
And borders. We've already got a ton of Americans offended at our current immigration policies. You'd have to be crazy to consider opening the border. (Though, funny enough, that's the natural counterpoint to go with free trade agreements. Funny how willing they are to discuss one and not the other.)
If I were thinking long term, strategically...I'd work at breaking down those barriers between the US and Mexico. There's a certain amount of distrust and dislike, on both sides. Yet I think integrating all of North America would be a pretty powerful and amazing thing.
Which also heads straight into everyone's fears. How would you do it? Nobody wants an invasion, which generally means treaties and diplomatic arrangements. Yet those can be slow, tedious, and sometimes more about appearances than reality. (Is the EU really powerful enough? NATO seems to be run by committee, which raises the question of how well they'd fight.)
Some of those issues remind me of our early American history. It's hard to remember, before the Civil War, how much individual states really mattered. How much saying you were from Virginia made a difference. Now, sure it says something. Kind of. But not to the extent it did when we started. And so much of our Constitution (and the Articles of Confederation) were tied up with allaying fears that individual states would lose out to a powerful central government.
Wait - where are we today?
The position was this:
Globalization causes upheaval, but we can have policies to ease the transition and the endstate could be good
Someone asked what those policies should be. I was thinking about what we'd discussed in my class on globalization (back when getting my MPA). It's a complicated topic, and a complicated process. It doesn't seem to be happening steadily, either. We grow more interconnected, trade grows more entwined, and then we get a recession or financial catastrophe. Off-shoring becomes re-shoring, or on-shoring, or whatever the term used was.
I was fascinated by the notion of a Ricardian system. One where the comparative advantage dictated where businesses were built. Build a factory near the best location to ship raw materials, or best location to ship to your market, or both. Build distribution centers near the roads and airports that will take your product to your customers...where depends on how many you want to build. (Only one in the continental US? You probably want to build somewhere close to where ours is. :) Two? Three? You'd split up the locations to better cover a specific region.)
Getting there from here is daunting, though. Would it mean giving up national sovereignty? I think that's the big question, and fear. Does it mean giving up our identity?
What about currency? Would we be faced with a crisis, like the Greeks with the euro?
And borders. We've already got a ton of Americans offended at our current immigration policies. You'd have to be crazy to consider opening the border. (Though, funny enough, that's the natural counterpoint to go with free trade agreements. Funny how willing they are to discuss one and not the other.)
If I were thinking long term, strategically...I'd work at breaking down those barriers between the US and Mexico. There's a certain amount of distrust and dislike, on both sides. Yet I think integrating all of North America would be a pretty powerful and amazing thing.
Which also heads straight into everyone's fears. How would you do it? Nobody wants an invasion, which generally means treaties and diplomatic arrangements. Yet those can be slow, tedious, and sometimes more about appearances than reality. (Is the EU really powerful enough? NATO seems to be run by committee, which raises the question of how well they'd fight.)
Some of those issues remind me of our early American history. It's hard to remember, before the Civil War, how much individual states really mattered. How much saying you were from Virginia made a difference. Now, sure it says something. Kind of. But not to the extent it did when we started. And so much of our Constitution (and the Articles of Confederation) were tied up with allaying fears that individual states would lose out to a powerful central government.
Wait - where are we today?
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