[prolways]

If a significant portion of the population has a market value lower than the cost for them to have a reasonable quality of life isn't that some kind of fundamental failure condition for society/humanity?

[brightball]

Or is it a function of supply and demand simply changing the rate because we've been perfectly comfortable sending millions of jobs overseas?

As soon as the supply of people needing jobs is low enough that businesses have to pay more to hire...they will do so barring alternative options.