[coffeemug]

It depends on whether you believe US action is overdetermined, but I think if Trump didn’t get elected we would have continued on the path of free trade. His election wasn’t predestined. He had just the right mix of features to win at the time, but if this basket of features didn’t exist it’s not hard to imagine the country going down a very different path.

[smallmancontrov]

If we had continued on the path of free trade without "dealing in" those displaced by free trade, the pressure would have continued to grow. It certainly could have exploded in a different direction, at a different time, with a different champion, but so long as it was repressed instead of addressed it was always destined to explode.

[coffeemug]

Another plausible future is AI reshuffling the economic hierarchy. In a technological civilization the pressure valve need not be political.

As an aside, you made me curious if Trump made this constituency materially better off. Here's what Claude thinks (tl;dr: it's a wash): https://claude.ai/share/36233694-3729-4758-b2e6-c2058791ab1a

[smallmancontrov]

Explosions are rarely productive. Populists are notorious for delivering lots of chaos and few results.

It's easier for everyone to just deal in the economic losers, but we didn't do that, and now they are burning the house down. This will not get them what they want, but they will continue doing it anyway.

Globalization was the test, AI is the final exam.

[eru]

> Globalization was the test, AI is the final exam.

I'm not sure history will end so soon.

[smallmancontrov]

True, and we've been here before. The industrial revolution got rid of the need for most labor, which at the time was overwhelmingly agricultural and textile. We came out the other side OK.

But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse and stayed worse for entire lifetimes before they got better, and they didn't get better because the people who won decided to deal in the people who lost, they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.

That, uhh, won't happen the same way again. Now we have robots and nukes. But it's true that without the benefit of hindsight I'd have had an apocalyptic view going into the last kerfuffle, I'd have been wrong, and it would have been due to a failure of imagination. Let's all hope that I am wrong again, but the mechanism will again have to be a failure of imagination, and it takes a lot of optimism to fit my hope squarely inside my blind spot.

[eru]

> But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse [...]

No, living conditions did not get worse. Yes, livings conditions were pretty bad during the early industrial revolution. But they hadn't exactly been rosy before.

> [...] they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.

Which war are you talking about? There's been more than one, you know. And the decades after the second world war were probably the nadir for humanity: we never had as many dirt poor people as then and will hopefully never have as many. Remember, that's the time when there were genuine fears of global starvation. Things have been looking up a lot since perhaps around the 1980s and even more so in the following decades. Mostly thanks to PR China and India and South East Asia graduating from dirt poor to merely poor or even middle class.

You also seem confused. You seem to say that a relative capital scarcity is good for labour ('incinerated most of its capital') but also that relative labour scarcity is good for labour? Which way is it?

[hollerith]

George Friedman disagrees with you: he's been saying for years that US trade policy towards China had to change no matter who won the 2016 election (because an economy cannot rely on a trade partner it might go to war with, among other reasons).

When last year the Trump admin started interdicting oil shipments out of Venezuela, it left shipments heading to China intact. Then during Trump's visit to China, the two parties made a lot of progress on trade and other issues (in part because Beijing's attitude improved because the first Trump administration's restrictions on trade underlined to Beijing how dependent China is on trade with the US).

[boelboel]

Biden wasn't a free trader at all, more alike to Trump in trade than many would like to admit.