Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by qikInNdOutReply 1348 days ago
The west defeated the socialist alternative lurking behind the iron curtain and all bargaining power of unions went to hell. Rollback started right after the discovery what a brittle giant the Sovjet Union really was (about 1970s-1980s) and kept going ever since.

Stand alone, with no gun to its head, capitalism auto decays into the neo-feudalism of the guilded age. And alot of the gullible citizenry supported this return to nothing.

1 comments

Without the politics angle, just adding a new ~two billion poor people to capitalism, over the course of mere ~10 years, will depress wages (imagine US took in a a couple hundred million very poor refugees from Afria and Asia, that are happy to work for half the US minimum wage or less - that's the equivalent of what happened thanks to globalization and free trade). Things might stabilize now, as we enter into de-globalization and the wage levels in Asia will not influence wage levels in the US as much.