bi0boy said:
So you are advocating inefficiency? No one is suggesting that the Japanese workers are not paid a good wage, just that Japan have the technological and manufacturing capacity in this area that we lack. We could regain that capacity but it would require such huge government spending that it wouldn't worth while.
Yep. We'll just keep exporting the jobs and the pesky working-class will soon follow. Hurrah!
Efficiency, as defined by capitalism, is not a good criterion to judge an socio-economic decision - unless you think Reaganomics is where it's at. You know, the economic ideology that has no explanation for unemployment except for laziness, and thus cannot even explain the Great Depression of 1929 (ref: Joseph Stiglitz, former chief of the World Bank, keen globalisationist but harsh critic of stupid economic policies, in "Globalisation and it's Discontents").
You can define efficiency in other ways of course - it should be defined as the most cost-effective use of available resources to achieve ends that society as a whole agrees are desirable. eg If we, as a society, place high value on having well-trained and well paid workers, it's a big effect and thus "efficient" to deploy considerable resources to achieve it.
This is exactly how the NHS makes it's healthcare purchasing decisions - it attempts to purchase the greatest health benefit for the resources available. No expensive but largely useless Alzheimer's drugs if it means more dead premies or elderly people in wheelchairs for the rest of their still active lives because we can't afford enough incubators and hip replacements. It's not only simple and obvious - it's used by every country which is serious about managing spiralling healthcare costs (we can spend more, but there is always a point where we need the cash for schools and transport and social security etc - resources are always finite).
When only cost-effectiveness (more usually cost-utility these days) is taken into account, economists consider this to be using "efficiency" as the sole criterion. The other one sometimes taken into account is equity - the rules may be bent a little for particularly disadvantaged groups of patients if the grounds are sufficiently compelling to override the preference for purchasing greater health benefits for other patients.
So that's the other reason why I said my way was more efficient - beyond the simple economics of circulating resources within an economy instead of letting them leak to other economies. It is - if we're allowed to use the term in it's true sense and not it's garbled capitalist sense - more efficient.
