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Superfreakonomics

Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
Oct 14, 2017
I could comment on this book, which has little to do with Real Economics/Finance, but I would rather comment on their last week's show on NPR [Oct. 7, 2017] which I found typically disingenuous. They featured the ongoing meme about // our \\ trade with China over the past decade of 2000 to 2010 as being OK, but could have been handled better, instead of the actual hard facts of all jobs offshoring! They did this by misciting the numbers, downplaying the actual number of offshored jobs [just one million, instead of the many millions of jobs offshored], never citing the actual number of factories and production facilities offshored [40,000 to Mexico after NAFTA, 70,000 to China], and cleverly confining those offshored jobs ONLY to China, NEVER mentioning all the jobs offshored to all those other countries like India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ireland, Central and South America, Sri Lanka, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera! Nor do they mention how the US government aid is directed to those countries to support the corporate offshoring of jobs, e.g., US aid dispatched to Sri Lanka for instruction in employment at call centers - - then American call center jobs offshored to that country, et cetera! Nor do they mention federal and state governmental jobs also offshored to foreign locales: the further dismantling of the US tax base. During the early 2000s in Seattle, the local chamber of commerce hosted seminars for locally-based corporations to most efficiently offshore local jobs - - using US Department of Commerce funds slated for this purpose! Holy Mother of Corruption! ! ! And like all the fake news shows, they avoided mentioning all the other categories of offshored jobs, instead mentionging ONLY manufacturing jobs [also scientist, R&D, egineering, programming, technician, aviation mechanics and techs, medical, legal, et cetera]; yes, manufacturing jobs are important and the basis for much later innovation, but all categories should be covered! When Micron Technology shut down a production facility in Idaho - - while opening up a factory in Malaysia - - they are simply doing a sleight-of-hand; the Fake Newsies will report the factory closing in Idaho, but never report on the new factory in Malaysia, which may very well have been subsidized with US government aid!? Anyway one views it, the plutocrats and oligarchs profit, while the workers are eternally screwed!