by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Mere mortals are left in a hopeless situation. In response, they’re withdrawing from the competition en masse.
The world has changed over the past two generations in ways that don’t fit the heavily promoted narratives of “growth” and “progress.” The “growth” and “progress” narratives hold that everything is getting better in every way and every day–next stop, Mars!–but if we consider everyday life, a much different picture emerges.
1. Globalization shifted high-pay work overseas to the benefit of capital, who reaped the profits from global wage arbitrage and to the detriment of workers in developed-nation economies.
The conventional-economic apologists glorified this as a net positive: everyone who lost their jobs to globalization would move up the food chain and get jobs as currency traders, highly paid tech workers, etc.