As I have tried, probably unsuccessfully, to explain from time to time I do believe that human action plays a role in global climate change and I think it’s possible even likely that greenhouses gases are implicated. I am, however, highly skeptical that the plans that have been put forward to deal with the situation will actually accomplish what their proponents think they will, largely due to assumptions of linearity which just won’t pan out.
However, for those of you who are interested I’d like to show you a couple of graphs that you may find eye-opening or at least interesting. The first illustrates U. S. manufacturing jobs:
and the second illustrates carbon emissions:
Look at the year 2001. That was the year that China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. If you have any doubts about the impact of that event not only on U. S. manufacturing but on carbon emissions, that should allay them.
Also, look at how little U. S. emissions changed.
I’m not going to go through the complicated analysis and number-crunching that would be required to prove it but to my eye it’s obvious that if we really wanted to reduce global carbon emissions we should be repatriating manufacturing jobs from China to the U. S. That would reduce carbon emissions more and faster than any foreseeable carbon tax or adoption of wind and solar power.
“I’m not going to go through the complicated analysis and number-crunching that would be required to prove it but to my eye….”
Amen. Its really a variant of the PCE/business investment/offshoring issue. It may be just your eye, but I bet its true.
The trouble I’ve found with hard analysis is that getting appropriate timeframes, inflation adjustments, proper data slicing and dicing seems one hell of a task. Even in FRED charts. But you can use your eye, common sense, and stare at enough graphs to build a picture:
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2017/econ/2017-csr.html
To my eye, several conclusions:
1. The gross investment numbers are dominated by manufacturing (and then construction and oddly, finance and insurance)
2. Manufacturing capex and ultimate demand go in pretty much lockstep. You don’t invest in machine making tools just because college is subsidized and soaking up consumer dollars.
3. Education, health care, hospitality etc are bit players in the business investment world. An economy deindustrialized and well serviced will not have the same investment levels – my essential point. Nor will that economy spit out as much CO2.
Yet another victim of global warming hysteria. But then again, who cares? We only have 12 more years……this time for sure.
Off topic, sorry, I just got back from he((. Fentanyl DOES come in from Mexico in very significant quantities.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/us-border-agency-made-biggest-fentanyl-bust-60757218
We just need to stop all the breeding. It seems China is well on the way, while the USSA still has a long way to go.
It would require a comprehensive industrial policy to reform American society into one that makes things. I just don’t see the Trump Administration as interested or capable of crafting such policy. The only potential for it would, I think, be in a Sanders Administration, as many of the economists on board with his agenda also support it.
Could you please name names and cite sources, Ben? To my eye the policy thrust from that side of the aisle is preponderantly towards the pastoral America in the imaginations of the present crop of environmental activists. For my part I think there are direct causal relationships among U. S. deindustrialization, increased global carbon emissions, increased income inequality, and distress among middle income Americans.
Michael Hudson, Dani Rodik, Dean Baker, Stephanie Kelton, Randall Wray. All are critical of our multi-decadal de-industrialization policy, and the MMTers like domestic manufacturing because the more we make the more we can afford to buy.
I don’t know that this proposal will happen, but it’s the only possibility I see.
Now that I think about the last year, I’m going to go out on a limb and say a re-industrialization policy of some kind will be attached to the Jobs Guarantee.
Gray- From your own article.
“The drug was found hidden Saturday morning in a compartment under the rear floor of a tractor-trailer after a scan during a secondary inspection indicated “some anomalies” in the load, and the agency’s police dog team alerted officers to the presence of drugs, Nogales CBP Port Director Michael Humphries said.”
No one is saying narcotics are not coming from Mexico. We are saying, our narcotics agencies are saying, that they are coming across at legal points of entry ie legal border crossings. Building a wall in the middle of the desert somewhere will not stop this.
Steve
If I understand correctly, we know that the majority of drugs are entering through legal points of entry because that is where the majority are caught.
If a drug smuggler is not caught, he/she did not smuggle any drugs. I guess it is like counting “jobs that were saved”.
All snark aside, TastyBits points out a legitimate problem. We don’t know what the volume of drugs coming in from Mexico is. We don’t know how many people are crossing the border from Mexico into the United States. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know how many foreign-born people there presently are within the United States.
WRT drugs, we could be interdicting 90%, 9%, or .9%. We just don’t know.
I am pretty sure that they search the people they catch crossing the border. They are not carrying much in the way of narcotics. They are carrying pot. They catch shipments of drugs further into the interior of the country. They back track to find where they came from. Can we be 100% sure of any of this? Of course not. But, what we do know is that a lot is c coming across at the legal points of entry. Why spend billions on areas where they might be crossing rather than where we know they are already crossing? If your intent is stop drugs from crossing, spend the money where you know it will have an effect. If you just want to fulfill the POTUS wish list, build the wall.
But wait, maybe TB is correct. The ones coming across in areas other than legal entry points are too smart, skilled and organized to get caught. Go ahead and explain how a wall that will take 5 seconds to climb will affect them and suddenly make them catchable.
Steve
For those who actually care about the issue of narcotic addiction, probably not anyone else here but maybe you know someone who does, link goes to the best detailed story on the influence of the pharmaceuticals, and Purdue Pharma in particular, in getting us to where we are with narcotics. It is just how amazing how long it went on and how pervasive they were in selling a drug they knew was addictive.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain
Steve
The whole point of Trump’s trade war with Tyrant Xi is to reverse the deindustrialization of the US and end the theft of intellectual property and rights by China. There are some very good sites out there that describe the overall policy and the tactics being used, one of them The Conservative Treehouse. China’s industrial base is based on export, they haven’t developed enough domestic demand for their products, which won’t happen thanks to the one-child policy which is slowly but steadily graying the population and the fact their industrial base needs to continue exporting and stealing other people’s ideas.