There is a thing we call path dependency. For example, If I wanted to be 350 lbs body builder that was pure muscle...Its a bit late for that. I can still get pretty buff -- but I'm not winning any shows.
Nor can I really try to be a competitive basketball player or something.
However If I wanted to be a PHD historian -- it would be totally attainable. I'm not specifically trained in history -- but it is close enough so I could get into a program. I could even maybe get into a top school after getting a terminal masters degree. I would just have to commit my life to it and knock it out of the park.
Sweden in Germany had people with working class identities that created strong unions. These unions help keep workers wages high across the economy. This meant the state had to figure out how to prosper without outsourcing everything (although they do still outsource) and driving wages into the dirt.
They came up with a lot of high tech skilled labor that only a advanced capitalist economy could pull off. The most difficult part of the Iphone is made in Germany for example. The cheaper stuff in it comes from China.
Financial self interest is a powerful force. If you make entrepreneurs and policymakers function in constraints like "you can't find people that will do this for $7.5 an hour -- that's illegal" they will generally find a way. Or at least enough of them will to work out well for the workers in that country.
The owners of production would much prefer to pay less for the same work. The casual link here is the boundaries of corporate behavior prevent this from always being the answer for them. You need a working class constituency that will stand against those that own everything.
Those constraints create a situation where the country does not revolve around cheap labor. So it doesn't shit out cheap labor jobs. But it didn't happen overnight. It was a very long process of investing and coordinating their economy.
I bring up Trump because he's a great example of politicians just telling older people what they want to hear. He literally said "the jobs are coming back" when talking about high paid car manufacturing.
It's like a guy in the 19th century telling people "the guilds are coming back." The hell they are -- especially not in 4-8 years. And sure enough -- they didn't.
The cognitive dissonance here among voters -- is that their idea of how an economy should work in America (laissez-faire) does not help them like they thought it did. They were all brainwashed into thinking about lazy unions, and welfare bums.
But even good propaganda gets checked by reality. It's like when the frontier filled out and people were still trying this Jackson Democrat shit as if it would help out the poor and middling farmers. It didn't -- it just produced a gilded age.
People don't change their minds on any almost anything once they reach age 65 or so. It's something about the biology of getting old. You see it all over the world. This is largely why people keep electing people like Clinton and Pelosi.
The new generation can't lie to themselves that this system is working great (mostly -- there is always a few). But the old generation believes exactly that. That the system probably fine -- its just these damn young people that obviously didn't do what you did. Probably because of that damn MTV they are always watching. All we got to do is ask the corporations nicely to bring our jobs back and it will be like the good ol' days again.
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