> If everything in your life costs 50% more, then your effective income has fallen by a third. Are people actually going to be ok with that? We'll see.
This already happens with the non-outsourceable stuff that's more expensive (housing, medical, education, etc). So who TF cares if flat panel TVs or Phones cost more? Not me TBH.
Electronic garbage and (some kinds of) entertainment are basically the only things for which "globalization will bring down prices" has really delivered, at least in the US. Turns out it doesn't help with most of the stuff that actually matters, and might even hurt.
So a fry cook can save a little and put together an entertainment center that would have been the envy of the neighborhood—almost unimaginably good—in 1992. So what? They're facing a hopeless financial situation on every other front. I guess it's nice the 65" 4K TV, Switch, and budget surround sound system can provide a distraction from everything else being ruinously expensive and getting worse every year, with seemingly no end in sight.
Its also a red herring. The reason costs went down is that this industry jumped on the same bandwagon as moore's law. Reducing the part count of items (compared to their 1950/60s counterparts) and handling a lot of tasks in a single piece of silicon that itself has been going down to 0 in cost is what really enabled the price of all this electronic stuff to become so cheap.
Lets compare a 1960s TV to a 2022 TV for example. In the 1950s you had the power electronics, the control circuitry for the tube, the tube, the audio circuitry, tuning, and possibly some control stuff (primitive OSD whether visible or not).
Now in 2022 you have the LCD panel which follows moore's law to an extent, a simple switch mode power supply to drive the TV(single chip solution also follows moore's law to an extent) and a single chip solution to handle audio, tuning, OSD and any special value add such as apps(also follows moore's law).
We should really exclude this category from the cost baskets as it is only serving to mislead.
Right, I didn't bring it up in my post but obviously the March of Technology is (we are told) supposed to bring prices on that kind of thing down independently of the effects of offshoring.
I actually wasn't entirely fair—cotton and synthetic casual clothes are so cheap they're basically free, anything that can be made of absolutely terrible steel and stamped is cheap (really bad knives, terrible dining utensils that bend under ordinary use, that kind of thing), and so's any plastic shit without expensive IP/branding attached. I think that's all some mix of efficiency improvements (especially for the plastic shit—we put a lot less material in most plastic goods now, than we did in, say, the 1980s) and, maybe, some actually-beneficially effect of offshoring. Oh, and kitchen appliances guaranteed to break within two years because some nylon gear wears out and it can't be repaired for less than the cost of a new one. Those are cheap. Meanwhile, actually-good stuff is about as expensive as it ever was. Be rad if we could apply this alleged cost-savings effect of offshoring to, like, nice things that function well and last, but mysteriously it only seems to materialize in things that are also a level of quality so low that we didn't used to even have such a category. Or rapidly developing technology (consumer electronics). It's as if consumers aren't seeing the bulk of these supposed benefits from offshoring, and instead what price decreases/stability we do see are mostly from tech improvements and obvious quality decline....
I'd add that I think cost increases of onshoring are overblown. US-made goods in e.g. clothing often command a large premium, but that's because if you're going to use US labor instead of Vietnamese or wherever, you may as well also use better processes [EDIT: and better materials] to produce a higher-quality item, since you can't compete with poorly-made goods on price anyway (though, sure, some places try to cheat and turn out crap at US-premium prices while implying it's better than it is). For extremely price-sensitive goods like bottom-of-the-barrel T-shirts that wholesale at like $1, even a 10% increase in costs would mean you fold even if the absolute increase in costs of the article is pennies, so of course those aren't made in the US when there are other options.
This already happens with the non-outsourceable stuff that's more expensive (housing, medical, education, etc). So who TF cares if flat panel TVs or Phones cost more? Not me TBH.