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Was it even avoidable with global competition putting pressure on price and cost? Americans just don't want to work for the same wages some in China may accept.

• lumost 6y ago
  The US chooses to allow unlimited competition from China. China allows limited competition from US companies with their nascent industries. Switzerland is a fascinating example of a country which almost entirely bans foreign competition in anything they can reasonably produce domestically. Costs are high, but wages are higher.
  • polskibus 6y ago
    Do you have some references on how the bans work in Switzerland? I live in EU and have never heard about Swiss having some parasitic relationship with EU (meaning export to EU is ok, but import is not).
  • xiphias2 6y ago
    This was probably working while the Swiss people were working and buying their products, but in Zurich Swiss people do banking and non-Swiss people engineering (and the number of non-Swiss people grow exponentially, now maybe 1% of people in Zurich is a Googler). They usually go to the German border for weekend shopping instead of buying the expensive Swiss products.
• voodootrucker 6y ago
  This article was on HN recently, and it does a pretty good job of explaining how we did this to ourselves by making the dollar the global reserve currency: https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/ https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/
• puranjay 6y ago
  To be fair, American wages, outside of the bottom percentile jobs, are much higher than their counterparts in the developed world.