"Vince Iorio" wrote in message
...
I have been following this thread with interest.

I have had 2 question for a long time that I have never seen the answer
to.

1.) How many foreign man years of labor goes into products consumed by
Americans?

2.) How many man years of American labor goes into products shipped over
seas?

and for completeness, I should ask

3.) How many man years of American labor goes into products consumed by
Americans?

I have a feeling that the imbalance would be scary, and that an augment
could be
made that the world is really working for America.

That's one way to describe the argument made by Milton Friedman, our
Commerce Dept., the Cato Institute, and many economists who take a
conservative view of free trade.

What scars me is that we will forget how to do
things ourselves. At some point factory workers in Chine will have
unions, and
better pay, and then better pay then Americans, and the world will stop
shipping
to the US, and start shipping to China where the consumer has money.

In the long run. g

Trade, like most economic activity, is a mixture of win-win (economic
growth) and win-lose (zero-sum) transactions. The free-trade ideologues are
macroeconomists who pay no real attention to micro issues, where there are
many more zero-sum transactions, in which somebody gets hurt badly so
someone else can get ahead.

What has the argument fired up today is that the zero-sum games appear to be
showing up at the macro level. The Cato Institute looks backwards, and says
there is no evidence of economic losses from trade because the figures being
used are overwhelmed by the recession. People like me aren't looking
backwards, we're looking ahead, and considering the effects of, for example,
$30B/yr. worth of car parts that will be imported by just two car companies
within the next seven years.



P.S. Has anyone ever seen data for my 3 questions?


I've never seen figures compiled that way, but you could roughly derive it
from existing trade figures. It would be a lot of work.

--
Ed Huntress
(remove "3" from email address for email reply)