I would like to know what happened around 1980 that so radically changed the economic trajectories of the various quintiles.
SOMETHING (or things) certainly did. Our entire economy changed in a fundamental way. Not just wages and incomes.
I know its not a single factor, but the shift is abrupt. I've seen it in a variety of graphs and charts, illustrating any number of different phenomena, all with a distinct "change" point right around 1980.
I personally believe that a key element was the world "filling up". Our "expansionist" capitalist model became unable to expand at its customary rate, resulting in a change in its nature as it sought new ways to continue to increase profits.
What do YOU think happened.
This is the key question. I agree something happened, actually, many things happened.
Summary
Nixon’s greatest innovation was his approach to the People’s Republic of China. Sensing the time was right to make an overture to China, Nixon sent a nervous Henry Kissinger to confer secretly with Chinese premier Zhou En Lai in July 1971. Nixon’s own 1972 summit meeting in China, at which he signed the "Shanghai Communique," was a diplomatic triumph that left the president’s critics, accustomed to his fervent anti-communism, astonished and off-balance. China had finally entered the world stage. Within a few weeks, Nixon was in Moscow to negotiate the first step in a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, (SALT). Born in that session was the era of détente, a search for accommodation between the the superpowers, and an effort to reduce the danger of nuclear war. Other leaders would follow, but Nixon openned the door.
Nixon Travels — China
This was a start on the road to an
excess of world wide LABOR. About 1.2 billion people who did not participate meaningfully in the world economy just joined. It took a couple of decades before it began to be felt, but this was the start in 1972.
- In
1981, IBM introduced the Personal Computer to corporate america. Before that, there were some Atari systems and Radio Shack TRS 80 (Trash 80's!) personal computers, but IBM legitimized it, and corp. america could depend on an adequate supply chain and standards for hardware and software. This ushered in the widespread use of spreadsheets, word processing, and database applications to the masses. There were also new custom applications like AutoCad that dramatically reduced the need for draftsmen, as one person could do the job of 10 working manually. The ensuing productivity kept lowering product cost for decades. This was hostile to labor.
- Robots, began entering the workforce in the 70's, use has become commonplace, replacing the need for humans. Robots don't call in sick on Monday.
Factory robots
Car production
Over the last three decades automobile factories have become dominated by robots. A typical factory contains hundreds of industrial robots working on fully automated production lines, with one robot for every ten human workers. On an automated production line, a vehicle chassis on a conveyor is welded, glued, painted and finally assembled at a sequence of robot stations.
Packaging
Industrial robots are also used extensively for palletizing and packaging of manufactured goods, for example for rapidly taking drink cartons from the end of a conveyor belt and placing them into boxes, or for loading and unloading machining centers.
Electronics
Mass-produced printed circuit boards (PCBs) are almost exclusively manufactured by pick-and-place robots, typically with SCARA manipulators, which remove tiny electronic components from strips or trays, and place them on to PCBs with great accuracy.[76] Such robots can place hundreds of thousands of components per hour, far out-performing a human in speed, accuracy, and reliability.[77]
Automated guided vehicles (AGVs)
Mobile robots, following markers or wires in the floor, or using vision[78] or lasers, are used to transport goods around large facilities, such as warehouses, container ports, or hospitals.[79]
Early AGV-Style Robots
Limited to tasks that could be accurately defined and had to be performed the same way every time. Very little feedback or intelligence was required, and the robots needed only the most basic exteroceptors (sensors). The limitations of these AGVs are that their paths are not easily altered and they cannot alter their paths if obstacles block them. If one AGV breaks down, it may stop the entire operation.
Interim AGV-Technologies
Developed to deploy triangulation from beacons or bar code grids for scanning on the floor or ceiling. In most factories, triangulation systems tend to require moderate to high maintenance, such as daily cleaning of all beacons or bar codes. Also, if a tall pallet or large vehicle blocks beacons or a bar code is marred, AGVs may become lost. Often such AGVs are designed to be used in human-free environments.
Intelligent AGVs (i-AGVs)
Such as SmartLoader[80], SpeciMinder,[81] ADAM,[82] Tug[83] and MT 400 with Motivity[84] are designed for people-friendly workspaces. They navigate by recognizing natural features. 3D scanners or other means of sensing the environment in two or three dimensions help to eliminate cumulative errors in dead-reckoning calculations of the AGV's current position. Some AGVs can create maps of their environment using scanning lasers with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and use those maps to navigate in real time with other path planning and obstacle avoidance algorithms. They are able to operate in complex environments and perform non-repetitive and non-sequential tasks such as transporting photomasks in a semiconductor lab, specimens in hospitals and goods in warehouses. For dynamic areas, such as warehouses full of pallets, AGVs require additional strategies using three-dimensional sensors such as time-of-flight or stereovision cameras.
Robot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Widespread use of email. This has made many information based / information sharing jobs "geographically independent".
- Widespread use of the internet. This has made many information based / information sharing jobs "geographically independent".
- Advances in the quality of telephone services, especially internationally and vastly reduced cost of telephony. This has made many information based / information sharing jobs "geographically independent".
So, advances in computer and robotic technology are reducing the need for many traditional jobs in america, and widespread use of email/internet/telephony allow us to tap the huge job markets in asia, primarily China and India, but also Japan, S. Korea.
These are all 1970's to 1990's phenomenon, and they all add up to offshore jobs or eliminate traditional jobs. What we are left with is too many people in the US, chasing a smaller pot of jobs. For decades we have been told not to worry about the loss of those "low tech" jobs in the US, as they would be replaced with better "high tech" and "service sector" jobs that would not be so boring. One bad thing about service sector jobs, they are all "discretionary", instead of hiring someone to do them, we could just do it ourself when times get hard, and that is what we typically do. That is a big reason why unemployment remains high 2 years into the recovery. The nature of the jobs people did the last 20 years is not at all the same as the nature of jobs done in the 20 years before that, say 1960-1980.