.> Neither Brad DeLong nor Jeff Faux
> nor anyone else knows what China is
> going to be like in 2047 0r 2075. Or
> whether China today is like America in
> 1877 or Japan in 1970, or Brazil in 1950.

I do know that there ain't gonna be no oil in 2075, and probably not much easily-accessible iron ore either. Neither the US nor China are preparing for this AFAICS, so both will probably be in the same boat.

sPh

This debate is silly because you are throwing in over-the-top accusations. You say "Brad DeLong says America(sic) workers making $30,000 a year ought to be willing to cut their living standards in order to help China's economy." Wow! That's really some statement! And you have a link, so it must be backed up, right?

So I check the link - does Brad really say this? Nope. But apparently this post is a followup to a previous post. Does Brad say it in the previous post? Again, nope.

But this is what I can understsand, if I read your characterization of his argument, and his characterization of your argument:

- Brad wants lower-middle class Americans to become poor.
- You want poor Chinese to stay poor.

I feel like I'm watching a debate between high schoolers here.

Its our standard of living that makes this country what it is.

We live in homes with central heating and plumbing. Our water is clean enough to drink. The majority of homes are air conditioned. Many are able to take 1-2-3 week vacations almost anywhere they wish. Many have single homes, two cars and a swimming pool. When we go to the market we can choose between 50 different types of cookies while some in other countries don't have bread. For many the hardest decision they will make on a given day is what to have for dinner tonight. We shop at malls with a variety of stores offering us all our heart's desires. We spend billions on fashions, dressing "in style" while many in other countries wear rags. We don't cut our own hair, we go to 'salons'. Open the Yellow Pages and look under "Doctors" and see how many we have. Why, we even have Dentists! Physical therapists! Manicurists! We have retirement programs and Medicare to help when we age.

Democracy, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Rule of Law, are all meaningless if we lose our standard of living and have to live like those in Sudan, Bangladesh, Somalia. etc.

We are living the American dream; the idea that our children will have it better than we did.

But will they?

"Democracy, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Rule of Law, are all meaningless if we lose our standard of living and have to live like those in Sudan, Bangladesh, Somalia. etc"

Surely you don't suggest that people living in those places would have no use for the rights and freedoms you mention, if made available to them. And surely you don't mean that Americans would not fight to retain them even through economic hard times.

...because tangible rights and freedoms, I like to think, go together with high living standards. If the Chinese had the right to unionize and collectively bargain, and if that right wasn't being threatened here in the US by our Brahmins, then we wouldn't be having this debate right now.

Surely you don't suggest that people living in those places would have no use for the rights and freedoms you mention, if made available to them. And surely you don't mean that Americans would not fight to retain them even through economic hard times.

Wigmar1, No, I didn't suggest these things, you did.

I would really like to see a cite for the 'stagnant wages' claim.

http://www.petersoninstitute.org/publications/papers/lardy0304-tables.pdf
claims that nominal manufacturing wages trebled in the years 1993 to 2003.

http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/paper.cfm?ResearchID=201
has more details.

Certainly a quick google on china wages would seem to disagree with your claim.

because tangible rights and freedoms, I like to think, go together with high living standards.

I would agree that a set of tangible rights and freedoms do not evolve in a state of nature, and are typically product of a stable and productive society. That's not the same as saying that once a society has developed these values, that they will be, or should be expected to be, lost when that society declines. In the American Depression, for instance, tho it was not really horrible by world standards, I don't think the general level of regard for civil rights and liberties diminished at all. Quite the contrary, IMO.

Well, for one, this shift appears to be creating a 90/10 split of aristocrats/plebs. Now, if I'm a pleb, and I see a declining living standard while a relative few are heading into aristo status, why should I care about rule of law? To protect _their_ property rights?

Even now, our system has created a "volunteer" military via economic draft. If you're J. Bradley DeLong, daddy sends you to Harvard. If you're a poor kid, you join the military for GI Bill bennies. You get sent to Iraq in a war started by a President who's qualification for office was being born to an aristo ex President.

All of this quite legal and quite Constitutional. It was also quite legal and Constitutional during the Civil War, and folks rioted in NYC and other places across the country. The riots were of course illegal.

The value of laws and freedoms are worth exactly as much as the overall society participates in them. The draft riots during the Civil War occured because a wholly legal and Constitutional policy screwed enough of the plebs to the benefit of the aristos that the plebs decided "screw the law". A lower level variant occured during Vietnam.

The value of laws and freedoms are worth exactly as much as the overall society participates in them.

A correct generalization, but why assume that if we get taken down a few pegs that people won't care about (or participate in) them?

folks rioted in NYC and other places across the country. The riots were of course illegal.

These draft/race riots destroyed half of NYC, and dozens were killed IIRC. Is it wrong that they should have been illegal?

That's an interesting question.

How many rioters would have been killed in the army, while the kids of the elite did the 19th century equivalent of "serving their country best, managing a hedge fund"? Probably more than "dozens" given the casualty of that time. Also, as almost everyone in the sucker social class was a renter, who actually owned most of the "destroyed half of NYC"? If you guessed the families "serving their country best managing a hedge fund", you win a kewpee doll.

So, on one hand your point is well taken. On the other, a dispassionate view of legality on this says the law was to...

1. Send only lower class folks to die for their country.
2. Protect the property rights of those who didn't have to die for their country.

You must have read different histories of the Depression than I did. As jobs and food disappeared, violations of civil rights became widespread. Anyone who was different from the accepted social norm of a region was subject to being driven out onto the road if not outright murdered.

Here is how it played out in 2005:

=== From the Los Angeles Times
GRETNA, Louisiana - Little over a week after this mostly white suburb became a symbol of callousness for using armed officers to seal one of the last escape routes from New Orleans — trapping thousands of mostly black evacuees in the flooded city — the Gretna City Council passed a resolution supporting the police chief's move.

"This wasn't just one man's decision," Mayor Ronnie C. Harris said Thursday. "The whole community backs it."

Three days after Hurricane Katrina hit, Gretna officers blocked the Mississippi River bridge that connects their city to New Orleans, exacerbating the sometimes troubled relationship with their neighbor. The blockade remained in place into the Labor Day weekend. ===

We are only two weeks' food supply away from descending into this behaviour throughout the nation, and the Other will be thrown to the wolves first no less here than anywhere else on Earth.

sPh

Well if the entire country were as destroyed as New Orleans was by Katrina, who knows what would happen, you may be right.

But the fact that you have to reach so far into the improbable does not help to establish that basic rights, etc., will become meaningless in a time of economic decline, even a severe one, that occurs over time and without a sudden and complete disruption of all systems at once-- transportation, law enforcement, medical care, food supply, water systems, etc.

It is highly, highly improbable that the entire country would be reduced as suddenly and completely as New Orleans was reduced by Katrina. That's why cherry-picking events from the Katrina experience is bogus as a prediction of the way the country would go in even a severe economic and standard-of-living decline. If you need a definition of 'improbable,' you can help yourself to any number of on- or off-line dictionaries.

Alphonse ( Al ) Kada Iranians are fighting the Americans in Iraq so they don't have to fight them on the streets of Tehran.

HAHAHAHAAHA, good humor there.

Once they become a part of the social fabric, and population's political consciousness, they are not easily thrown aside.

Yes, after a full nuclear exchange, the concept may become meaningless. But in any reasonable scenario, remembering that the US has the best combination of natural resources, climate, and transportation resources of any large country except possibly Argentina, no.

"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'"

- Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor -

or in 2007; "Make us your slaves but make us safe"?

<I> OF COURSE they don't practice what they preach. OF COURSE their newspapers feed us a steady diet of jingoism and nationalism, while they practice a cosmopolitanism that borders on treason. </i>

 Holy Ironic sentence batman! 

"How many rioters would have been killed in the army, while the kids of the elite did the 19th century equivalent of "serving their country best, managing a hedge fund?"

I don't quite get the above quote. The Draft protests were instigated by Copperhead Democrats (Confederate supporters of whom NY's mayor was one) using the $300 "commutation fee" as a pretext. The fee was designed for the wealthy, yes, but it seems that frequently poorer people banded together and cooperatively raised the money for each other to pay it.

On August 13, 1863, when the draft was first initiated (due to a shortage of soldiers in the 3rd year of the war) mobs of Irish poor began rioting against the draft and the police and then turned their brutal violence, which lasted several days, on NYC's African American population, lynching, burning and torturing them. It was these scapegoats who bore the brunt of the casualties -- not the rioters, as I understand it. State and federal troops finally restored order.

In the end, "on August 19, the draft was resumed. It was completed within 10 days without further incident, although far fewer men were actually drafted than had been feared: of the 750,000 selected for conscription nationwide, only 6% actually went into service." (Wikipedia)he episode was not a pretty one in our history, which is why people don't seem to want know about it. However, more of the nineteenth century "elite" seem to have done their patriotic duty and enlisted, unlike in the colonial wars of today.

Just because you don't like the direction a post is going, is no reason to give it a 1, unproductive.

My suggestion is that you give out 10 4s and 5s for every 1 you give out.

Encourage people to contribute.

Of course, in the event of the Second Coming, all bets are off . . . .

There was a First?