Anyway, my point (if I have one, maybe I am just thinking
out loud) is that I have the impression that wealth of all
sorts was created in the 80s and 90s. And now that wealth
is going to go away to balance things out. Am I nuts?
I think the entrance of China and India into the worldwide labor force is the major factor driving the long term world economy these days. The result is the value of labor of all kinds, including blue collar work, is declining and will continue to decline. Americans are just too rich compared to the rest of the world, so as the population of the rest of the world (China and India) rise in wealth, American wealth will decline. In 10-20 years the US (on average) will still be orders of magnitude ahead of those two places, but from the US perspective it will still feel like a decline because the US will have gone from something like 20x better off to 5x better off.
Some Indians move to the UAE to get jobs that pay $200 per month, 6 days a week of work 9-10 hours per day. It's amazing! That means that the UAE job, where they are 2nd class coolie boys, is better than what they can get in India near their families.
We shall see - the US will remain dynamic and strong because it is one of the few countries where the economic system will tear up and destroy the losers (bye bye Bear Stearns) and replace them with better fighters, but beating the long term affect of a declining cost of labor, and thus declining salaries and declining personal wealth, is tough. |
