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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2540 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 6, 2025

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Forgive my ignorance: if globalization suppressed the wages of blue collar manufacturing/farming workers, why didn't it then commensurately suppress their cost of living? Naively, if the cost of labor inputs to everything made by those workers goes down, the prices of all relevant end products should go down. I get that a significant part of the cost of living crisis is housing, healthcare, and education, which are all affected by various forms of natural and artificial scarcity, but have most other goods actually gotten any more affordable than pre-globalization?

If not, where did all of the savings and productivity gains of globalization go?

If so, then is the "cost of living" crisis more accurately just a "cost of specifically housing, healthcare, and education" crisis?

Yes. Shoes used to be really expensive; now they’re cheap, just for one example.

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