Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "Trade wars, explained" video.

  1. +Larry Vasquez International trade doesn't have to be at the cost of the enviroment. Here in Norway we're starting to build more electric ships for things like ferries etc as well as buying electric cars both for the transport of people and goods. And our railway is already running mostly on electricity that's created by hydropower. Norway as a country will never, under any circumstances be able to cover all of our needs internally, we don't have enough high quality soil to feed our population with agriculture among other things. And the cost of living (even for farmers) is too high to make our agriculture competitive. We use tarrifs to keep our agriculture alive but import will always be our main source of food not originating in the sea, as it should be. I suggest that reducing or eliminating the enviromental impact of international trade is better then to outright put an end to it. That said, I agree with you that there's many things that we don't need to trade in the sense that we're overtaxing our planets resources with products that we quite frankly don't need.
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  2. +Larry Vasquez Because sometimes the quality isn't the same, or those workers are better utilized producing something else that another country does not have access to or that the US is better at then another country. Norway does have some tarrifs on food in order to ensure that the gap between what we produce ourselves and what we have to import isn't too big (so we can manage for longer in case of for instance a blockade, since the last one we experienced caused starvation...) But we're still importing food, and should import food, spreading the wealth to countries that's better at food production then we are. In the case of US steel, I don't know exactly why local steel is being defeated in the US market. But there's a number of possible reasons. It could be a matter of quality. For instance during the napoleonic wars Denmark-Norway had a protectionistic trade policy leaving us only with access to the inferior locally produced steel instead of buying the higher quality steel produced in other countries. That had many consequences for other parts of our economy and society. Other companies that need that high quality steel in the US might be unable to produce their products if they're limited to a lower quality product, if that is the issue in the US. Alternativly, and this might not apply so much to steel as to the iron used to make the steel, when you have a mine or drilling hole or some such that does have a product but where the economic viability of the resource is near the end of its lifetime then the effort needed to effectivly use that resource is higher then for competing mines or oil platform or whatever. This is the case many places here in Norway, the oil is becomming more and more expensive to extract and as a result production is falling. You can argue that since our oil production is more enviromentally friendly we should continue producing more at all cost, or because we are the ones earning the money on that extraction... However quite frankly, given the amounts of energy and effort needed to extract those resources it's quite frankly better to leave them in the ground and use the minds and machinery more efficiently elsewhere. We're still competitive in terms of highly educated population. And even if the production happens elsewhere we'd still be competitive in producing supplies for the oil companies in other countries and in teaching them how to do so more enviromentally friendly, safer for the enviroment and the oil workers, more efficiently etc, etc, etc. And those that can't work with that can quite frankly find other jobs. Sure, it hurts a bit that we have fewer jobs these days then during the local peak oil, but right here and now we're not really all that competitive when extracting those harder to extract deposits. Perhaps one day all the oil in the world elsewhere runs out and we need those resources, then they can be extracted, or perhaps there's a huge crisis of some kind, a war in a oil producing country, then we'd be able to start producing more ourselves as a response to the new prices. Or perhaps oil is replaced, then that's good and the enviroment will be better off, and we'll have moved on to other ways of making a living here in Norway. Getting stuck in old ways isn't how you make a efficient economy, instead you adapt. Yes, I agree with you that there are issues that we need to address. Norway is trying to address some by experimenting with electrically powered shipping, currently mostly short distance ones between fjords and within fjords. But as the technology improves we'll be able to increase the range just like with cars, and we'll be able to do trade with mainland Europe using electric ships. And eventually with the US across the Atlantic with a pitstop in Iceland and with Japan and China with another pitstop either in Canada and one in Alaska, or optionally in nothern Russia. I don't expect electric ships to do circumnavigation of the globe anytime soon, but we can probably address our most important markets with them in comming years if we can get the infrastructure going.
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  3. +batata The spiral towards the bottom in terms of prices is not a good thing... However for various reasons the productivity of different nations for different products differ. If country 1 can produce product A in 2 hours and product B in 3 hours and country 2 can produce both in 2,5 hours then it makes sense for country A to buy product B from country 2 and for country 2 to buy product A from country 1 as both countries can make more of the product they're better at in the same amount of time leading to higher total production for the two combined. And the resource being saved don't need to be time, it can be raw materials or anything else too. Highly educated labour is cheaper in countries like Norway, my own country due to the free education we have, the universal healthcare etc, etc. So a company can for instance design microchips in Norway (the Mali iGPU used on ARM CPUs is one such example) at a lower cost then in the US since they don't have to pay their employees enough to pay down a huge student loan, pay enough for them to have a health ensurance etc, etc, etc. On the other hand, there's a lot of other things that's way, way, way cheaper to produce in the US then in Norway. So yeah, we sell components to NASA and ESA, you guys sell us Teslas and Fords, among other things.
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  4. +Larry Vasquez Sure, some US steel factories might be opened up. But the sum is likely to be that more US jobs are lost as a result of the higher price of non-Ameircan steel then what is gained. And more damage will be caused to the enviroment too as there's more mines and factories running then needed. As for the transport of products all over the globe... Norway sell salmon to Japan and a lot of products made from Norwegian raw materials are sent to other countries to be turned into finished products before they're sold, even if they're sold here in Norway. And honestly I really do not think that this transportation around the world is harmful in it self. The problem isn't the transport, it's the method of transport. Once we've replaced the old polluting ships with new enviromentally friendly ones we should probably encourage more international trade. It may lead to less resources being used in production. And even if they do not it reduces the problem that extra factories are created. Take that steel. If those factories are re-opened in the US like you think then you're ending up with more factories in existence that have to compete for survival. As a result the competition may cause increased competition in the steel market reducing steel prices (once the tarrifs are gone again) leading to lower prices, something that in return may cause higher consumption of steel, possibly at the cost of greener materials like wood. The other side of the coin is that a lot of companies that depend on the steel sees their raw materials going up in price, possibly doubling or trippling in price, reducing their competitiveness both internationally and locally. So instead of a US company supplying US companies with steel nails to nail wood together US carpenters might end up buying the nails from Europe or Asia instead because of the tarrif on the Canadian steel. Any reduction in climate gasses caused by the reduced transportation of steel into the US due to tarrifs is then made up for by increased transportation of those steel nails and other products that are bought from outside the country instead of being made locally from international raw materials. Trust me, blanket tarrifs on import of raw materials is not the answer. If you want a real change use a tax on CO2 emissions and make it high. And require companies selling products in the country to document the CO2 emissions involved in bringing the product to market in the country through every step of the way using trusted third parties.
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