IS THERE AN ECONOMIC MODEL IN A TEXTBOOK SOMEWHERE FOR AN ENTIRE NATION'S LABOR FORCE BEING AS DUMB AND GETTING AS FULLY TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF AS RENT-A-CENTER CUSTOMERS?:
Wealthy Americans reap the benefits of globalization for the same reason wealthy Americans reap an outsize proportion of the benefits of the economy as a whole: American labor's complete complacency about its need to bargain powerfully in the free marketplace.
I don't know if there is any equation or model in the text books to fit -- for a close parallel -- uninformed customers being taken to the cleaners in a Rent-A-Center store. Rent-A-Center suckers are a tiny bit of our economy -- taken-to-the-cleaners (as in completely deunionized) labor is the going standard.
Again, I don't believe there is a text book model that spells out the cause and effect of what is truly America's "great wage depression". Imagine if we predicted to Americans of 1968 that by 2008 25% of our workforce would be earning less than LBJs $10/hr minimum wage.
If American workers were getting their share across the board, then globalization of manufactured goods might merely be the equivalent of automation to them.
Posted by: Denis Drew | Link to comment | May 25, 2008 at 08:01 AM
1 comment:
Seeing these kind of posts reminds me of just how technology truly is something we cannot live without in this day and age, and I am 99% certain that we have passed the point of no return in our relationship with technology.
I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Ethical concerns aside... I just hope that as memory becomes cheaper, the possibility of uploading our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I dream about every once in a while.
(Posted on Nintendo DS running [url=http://kwstar88.livejournal.com/491.html]R4 SDHC[/url] DS BB)
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