After the trillions invested, and countless 12 hour shifts by underpaid workers, what have we built?

Countless economies across the world are near collapse or have budget and standard of living crises. All the progress of the last 200 years is a complete failure.

Would love to know more about who their customers would be, how much they may have earned and how they lived off of that. Any info about the broader fishing industry would be greatly appreciated too.
Thank you!

Across textiles, cutlery, shipbuilding, and a much broader range of industries, American production eroded through successive waves of foreign competition after World War II. Light bulbs followed a strikingly different path.

U.S. factories remained competitive despite high wages, and China accounted for less than 3% of lamp imports as late as 1989.

I wrote this article to examine why the industry resisted foreign competition for so long—and why that resilience suddenly broke down during the transition from incandescent bulbs to CFLs and LEDs. It draws on an FTC history of the electric-lamp industry, MIT industry research, and federal records on lighting-efficiency policy.

Are there other industries that resisted imports for decades and then declined just as quickly?

https://puresource.substack.com/p/china-didnt-kill-american-light-bulbs

It's Book Review Monday @ Apoc! Catch our look at E.P. Thompson's seminal study "The Making Of The English Working Class (1963) HERE: https://apocatastasisinstitute.wordpress.com/book-reviews/