Some of the most iconic moments of the Trump campaign come when he stands somewhere in the rust belt, and shouts that he will bring back the jobs of the hapless unemployed or underemployed in the audience. The jobs they have lost are moderate to low skilled manufacturing, warehouse, and similar positions for the most part. He of course has no clue on how to do this, and offers no suggestions, other than tariff walls and trade wars, which historically have been disastrous, and have been studiously avoided since WW2. The point of my question was to bring this issue to stark relief: either one is going to do something nonsensical, like roll back technology, or isolate the nations with trade and literal walls, or else....face the fact that they are not going to come back, unless they come back to robot employees. And if you had read anything from realistic progressive sources, they would not have advocated destroying technology, but facing reality, and changing our views on work and compensation.
Yes, some unemployment is attributable to globalization, but it is not as simple as exporting job X to China, and telling the US worker X he is fired. US manufacturing output has continued to rise since the advent of the globalized economy, although employment in that industry has dropped. That tells us that we do not need nearly as many people any more to produce items, something we hardly needed to hear when contemplating cars being built by robots, ATMs instead of live bank tellers, internet travel booking instead of real travel agents, and on and on. And at any rate, these are jobs are not going to "come back", short of building walls and initiating a command economy, where the purchase of various goods and services is mandated by nationalism rather than economics.
OK, then you tell me. Bring back low skilled manufacturing jobs, pay a good living wage, and then do what? Compete with the rest of the world, or wall off the US? The US will hardly be a powerhouse of the world if it cannot compete on price with items made by cheap labour, or increasingly, even in places like China, computers. Selective tariffs tend to produce countermoves, which can spiral out of control.
Actually, he doesn't speak to these issues at all. He tends to avoid or change the subject when challenged, after he has delivered a couple of cliche one-liners, and for good reason. His exhortations have been roundly condemned by economists and those others with some knowledge in the field. I've included a couple of links from prominent economists who have something to say on the subject.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/?_r=0
Economist's View: Stiglitz: A Progressive Response to GlobalizationEconomist's View: Stiglitz: A Progressive Response to Globalization
