Economics cannot belie its own fervent ideology, but common sense calculation and prediction for economists always turn to be common sense ridicule for people buried by real world relationship and interaction. Dissent within discipline Amartya Sen once made it straight: "Economics is ultimately not about commodities, but the lives human beings can lead". People in their life-world don't usually see even practical manifest of those rational choices and price curves, what matters is power. Money has no value apart from its power to engage in social interaction, and the latter is the true carrier of any economic means.
Rethinking dollar's depreciation then is put under another scope. While I am sitting here sipping a cup of chocolate worth as little as 2.69, the price is unimaginable back 20 years in my childhood, when my weekly pocket money is that of the equivalent of contemporary 15 cents. Americans make less as well back 20 years, but no one would doubt the purchasing power of that time is too far from being equal between two giant countries. At the time of Yuan's depreciation, the route of production and consumption is almost fixed in aspects of life, China enjoyed the growth, U.S enjoyed the commodity. There are just too many descriptions about the good(bad) old days, mine will only add redundancy onto redundancy.
From 2010, trend started to reverse, with China initially taking action to lower Yuan's value against Dollar. Now it is close to 6:1 as compared to 8:1 of two years ago. Cheers? Now more job will be available in States isn't it?
But the fact is people don't get better life just because of jobs. It's more about power, as defined by Max Weber: "the ability of an actor to realize his or her will in a social action, even against the will of other actors". People consume with the surplus consuming power apart from basic need consumption, by and large this includes conspicuous consumption, secondary consumption. Undervalued dollar assures more jobs, and assures more foreign consuming power over U.S labor and resources. What I meant by the real world relationship and interaction is the common perception of this changed power. With more low value money from the newly created jobs, producers become less capable to afford consumption from their appreciated buyers, the distribution of surplus power can therefore only flows to domestic population instead of the dreamlike cheap tourism resorts in the past. In sex trafficking sector, an obvious consequence of the unequal distribution of power is the uni-direction of woman flow. No more cheap shining skin Asian chicks now, the more low value money created by your new jobs will enable you to find suppressed dis-powered women in domestic market, but don't dream about foreign markets. This can go further to see the women from the less power side swarm to powered side to provide labor directly. Italy for France, Southest Asian for East Asian, China for U.S all witnessed how producers can earn power by accumulating money but have to undergo the pain of dispower by offering human labors including sex labor to the consumers. The bottom line logic is: the unequal distribution of interpersonal power is reflected by consuming power; apart from basic need, people exert power to consume others only on their surplus power; consumption based on surplus power is dispensable and production of commodities for surplus power is less dispensable because although surplus consumption can be avoided, production is by definition for power/money, which is indispensable. Thus created the unequal power distribution in social interaction.
