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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2065 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 6, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Forgive my ignorance: if globalization suppressed the wages of blue collar manufacturing/farming workers, why didn't it then commensurately suppress their cost of living? Naively, if the cost of labor inputs to everything made by those workers goes down, the prices of all relevant end products should go down. I get that a significant part of the cost of living crisis is housing, healthcare, and education, which are all affected by various forms of natural and artificial scarcity, but have most other goods actually gotten any more affordable than pre-globalization?

If not, where did all of the savings and productivity gains of globalization go?

If so, then is the "cost of living" crisis more accurately just a "cost of specifically housing, healthcare, and education" crisis?

My father grew up affording meat and getting new clothes twice yearly on his birthday and the new year, nowadays a meaty meal and an outfit would barely cost an hour's minimum wage in the west. The austerity of my father's childhood doesn't exist in the west and would be much rarer than a few generations ago even by global standards.

Really nearly everything is cheap if you have a Western income that isn't a zero-sum status competition (housing, education, luxury goods), artificially constrained by regulation (housing, healthcare, education, childcare) or dependent on high Western labor costs (housing, healthcare, childcare).

Technology could help with the last of these but I can't really see anything short of the singularity solving regulated artificial scarcity and anything short of the end of humanity solving status competitions.

have most other goods actually gotten any more affordable than pre-globalization?

yes

check clothing costs, food cost

check what people expect from their housing

check what is considered as a minimum viable equipment in house

how much people travel

and so on

cost of living

compared to past, especially pre-industrial times it is more of growth of expectations

when you measure cost of square footage of housing, measured by hours of average/median/typical low wage - then a lot of costs increase disappears do that while holding quality standards steady, and it disappears even more substantially

people dramatically underestimate wealth of typical modern people, compared to XX/XIX/XVIII century

when compared to typical people in ancient times (NOT emperors or pharaohs) it is even more hilarious

Pretty much everywhere I go, modern housing is appalling. Buildings thrown together; decorative panels falling off new-built apartments; concrete slabs rush-poured and not given proper time to cure; residential towers that catch fire or crack so badly they become uninhabitable; just enough lighting that you can photograph it for a real estate listing, but not enough to actually live in it; cupboards shallower than the width of a single mug; I could go on. It is not clear to me that we know how to build things any more.

You should compare equivalent-cost housing (in work hours or at least in inflation-adjusted cost), not worst currently available to best preserved ones.

Are you doing this?

It did, probably.

Color TV cost like $650 in 1980. Ten years later you could get a Japanese one for…$400. They even ditched the wood paneling. Today a similarly-sized Chinese flatscreen is, like, $150.

I’d grabbed a bunch of links from the FRED, Minneapolis Fed, and BLS to show this for other goods, but lost my draft. So feel free to compare numbers. All else equal, more competition means lower prices.

These charts of food prices per hour worked in England may be of interest. Along similar lines, I happened to be reading some 100+ year old newspapers about a month ago, when egg prices reached their zenith, and I was interested to see that, correcting for inflation, eggs regularly cost more than $6.00 per dozen c. 1910–1920, which is higher than any of the highly elevated prices I saw recently.

I also recall reading in an old book of etiquette from the late 1800s that a gentleman should look to spend 2–3 months’ income when purchasing a suit. I cannot fathom spending a sixth of my annual salary on a suit today.

I also recall reading in an old book of etiquette from the late 1800s that a gentleman should look to spend 2–3 months’ income when purchasing a suit. I cannot fathom spending a sixth of my annual salary on a suit today.

Perhaps the society is truly richer or tailors are poorer. Does anyone have an idea how expensive are handmade bespoke suits? I know made-to-measure is certainly cheaper.

Taylor’s are also far more productive due to sewing machines.

That’s fascinating, but I wish it had data points from the mid/late 20th century. If the curve flattens out by the 70s, with ubiquitous refrigeration and antibiotics and other technologies, it wouldn’t actually contradict the OP.

(I suspect the curve does not, in fact, flatten at that point.)

First, globalization didn’t suppress the wages of blue-collar workers, it suppressed the wages of manufacturing workers. Blue-collar service workers are doing fine.

Second, it did suppress their cost of living. The idea of going to work “to put food on the table” is an idiom in modern-day America. When an American loses his job, he doesn’t stop being able to literally feed his family. He doesn’t lose the clothes off his back. He doesn’t lose his refrigerator. He doesn’t lose his microwave. Instead, he loses his house, his healthcare, and his children’s formal educational opportunities.

his children’s formal educational opportunities.

Not even this. You might have to switch school districts because you lost your house, but universities offer scholarships. Harvard is 100% free including room and board to students from families earning under $100k (and has lesser benefits for other income bands).

Yes. Shoes used to be really expensive; now they’re cheap, just for one example.

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