If two workers are competing for jobs in the same market, there is no way one will be paid $100 and another $1000 to do the same job. We would expect everyone doing the same job to earn about the same salary.


We are now in a transition period from the world being a collection of domestic markets to a single global market. It's a slow transition that may take a century to complete. However, at the end, a cleaner or programmer or researcher in the US or Europe will earn the same as a cleaner or programmer or researcher in India or Myanmar.

This means that currently, there must be a downward trend in the real value of wages in developed countries. Since people don't swallow paycuts well, this is likely to translate into inflation - a gradual long-term decrease in the value of the US Dollar (and other OECD currencies) versus currencies of countries that are now moving into the global marketplace, such as China or Iran.

Perhaps the current downward trend in the value of the US dollar is just part of this longer-term trend? Perhaps it just looks like the world economy going down the tubes, because our eyes tend to equate the global economy with the economy of OECD countries - whereas in fact the wealth is just being spread out more evenly?