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This should be the norm for the average family again
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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It was never going to be possible for the US to maintain that kind of standard of living forever. It worked out in the 1950s through to the 1970s because WWII left huge swaths of industry and agriculture in Europe and Asia devastated — it took decades^0 for affected countries to rebuild. Meanwhile, North American based manufacturing soared and became the envy of the world — everyone bought form North America, and anyone with no particular skill set who was looking for a job could get a good Union job in any number of factories.
But that couldn’t last forever. There was no policy the US Government could have taken (other than perpetual war against everyone else?) that would have kept the rest of the world from re-industrializing. Japan, China, Germany, Italy, France, and the UK (amongst others^1) were able to re-industrialize to a point where the US suddenly had competition again — and while the US could have some competitive advantage against some of its more Western allies due to size, they weren’t going to be able to keep that kind of lead forever against China, Taiwan, and Japan. The world wound up with more capacity than there was a market for, and so the winners were the ones that could do the job the cheapest (as is the way in a competitive marketplace).
It was an anomaly that brought the kind of prosperity the US experienced in the post-WWII years; you can’t recreate that today (as it’s only due to the limitations of the technologies at the time that North America was broadly spared any destruction during the war years — in the post WWII nuclear/ballistic missile era that wouldn’t be the case anymore).
^0 — there are still areas in Europe that are uninhabitable (and unfarmable) today due to WWI and WWII.
^1 — it did somewhat help that the Soviet Union re-industrialized under Communism; the generally closed nature of their economy, combined with the huge inefficiencies of most of its industries under centralized control didn’t really challenge or threaten the US’s economic might.
Considering how much wealth is hoarded but so few in the US alone, this kind of sounds like bullshit. It’s not that it couldn’t be maintained, it’s that the forces that ensured employers respected employees were weakened, so greed ran amok again.
If we ate the rich and divided their assets amongst us, we’d meet and exceed that “old timey” quality of life for everyone.
I have as much problems with the hoarding of wealth as everyone else here does, but it’s not enough to change the calculus here.
The top 0.1% in the United States hold approximately $20 trillion dollars in wealth. If you “ate the rich” and handed this over to the other 99.9% of citizens evenly, that would give everyone a one-time payment of about $58 000. And sure — we’d all love to have an extra $58 000 in our pockets, but when you divide that by 40 years of inequality you’re looking at less than $1500 per year per person — and that isn’t going to make up for the fact that a lot of high-paying jobs left the US in that time because they weren’t needed anymore.
And you ignore the fact that the wealth that has been hoarded isn’t sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-like vault full of gold. Most of the wealth held by the top 0.1% is tied up in investments which back real, tangible industrial and civil infrastructure important to the US economy.
None of which changes the fact that as the rest of the world (re)industrialized post WWII, those other countries didn’t need to do business with the US as much anymore. The US didn’t become the global financial powerhouse it was in the 50s and 60s and 70s because people inside the US were wealthy — they did it by selling stuff everywhere around the world, because much of the rest of the industrialized world had to rebuild their infrastructure to build their own stuff. But now the US gets to compete with China and Germany and Japan and Taiwan and France in ways they didn’t have to back in the middle of the 20th century, and other countries are buying from these countries instead of the US. And no amount of US regulation was ever going to change that.
The US benefitted from a one-time bubble that can’t be repeated. No duh things changed for the worse.
You ignore the incredibly high cost of the Vietnam War. At the height, America was dropping three Hiroshimas a day on the jungle. US plants were working 24/7 to supply the steel, which meant German and Japan had to build their own plants. When the Arab Oil boycott hit, Detroit was doubly screwed, because Toyota and Volkswagen already had small gas sippers ready to go.
America could have regained it's edge after Vietnam ended, but Reagan's tax cuts and deregulation let the wealthiest build vast fortunes without doing anything to save the 'Rust Belt.'
You accuse me of ignoring the high cost of Vietnam — but ultimately your own argument supports mine. Toyota and Volkswagen couldn’t have challenged the American automotive hegemony in the 1970s had it not been for the re-industrialization of Japan and Germany that allowed this to happen in the first place. The US got “stuck” in a 1950s mentality (cheap overseas oil, no significant international industrial competition), and re-industrialized countries that 20 years prior couldn’t compete had built up enough that they could.
The US wouldn’t have regained its edge even without Vietnam. At best, it would have slowed the slide — but ultimately every other country on earth was also going to grow its economy, and the re-industrialization that happened in countries with much cheaper costs of living (and yes, in some cases with regressive political regimes that worked to keep costs down) was always going to happen anyway, and no amount of US protectionism was ever going to prevent it from happening. As I pointed out elsewhere in this post (as one example), Australia in the 1950s bought the vast majority of its automobiles from US companies — but now they buy primarily from Asian manufacturers. The US lost that business because those other manufacturers focuses on cost and quality — and it’s not likely getting it back anytime soon. Multiply that by virtually every industry in existence today, and it’s not hard to see that the 50s and 60s were a special economic anomaly that won’t likely ever happen again.
We can't say exactly what would or wouldn't have happened. What we can say for certain is that the war build up allowed the steel industry to make a lot of money off of old plants.
Jimmy Carter wanted to end America's oil dependency in 1976. He installed solar panels on the White House as a symbolic way of saying we were going to get off the oil addiction. Reagan tore those things down and kept us dependant on oil.
We can say, because the things you list are almost completely independent of the fact that Germany, Japan, France (to a certain extent), and later China all made major advancements in their industrial capabilities post-war, and they (along with countries within their geographic and political spheres of influence) didn’t have to buy from the US anymore.
Would a 1970s and 1980s green energy revolution in the US have been a good thing that would have benefitted the United States? Most likely yes (and everyone else for that matter) — but again, that doesn’t change the fact that the countries left with minimal industrial output post WWII were going to rebuild that output. Individually many of them my not have surpassed the US (and may never do so), but in aggregate they (especially China) have reduced the US’s near sole-source influence they had on the supply chain for manufactured goods in the 50s and 60s. This was always going to be outside the US’s control and ability to change in any significant manner — they were always going to go from “virtually no competition” to “competition with virtually everyone” in the post-war years.
So, you're telling me you know exactly what would have happened if Humphrey had won in 1968 and had pushed for a massive increase in NASA's budget, resulting in a vast leap ahead in US technology?
The US ceding manufacturing to China et al was a political choice by Reagan and the GOP. They wanted to destroy the Unions, and were happy to let cities like Detroit implode.
We could have had a better grip on what companies chose to do with their workforce, so instead of offshoring previously well paying manufacturing jobs they could have "forced" companies to hire Americans to make American goods. Instead we blindly accepted the "service economy" bullshit and ditched manufacturing almost completely :/
I'm guessing those companies would have died of because they couldn't compete with cheap overseas labor
And none of that would change the fact that other countries are now able to buy goods they once bought from US manufacturers from other countries.
China, Japan, Germany, and other modern industrial powerhouses that were decimated after WWII are now competition for US manufacturers. Even if the US went full on protectionist and kept their own factories from offshoring, that wasn’t going to prevent China (or Germany, or France, or whomever) from pursuing its own industrialization, and then going after countries that were buying American in the mid 20th century to buy from them instead.
A good example to look at right now is Australia — in the 1950s, they were dominated by American vehicles, either importing them directly from the US, or via locally built Holdens (which may have been manufactured locally, but the company was owned by General Motors — the profits flowed back to the United States), with some small British cars thrown in. But today only two American brands even make it into the Top 10 — Ford at #3, and Tesla at #8. All of the other brands are now primarily out of Asia (Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Kia, Hyundai, Isuzu).
The US “not offshoring” manufacturing wouldn’t have changed this. And the story is the same across all of the rest of the world — back in the 1950s, the world was buying from the US (or to a lesser extent Canada and the UK). Today they don’t have to — and US protectionism was never going to change that. Forcing American companies to stay in the US and only hire Americans would have just made life for Americans more expensive, and wouldn’t have changed the fact that money that had been flowing into the US during the post-war era had more or less dried up once the major economies in Europe and Asia had re-industrialized.