General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'm going to post a chart you've seen a million times before (the myth of wage stagnation) [View all]Recursion
(56,582 posts)And, yes, global labor has been a factor in white male wage depression. As has opening the US labor market to women and minorities (which, you'll recall, had to be pried out of white males' flagpole-stabbing hands). Automation even moreso (several textile plants that left for Mexico in the 80s and 90s have reopened in the US, employing a tenth of their former staff but producing more than they were the first time around).
And, meanwhile, a lot of us on the Left are stuck repeating the mantras of FDR and Truman, despite the fact that their solutions were for a time when only white men benefited from economic growth, global labor couldn't easily compete with ours (for political and technological reasons), and automation wasn't remotely as advanced. We really needed three quarters of the adult population working to produce the food and stuff we wanted.
Those days are gone. There isn't enough work needing to be done that people are willing to pay for for everybody to have a high paying job. There's no future in jobs. We need to accept that fact and figure out a way to have a just and fair society without them.