[pertsix]

> They had all forgotten about blue collar America. They all thought people would change jobs and these jobs would offer a good living to blue collar workers.

But.. people did change jobs? Unemployment is at an all-time low and goods and services are very cheap. Housing is not cheap, but that's a function of the wage rate (which could be argued is a function of housing costs).

Just because there are more services industry jobs and less manufacturing does not mean that 'blue collar America' is forgotten -- it's just changed identities.

Everyone benefits from global trade because the terms of trade should always benefit both parties.

[yourapostasy]

> Unemployment is at an all-time low and goods and services are very cheap.

Unemployment is low, precarity is high. Wall Street bitches about the primacy of stability and predictability all the time, but doesn't apply the same principle to working- and middle-class families' employment.

In percentage terms in the US, several big-ticket items in a working or middle-class family's budget are not cheap at all. You named housing, but it really is real property (the dirt), which makes this an even worse problem than expensive buildings. There are any number of alternative structure designs that can work around expensive buildings, and many DIY'able as well. You can't get around expensive-ass dirt, no matter how much "up by your own bootstraps", creative, or determined you get, and dirt even in "flyover country" is expensive for these kinds of budgets, especially so considering the kinds of wages they can get in those areas of the country.

Healthcare isn't cheap. Education isn't cheap. Insurance isn't cheap. Internet isn't cheap. Leisure time isn't cheap.

In young Millenial, working- or middle-class families, these budget categories combined tally into the 70%+ range of take-home, after-tax income. Sure, computers are hedonically cheap. Packaged, sub-standard nutrition food is cheap. Externality-reliant-business-models spewing forth piles of throwaway junk appliances, one-time-use-plastic, etc. are cheap.

Not all categories are weighted the same in quality of life, don't fall for the economic canard that just because a number of categories are dirt cheap (and many of them are externality- or outright subsidy-dependent to make them cheap), that those people standing closer to the left-hand side of the bell curve are getting a fair shake. They aren't, they haven't for the past 40 years, and just because they can't figure out the relationship between interest rates and bonds, or use Lexis-Nexis, or read an actuarial table, or navigate a bureaucracy, or extrapolate the possible implications of policy decisions decades into the future, or write a loop, doesn't mean it's open season on their human dignity or they're "muppets".

[late2part]

I don't think unemployment is at an all time low. The media says this and the government reports say this, but the methodology for calculating this is subjective.

These statistics suggest that unemployment is at 25%: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

This article explains some concerns about the manner in which the rate is calculated: https://qz.com/877432/the-us-unemployment-rate-measure-is-de...

"Yet to leave this group out significantly underestimates employment issues in the US. For example, the unemployment rate completely ignores the nearly 600,000 “discouraged workers” who say they are no longer looking because they don’t think they can find a job. It disregards the many students who would like a part-time job but have given up looking, and caretakers who would take a job if the compensation was high enough."

[mc32]

Yes unemployment is low, but much of that is because many people have given up on finding jobs. U6 is something like 90 million.

Also, most service sector jobs don’t afford you a mortgage and other lower middle class living. Most service sector workers struggle to get by, compared to your blue collar worker of yesteryear. Those people could afford a mortgage, raise three kids and send the off to state school. That ain’t happening no more.

[bjourne]

That's the same tried and tested argument that always comes up every time unemployment is discussed. See f.e https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17474163

But it is completely false as this graph shows: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/u-3-unemployment-rate-was-... Empirical data suggests that U6 is almost linearly dependent on U3, meaning that, indeed, the "real" unemployment in the US is record low.

Yes, service jobs doesn't pay well. That is perhaps related to decades of union busting and resistance against raising minimum wages?