No. of Recommendations: 4
And service industries don't create other forms of pollution or other kinds of externalities that have adverse effects?
They do. My point wasn't "factories bad." My point was that it doesn't make sense to ask "Is economic dislocation good?" in isolation, any more than it makes sense to ask "Is pollution good?" in isolation (whether talking about factories or service industries). Of course the undesired and unintended side effects of an economic policy aren't inherently "good" - but that doesn't tell you anything.
National economies need balance to weather storms. Too much of a service industry leads to too many dependencies on people's willingness to buy inferior goods (which are the first things cut in a downturn).
Maybe? I mean, it's not like the U.S. economy hasn't weathered storms - right? I think the main argument against ripping up the global economic rulebook is that we have been winning under the current system for the last six or seven decades, even through all the storms.
I understand that economic dislocation hit the Rust Belt hard, but a big part of that was due not only to trade with China, but from technological innovation and internal competition from the U.S. South, as manufacturing (and iconically auto manufacturing) relocated to the South. That's why we still have a lot of manufacturing output without having a lot of blue collar jobs in the Midwest. And messing around with trade policy and blowing up the global economic system isn't going to change that.
