[HillaryBriss]

i'm not sure i agree with everything you wrote, but i do share this sense that US policy has tried to optimize for some over-simplified, short-term, dollar-maximizing measurement.

it's not clear that we've been optimizing for something that's actually connected to what makes people happy and satisfied with life.

some people absolutely need to be able to say "We're number one! We're number one!"

but other people would be happier to live in country number 17 if it meant they had a steady job with decent working conditions, reasonable health care, more predictability and a lower crime neighborhood.

[mistermann]

> but other people would be happier to live in country number 17 if it meant they had a steady job with decent working conditions, reasonable health care, more predictability and a lower crime neighborhood.

This is pretty much the essence of what I'm getting at, and to me is what post-secondary educated people on both the left and right seem to be very strongly opposed to on an ideological basis (but for completely different reasons I suspect), as seen in comments like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17346684

It worries me that almost no one seems to be thinking about the range of possibilities that might lie at the end of this outsource & optimize for GDP/efficiency/profit, rinse and repeat ad infinitum approach to the economy, and that some of the possible outcomes might actually be negative. It's almost like there's this religious belief in the West that negative consequences aren't even possible. Are people's memories really this short?

Or maybe I'm the one that's wrong. I'm more than willing to listen to anyone explain to me at length how success for everyone is inevitable as long as we have unrestricted free trade, but all anyone seems to have to offer is their own personal take on what "a" path to success would look like, which is typically not much more than a vague theory resting on the assumption that recent history is all that's worth paying attention to.

[HillaryBriss]

> It worries me that almost no one seems to be thinking about the range of possibilities that might lie at the end of this outsource & optimize for GDP/efficiency/profit, rinse and repeat ad infinitum approach

good point. and even when they do think about lost jobs the best solutions they come up with are feeble.

too often it's poorly funded government worker training wherein middle-aged washing machine plant workers who live in upstate Michigan are supposed to learn to code (or something equally likely to fail for the majority of retrained workers.)

another dubious aspect of this policy is that government officials are somehow supposed to both accurately predict the industries where the economic growth will be and what sort of training these industries will actually require from job hunters. that's really really hard. wall street investment firms are constantly trying to that sort of thing, and it's very difficult to get right.

this is where the globalization story unravels. the replacement careers don't materialize for the displaced workers. so the defense of the policy becomes a loud repetition of "it's great for consumers!"

but, somehow, it's "absurd and irrational" to ask if Walmart/Target/Amazon's massive quantities of cheap imported throw-away garbage (aka "consumer goods") are actually useful at all.