Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The late 1990s were a very prosperous time for America


Whheeeeeeeglesias.

Posted by IOZ at 3:32 PM | email »
Labels: , , , , ,

28 comments:

George Jones said...

It helps to be correct in your analysis.

3:36 PM
IOZ said...

Lulz. That was aaaallllmost the title.

3:41 PM
Karl Franz Ochstradt said...

That guy in the upper right... he looks so sagacious and worldly! I'll bet he went to some fine academies and universities and has amassed an impressive array of facts and words!

3:51 PM
Happy Jack said...

What is this, the high hat?

4:21 PM
Justin said...

Africa... which country is that again?

5:15 PM
Anonymous said...

africa is a country . . . there's even a blog about it http://africasacountry.com/

6:13 PM
Anonymous said...

What does this graphic demonstrate?

That there are still places where war and poverty cause suffering?

Yglesias doesn't deny this, does he?

6:18 PM
joonsae said...

Anonymous: Way to miss the point. Yglesias did deny that these countries had been "immiserated", when in fact they have as a direct result of globalization and financial deregulation policies adopted during the 90s.

6:37 PM
Anonymous said...

Joonsae:

Thanks for the response. I think you're running together two separate issues that Yglesias wants to keep separate: golabilization (or "free trade")on the one hand and the de-regulation of financial markets on the other.

When it comes to financial de-regulation, Yglesias agrees with you 100%: he thinks it's been a disaster (From his post: "the main analytic points of Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots are correct.")

As for the other set of policies and the question that they raise - whether increasing trade with China, Brazil, and India has been good or bad - my sense is that this is a far from settled question.

I do know that there exist reputable folks who will tell you that increased trade has reduced the amount of inequality between countries.

I don't know if these economists, demographers and political scientists are right - I don't have the statistical chops to evaluate their arguments - but I do know that a photoshop collage like the one IOZ posted doesn't prove shit one way or the other.

7:39 PM
TGGP said...

I second anonymous that I'd like to hear someone explain why he's wrong about the immiseration of those countries (I've had enough arguments about Africa from UR-readers, so let's focus on the named countries).

7:54 PM
joonsae said...

TGGP and Anonymous: What about the millions of third world children who die across the world because of debt repayment schemes forced on them from the IMF, World Bank, and other proponents of globalization - does that count as "immersion"?

You want more specific examples? How about what happened to Haiti in the 1990s as a result of NAFTA? Or Mexico?

Regarding India, why don't you ask the Adivasi people who are having their land taken from them by the Indian government so it can be sold to foreign mining corporations? How about the Indian farmers who committed suicide during this period of liberalization, or the multinational corporations that are buying not only their land but also patenting the very genomes of the crops that they have cultivated for milenia?

As always there is a particular class that benefits from free trade agreements - not coincidentally, it's the class that Yggy also happens to belong to and the class that he serves with his textual excrement.

8:09 PM
joonsae said...

Sorry, that should say "immiseration"

8:09 PM
NutellaonToast said...

Nony has a point. This picture doesn't prove anything. It's a fake. A fucking goldbricker.

8:32 PM
Enron said...

"The late 1990s were a very prosperous time for America."

It is important to understand what is meant by 'prosperous' and 'America'.

10:17 PM
demize! said...

He could have been a fish.

2:14 AM
TGGP said...

Poor countries are poor. The question is how they compare to how they used to be. If we're talking about the past decade (which Yglesias gives as a time frame for Africa), the U.S has gotten poorer. Is that true of these other places? I will give you Haiti (it's not surprising Yglesias didn't mention that one), but that's one of the places with the least foreign direct investment or exports. Mexico has been plagued by economic globalization: it serves as a conduit for drugs into the U.S and the exporting of our drug war to their soil has killed a lot of people. But even some really horrible violence hasn't stopped strong economic growth with reductions in the poverty rate. Most demographers think we're on the waning end of the immigration wave because economic growth has resulted a lower differential and smaller family sizes (the fertility rate for Mexican immigrants is significantly higher than for Mexicans who remain in Mexico). The economic growth in India is second only to China in the press attention it receives, but we don't hear as much about the change in the social station of Dalits. Does that means tribals aren't getting kicked around? No, but I don't know if things were any different before. But I suppose it might not settle the argument about policies in specific countries if we're just seeing a general worldwide trend.

2:32 AM
Christopher M. said...

Tiggy, the question is not one of "economic growth." The United States has done "economic growth" for decades while wages for the average worker have stagnated and its prison population has exploded; indeed. What you see in that economic growth for India, China, Brazil, et al is not fistfuls of cash being evenly distributed throughout the land to rich and poor alike, but a rapacious upward redistribution of wealth, as the poor are forced to work longer and harder to produce more for the rich. That's where economic growth comes from.

10:04 AM
Jack Crow said...

The poor stay poor. If it's not a moral disease, look for the boot.

And it's not a moral disease.

10:22 AM
Justin said...

Yeah, TGGP. How's your GDP?

Positive? It's all good then.

10:49 AM
fish said...

Nony has a point. This picture doesn't prove anything. It's a fake. A fucking goldbricker.

The speech bubbles look pretty authentic. At least that is what I imagine everyone would see if Yggie were actually real.

11:52 AM
Sorry said...

The building that's all like, "Pick a yard, any yard!" has been standing there for years with no takers. The inhabitants of the left side of the photo have seen that trick before.

1:29 PM
suffer said...

Sorry bros, Tiggy has a point. Life expectancy, Mortality rate for under 5 year olds, Malnutrition prevalence...that's shit's all real, yo!

5:05 PM
TGGP said...

Personally, I do alright as an entry-level programmer. But one person is an anecdote, and basically garbage as far as statistics are concerned.

Certainly GDP is an imperfect proxy. So I tried to reference some other measures as well. I'll grant the expansion of prisons (and recommend Mark Kleiman's "When Brute Force Fails" on how we should respond if calling of the War on Some Drugs is off the table, and even to a large extent if it isn't) but it's not really much of a response to Yglesias' post (I don't know what has happened to incarceration rates in other rates in other countries, but reportedly China has a lower prison population despite a larger total population and I don't know if executions make up for that). Places with higher per capita GDP (perhaps with PPP adjustments) are as a general rule more desirable to live in. It correlates with lots of those objective measures suffer mentions. Over time we can agree that in periods when GDP growth was flat or negative like the Great Depression or our current recession were shitty and times when GDP when GDP is growing faster tend to be better (except for some times when the nominal GDP growth numbers were mostly coming from inflation). Net migration tends to be from places with lower GDP to higher GDP. And much of what has happened with recent globalization is not merely people going to other countries but leaving rural areas to cities. In China (and elsewhere) there are lots of restrictions on hayseeds coming to the coasts (this is not the story sometimes told of people being pushed out of rural areas in some enclosure movement), but there has still been a massive migration. And when we see these masses of poor people flooding into cities it looks terrible to us, but that's because the even more severe pre-existing poverty people are leaving is less visible.

8:47 PM
Anonymous said...

I think that infant mortality, etc. blah blah being decreased IN third-world countries is net good and we shouldn't ignore that. OTOH, guess what? It's part of the whole race to the bottom we're in. Just because we're coasting doesn't necessarily mean we're going in that direction forever. Sometimes it's a myth, this progress thing, and staying on the present course right now makes it a myth.

2:52 AM
Anonymous said...

Oh, and who the fuck reads Matt Ygglesias. That guy takes himself seriously. I can't believe anyone else would.

2:54 AM
TGGP said...

Anonymous 2:52, true enough. The UR argument I referred to started here and near the end I make the same point.
Now get a handle.

12:23 AM
Freddie said...

The patient explainer is the scourge of the Internet and all decent people.

They have cell phones now, didja hear?

12:21 PM
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8:36 PM

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