That's a log way from being the whole story, then or now. In the 1870s ok unemployment was high at 25%, but the rate of growth of the population had only just dipped below 30% per decade. Job growth was actually also booming, just not as much.
Similarly if we take a global view over the last few decades, China added hundreds of millions of people to the labour force. It's been the period of the greatest reduction in poverty ever. That's got to count for something.
EDIT
In fact enormous wealth has been created, and it's not all been concentrated in the top 1%. The bottom 30% or so globally has also benefited massively. It just hasn't really benefited mid range workers in the West, but let's not pretend the last few decades have been a disaster, or even particularly bad in the grand scheme of things.
Agreed. And the post-civil war south adds a bunch of confounding factors that make comparison hard.
In the 1870s there were a lot of newly free blacks who were saying "fuck sharecropping, fuck being scared of the klan, I'm gonna work in a factory up north" and they weren't moving north with jobs already lined up.
Wow. So do you see an analagous relationship between the freed blacks entering the American labor market in the late nineteenth century and the Chinese peasants entering the global labor market in the last 4 decades?
It's not that far off. In both cases, it involved agricultural laborers in a mass migration to jobs in newly opened factories that were building stuff for mostly far off other people.
Similarly if we take a global view over the last few decades, China added hundreds of millions of people to the labour force. It's been the period of the greatest reduction in poverty ever. That's got to count for something.
EDIT In fact enormous wealth has been created, and it's not all been concentrated in the top 1%. The bottom 30% or so globally has also benefited massively. It just hasn't really benefited mid range workers in the West, but let's not pretend the last few decades have been a disaster, or even particularly bad in the grand scheme of things.