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Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

There appears to be a section missing: the one that discusses the consequences of the globalization of the labor market, especially with regard to non-physical labor. Arguably, this is a consequence of policy changes, but it is not discussed in that section, either.

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That’s probably because it’s antithetical to current economic and political thought (free global trade is an unalloyed good). Of course this has an impact. It’s the converse of the rising foreign economy where the local worker has seen their incomes rise due to export driven economics. They’re exporting their labor, we’re importing to complement our labor and that has placed negative pressure on wages.

It’s clearly seen in farm workers. Large agri businesses say that unless they have cheap imported labor, they can’t afford workers. But that does not stand. In their current economic model cheap labor is necessary, but it’s not inherently necessary.

The late 1990s to early 2000s anti-WTO leftists understood this, Perot understood this, but they were vanquished by non labor interests.

In the conclusion the author guesstimated globalization was ~5% of the effect. It'd be nice to see the reasoning for the guesstimate.

I'm not sure about 'non-physical labor' but an IMF report [1] found that in many industrialized countries, such as the US, Germany, Japan, etc., depressed wages correlate strongly with low labor union participation rates. Surprisingly, other factors such as globalization and automation where found to be of little significance.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/pdf/jaumo...

Particularly telling is that he compares the gap between the US, Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.

I really want to see the same charts for coastal vs inland China and Mexico. Did a rising tide lift all boats there or not?

The problem is mostly one of data availability. China has plenty of data, but not all of it is credulous. That, and the fact that comparisons of any two nations will always be susceptible to the accusation that the data has been "cherry-picked" to show a favorable result.

But the global data on poverty is basically unassailable. Poverty has declined absolutely everywhere. The rising tide lifted at least the very poorest boats, whatever can be said for the American middle class notwithstanding.

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