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Comment by zip1234 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much having to be globally competitive affects the income growth? Non-skilled factory labor is the easiest thing to move to a different country. The 1990s-now were huge for pulling the lowest of the low out of poverty around the world. It seems that unskilled laborers in developed countries took a hit at the same time. Until the world is playing on a level playing field wage-wise, I'm not sure the situation will improve.

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Internationalization, exponential worldwide population growth, and technological advancement are probably all major factors in making labor, across the board, less valuable. I would imagine that it affects low/non-skilled the most, but also cuts into high-skilled labor. And when labor is cheap, value shifts from the labor itself to the holder of the goods [citation needed].

Isn't it intriguing that in all of these talks and comparisons of now to "the good ol' days", whenever you pick those days to be, it's seldom mentioned that the world population grew by multiple billions since the comparison started? There are twice as many humans on the planet as there were in 1970. What that means for income distribution isn't for me to say, but it seems a safe bet to assume it's at least _related_.

This is my hypothesis as well. It will be great if someone can juxtapose this graph with growth in China and India's GDP, growth in middle class income in these two countries, and growth in manufacturing and services output in China and India (India more so starting late nineties).

It's probably related in that markets beforehand were more national than international. Nowadays, the national barriers are pretty porous, so lower-skilled workers have to compete with labor at a fraction of a cost of theirs.

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