[mmooss]

> talented people having more options is generally good for everyone

While I support free markets, that argument sounds a bit like the basis of the old 'trickle-down economics' and similar theories such as global free trade: Help the wealthy and the benefits will 'trickle down' to everyone else.

It turns out that if you help the wealthy, then the wealthy benefit. I know that doesn't sound like a surprising result when it's said that way, but the point is that the rest is a convenient fiction the wealthy tell themselves and politicians tell the public, in order to serve themselves.

In the US for example, those policies have led to historic increases in wealth for the few, and stagnated wages for the many. On the other hand, in less well off economies such as China and Brazil, the policies led to historic numbers lifted out of poverty - far more than anything in history. So that's a great result that we absolutely should not ignore or put a stop to. I support free trade.

But if the policy isn't specifically designed to benefit workers in the US, for example, if they are left to get theoretical second or third order theoretical benefits, it won't work for them. It's not 'generally good for everyone' unless it's made that way.

[BonitaPersona]

I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy.

What should I be getting out of your argument? Asking in good faith.

For example, that there's more to it than that simple rule, or that once a certain level of general population prosperity is reached it stops working, or that impoverished populations have a culture that better benefits from such policies... ?

[mmooss]

It's complex; there's no simple answer. Why did China's workers, for example, benefit enormously while US workers did not?

I don't know. It might have been good luck: outsourcing low-wage labor will of course benefit low-wage workers in other countries, and China's workers happened to be the beneficiaries. Maybe China's government, with a strong motivation to transform its economy from widespread and deep poverty (at the time, much poorer than anyone in wealthy nations), designed their trade policy to achieve that result. (People will also give simplistic answers that serve their ideologies, which I'm not addressing.)

The US's and China's policies were necessarily different: One country was outsourcing low-wage work (hopefully replacing it with higher-wage work) and the other was trying to get as much low-wage work as possible. One was exporting and the other importing.

My main, general point was that unless US policy is designed specifically to benefit X, it won't. Often leaders try to smooth over difficulties by claiming some second-order or third-order effect will benefit X, but that doesn't happen. In this case, X was US workers, and the policy was designed specifically to benefit corporations (afaik).

[modo_mario]

>I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy.

Not him but I'd say it suppresses wage bargaining power in the USA or in this case Europe.