03-08-2016, 11:23 PM
It isn't actually so much trade that is the root cause for the white working class malaise as other countries like Japan and France are even more open to trade and haven't seen anywhere near the same stagnation in real wages for decades:
Quote:This is simply extraordinary. It turns out wages in France and Japan, often considered economic basket cases, have grown 2.5 times as fast as those in the US. A possible retort to this could be that while wages have been growing much faster in sclerotic France, this could have come at the expense of job creation. After all, higher wages could mean labor pricing itself out of the market and France isn't well known for its economic dynamism anyway. But then there is this figure showing that while France has managed to increase employment for it's working age population, the US hasn't... But there is a much more fundamental and important conclusion to be drawn from these developments. Japan and France are very much under the same forces of globalization and technology which are often deemed the culprits of the stagnant wages in the US. This points squarely to domestic causes for the stagnant median wages in the US. That is actually good news, as policies and institutions can be changed, while globalization and technology are much bigger and powerful forces.A Uniquely American Problem | Seeking Alpha