It's not a question of blaming trade deals OR blaming automation.

[JHan]

12. The problem is these anti trade anti automation arguments barely scratch the surface...

Why I get upset with blaming trade deals: it's senseless. High tariffs and trade wars don't help people, or small business owners.

I'll just paste what I wrote elsewhere in a thread about automation/mechanization:

We can look at Germany: Germany, for example, lost less jobs than we did, despite increased automation, which is not to say they didn't lose jobs but job loss occurred at a slower pace than we experienced here. Germany is also strongly unionized.

The culture in Germany is different to ours - here, our business approach places too much stock in shareholder value, which is great for profit in the short term but terrible for sustained wealth creation. This culture permeates our approach in everything - and contributed to the spending and lending habits which led to the crash..this is why blaming Glass Steagall for the crash was always myopic and .. frankly stupid.

The problem in the U.S of A is that we don't invest in US - the people - enough. We prioritize profit above all else.

Illustrating Germany for contrast:

“ Germany set about enacting a range of comprehensive economic reforms to increase the competitiveness of Germany’s economy throughout the 2000s, including making its tax code more competitive, articulating The High-Tech Strategy for Germany, increasing investment in apprenticeship programs, increasing investment in its Fraunhofer network focusing on investments in industrially relevant applied R&D, and during the Great Recession introducing the Kurzarbeit (short-time work) program. Kurzarbeit helped [bGerman companies respond to the drop in global demand engendered by the Great Recession not by firing workers outright (as was too often the case in the United States), but by cutting their work to part-time and using the remaining time to retrain/reskill them (through a program collaboratively funded by German industry, labor unions, and state and federal governments) and so when global demand recovered German firms were fully staffed, and with a workforce reskilled to leverage the technologies and manufacturing processes of the future. And of course, Germany is not alone; many more of America’s competitors—including Japan, Korea, Holland, Taiwan, and even China—worked feverishly throughout the 2000s to bolster their science, technology, and innovation ecosystems that underpin the competitiveness and innovation potential of their private sector enterprises]."

We didn't adopt much of those strategies for a number of reasons - the German government controlled these initiatives for the most part, and we have to contend with sily anti-government republican thinking here.

And "Competitiveness at a crossroads" explains it more in detail:

http://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/competitiveness-at-a-crossroads.pdf

"international firms became less invested in “the commons”—shared resources such as pools of skilled labor, supplier networks, an educated populace, and the physical and technical infrastructure on which U.S. productivity and competitiveness depend.

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This is where the elites failed - the problem wasn't Globalization but our stupid greedy response to it (greed isn't bad but stupid greed is dumb), and the failure to protect the middle class:

"How did America respond to pressure on its middle class? Unfortunately,our society did not mobilize to invest so that the middle class could compete in the global marketplace. Instead, America and Americans maintained an illusion of growing prosperity. Abetted by lenders and government institutions, consumers with stagnant incomes borrowed more to buy houses and fund consumption.

Government itself made unsustainable promises to the middle class, pledging to cover more healthcare expenses of future retirees, to employ more individuals in government jobs, and to pay generous pensions to many in the public sector, while reducing effective tax rates across the board between 1980 and 2010. These promises, coupled with a deep recession and two wars, have left government finances in a fragile state.

As debts and unfunded liabilities have risen, federal, state, and local government expenditures that support long-run growth in productivity and competitiveness—on items such as infrastructure, training, education, and basic research—have stagnated or fallen as a portion of GDP. Moreover, a resulting need to make tough, unpalatable choices has contributed to paralysis in our political process."

Addressing some of those harmful effects was all over the democratic platform this year - even pressuring Wall St. When HRC spoke of the need for Wall St to see the value of regulation through regulating themselves she understood that public regulatory bodies cannot do everything - there has to be forms of self regulation. One of the ways to tackle it is to deal with consolidation since it hampers the ability of business to self regulate, there are other methods as well.

Hopefully I'm making sense because in a nutshell, protectionist ideas and demonizing trade deals make for great slogans but don't solve the underlying problems with management/culture. These problems require creative solutions across the board - and above all we need to acknowledge that the job market is forever changing.

2016 revealed how ill prepared we are - not a single debate question dealt with automation and mechanization - which is crazy - and HRC was the only candidate who had some semblance of a tech plan.

Even Climate Change was ignored in the Presidential Debates.

We're sipping some strange kool aid when we think we will get the 50's and 60's back. We can't afford retro thinking right now.