How much will San Francisco's Made In China bridge really cost?

[NNN0LHI]

http://prestowitz.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/06/27/cheap_is_expensive

Posted By Clyde Prestowitz Monday, June 27, 2011 - 6:09 PM

The Dutch have a saying: Goed Koop is Duur Koop, Cheap is Expensive.

That came to my mind yesterday as I read in the Sunday New York Times of the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge having been made in China and now being readied for shipment to San Francisco where the its modules will be placed on their supports and snapped together like an erector set.

I am old enough to remember the pride my parents took in telling me of the completion in the middle of the Great Depression of the Golden Gate Bridge, then the world's longest suspension bridge. In that trying time, the bridge, almost entirely made in America, was a symbol of hope because it demonstrated that Americans could still do great things when properly led and organized.

Now, in these trying times as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke tells us the economic recovery from the Great Recession is stumbling for reasons he doesn't understand, it seems that we take pride in what China can do for us. Thus California Department of Transportation program manager Tony Anziano told the Times "they've (the Chinese) produced a pretty impressive bridge for us." In this, Anziano was only following the lead of former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who strongly backed the Chinese project on the basis of an estimated $400 million saving to the state and who praised "the workers that are building our Bay Bridge" during a visit to China last September.

[xchrom]

1. this is nothing to be proud of for the u.s. nt

[robcon]

2. China can produce whatever it wants, and will succeed if the cost/quality works out.

Getting upset because a bridge is made in China, or doubting the quality of the bridge because it was made there, is pure nonsense.

[Taverner]

3. Who pays you?

[bahrbearian]

7. Its hard to get steady work now days,Sometimes you have to do things that are distasteful.

[NNN0LHI]

4. Well maybe we can try to collect our SS and Medicare from the Chinese workers who built it?

Because those workers don't contribute to our social programs like many American workers do.

Good luck.

Don

[robcon]

5. Free trade benefits all countries and peoples. Read Krugman's defense of free trade.

Comparative Advantage - the theory that trade will ALWAYS improve both parties to the trade - was first promulgated by David Ricardo in the early 19th century. It is perhaps the most fundamental economic theory of all.

Here's Paul Krugman on comparative advantage:

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

But this expectation is utterly disappointed. What is different, according to Goldsmith , is that there are all these countries out there that pay wages that are much lower than those in the West -- and that, he claims, makes Ricardo's idea invalid. That's all there is to his argument; there is no hint of any more subtle content. In short, he offers us no more than the classic "pauper labor" fallacy, the fallacy that Ricardo dealt with when he first stated the idea, and which is a staple of even first-year courses in economics. In fact, one never teaches the Ricardian model without emphasizing precisely the way that model refutes the claim that competition from low-wage countries is necessarily a bad thing, that it shows how trade can be mutually beneficial regardless of differences in wage rates. The point is not that low-wage competition never poses a problem. Rather, what is significant is that despite ostentatiously citing Ricardo, Goldsmith completely misses one of the essential lessons of his argument.

One might argue that Goldsmith is a straw man, that he is an intellectual lightweight whom nobody would take seriously as a commentator on these issues. But The Trap is structured as a discussion with Yves Messarovitch, the economics editor of Le Figaro; Mr. Messarovitch certainly took Sir James seriously (never raising any objections to his version of international trade theory), and the book became a best-seller in France. In the United States, Goldsmith did not sell as many books, but his views were featured in intellectual magazines like New Perspectives Quarterly; he was invited to speak to the US Congress; and the Clinton Administration took his views seriously enough to send its chief economist, Laura Tyson, to debate him on television. In short, while Goldsmith's failure to understand the basic idea of comparative advantage may seem stunningly obvious to any trained economist, other intellectuals -- including editors and journalists who specialize on economic matters -- regarded his views as, at the very least, a valuable addition to the debate.

[NNN0LHI]

6. Your link leaves out which workers contribute to our social programs and which ones don't

Why don't you try addressing that issue once and tell us how we make up for that loss of revenue?


Don