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Cities, trade and cars
Mar. 5th, 2005 10:17 amZompist has a lengthy synopsis of a book by Jane Jacobs about the economics of cities. I'm not really competent to comment on most of the stuff he says, but one remark got me thinking about my personal politics:
I think I know the reason: it specifically has to do with the auto industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At that time, American car manufacturers were, on the whole, making incredibly crappy cars, and getting stomped by Japanese manufacturers. My parents bought one to replace their beloved but ailing sixties Oldsmobile Cutlass, and the new car (an Oldsmobile Omega, essentially identical to the Chevy Nova of the era) was a notorious lemon that barely ran and died entirely within a couple of years; pieces were constantly falling off of it. My dad, meanwhile, had a little Japanese car that gave us no trouble at all.
Part of the response to this, from both labor and management (who tend to be on the same side in these particular situations), was to conduct a massive patriotic campaign to get people to buy the crappy American cars, and it was tinged with ugly racism and xenophobia. (Meanwhile, the same companies that were trying to do this—I am thinking particularly of Chrysler—were simultaneously reselling Japanese imports and proudly advertising that they were doing so.) It seemed to me that, while there were real American jobs at stake, the solution was not to engage in special pleading when the products involved were so obviously inferior.
Years later, the American manufacturers mostly got their acts together and started making better cars, though of course they are also famous for moving actual production to other countries.
The whole thing tended to make me suspicious of exhortations to buy locally. As a late-Cold-War kid terrified of Armageddon, I also bought into the idea that trade was a disincentive to war, though I now doubt that it's all that effective in that regard. And now I'm in an industry in which the US still has a strong export business, though for how long is an interesting question. Of course, not everything is the circa-1980 auto industry, and as a kid I had no concept of any middle ground between completely unregulated trade and life in a North Korea-like black hole.
Industrializing Japan also had tariffs; one has to wonder why "free trade" has become a dogma to be foisted on all nations. The answer is clear, though: it's not because it facilitates development-- quite the reverse. It aids countries which already have strong export economies.I am still suspicious of dogmatic anti-trade movements, the campaigns to get people to stop buying all foreign-grown produce and such. But for a long time I had extreme free-trade sympathies that were supposed to be anomalous for someone of my generally slightly-left-of-center politics, and I think (just from reading blogs) that a lot of American liberals (as opposed to radical leftists) of my generation feel the same way. I was wondering why that was.
I think I know the reason: it specifically has to do with the auto industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At that time, American car manufacturers were, on the whole, making incredibly crappy cars, and getting stomped by Japanese manufacturers. My parents bought one to replace their beloved but ailing sixties Oldsmobile Cutlass, and the new car (an Oldsmobile Omega, essentially identical to the Chevy Nova of the era) was a notorious lemon that barely ran and died entirely within a couple of years; pieces were constantly falling off of it. My dad, meanwhile, had a little Japanese car that gave us no trouble at all.
Part of the response to this, from both labor and management (who tend to be on the same side in these particular situations), was to conduct a massive patriotic campaign to get people to buy the crappy American cars, and it was tinged with ugly racism and xenophobia. (Meanwhile, the same companies that were trying to do this—I am thinking particularly of Chrysler—were simultaneously reselling Japanese imports and proudly advertising that they were doing so.) It seemed to me that, while there were real American jobs at stake, the solution was not to engage in special pleading when the products involved were so obviously inferior.
Years later, the American manufacturers mostly got their acts together and started making better cars, though of course they are also famous for moving actual production to other countries.
The whole thing tended to make me suspicious of exhortations to buy locally. As a late-Cold-War kid terrified of Armageddon, I also bought into the idea that trade was a disincentive to war, though I now doubt that it's all that effective in that regard. And now I'm in an industry in which the US still has a strong export business, though for how long is an interesting question. Of course, not everything is the circa-1980 auto industry, and as a kid I had no concept of any middle ground between completely unregulated trade and life in a North Korea-like black hole.