Why should people have adjusted? When you are in your 50's and have worked in that factory all your life, surely that means something. It also means a lot when neccessities were getting more expensive so you couldn't save enough and then they say YOU are too expensive, we are going to China! It also means a lot more when the jobs have largely been shipped to a country that pretty much provides slave labour and is supposedly a communist menace. It's a heist. I suppose 'communism' and sharia law go out of the window when the elite want to pillage their own economies in order to please the 1% of the populace with a serious claim on stocks and shares. Globalisation is the biggest con as all it has meant is that corporations have moved on the hunt for cheap labour and the only people who truly advance are the shareholders in those corporations which is the American elite, and now the Chinese elite.

More stats... NEW PAPYRUS: The Rapid Decline of the American Middle Class

I don't think anybody truly imagines life as good as generations past, but what has taken place is a systematic assault upon the vast majority of the population. The business elites and Wall Street have commited a vast money grab in the name of globalisation which basically means swarming like locusts to pick up cheap labour in places with few labour laws and even less of a pretence at being democratic.