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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?
My father grew up affording meat and getting new clothes twice yearly on his birthday and the new year, nowadays a meaty meal and an outfit would barely cost an hour's minimum wage in the west. The austerity of my father's childhood doesn't exist in the west and would be much rarer than a few generations ago even by global standards.
Really nearly everything is cheap if you have a Western income that isn't a zero-sum status competition (housing, education, luxury goods), artificially constrained by regulation (housing, healthcare, education, childcare) or dependent on high Western labor costs (housing, healthcare, childcare).
Technology could help with the last of these but I can't really see anything short of the singularity solving regulated artificial scarcity and anything short of the end of humanity solving status competitions.
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