BP Podcast

(Apologies for the length)

OK, as you already know, I love you guys, and love the podcast, so please take what I'm about to say in the way it's intended -- with great love and affection:

That had to be the most low-information discussion about Walmart that I've ever heard. Granted, I tend to avoid watching CNN, but even they'd be hard-pressed to come up with a quarter hour of discussion that was as fact-free as what you guys ended up with.

For my money, this article in the Chicago Reader summed up the issues nicely: A retail business that took advantage of logistical efficiencies and global markets was bound to happen, but Walmart goes out of its way to screw over it's employees to a scale that hadn't been tried before the '80s.

However, the complaints about manufacturing leaving the US are unfounded. As bonddad over at your former math overlord's site writes:

The "jobless recovery" is in fact a realignment of the US labor force. Fewer and fewer employees are needed to produce durable goods. As this situation has progressed, the durable goods workforce has decreased as well. This does not mean the US manufacturing base is in decline. If this were the case, we would see a drop in both manufacturing output and productivity. Instead both of those metrics have increased smartly over the last two decades, indicating that instead of being in decline, US manufacturing is simply doing more with less.

So I won't step into a Walmart if I can avoid it, either, but it's because they poorly treat the employees in retail that they actually have, not the unemployed in manufacturing that they don't.

Finally, since you've been offering a primer on middlebrow periodcals (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist), I'd like to recommend to you both The New York Review Of Books. Instead of basking in perverse contrarianism (The Atlantic), or presenting reasoned discussions of current crises that always end up with "and that's why we should listen to the Republicans/Tories/George W. Bush" (The Economist), NYRB presents its point of view free of rhetorical flourishes and full of interesting, compelling information.