- It is certainly true that some people have lost jobs due to increases in international trade. It is also true that some people have lost jobs due to changes in technology. Should we treat those two causes differently? Why or why not?
- How important is production efficiency to sustainability? How is trade related to efficiency? (This question is really for the many sustainability students in this class. :^))
The lost jobs due to international trade are a common by product of global trade markets. As countries go through the different stages of development, they usually move through different stages of manufacturing too. Textiles can give way to plastics, to electronics, and then on to finished goods like Airplanes, Cars, Computers, and eventually Software and Financial Services. Jobs will be lost in certain industries, and they will be gained in other industries. Some workers will be forced to retool and retrain to take on new job opportunities. This isn’t always caused by international trade, but can also be caused by time and innovation. When examining why jobs are lost we should look at all of the causes and see if we can determine the impact of each. Usually these causes happen at the same time and are difficult to separate. Most of the USA Manufacturing jobs have been lost due to technological innovation, not due to international trade. Would we rather do manual labor, or manage and program the software and robots to do manual labor? I think America should aim high and focus more on education and retraining, technology and robotics and software. Lets train software developers that don’t know how to sew, or write in cursive. These are skills that are only needed in very very small amounts these days. I will be pushing my children to educate as much as possible, see the world, and find something they love and help make a difference in the world doing.
Most of our capitalist markets are geared toward profit and resource efficiency, or production efficiency. They are not designed to focus on sustainability. If we focus on resource efficiency when we look at how we are trying to be sustainable we may come to some interesting conclusions. One idea says that putting solar on our houses isn’t the right use of our resources. If we pull all the homeowners together and do solar at larger scale it can be more efficient to produce energy. Should we try and manufacture solar panels in America and raise the prices for home owners even further? Or should we buy them all from China where they can make them much cheaper and try to push more homeowners to buy solar with lower costs? Or is the answer that we have to do all of these things to get even close to the sustainability energy goals we need to reach to sustain human growth and hopefully curb climate change? I think it may be that we have to do all of these things. I am excited to finally be putting solar on my house this month. It is not cost effective, and won’t pay off until year 10. But I feel it is the right thing to do and I am lucky enough to have the funds to do it. The subsidies really do help. Without them, most homeowners will not make the choice to install solar. I believe trade makes our resources more efficient, in our state, in our country, and for our planet. It has challenges when it comes to sustainability. The large further developed countries have the benefit of becoming powerhouses back during the industrial revolution. We weren’t thinking about sustainability as we built the early engines that powered the USA to the top. How are we to sit on our high horse and tell other countries they should pollute less while they grow and develop? If you look at it from that angle it doesn’t seem fair. Being a leader in the world means we need to be the leader in solving these global problems. We can do this with sustainability and should.
Dude.World 