12.04.13
The Plutocrat’s Telecaster (a series)
A fresh example today, an artistocrat’s Telecaster from the Fender Custom Shop, American-made — 4,000 dollars. The original electric guitar made for everyone, priced as a gem stone.
That’s an order of magnitude times about 2.3 more expensive than the offshored Telecaster I borrowed to do this tune.
You think it could have $3830 more twangy sound?
The 40-Year Slump, at the National Prospect, which explains how it got this way, among other things.
Excerpted:
The decimation of manufacturing wasn’t due to a sharp acceleration of manufacturing productivity—indeed, productivity increases were higher in the previous decade, which saw less job loss. What made the difference was trade policy. Economist Rob Scott has calculated that the United States lost 2.4 million jobs just to China in the eight years following the passage of normalized trade relations.
Offshoring has had an even broader effect on the jobs that have remained behind. Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist who was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1990s, has estimated that roughly 25 percent of all American jobs are potentially offshorable, from producing steel to writing software to drafting contracts. This has placed a ceiling on wages in these and myriad other occupations that can be sent overseas.