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"The timing of America’s wage stagnation — roughly, 1973 through 1994 — just didn’t line up well with the era of globalization that began with NAFTA in" The ar
by AndyNemmity 1y ago
"The timing of America’s wage stagnation — roughly, 1973 through 1994 — just didn’t line up well with the era of globalization that began with NAFTA in"
The argument isn't that any of this began with NAFTA. The argument as I've always understood it was that it began as the Neoliberal project which started in the late 60s, and early 70s.
The 1973-1994 period wasn't before globalization. It was the period where the groundwork was laid to make labor vulnerable to the type of globalization that neoliberals wanted.
The threat of capital flight for example was already being used to attack workers.
The breakdown of the Bretton Woods system was the start which aligns perfectly with the time period.
Noam Chomsky on the topic
"Bretton Woods restrictions on finance were dismantled, finance was freed, speculation boomed, huge amounts of capital started going into speculation against currencies and other paper manipulations, and the entire economy became financialized.
The power of the economy shifted to the financial institutions, away from manufacturing. And since then, the majority of the population has had a very tough time; in fact it may be a unique period in American history. There’s no other period where real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — have more or less stagnated for so long for a majority of the population and where living standards have stagnated or declined." - https://chomsky.info/20090210/ https://chomsky.info/20090210/
So we start off with an flawed view of the world, and then we move forward with the argument to explain it through other means.
The 1973-1994 wage stagnation isn't a "mystery" caused by a patchwork of unrelated events. It's a direct consequence of a fundamental, politically driven shift in the economic regime, specifically the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s and the subsequent financialization of the economy and deregulation.