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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>The fact is your household lost $500,000 in earnings and gained essentially nothing in supposed "cost savings

I assume 'you' in this piece isn't addressing the people in this circle[1]. I mean even the extremely wrong basis for that quoted claim aside (anyone who has visited an electronics store and compares quality and price to pre-globalization can verify that for themselves), I always find it funny how anyone can think globalization hasn't drastically improved the world we live in. It's somewhat bizarre to me that support for globalisation is being attributed to shills and some financialied elite. I don't know which 70s the author grew up in but I don't think a minimum wage worker had a pristine supercomputer in their pocket and a big flatscreen tv on the wall.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#/media/Fi...

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When remembering past decades they identify themselves with the top 1% on the basis of having 70s 1%-markers today (eg., a degree, etc.). What has happened is that the markers of the 70s 1% are now of the c. 50% today.

The author should be mapping the life of a 70th percentile person across all the decades... till the late 70s, that person was a poor industrial worker.

This is false. See https://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compen.... Income inequality has massively increased since the end of Bretton Woods and the start of the era of neoliberalism, deregulation, financialisation, and Reagan/Thatcher. Productivity increased while median (not top!) compensation remains stagnant.

For US it's gone up, but massively is a bit of an overstatement. See the Gini Coeffecient which is often used for representing income equality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

UK seems worse, but other EU countries actually gone down, for instance France has had a big drop since the 50's.

Income inequality is irrelevant. The key metric is just how the income has changed for the bulk of the people.

The existence of a 100 people with 100 billion each really does nothing for the real purchasing power of the middle and lower class. Income inequality is a red herring designed to act as a political wedge and distract you from a failing government.

I've come to this conclusion as I've grown older: Income inequality is far more important than income.

It doesn't much matter if everyone lives in a 2-bedroom house and rides a bicycle to work, or in a 5-bedroom McMansion and drives a Lexus. DDG for "hedonistic adaptation." Or travel to poorer countries.

What does matter is /stress/.

Right now, most Americans seem to be living in a state of high financial stress. Baseline costs, e.g. college debt, housing costs, medical costs, and similar take a majority of people's income. The remaining disposable income might buy more computers and TVs than in 1950, but that doesn't matter much.

What does matter is that, for example, the short-term job loss, a litigation, a divorce, or a medical problem can lead to cascading financial ruin. It matters that the cost of raising kids puts having a family out-of-reach for many, or just very, very hard.

The economy in, for example, the Soviet systems was far poorer, but on the whole, everyone was guaranteed housing, food, and basic medical. People were happy enough.

I have mixed thoughts on universal basic income, but as I get older, I find concepts like that more and more appealing (personally, I'm more a fan of universal basic food, medicine, and housing, with all the complexities that entails). I also find Chinese-style socialization of land and of finance more appealing.

Concepts like this date back to Rome. The poor in Rome were guaranteed grain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae

>The existence of a 100 people with 100 billion each really does nothing for the real purchasing power of the middle and lower class.

It has many deleterious effects but the most visceral one is that it prices them out of the housing market. Those 100 people's purchasing power distorts the hell out of any market they dive into and real estate is very much one of their favorites.

Taxing them and all the people with wealth close to them to hell and back would make the real estate market sane again even if the tax money wasnt used to build new housing (which it should be).

Wealth inequality is the real killer though, and the measure that is the most out of whack. I The rule is that if you ever want to downplay how bad things are, focus on income inequality to the exclusion of wealth inequality.

I don't see how Bretton Woods has anything to do with this. Contrary to what goldbugs to believe, there was no real desire for anyone to return to a proper gold standard post-depression. Rather, Bretton Woods was a scheme to for the US to profit off the rebuild after WWII, which was why only governments could participate. Europe and Japan were desperate for dollars, so they were initially happy to exchange real gold for freshly printed dollars even though they recognized this was unfair. After they tried to exchange their dollars back into gold in large quantities, the US ended Bretton Woods.

Income inequality has increased because the top earners earned more. The poor people didn't become poorer.

Notice how you're justifying the system by arguing inside the system. "The system is not unequal because the system has allocated rewards this way". Classic circular reasoning: justifying a thing with the thing itself.

Poor people and even the median did indeed become poorer, as wages either stagnated or even declined in real terms. Some consumer goods particularly electronics have decreased in price, but essentials have not: they increased a little (food) to a lot (housing, healthcare).

I'm not justifying anything, I'm simply stating that income inequality is the result of a lot of people becoming rich.

Poor people did not become poorer and incomes did not stagnate if you include benefits. Currently healthcare is more expensive, and a larger percentage of total compensation is given in health benefits.

Doesn't matter what your view on the health care issue is, if you're an employer, you spend more on your employees now than before

If you can afford a TV but not a house, education, healthcare, etc. are you not poorer than a period where the inverse was true?

Which one makes for a successful society?

Because health care became more expensive.

You couldn't have an MRI in 1970 because your hospital didn't have it. The technology of health care is now a lot more advanced and can add years to your health expectancy.

Now, there are government programs that help you pay premiums or give you free care. I was on Medicaid several years ago, so the poorest people don't have the issue of not being able to pay.

But that's a whole another topic. The point is you can't just compare what you can afford, because you're not comparing the same things. Houses are bigger these days as well.

>I don't know which 70s the author grew up in but I don't think a minimum wage worker had a pristine supercomputer in their pocket and a big flatscreen tv on the wall.

Yes, I know that you cannot afford housing, or decent healthcare, or access credit, that childhood poverty has increased, that you're 100K in debt for getting an education, that worker's rights are being eroded, that we've bailed out the very rich to the tune of trillions for the second time in a little over a decade... but have you considered that in the 70s you didn't have a Samsung Galaxy Pro S37+ Ultra©™? /s

I can't believe I'm reading this, it's the stereotypical "consoom" meme.

Other stuff being bad (mostly for reasons other than globalization) is irrelevant to the obvious absurdity of the claim in the original article that globalization didn't allow us to have more consumer goods for less, it just made the consumer goods worse. The claim being addressed was that consumer electronics are so much worse than the consumer electronics of the 1970s it cancels out price cuts: he even makes up a number to go with it! You can't defend instances of the "everything was better in the good old days" meme as laughably specific as saying we're $2000 worse off buying modern appliances than 1970s ones by pointing to other stuff where the evidence might not point in the opposite direction.

I can’t tell if it’s a joke?

Apart from anything else, globalisation and financialization aren't the same phenomenon. You can slash tax on the rich and deregulate financial services at the same time as you stick up massive trade barriers and provide corporate welfare to domestic companies. And you can remove barriers to imports whilst regulating banking and m&a more, levying super taxes and expanding the welfare state (The latter bit is more difficult if you're a small developing country, but the US clearly isn't.)

Seems as unreasonable to blame the people who assemble your iPhone for Reaganomics as it does to accuse them of making consumer goods substantially worse than the great phones we had in the 1970s!

I admit I have no first hand experience about the US part, but I read a lot of stories about rural or even city infrastructure in the US and oftentimes can't help but think that in a lot of countries I grew up as being labeled 3rd world/developing countries the infrastructure is of significantly better quality.

So sometimes I am not sure how much of the US is (in parts) a developing country in disguise?

And from 1st hand experience I can only say that I have to come to that conclusion for parts of Germany (where I am from and living). There are big-ish areas in Germany where you can't call emergency services from a mobile phone as there is not one carrier servicing these areas. If you happen to have an emergency there - good luck.

But as only a few people live there it doesn't make economic sense to service these areas and build the necessary infrastructure for the service provider companies. So these areas go unserved.

To be fair, Germany is Europe's worst offender when it comes to digital infrastructure, which is laughable for Europe's richest country.

Even poor Eastern European villages do better sometimes.

I did not want to punch the easy target with digital infrastructure.

Our 100 MBit includes satellite TV and telephone flatrate for 30 € per month. Still not in the range of other countries, but at least significantly cheaper than the big players in Germany.

It is provided by our municipal telephone, gas, electricity provider. With really good customer service thrown in (compared to the crap of the big corporations at least)

Germany 100 mbps 46.92 $

Ukraine 100 mbps 6.19 $

Romania 1 Gbps 8.84 $

Ukraine 1 Gbps 10.11 $

10 * (46.92 / 8.84) = 53

population Germany vs Romania:

83.24 m / 19.2 m = 4.34

size:

357.386 km2 / 238.397 km2 = 1.5

/* Insert economy of scale joke here */

>Insert economy of scale joke here

More like German political corruption that guarantees telecoms' monopolies to milk customers with expensive shitty offers, rather than a free market with healthy competition like in Eastern Europe.

Also, didn't some German politician say "There's no way to make money with the internet so why bother with infrastructure investments?" LMAO

I find it a fascinating sector and like to compare it to drinking water, electricity, sewage, roads, trains, dykes, rivers etc that all require enormous mind boggling contraptions that we managed to successfully plan, build and use at affordable rates. I'm sort of offended that people seem to have forgotten what an accomplishment our ancestors made there.

These defenses based on how technology has improved are weak and hollow. Is the suggestion that technology would not have improved as quickly if quality of life had remained the same?

Single worker households, healthcare, education, home prices, etc. being what they were in the 1970s would’ve prevented LED TVs and iPhones? Really?

Pointing out that technology has improved drastically in response to an article making the specific, absurd claims that (i) that improvement can be quantified as $137.13 and (ii) actually that's generous because imported technology made is of significantly lower quality to US-made 1970s tech is not a weak and hollow response, though it wasn't exactly the focus of my response

A weak and hollow response would be defending that absurdity by constructing a straw man to attack me with (ignoring what I actually said about welfare policies, which is that they have little to do with globalization).

Are real wages measured by computers and TVs?

Lets try, just to be sure? If I earn 1500 euro per month and pay 1100 worth of bills. I need a new computer and a new TV every 5 years or so. I have 400 left for food etc so saving more than 50 per month would be unreasonable. How much money do I have saved up after 5 years? 50125=3000! Should be enough for a modern computer. For comparison, doing the same job in 1985, earnings: 4500 guilders bills: 450. where 1 euro == 2.2 guilders. I set aside 3000 per month for the TV&PC. 3000125=180000 or 81818 euro. Hummm... Lets adjust that by 50% for possible inaccuracies(?) 40 000 vs 3000 seems like it wouldn't bother me if the TV&PC was 2, 3 or 13 times as expensive?

I could be wrong of course but it seems to me consumer electronics need to be so cheap because people don't have money.

Does this have anything to do with either of the points I'd made in the above posts about the crudeness of conflating financialization and globalization or the author's claims about the superiority of 70s consumer goods? Are you GPT-3?

Also, the article author thinks that U.S. borders can be hermetically sealed. Even if American companies were to recreate all those companies, and rehire all the people, China will still be able to make TVs, Computers and Phones at one-fifth of the price.

How does he propose stopping those goods from entering the U.S. if the U.S. (presumably) wants to export to those countries?

My cheap Chinese-made Android phone is a remarkable piece of work. Not junk for sure.

>anyone who has visited an electronics store

Great, now do rent. Healthcare. Education.

But hey at least we have iPhones with 73 cameras and cutting-edge CPUs which we use to browse instagram.

Funny, access to healthcare and education don’t seem to be big deals in most of the developed world. I wonder why the US needs to be an exception? I don’t think the answer is financialization and globalization, but rather the aggressive privatization of healthcare and education. That seems like it’d be a problem whether or not the US was economically connected to the rest of the world.

The funny thing is you've picked three sectors that aren't even exposed to globalization! People don't compete globally for American homes or healthcare (and wealthy foreigners actually subsidize schools). The rise in cost is a result of cost disease. Americans now live in houses that are 150% larger than in 1980, with fewer people living in each home. And overall many cities are not building enough of them.

Your logic is exactly the wrong way around. If Americans could consume global education or healthcare it'd be much cheaper, the same way everything else has gotten cheaper. Let Asian construction firms actually built some homes in California instead of stopping everyone from doing that and you'd be surprised how affordable your housing is going to be.

Right now in the US you can't even buy health insurance across state lines. not only is that not a global market, it's not even a national market! The three sectors uniquely shielded from global as well as local competition are the ones that have exploded in cost. That is a lot of things, but surely not an argument against more open markets.

Maybe it's the other way around: rent, healthcare, education haven't benefitted as much from globalization as electronics. Rent is based on local supply, not cheap china factories churning out cheap housing. Same for healthcare, mostly limited by local wages. Same for education, mostly limited by local wages.

Image no globalization for electronics as well, it'd be as unafordable as the other 3 today.

> I always find it funny how anyone can think globalization hasn't drastically improved the world we live in.

Have you been to Detroit?

> I don't know which 70s the author grew up in but I don't think a minimum wage worker had a pristine supercomputer in their pocket and a big flatscreen tv on the wall.

But they might have had available healthcare, education, pension and ability to afford a place to live. You could say losing all those for tvs (that are just ad delivery mechanisms people have been duped into paying for) and smartphones (that are mostly ad delivery mechanisms people have been duped into paying for) is a good trade, but a lot of people seems to disagree.

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