In the new decade, I hope that we reach a consensus on the absolute negligence of treating deindustrialization as an ineluctable fact of our economy or, worse yet, as merely a “price of progress.”https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/business/economy/30opioids-auto-plants.html …
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Feels like the challenge here is to convince the great majority to pay a lot more for manufactured goods made in America so that the minority can have higher wages.
But haven't we learned that our relationship with China isn't based on "free trade" at all? We get cheap toasters, yes, but the market-access to American producers never materialized. Then we dumped the costs onto these places and said "just retrain to install solar panels."
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All I'm saying is that deindustrialization happened for a basic reason: workers in other countries will produce goods that American consumers want at much lower wages, and so the cost of those goods is lower. Those lower prices benefit poor consumers too.
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You may like it or not, but it WAS kind of inevitable given Americans' preferences. Now, could the policy response toward workers negatively impacted by trade have been different? Sure, but keeping industrial employment at mid-20th c levels isn't realistic.
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