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🪵 The Threshold

Trade integration fused American underinvestment with Chinese overinvestment for both workers' harm

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tagsja-picks, define, causal_relationships, trade, corroborated, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@varoufakis_technofeudalism_2023, loc. 569

2 min read

Trade integration fused American underinvestment with Chinese overinvestment for both workers’ harm

Evidence

Why call it a Dark Deal? Because in the small print of this pact between America’s and East Asia’s ruling classes was written misery for workers on both sides of the Pacific. American workers faced the exploitation and immiseration that resulted from underinvestment and its industrial heartlands being hollowed out by manufacturing in Asia and the underdeveloped Global South. Meanwhile, in China’s fast-industrialising coastal cities, workers suffered the frenzied exploitation associated with overinvestment – it was as if parts of the Global North, fattened by overinvestment, were migrating into Chinese urban centres where local workers struggled to survive on Global South wages and social benefits. Different miseries, same global recycling process. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 569

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Defines the Dark Deal as a pact whose small print condemned workers on both Pacific shores to opposite forms of exploitation.
  • corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 569
  • XREF: connects to: The US-China Dark Deal traded market access for investment in American FIRE — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 566; Greater import penetration lowers labor’s share of income — Ken-Hou Lin & Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Financialization and U.S. Income…, 133; Deunionization and import competition drive inequality, but computer investment’s inequality effects are uneven. — Ken-Hou Lin & Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Financialization and U.S. Income…, 170 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

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