When I was first starting out in college and studying physics, I used to find that it was an interesting exercise to go onto some of the various websites dedicated to perpetual motion machines, and see if I could sort through all of the crazy complicated arguments and pinpoint exactly where the inventor had gone wrong in thinking they could get energy from nowhere. Sometimes there wasn't enough detail to do this, but most of the time I would find it always arose from the same problem. The inventor simply made the machine so complicated that they couldn't be sure it didn't work, and hoped nobody else would be able to be sure of it, and the trick to disproving them was to actually solve the equations. Then it was always obvious their machine couldn't do what they were saying it could.
How is it that people can be so aware that these machines are bullocks, but so many people have been taken in by globalization?
In basic Keynesian economic strategy, you pay your workers more so they'll consume more. Basically, the more you pay them, the higher you are setting your productive goal. Set the goal too low, and you'll only be able to utilize a small fraction of your work force, because that's all you needed to achieve the goal. The rest of your workers either work short weeks, or stay home. Set it too high and you'll face other problems, but if you set it just right you can maximize production, because every worker is doing as much work as they can do. Everyone is getting paid more, but also everyone is producing more and so there is a match between supply and demand, and supply is still very high.
The problem when two countries trade, one with a low goal, and one with an accurate goal, is that the businesses in the country with the low goal are producing to meet the higher goal set by the other country, but paying their workers in accordance with their country's own lower goal. The consumers in the country with the higher goal are buying from a country with low expectations, and therefore getting a cheaper price, but their employers are losing customers. The businesses in the country with the higher goal have to pay their workers in accordance with their own country's higher goals, but have no source of revenue from which to pay those wages.
During the descent, it feels like we're all getting something for nothing. One country is getting more customers for its businesses. The other is getting cheaper prices for its consumers. Everyone is happy. It's like riding a bicycle downhill. However, the country that's getting the worse business outcome will eventually have to shift policies, and soon everyone will be eeking out a subsistence lifestyle. It won't balance out for a good outcome. It can't, because the only good outcome is the Keynesian outcome, and whichever country attempts to use it will get taken advantage of by the other.