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Notes -
Forgive my ignorance: if globalization suppressed the wages of
blue collarmanufacturing/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?
It did, probably.
Color TV cost like $650 in 1980. Ten years later you could get a Japanese one for…$400. They even ditched the wood paneling. Today a similarly-sized Chinese flatscreen is, like, $150.
I’d grabbed a bunch of links from the FRED, Minneapolis Fed, and BLS to show this for other goods, but lost my draft. So feel free to compare numbers. All else equal, more competition means lower prices.
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