tv Effects of Globalization CSPAN April 28, 2017 3:22am-4:37am EDT
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>> a panel of academics and public policy analysts recently explored the role the united states should play in today's world order. hosted by the ethics center and bard colleges globalization and interns affairs program, this is an hour. so now it is my very great pleasure to bro dues tonight's moderator, mr. steven greenhouse. he was a reporter for the "new york times" for 31 years. he spent his last 19 years as their labor and workplace reporter covering topics ranging from poverty among the nation's farm workers to fight for 15 to disasters in bang la tesh. he is author of the award winning book "the big squeeze, tough times for the american worker." please give a warm welcome to mr. steven greenhouse. [ applause ]
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>> good evening. welcome, everyone, to this evening interesting and important panel discussion. it is so bright here, i forgot my sunglasses. sorry. we're discussing a very hot topic, made hotter by the current president. does globalization only serve elites. globalization is, of course, in the news. president trump has railed against it, even as chinese companies are offering to invest $400 million in the fifth avenue building owned by his son-in-law's family. that's an example of globalization. we see article after article about how globalization has hurt workers in youngstown, dayton and detroit, even as economists strongly agree that globalization and free trade spur economic growth. those who rail against globalization are often beneficiaries of globalization as they wear gap jeans made in mexico or wal-mart shirts made in bangladesh or neiman marcus apparel made in italy while
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using mobile phones assembled in china. for the big show. we have an excellent panel of experts to discuss globalization tonight. steven chunk is president of the world trade center los angeles. he previously served as the los angeles secretary general of foreign affairs and trade under mayor eric garcetti and director of international trade for port of los angeles. catherine stone is an expert on labor and employment law at the ucla school of law. she was awarded a fwug enhypothetice guggenheim award. jury railway nichols burg focuses on asian economies. he works on the and aer son school's economic modelling and forecasting of the california and u.s. economies. kati zuwaman is founder and ceo of next trade group, a firm that helps government, multi-lateral development banks and fortune 500 companies shape their public
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policy and lending strategies in support of trade and obligation. so we'll start with a question for jerry. so president trump said last june in a campaign speech in pennsylvania, a state where there are many shuttered factories and steel mills, then candidate trump said globalization who made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy, but it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache. what is your reaction to the presidential remarks? >> well, when you think about globalization, you know, you have to ask the question, isn't it obvious and woe jue just say and kind of get to the deception here. the reason it is not so obvious is that the data are actually really convoluted because there are a lot of things going on. there's one major event going on
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that keeps us from getting to the root of this in terms of the data. that is at the same time as we've had had globalization, that is over the last 15 years because we didn't see this with the early times of nafta. but over the last 15 years, during that same time what we've seen is the rise of the robots. that has meant that firms are substituting capital for labor and for the returns to capital are increasing, but also those are complements with information -- information intensive workers. so you have kind can of a bifurcation of workers. in those information workers are also seeing benefits. so we're seeing much mor more inequality just on that and that would occurred without any trade. when we look at the data, these things are mixed together and you have to kind of unravel what
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is more important in order to get to solutions. >> so i want to take a quote from bernie sanders in an open ed op-ed in the "new york times." he said in the last 16 years and more than 4.8 well paid manufacturing jobs disappeared. much is related to disastrous trade agreements. i will pose this to you, catherine. then sanders added, the global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the word. this is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. >> okay. well, to pick up -- and i somewhat differ a little bit with what jerry said. i think it is certainly true there's been a huge drop in manufacturing employment, particularly since about the year 2000. i think there has been a huge rides in productivity which is reflected -- which reflect a big boost in automation technology,
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but there's also a big impact of trade. i think different economists have -- or economists have differed as to which is more responsible and how many jobs, and i have seen estimates that talk about anywhere from 2 million to 3 1/2 million of lost manufacturing jobs being the result of trade and the other 1 1/2 million being the result of technology and other economists would put the numbers vastly lower, responsibility for trade and more for technology. but i think there's no doubt that trade has played a big role. so from that point of view to at least -- is it only benefitting elites? no, consumers benefit and some workers benefit but there's a big cost. the problem with globalization or global trade is there are winners and losers, and that the losers haven't been adequately compensated or haven't been adequately supported or in any way sort of benefitted by social
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policies or other kinds of economic programs that might make them winners as well. >> a question for katia. when i read tom friedman's "the world is flat." i came away with the feeling that globalization is great for companies. they could invest anywhere in the world, in bangladesh, shh relaunch a -- india. it is great for them and the bot many on line. not great for workers in the united states. might be great for workers in sri lanka or india. i want to ask you, do you think globalization benefits the elite mainly disproportionately, does it hurt workers in the industrial work, and what are the effects for workers in the developing world? >> i think tying the two together, tied to both of the
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is the results of these studies are very textbook. trade, in theory is supposed to have wide and dispersed gains for all countries, all people. but concentrated losses and that's what we've seen in studies. so indeed there are some negative impacts but on the balance, i would sides with economies that have in multiple studies found that the competitive impact on u.s. economy of imports coming in are companies having to get more efficient has generated income gains for all of us. all of us are $30,000 richer every year because of the shifting and shorting r sorting through the u.s. economy and we have to compensate workers. we are at the verge of an
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opportunity in the u.s. economy in particular as well as at the global level where digatization is enabling people from every walk of life become, for instance sellers on e bay as workers on platforms like upward, provide services to companies all around the world. . we see companies selling online globally. an average u.s. company, 5% of u.s. companies export on average to about two countries. when you look at ebay sellers, 99% of them export and they export to 19 countries. these are the new drivers of globalization and these are the new kinds of companies that we should encourage workers to graduate into and contribute towards and ride on this new globalization. >> a questioning for steven est.
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the people who are hurt the most, the squeakiest wheel. i want to discuss globalization california. california -- the port of l.a., the port of long beach, the nation's largest ports, sillicon valley there's a little exporting. so can you talk about in the state of california and los angeles who were the winners in globalization and who were the winners? and does the state really benefit by and large from globalization. >> i think california as a whole has benefitted. there are a lot of discussions about how we're the victims and we're the ones hurt by this. the united states have actively participated and dominated in the global efforts. we set the monetary currency and for the global trade to happen and now that there's competition
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60/70 years later now we're the victims. yes, there's winners and losers. but there were losers from the very beginning 60/70 years ago. california, because of our proximity to asia, because of the manufacturing base in china, 30/40 years ago that started building up. 33% of all cargo comes into l.a. and long beach. from the logistic trade sector really benefitted greatly from it and our agricultural aspect from california, we export a lot of those goods internationally as well. overall, we've done quite well. and i want to take a note to something said earlier before. i think you mentioned that senator sanders mentioned that the free trade agreement has created these factories are
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empty. the one note i want to make sure that we know is the main target i guess of why we're seeing these decline in some of these factories is attributed to china. please note we don't have a free trade agreement to china. >> another question for jerry. so let's imagine that we're all taking a stroll into a walmart store and we meet several shoppers. one buying a samsung tv made in china or a pair of jeans made in mexico or shoes in brazil. and let's say we pose the question to the walmart shopper. it only serves the elites. how do you think they'd answer and how would you respond to that question? what would you tell them? >> first of all how did you get my shopping list. i mean i think their answer is going to be yes. of course it does.
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>> even if they're living in dayton, ohio. >> especially if they're living in dayton, ohio, maybe less if they're living in santa monica. yes, globalization hurts workers and helps elites. so the question is how do you explain? the gains from trade are really easy to explain. i do this with my mba. it takes about half an hour and at least most of them get it. but the issue when you look at the gains of trade, they go to different places. and the problem is with policy, we treat all industrial workers who lost their jobs the same and i think that was a point that was made earlier that some industrial workers in their 30s are quite prepared to move into the new economy with appropriate guidance. some are like tom joed and the grapes of wrath and that takes a
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different kind of policy and i think our policies are policies that use hammers when they ought to be using skcalpels. i want to make one other quick point and that is that u.s. manufacturing, some of its movaled abroad but here in california we're manufacturing about 160% of the goods we were manufacturing in 1990 with only 60% of the workers. so a lot of things happening in this economy and trade is one of them but it's only one of them. >> i have a question for catherine. so let's say we're taking a stroll in youngstown, ohio and you're walking down main street and find all these 60 year olds that used to work in steel mills and are laid off.
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you say economists say it gives consumers choice and lifts the overall economy. we know what ne'er going to tell you. what in your view should be done specifically to help them? >> thain places like youngstown ohio or upstate new york where i lived for many years or outside of pittsburgh or detroit you're going to see people devastated, particularly people who have manufacturing jobs in the past, high paid jobs with good benefits, often with unions. those jobs are gone. they either have no jobs or if they have jobs in the service sector, they tend to be low paid. they're working at fast food establishments, they're working part time in retail or they're working in home health aids. so what's happened is that high paid jobs have left and low paid
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jobs have not just filled in the gaps but multiplied. there's been a huge shift to service jobs but the low end service jobs have multiplied and are continuing to do so. they're projected to increase tremendously in the next 10 years and manufacturing jobs are predicted to continue their decline. and this gets back i think to something about what should be done. there's nothing in the nature of the universe that says the home health aid has to be a bad job. there could be steady hours, there could be benefits. a union. and so the fact that people have different jobs -- i mean in our economy it's true that they're very low paid and it's very hard for people to support themselves or pay their rent if they're only earning $10 an hour. 24 hours a week. but there's nothing that says
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that couldn't change and one thing that would be changing some of our labor laws. so they would have more bargaining power. we also might think about various other kinds of retraining or social benefits that make it possible for people to reenter the work force and to get some bargaining power so that when they actually get new jobs, the jobs are better than jobs they lost rather than it being a steady decline. >> so like many professional economists you sing the praise of globalization that it helps increase efficiency, licft economic growth world wide, gives consumers more choice. but why then does globalization get such a bad rap? why are donald trump and bernie sanders attacking globalization if it's a general good?
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>> it's an easy target, first of all. easy to point to. hey, my factory moved to china. but it's very much what jerry said. so much of this has been changing technology. china, the factories are in china are less and less run by miniature workers. there are robots, 3d printers there as well. it's a global fenphenomenon. some of you may remember around the time of the election there was a new york times story about two ladies in a carrier factory in indianapolis and this was a time when there was talk about carrier moving to mexico to manufacture there and these ladies said if trump doesn't deliver on those tariffs, we're going to vote a different way in
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the midterm election. 150 miles down the road, there's a guy called travis. he started his own business out of college, 2004, retailed for motorcycle products and couple of years later, he started to sell online. and today -- he started that business with $7,000. today he exports to 130 countries and 40% of his sales come from export and these stories repeat themselves from india, el salvador, all around the planet. these are the people essentially riding on globalization. we're on the verge of a historic period where for the first time it's posable to have a medieval town square at the global level. we are right now at the cusp of this and we can do this but it takes concerted policy in the u.s. and globally of trade
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facilitation, all this has to align as well as trade policy. >> germany is in theory a more globalized nation in the united states because a higher percentage of its gdp goes to trade, imports and exports. globalization does not have as bad a rap in germany as it does in the united states. so i ask why does globalization get such a bad rap here compared to other countries and i think one reason is we do not, as a nation, do enough for the losers in globalization. let me ask catherine, steven. why do you think -- what about the united states does enough to prevent us? >> to go back a little bit to first principals and his theory of competitive advantage. this is the 200th year anniversary of that publication
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and this shows if you have countries even with vastly different resources and levels of wealth that they're both benefits by trade but it doesn't say anything about whether different groups within the countries are benefitted by trade and so all the benefits can go to the top and the theory is ag nostic on that. each nation is a black box. so the question of who benefits from trade is really a question whether there are distribution method in a nation. the question in the united states is we've made it harder to form unions. s the there's been a new massive work laws that make it hard to unionize.
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we've had ever since ronald regan federal policy to weaken unions and so i think that it's not a surprise that labor shared gdp has fallen, that unionization rates have fallen and that you get these workers who have lost in the global marketplace who aren't getting any resources or don't have the resources themselves to be empowered to protect themselves. >> i want to add to that and bring an aspect of culture into this. i was in germany in april going to the hanover trade show and i saw the innovation there. they're looking at the next generation. i think united states are entrepreneurs are very inovatesive, but as a whole, the united states, there's a mentality of america's number one. number one in what? obesity? right? there are a number of different issues that we have but we're
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proud of our past and to the story earlier about the two ladies in ohio was it? indiana. they were looking that they want trump to bring back their old job, whereas this other gentleman down the street is looking towards the future. the solution i think is what you're seeing as well. especially with the auto manufacturing. we already know you can blame mexico for this. but a lot of the part components are going to mexico for the final assembly and 60% of their manufactured goods -- so we're integrating in their approach. so it's hard to pick it apart and blame someone. so it must be their fault. i think that cultural aspect has contributed to it. but if we do what cathy was saying earlier and even retrain our workers to know about e commerce, to know 95% of the
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consumers live outside the united states. 75% of the purchasing power is outside the united states. america is not going to be number one. if we continue to think we're number one, we don't depend on the global economy. taking that view will get house to step where we'll do nothing about it. if we go america was great, i'm afraid we might look too far in the past and other countries will take off without us. >> a couple of comments relating to our discussion and one is there is an economic theory that tells us who the winners and losers are. >> i didn't hear. >> it's the hectra lean theory of international trade. the unfortunate thing is it says we will have increasing inequality in the u.s. and decreasing inequality in places like china but the fact is there's increasing inequality
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elsewhere. that's why i said a number of things going on that are kind of important and the second comment is that there is no case in the history of -- economic history of the world where protectionism has improved the lives of the country. in fact, you can take argentina in 1911 was the 9th richest country in the world and it kind of hasn't moved much since then and that's because of a number of reasons but protectionism was one of them. and then to your earlier question. i think it's easy for a politicians to go and say somebody took your job and it's hard for them to go and say the world has moved on. your job is not coming back and here are the kinds of things we're going to do to help you move into the new economy. and i would submit the first one is an easier way to get votes.
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>> you're cynical. steven raised the issue of culture and i wanted to ask a question about cultural and globalization. we here a lot a lot of people are unhappy, manufacturing jobs have been lost to globalization, but here in hollywood, i imagine globalization has helped create a lot of jobs. >> when we talk about globalization and international trade, we can't just think of imports and exports. we have to think about foreign direct investments. by the way this pattern has repeated itself from japan 40 years ago, but let's just focus on china for a second. real estate wise, we've seen a downtown boom like we haven't seen in a long time. a lot of it has to do with major chinese investment.
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>> has it effected the elites or the nonelites? >> the elites, the investors who will basically gain a lot of return obviously are going to benefit greatly. however, there are going to be construction workers, hotel workers and we're creating new hotels and new residential residence and these hotel units will support our convention center. now we're able to attract big convention we weren't able to attract before. you look at las vegas. they're able to attract comi-con and other conferences. within the two mile radius of the staple center, you don't have enough hotel rooms to sustain it. so now investment is creating more jobs in various sectors. so yes, i think the elites again
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are going to benefit more. however, the common people i guess, are also going to benefit. as well. not to the same extent but don't get me wrong, this is not everybody's going to win. in globalization with competition, is someone will lose. it's basically what do we do with those people who are not going to be winning? >> construction is one of the more rapidly growing sectors in terms of employment in california with the past couple of years. and those are good middle class jobs. so it's not only the elites that have been supported in downtown l.a. there has been a drop off in construction wages nation wide over time that is no longer quite the path to success that
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it used to be for high school graduates and the other jobs that come in, unfortunately are very low paid jobs. the problem isn't that there aren't jobs. the bigger problem is these jobs don't give the kind of stability and life that jobs used to and it's not just trade. i would never advocate that we adopt some protectionest policies because i do think that's a track for poverty. but we need focus on distributional measures that correct or somehow compensate for the effects and i think one of the effects and it's not just from trade but from automation and managerial theories have changed so that firms no longer necessarily want long-term stable employees. they want flexibility, they want to change their skill mix because they have global
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competition, all these things translate into human resources practices that having a long term job for your lifetime is not available anymore. and we need social policies then that fill in those gaps that somehow deal with people as they make transitions in their lives. >> i'm sorry. i forgot to answer your question. hollywood. i was going to get jerry to answer. >> so, as an example, there's a company that invested $3.5 billion at legendary pictures. so that's a big investment and obviously what this infusion of capital allows legendary films to do more films. second part is actually allows us to start partnering with wanda who has a big presence in china. by the way they bought the amc theater chain and we can potentially start entering the
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chinese market. >> and beyond investment, exported movies, sillicon valley exporting all sorts of services all around the world. again, does that only benefit the shareholders of apple and facebook and google? or does it very much benefit the nonelite? >> the interesting thing about services is that we tend to have a trade surplus in services and a deficit in goods. and that's because we deal more in cognitive work, more in information. and california disproportiona disproportionately so. does it only benefit the elites? well, it benefits the well educated and the well educated, that's that information skill class and there again that does not benefit the industrial workers in the midwest who have lost their jobs due to a whole
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host of things including globalization, automation, a change in the economy and changing tastes. and so you have that group of workers that are hurt by this major transformation from an industrial economy to an information economy. we've seen this before in economic history and they're painful and sometimes countries don't survive them and sometimes they do. >> you've not yet mentioned a word about agriculture, which is in ways very globalized. it used globalized labor from countries south of the border, exports highly and california, like every other state imports a lot of food as well. yet donald trump and others condemn the use of immigrants in
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agricultur agriculture. ical someone discuss is globalization good for agriculture, are people attacking it unfairly? >> so of the u.s. ports, the port of oakland is the export port, it exports more than it imports. and that's agricultural goods from central valley. so there is this issue about farm workers and of the farm workers engaged in harvesting, so you have to take out those using computers to drive tractors in the midwest, about half of them are undocumented or as i was corrected, many of them are documented, just not with the correct documented. and if government policy runs to mass deportations, what we're going to see is higher food prices and more food imports.
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so if we're concerned about globalization because foreign workers are going to be doing jobs that people in the u.s. were doing. yes, they're going to be picking food in their countries and shifting it to the u.s. costing other jobs like transportation and food processing here in the u.s. we had one similar experience in 1941/'42. mostly 1942 when about 40% of those picking vegetables and fruits in california were ethnic japanese and during the internment, that disappeared. well, in 1942 high school students went on victory vacations, which meant that they went aught to pick strawberries and lettuce and so on. and you dood that because of the war effort. you were being patriotic. i don't think we can have
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victory vacations today. >> i see in today's headlines that president trump tends to cut the state department budget by 28% and he's withdrawn from tpp, he hates nafta. i see he's talking about withdrawing from the world trade organization. china takes advantage of us in trade, germany's surplus is so big, it means they take ed advantage of us in trade. mexico screwed us in nafta and took advantage of us. and i see president trump and steve bannon creating a fortress america and maybe trying to stop the world and turn globalization back. are you -- i mean, am i imagining this? am i paranoid and if they really try to form a fortress america and putting a break on trade and somehow stopping globalization,
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will that be good for america, bad for america? bad for consumers, good for consumers? >> election was going on there were these studies and simulations done by economists what would happen if we put out tariff barriers. as was advocated by the candidate trump at the time and the result was in a few months we'll be in a recession because we're so integrated in north america and globally that we have supply chains and foreign direct investment that benefits us, workers, the elite. but our economy is so integrated that for us to put up tariff barriers, we're starting to have the same effects we experienced in argentina as in the 1930s. what i worry mostly about is
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perceptions from other countries or their retaliation or whatever activities they take or actions they takes a a result of us turning protectionest and perhaps simply that china and others will eat our lunch, integrate more with trading partners, get more of the foreign direct investment, more market access to other markets and removes all the access that we have gained in 70 years of very intelligent trade policy. >> i think it would be a terrible mistake to pull out of all these trade agreements and the problem isn't trade. if you don't have agreements for trade, then all you have is unilateral force, so agreements are definitely a belter way to do it if you're go having to trade at all. and the problem is that the trade agreements that we have, have not been very protective of
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labor conditions here or in the developing world. so for example the wto has not built labor standards into its trade requirements and the international labor organization has refused to also take its labor standards and make them enforceable in terms of trade sanctions or whatever. at the same time nafta, which has this labor agreement has been very weak and hasn't been effective at all. there hasn't been a single case that has gone to completion, challenging any labor practice under nafta and those that can be challenged are very narrow set of circumstances to begin with. and so the problem is that the trade agreements that we have protected the movement of capital. they've protected intellectual property, work on protecting investments and there's a lot more out there trying to work on
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investment treaties and they've done very little. some of the bilateral agreements have labor standards built into them. on the whole it has not been built with a view towards protecting labor that same time we protect the movement of capital and intellectual property and that's what we ought to be focusing on, not getting rid of the trade agreements. >> i want to jump into the point of say we do walk away from these trade agreements. we've manufactured before but what happened during the in between phase? how do you capitalize to invest fast enough to train your workers and get the supplies and who you going to buy it from once the barriers come up because they're retaliating. so the idea that we can manufacture here, of course we can, it's just coming at a cost. you can no longer go to walmart.
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your ohio person. are you willing to pay $35 for the t-shirt you were getting for $5? you're going to get a manufacturing job but who's going to pay you in the it years to get ready for it? those are the questions i would like the administration to lay out the plan and we're waiting for it. >> two comments. one, your question. a bumper sticker that went something like this, just because i'm paranoid doesn't mean no one's after me. >> the car behind you is after you. >> if we were to take this tact of withdrawing from the world, it would crash the auto industry because it has been stated our auto industry is so integrate would the mexican auto industry, that it's not -- i mean, eventually we'll start building cars ourselves but it's hard to
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drive a ford f-150 without a motor. and it's a little hard to use an iphone if you have to assemble it yourself. so we have a number of industries that would crash. we would have real serious repercussions, both for labor and for capital such that i think we would see a change in government. >> two quick questions before we take questions from the odd ynls. as someone who's written lot about labor over the years. a bigging concern is workers over the years, bangladesh, china are treated. in bangladesh, the workers are paid very little. there were these hor endess disasters. the building collapsed, 130 people died. 119 workers died in a fire. fox con which is the main
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manufacture of iphones in the world is -- was -- has been known for very bad and unsafe conditions. it often seems to me -- the industrial world, the advanced world is takedinged a vantdage of these countries. what could be, should be done about this? >> well, again, i don't want to talk about the cultural aspect. we look at the poor undeveloped countries and basically we're taking advantage of them but if what if i told you right here in los angeles, there's an organization called asian american advanced justice l.a. fought the workers trapped in el monte. the slave labor is right here. it's internationalized. i'm not justifying that it's good there but it's also happening here. what needs to be done is public
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policy across the board that does not allow slave obviouslier to happen either here nor there. the transpacific partnership has a clause for the first time in terms of labor and it's not the best but it's the first time we're able to move forward. that's progress. it forces the country trying to get into tpp they have to adopt a certain labor standard. and so in order for vietnam to join the tpp, they have to change their constitution to allow the unionization of workers. those are the types of policies that globally we should encourage and have our elected officials take a more social justice focus stance to make sure, as catherine was saying many times before, that it's not basically looking that leads and making sure we protecting the most vulnerable population across the board pch. >> i think the tpp does have very good labor protections.
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it's a model among labor agreements. the fact we pulled out of it is probably going to collapse now and so that may not survive but i think the idea there was to -- there are internationally recognized labor rights and standards that have been promulgated by the international labor organization. and there's no reason they couldn't be built into these trade agreements. it doesn't mean everyone has to have the same minimum wage. it might mean more than the right to protect unions or child labor and should protect against forced labor and so arts one thing to make these enforceable to have monitoring mechanisms and enforcement mechanisms and there's no reason they couldn't build this in as part of the architecture of a global trading
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order and i think that's what we need oo be moving toward. >> last question. steven and catherine how it would be improved. what do you think should be done for the losers to make it less painful, not just for americans but people around the world as well who are hurt by globalization? >> okay. i'll start. we've talked about the winners compensating the losers and it's very clear whose incomes have been going up the last 15 years and whose have not. and it's pretty clear where you would find the funds. it's a little harder to design the policies. maybe it's a little harder to get those funds.
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it's harder to find the policies because there isn't a blanket policy. individuals are different and cercum circumstances are different. so that's one aspect of your question. the second, which i think was addressed with respect to labor standards is true about pollution. so if we think it's bad to put led in the water because it's bad for our children, we ought to think the same thing about chinese children and bangladeshy children. and so -- the notion of fair trade is yes, you have comparative advantage in tex tiles but you're not going to get the comparative advantage by not incorporating the cost.
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the full cost of production. right? so we're not going to buy cheap clothes on the backs of children of bangladeshy children. those are the kind of agreements that would fix some of the inequities that would fix with globalization. we have a domesticing policy for those that go through the transformation and international policy to get better allocation of resources across the country. >> should i just take questions from the audience? >> we are kind of facing a choice here. do we want an america that protects these workers whose jobs have probably been taken over by robots or by trade or whatever issue. or do we want an america where there are guys like travis with $7,000, started an online business and started a global seller. do we want the world is moving
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everybody around the planet, providing services or selling goods online. and we start with education. we have a amount of digital knowledge and skills. so that's number one. i will also start with trade policy as was mentioned, tpp and only had labor laws. it also has a structure that enabled guys like this to get to other markets, use their junewty, use all that we have here in terms of technology, in terms of our ip, in terms of our innovation. we have an ample supply here. how do we enable people like him to become global exporters essentially. there's actually studies that
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show anybody from anywhere you can become an exporter. you can become a designer. somewhere in the middle of america where factories have gone and you're much less location dependent than you were before. and run a global business essentially. now, do we want to encourage guys like that and ladies like that or do we want to protect our economy? >> so take question from the audience. i see anyone or anything. >> please raise your hands and we'll come to you. you would please say your first and last name before you ask your question, we would greatly appreciated as this session is being recorded and will be published on our website and rebroadcast on c-span at a later
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date. i believe lewis has your first question. >> my name is aovi. and my question is about the last book in regards to education and environment. like your talking about accessibility like people like travis becoming multimillionaires or whatever butt but education is super expensive. so where does the accessibility come in? and i want to know more about globalization and the impact on the environment. i was at -- prior to brexit. and you had a few diplomats talking about tpp to the audience and they didn't have answers to fracking for example. the clause was included in it or
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not. so i'm curious to know how these trade pallies -- liking do they think about the environment or not? >> thank you very much. jerry. >> let's start with education. i think the critical issue is work force education. and the way in which technology is going to change our world, it's no longer going to be the case as it was when i was growing up that you finished school and graduated. and then just stayed. but not everyone stayed at a university. at any rate the education is life long education. i think it's actually a growth
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field but in terms of policies this is the most critical issue for a globalized world. >> the big issue is that as inequality is increased, the people on top seem reluctant to fund subsidized public education and so in ways increased inequality is making the education picture worse, i think. >> i would agree with that. you're going in the wrong direction. >> this is one of the distributional policies that we need to address if we really want to have an agalitarian globalization, then we need to make education available and we can't make it just something only the elites can pay for and squeeze out public education. we should be going the opposite way. >> we also need it for practical purpose. a lot of the companies investing
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in the united states come here because of the talent and there's an education gap. so they keep going after the ucla students, the cal tech students, the stanford students. there can be folks going to santa monica college that have the full ability to code. so it's a mix of everything and if our political system doesn't fund the educational cyst, not only at the college level but trade tech community college level, it has to be a comprehensive round so we have a supply of trained and educated individuals to supply the demand for our workers. >> i have to say in that regard that here in california our legislators understands this, our governor understands it. funding is always difficult but at least they understand the problem and know the direction it should go in and are trying to nudge it in that direction.
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unlike some states such as kansas that needs their supreme court to tell them to minimally fund k-12 or texas is cutting and louisiana. so i think we're fortunate in california but u.s. as a whole has not adopted the same view of the importance of education for the globalized economy. >> the other thing i want to add and jerry started on bringing up the issue of lifetime learning because in the old days you would get your education by the time you were in your early 20s and would last you your whole career. and it doesn't do that examine. so you need periodic opportunities for retraining and somebody has to pay for them and for the time you're there. and so we might think of retweaking our unemployment insurance system to make it something where people can get some kind of support, maybe not
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to live like elites but at least to survive while they're going through the kind of necessary retraining that today's labor market requires. >> next question. >> can we add the environmental issue. it's very important. globalization in some ways when we talk about the labor issue, let's look at the microcosm of los angeles. don't forget in the '60s/'70s. we were known as the smog capitol in the united states and a lot of that manufacturing has left us and gone to china. so the pollution issues are shifting over there. again tpp is not the perfect solution for everything in life but the thing that's attempted to address environmental issues by talking bouts antiillegal logging, antiillegal fishing and things. but the things they didn't get to carbon emissions and other things that's very important.
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the question on the bigger level is should a trade policy be addressing everything? sh should a financial policy be addressing labor? that accord in paris by the way should be the standard for environmental regulation. those are the challenges we have to face and the it things people are looking to tpp and other trade agreements to resolve when they might be multiprong approach rather than focusing using the trade agreement as an avenue to address your issues. >> this may sound a little futurestic but i think it's closer than any of us realize. technology is changing this. in the 1990s/2000s. globalization was essentially about these giant supply chains being create by companies like
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apple, and assemble them into ipads and iphones in china and export those to u.s. or europe and that created enormous amount of trade in terms of the volume of movement and that created pollution, congestion, what have you. now we have 3d printing and this is changing the game for parts and components. no more have to be transported around the planet. you can print them on site. and i think there's been a lot of inthuzy asm. and we have parcels are just growing 30/40% every year there's more and more volume in our trade circulating on these little packages being exported around the planet. so you have this pressure there.
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but there are interesting things happening with 3d printing with things that can help streamline the supply chains in internation trade and reduce impacts on the environment. i thank you very much for this opportunity. my question is about redistribution and compensation. and as jerry mentioned i know that there's not much fund and when we think about fund, we think about multinational companies like apple or starbucks not paying the taxes here in the u.s. for example and that is i think one of the reasons why globalization recently is getting such a beat. do you think there's an issue with tax policies regarding multinational companies? do you think there's a better system and a lot of the ideas about labor laws, all of them are from public sector. do you think there's anything from the business side we can do
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to show that globalization have more merits? >> there are many questions in there. let's try to break it apart. first can the private sector do something about the labor issues anduct eother issues? yes, they can. and i think they will with our actions. our purchasing power becomes the action. i'll go back to the environment regulation a little bit. girl scouts cookies. remember they were making them a comal years ago and found out it was made with palm oil and in indonesia they're burning these forests and scraping it clean to get the palm oil and you start seeing orphaned orangutans. i was just crying on tv.
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and so girl scouts react to that. so they change the whole dynamic. the purchasing power becomes that aspect. i think all of global consumers have the power to do so but we can't just be complacent and say i don't know about it. we can know about it and we should know about it. i agree with you it shouldn't be just government policies because then basically you're going to have a big batbtle between the public and the private sector. and tax policies. yes. tax policies are always going to be tricky. for me on the personal level, i benefitted from the public education system. i drive on the road of los angeles. i benefitted from the fact that public policies have created cleaner air for me.
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so believe in this atmosphere. so i think the company should do the same thing. if they want to reap the benefits of what they're getting out of this, then they need to contribute willingly and i think there should be a more just system. how do we do it internationally? i think that's why the globalization aspect is to get us all on the similar standard. we're not going to be there by fighting with each other and not talking to each other. we have to come up with a unified system, at least for communication to make sure we're not poach frumg eaing from each. would it be better for us if we knew texas is poaching from us? would you feel any better that 4,000 jobs, toyota are leaving us and going to plano, texas. it's not internation snl but
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it's still the same thing. in the microlevel we're still experiencing it but not attacking texas the same way. texas has a much -- i guess -- more open tax system in and allow people to flow that way. it's a complex issue. i don't think anybody can have a single solution if it's so easily available, it would have been solved. >> on the other hand these states like tennessee and texas provide fewer of the social services that you value. and by the way california has added more jobs than they have. tax policy is complicated. what the european union did successfully which is both good domestically between states as policy is tax harmonizatioharmo.
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and each jurisdiction gets their fair share of taxes. but in the u.s. we have kansas that doesn't want to provide social services and so you need differential taxes and that does cause a sorting of firms and you have that internationally as well. >> california has a better educational system than kansas and that atracts a lot of investments and businesses. >> it does. if you read my little article, you will see that. >> my name is kent tujy and i guess my question is regarding trade agreements. recently britain had the brexit vote because they didn't want the european union decide all of their trade agreements and laws and such. is there a disadvantage to a
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group trade agreement verses bilateral? >> one of the things that happened in brexit was a concern about sovereignty and this is a concern also in the antitrade political movements in europe and you hear this also now in the u.s. with that, with trump is that we lose our sovereignty, that we have other tribunals that tell us what we have to do about environmental standards or various other kinds of things. and so there is this concern about sovereignty and the question is what's the appropriate level of decision make sng what things do we want decided at a multilateral level and environmental protections and tax policy? there's lot of things that makes sense to do multilaterally, which doesn't mean every single decision gets made in some
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invisible organization that you don't have any control over. so i think that the problem was of sovereignty gets raised as people feel they've lost control of things that matter to them and so sometimes that gets exaggerated in people's minds. that was the brexit concern. and now i've actually forgoten the rest of your question. >> i was just wondering if there were any advantages or disadvantages? >> bilateral agreements are limited. and it's much easier to monitor them and to enforce them and if you're the united states t you're the tough person in the room and you're dealing with this little country, you can actually dictate the terms of it
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and so there has been a move to bilateral trade agreement because the u.s. dek dictate the terms. it's much harder when you're working multilaterally. but if you want to come up with some kind of regime that does deal with these big issue like environment, you need think multilaterally. >> we're going to jump to our final question right here in the front. >> charley wu. in california, northern california investment technology. so to create a lot of jobs. we invest in trade and logistic. we're getting a lot of low wage paying jobs. will los angeles end up being the loser in globalization? >> let me take the first stab at that? if you look at west los angeles, it looks in every way like
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sillicon valley. if you look at orange county at the western part and north county san diego, all look very much like northern california and what we're seeing in southern california is we remained a manufacturing substate or region much longer than the bay area did. and so our transformation is happening later. so yes, we had more losers here from globalization but we have lots of winners too. >> can i add to that as well. but the other thing is comparison of size and geography. san francisco is a fantastic city of 500,000 people. l.a. countsy is 10.2 million. greater los angeles reason, 18.4. so slight difference than the city of san francisco can sit
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inside it could fit inside probably santa monica region, right? >> santa monica and venice. >> yeah. >> and the economies look very similar. >> so when you compare that to that, yeah, we're the same. but if you look outside, of course. if you compare, let's bring salinas into the picture, compare them to other places here in san bernardino. you know, it's kind of comparing apples and oranges. >> i'll add to that, we've had this on silicon beach, and so forth, and as i looked at the latest numbers on venture capital, there's a lot of this happening in los angeles. there is a transformation happening a little later. but it's coming. snapchat ipo is hopefully feeling the enthusiasm. and the weather and all of that that we have here helping us along here as well. i think these economies are also poised for that digital era, and
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exports in the services and exports just by virtue of that. because of the entertainment industry as well. very natural alliance, right? and to enable that and bring some more venture capital here and push that out to the marketplace. very powerful. netflix is a primary example of a kind of entertainment digital company that is globalizing. and i think adding three times more users than any given day from the international markets from the u.s. so these stories will probably multiply is my hope. >> but to your point, los angeles had maybe the largest nondurable goods manufacturing sector of any region in the country. and non-durable goods manufacturing tends to be low-skilled. so that has been adversely affected by globalization. and so that's one of the things that we see in l.a., that really
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gives us that -- the impression that you described. it's a very real impression, and something that has been going on over the last 15 years. but particularly since the downturn in 2008. >> with the transformation that she was talking about, we're actually seeing more and more of that. so, for example, silicon valley bank has recently coming to southern california, santa monica, didn't even change their name. they want to be here because they know google is here, hulu is here, snapchat is here. and with all the investment, the integration between entertainment and tech. so you have video games. the gaming sector is growing here. you have ea. it's all growing-here. i think this transformation is happening quite a lot. but to one last point. we were talking about this entire night, it's been hard for me, because we're adopting this language of winners and losers. that we're going to win so much
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that we don't know what to do with ourselves. we've all lost a little bit, and that's a cycle of life. it's okay for us to basically sometimes gain a little and ease a little back. but basically to have the definitive term of you're either a winner and a loser. and if you're a loser, you're nobody. it's hard for me to swallow that. >> thank you. thank you, wonderful panelists. i don't know about you, but i learned a lot from these four. so let's thank them. >> and before we wrap, on behalf of the public square, with ewe would like to thank our friends at the japanese-american national museum for hosting us. and of course, all of you for spending time with us tonight. i invite all of you to stick around for the reception which is just down the hall from the lobby, in the democracy lab where you can continue this conversation with our fantastic panelists. let's give them another round of applause. [ applause ]
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this weekend book tv on c-span2 features include the evangelicals, the struggle to shape america, saturday at 5:00 p.m. eastern with pulitzer prize winning author talking about the evangelical movement in america. >> eventually it occurred to me that it was perfectly impossible to understand the evangelical right without understanding its history. and because it -- a lot of their doctrines, ideology, points of view make perfect sense in the context of the 19th century. >> senator elizabeth warren at 8:50 p.m. eastern on the current state of the middle class and what can be done to revive it. >> gina has worked several years now at walmart.
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and i asked gina, after telling a lot about her life story, what she built, how careful she had been, does gina think that she's still a middle class? and she said, i don't think there is a middle class in america anymore. if there was, i wouldn't have to go to the food pantry at the end of every month. >> the life of president richard nixon sunday at 3:45 p.m. eastern with author john farrell talking with david marinets. >> he was up to his neck. his loyalist attempted-the years to try to say it was deemed random cover-up, or dean and be halderman p -- they showed right from the start, he was going to play it rough the way that they played it. he was going to be tough, tough, tough. and it was a terrible downfall.
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