How good we had it (company, cost, employment, jobs)

[jambo101]

Reading the life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. early in the book he reminisces about how it was in the 50's

By 1951 almost 90% of American Families had Refrigerators and nearly three quarters had washing machines,telephones,vacuum cleaners and gas or electric stoves things that the rest of the world could only fantasize about.
America owned 80 percent of the worlds electrical goods,controlled two-thirds of the worlds productive capacity,produced 40 percent of the worlds electricity,60 percent of its oil and 66 percent of its steel.
The 5 percent of people on Earth who were Americans had more wealth than the other 95 percent combined.
Remarkably,almost all this wealth was American made!
Of the 7.5 million new cars sold in America in 1954 99.93 percent were made in America by Americans, we became the richest country in the world without needing the rest of the world,

It goes on but you get the idea.
We were in the promised land and for some reason we let it get away.

[las vegas drunk]

Here is your answer:

The Final Stage in the Deindustrialization of America | The Economic Populist

[jambo101]

Excellent link LVD, pretty well sums up what happened to our promised land.
So to edit my previous post we didnt let it slip away,we got sold out with a bottom line logic of
. "the work could be done cheaper overseas"

[Robhu]

I was born in 1947. I remember growing up everything the family bought was proudly stamped "Made in in the USA."
These days you can't hardly find anything with that stamp on it.
It might be made by a Company headquartered in America but the product was manufactured in a foreign country with cheap labor.
Yep, our leaders and big business did the thinking and the workers in other countries did the sweating.
Now we are sweating with worry because there are no jobs and the foreign countries are thinking about controlling the US.
Whoops, I said that wrong. They already control our lifestyle because we have lost a lot of good paying manufacturing jobs that allow the hourly laborer to acheive the American dream.
And it is going to get worse, imo.
U.S. politicians and big business leaders have sold out a great country to cheap labor because of greed and no thought to the end result of what is good for the American economy.
If it isn't made here some American worker has lost a job. Multiply this by thousands of lost jobs and you get where we are today.

[jambo101]

As an example the Swedish appliance giant Electrolux announced it is shutting down its plant here in Montreal,1300 workers will lose their jobs, Electrolux says its moving operations but wont say where Let me guess.
Last year a local company that makes footwear called Crocs closed its doors and relocated to China, 650 people are now looking for employment in Quebec city..
Multiply these two instances by thousands and its not hard to figure how we are losing the game..

[edwardianlady]

Ah,the good old days when things were Made in America and stamped with pride .Which will most likely never be seen again except in a history book.

[mathjak107]

you mean like my american cars i used to buy? i started driving in the early 70's. whenever i bought a new car i already planned the day i would take off to go back to the dealer to have all the problems fixed,even before i took delivery. i dont even want to think about what goods would cost today with the rises in commodities without cheap labor holding down the fort. im not talking low end cheap goods either. im talking world class products that are the best of breed.

[bale002]

Originally Posted by jambo101

It goes on but you get the idea.
We were in the promised land and for some reason we let it get away.

The world's first agricultural community could have boasted in an analogous way about barley, grapes, olives, cows, chickens, brick ovens, bronze tools and weapons, and so on. So what?

Then agriculture spread to other communities, the process took, oh, some ten thousand years, composing, crystallizing, decomposing, recomposing and recrystallizing into almost every form of social organization imaginable, from subsistence farming villages to sprawling empires. So what?

US society was among the first to industrialize, and because it had its first industrial war in its early stages, and a decisive one at that, and it was the main victor in the second wave of industrial wars that swept over Europe and Japan in the ensuing decades, it was pre-eminent in the 1950s-1960s and into the 1990s. So what?

It has taken some two hundred years now for industrialization to spread to most of the rest of the world, utterly predictable. So what?

For millennia throughout history, western Europe and the British isles were a marginal fringe on the extreme western edge of the Euro-Asian landmass, while more important economic, political and cultural events were taking place elsewhere, and North America was an obscure continent between the two great oceans surrounding the Euro-Asian landmass.

Not that history repeats, but there may be a time, and that time may be coming relatively soon (50-100 years?) when North America and western Europe are just not that important anymore.

The "golden age" of the industrial middle class in North America and Europe lasted what, about 50 years?

Hardly a footnote in the sweep of world history.

Get over yourselves.

[slackjaw]

1 in 10 people not owning a fridge
1/4 with no washing machine or telephone
How many had a televsion?
No home computers
No cell phones
1000 sq foot family home
Much smaller variety of available foods

Sounds like heaven.

[Philip T]

Suppose 'mericka just needs to figure out to export our sell-outs, MBAs, profiteers.

We seem to be very much in surplus on them.

We can even put some trademark slogans with them.

A knock-off of The Great Wal (of China) Mart --- We Sell-Out For Less.