Unfettered free trade has been a disaster for workers in both the developed and the developing world. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
You can see the same template in effect in Africa too.
If workers are better off today, how to explain the gini coefficient, and the mass migrations of peoples? Happy people tend to stay put; people in distress migrate. Migration costs a lot of money, I know this first hand.
Ask a migrant if he'd rather be back home or in a Des Moines, IA meat packing plant doing grueling work for low pay and no protections as an illegal immigrant, I think you can guess the answer. But, ask him who's got the family plot of land now, and he'll say Dole or Del Monte or some other agro-alimentary concern, which flooded the market with low priced goods from subsidized and mechanized farms, drove him out of business and then bought his land cheap.
Collectivization in the interest of Capital rather than the people, that's what "free trade" has been primarily about. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
The big story is China and India and the giant progress which has been made there (check it in Gapminder), and no amount of Mexican anecdotes is going to change that.
By the way, massive migration is in itself nothing bad. The hundreds of millions who have left the Chinese countryside hasn't done it because they've gotten worse off - you can't get worse off than a poor Chinese farmer without dying - but because they've gotten an opportunity to live a better life in the cities. It's the same thing which happened in Europe during the 20th century.
All your complaints about the results of free and unfettered trade is not due to the trade itself, but a sympotom of local problems. They are bugs, not features. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
I hve this in my "decline" article:
In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
On one hand you have the US were GDP has grown by X % over time Y, while median incomes have been stagnant. That's very bad and one can indeed question why the hell we should even care about economic growth at all in that situation.
On the other hand we have places like Western Europe where the elite might have increased their incomes by 100 % over time Y while median incomes have risen only 50 %.
While the first situation is horrible, the second is certainly not. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
