Of course the answer isn't to put them to make work in some factory. It wouldn't be possible even if we wanted to. I'm just pushing back at your theory that there'll be some sort of cultural/artistic renaissance or merry making. My vision is much more dystopian. It's not like the uneducated aren't a problem. The attraction of the uneducated to low brow entertainment is one factor that turned a reality tv star into the president. Bannon got his start investing in gold farming for gamers and saw what the power of gamer culture could be as a political force. Breitbart is in part an attempt to draw them into right wing politics.

These people still have the right to vote. You're missing a powerful degenerative force in our society if you can't see the problem of the uneducated who can't tell the difference between the slight liberal bias of the NYT and the outright lies of Breitbart and Infowars. More than not being able to tell the difference, they seem to prefer the lies.

The old joke about the future of factory employment is:

• Computer controlled robots do the work.
• A human is hired to feed the factory dog.
• The dog is trained to keep the man from interfering with the equipment.

And, you know... isn't the bright side of this that factory work kind of sucks? Isn't part of the point of what's been going on that if we can spare people from spending their lives sewing shoes together for Nike, we should?

Yes, like you've pointed out many times many of what we now see as problems will just disappear as the problems in the future. No one will care about whether or not free trade deals exist when all the factories come back and there's still no jobs since most of the workers are robots.

Well, we disagree about whether the only manufacturing work available now is for the highly skilled but I share your view that automation and technology advances are reducing the need for labor worldwide.  One solution, which I'm not sure I support, is much higher taxes on the wealthy with an income sufficient to lead a comfortable life guaranteed for all.   At this point, I'd raise taxes to perhaps 1936 levels, guarantee health care, education, and retirement, impose a stiff and rising fossil fuels tax with collections rebated evenly to all Americans with a significant chunk set aside to help struggling people around the world.  I'd also strengthen protections for unions so they can organize low-wage service employees and I'd definitely impose barriers to trade in the expectation that doing so would lead to higher demand for labor here.  What would you do?

IT IS ADICTIVE, IS IT NOT?

hahahhah

There's so much to respond to here:

Regarding NAFTA, in your last post you argued that you weren't just talking about "free" trade, you were talking about how things were getting better around the world.  Therefore, you wrote, I shouldn't be constantly (allegedly) pointing out how bad things were.  You identified Mexico City as one of the places that are important to you.  (Cuba and Wichita don't make the grade for some reason.)  I noted that despite your Panglossian viewpoint, things weren't going so well in Central America's largest city 24 years after Bill Clinton signed off on NAFTA.  You have ignored this point altogether. 

Per the Sierra Club: "Fifteen years later, NAFTA has created a legacy where corporate profits are promoted at the expense of environmental safeguards, health protections, and workers’ rights. While NAFTA’s impacts have been felt in all three countries, Mexico has been most negatively affected."

Regarding the general environmental impact of increased trade outside North America, it is a truism that flying or shipping finished goods thousands of miles by diesel-powered ship or truck is worse for the environment than manufacturing them with local inputs close to their point of sale to the ultimate consumer.  Likewise, it is a truism that Americans have control over our environmental laws but not those in other countries.

Regarding the specific impact of "free" trade with China, this is from the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns in 2015.  All the facts stated are sourced.

In just the first seven years of its membership in the WTO, 2.4 million manufacturing jobs were moved from the U.S. to China, according to the Economic Policy Institute. China’s lack of environmental protections, which helped lower production costs, was a draw for many transnational corporations. President Bill Clinton’s chief trade negotiator, Mickey Kantor, later admitted, "We made a big mistake" by not including environmental safeguards in trade negotiations with China.

But not only trade policies have contributed to China’s increasing pollution. U.S. and multilateral financial institutions helped finance at least 20 coal power plants in China between 1994 and 2009, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

The result has been a marked increase in greenhouse gas emissions, from 2.2 billion tons of carbon in 1990 to 9.9 billion tons in 2012. While the U.S. and Europe proudly announce small decreases in their greenhouse gas emissions in recent years, the WorldWatch Institute and others estimate that about one-third of China’s emissions come from the production and export of cheap goods to the U.S. and Europe.

The results for Chinese citizens have been striking. Recently, an eight-year old girl died of lung cancer caused, according to government officials, by the intense smog in her city. Close to 60 percent of China’s underground water is polluted by the intensive industrial production. In response the Chinese government plans to build dozens of "coal bases" in rural areas that will convert coal into cleaner-burning liquid fuels, chemicals and electricity that will be shipped for use in major cities. The process to extract these materials requires huge amounts of energy, which releases greenhouse gases (GHGs), with more gases released in the transport to and use in urban centers. While likely to reduce pollution and smog in most cities, the GHGs released by this plan might possibly be double the current amount.

You contend that the TPP wouldn't make things worse because moving manufacturing from China to Vietnam wouldn't change anything.  The assumption underlying this point is that I support the status quo.  I don't.  I support tariffs that  would reduce the total cost of distributing American-made goods in America below that of distributing comparable foreign-made goods in America.

Regarding your insistence that industrialization has left China and India more equal places, in 2015 the IMF reported otherwise.

New Delhi: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that both India and China face the social risk of growing inequality.

By implication, it is suggesting that there is a problem with the redistribution of incomes in both these economies as high economic growth rates are not reducing inequality.

In its regional economic outlook for Asia and Pacific, IMF said that Asian countries are unable to replicate the “growth with equity” miracle and pointed out that inequality has only increased in the past two and a half decades, lowering the effectiveness of growth to combat poverty and preventing the building of a substantial middle class.