by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-20 00:57:25+00:00
Valid assumption since China has always been so huge, but was actually not yet a factor in domestic labor at that time.

The Nixon adinistration had recently effected more serious decoupling of the labor supply to wages anyway, by their deep anti-union actions in so many ways not even well-recognized then.

Nixon "opened up" China but in the 1970's they had still never yet had enough dollars to impact the balance of US trade in any significant way.

It took years after investment was allowed to be made in China by Americans, by many on Wall Street who started out reaping much more benefit than their Chinese counterparts, before there started to be the downward effect on US wages. Big financial giants were making actual bank(s) just from the growth in dollars transferred to China, not to mention the absolute total amount of dollars which was "instinctively" not intended to grow less than exponentially. After a few decades though, it was impossible not to consider the Chinese "better armed" with more ammunition than ever in case any kind of a currency war were to come along. Trade war could almost be considered a currency war denominated in physical assets instead, allowing opposing parties to arrive at a status quo regarding how much of each other's currency they possess once it quits fluctuating wildly. And be retained in case it escalates to actual currency war, where it might be a more damaging salvo. Notwithstanding that with the same dollar amounts one nation may be a "richer" country than another in other ways or currencies. Sometimes more rich from past progressive moves in aggregate, other times expected to be richer in the future from aggregate moves being made now or even momentum building under the surface in non-transparent situations.

In some imaginary world of perfect equations and other ideal assumptions, if an overseas nation had the same population as the USA, and actually held the same number of dollars as the USA still had remaining domestically, the wages would tend toward the lowest of the two locations.

Plus the women who were working full-time before things cratered were doing it for prosperity and relative independence to a very large extent, even though they were still paid much poorer and always had been, that's very much what filled the female ranks. The increase in numbers of working women after that point were more often for desperation after a single income could no longer support a family. When you watch prosperity disappear as an option first hand, it's a little more difficult to deny. At least there was eventually enough critical mass to make strides reducing the wage gap, but realistically things had been bungled so bad that there just wasn't enough to go around any more so men really were often paid less so women could be paid more fairly by comparison. Regardless, more opportunity had been lost than was often remaining for so many.

But it wasn't yet due to China, even though their exponential growth had been initiated, it was still far too few dollars to make a difference. But that's where all the manufacturing investment started going when it came to an abrupt halt domestically.

Even by 1979 and a bit beyond about the only thing in the US that I ever saw from China was their ginseng and you had to seek it out. It was like other specialty products not available anywhere else which was one of the main reasons for some imports from other countries a lot of times. Before they went through the roof from everywhere. American companies were still rarely going through the trouble of importing from a communist country at the time for any other reason, which was still no picnic. Reagan, like so many others from many political parties, always hated Communists. People even asked me if I was getting it legally :0 There was just nothing yet like a constant stream of low-cost consumer products from China, the lead-up to that had been handled by other Asian countries for over a decade by then though, their products were everywhere.