"The Trump Administration and I are here to make a very clear point—globalisation has failed the West and the United States of America. It’s a failed policy… and it has left America behind.
"America is done exporting jobs and offshoring its future. We will no longer give in to globalisation.”~ Trump's Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the World Economic Forum“'Globalisation has failed' claims Trump’s Secretary of Commerce at Davos."Give me a break. Global free trade hasn’t failed. It helps America PROSPER."~ John Stossell"Everything Lutnick said in that statement is wrong, but the biggest flaw is that the US has somehow been 'left behind.' The US continues to enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, and it has been rising in the Age of Globalisation too (whenever you define it)."~ Jeremy Horpedahl"The US since 1990:
- Real GDP per capita: +68%
- Real median wages (PCE): +34%
- Infant mortality: -42%
- Life expectancy: +4 years
- Nonfarm employment: +46% (50M jobs)
- Median household wealth: +128%
- Industrial capacity: +76%"
~ Scott Lincicome
Thursday, January 22, 2026
"Other countries are not ripping off the US on trade"
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4 comments:
The per-capita GDP growth hides a very important fact: blue-collar workers have seen little to none of those gains, over decades.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-in-one-chart/
People aren't stupid: they know that their real wages haven't increased in 25 years, while costs have ballooned. A year's University education that cost ~$5k in 1963 now costs ~ $15k (adjusted for inflation). House prices have soared from 2.3x median annual income to 4.8x.
That's why Trump and his fascist ilk are able to mobilise so many voters. They know they've been screwed; they are just misidentifying the nature of the screwage and the people doing the screwing. Thus they vote for more economic controls, not fewer, and make the situation worse :/
The chart you cite ends in 2019 - since then, US wages have continued to increase in real terms.
The original peak was immediately before the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, and the subsequent decline was due to the huge economic disruption arising from that. Real wages fell until about 1985, then stayed much the same until bottoming out in the mid-1990s. Since then they have risen fairly steadily, and an extension of that chart to the current day shows them continuing to rise (with a big peak in the Covid era, followed by a drop back to about the ongoing rising trend).
Trump does tell his followers that they have been screwed/made worse off, but that claim, like much of what Trump says, is simply false.
Hey by any chance are you the PaulVD I knew from NZ? If so, hi :)
Yes, they have increased, but at nowhere *near* the rates at which key costs like healthcare, education, and housing have all increased.
Only those in upper income brackets have experienced income rises that keep pace with cost of living rises and inflation (two different phenomena, according to Austrian economists, but I have an entirely separate rant about how conflating them helps protect politicians careers from the consequences of either).
That is what "increase in real terms" means: that wages have (by and large) increased faster than costs (by and large) have risen.
Your statement that wages "have increased, but at nowhere *near* the rates at which key costs like healthcare, education, and housing have all increased" is simply false: the truth, shown by your chart and its extension to the present, is that wages have increased (modestly) faster than those costs have increased.
In fact, the text on the page that you cite says that "today’s [i.e. in 2019] wages in the United States are at a historically high level"; and since 2019 wages have increased further relative to prices.
Those in upper income brackets have done much better still, but it is simply not true that typical Americans have lost ground over the last several decades. Even if Trump says so, it is still not true.
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