Why Donald Trump Got Elected

[pbrower2a]

Let's start by looking at one innovation, not particularly high-tech, that (1) killed lots of jobs and (2) made offshoring of existing jobs easy. Containers. I recall a piece in Mad Magazine that mocked longshoremen, warehouse workers, and freight handlers back in the 1960's. One measure of how such people lived was their ownership of stuff that the middle class still considered luxuries, such as color TV's. These people might have several of them despite modest pay... the TV's were of course pilfered. The more exposure that costly merchandise from whiskey to golf clubs to color TV's to high-cost clothes had to 'sticky fingers' the more it faced an informal pilferage tax as a cost of doing business. Containers ensured that a load of Magnavox televisions shipped from Fort Wayne to Fort Worth would be inaccessible to any sticky fingers between the factory and the store. Such greatly reduced the number of people in shipping... meaning that someone like "Archie Bunker" who seemed to have paid for everything that he had) could be laid off and never re-hired. The people actually moving the stuff around on land were crane operators who could do with one crane what perhaps twenty freight handlers could do.

Add to this another obvious fact: transporting stuff over water has always been cheaper than land transport. It costs less to ship a bulk load from Shanghai to San Francisco than from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. Shipping costs fell, so it was easier to import than to manufacture. Manufacturing jobs in America disappeared in favor of manufacturing jobs in poorer countries .
That ainno0vation made life much less expensive. It also killed jobs. Nobody has a viable solution for job loss