From Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism loc 373:
While neoliberalism, which emerged with the Thatcher and Reagan governments, led to higher unemployment and lower wage growth, for more than a generation this was mitigated by access to cheaper goods and services–by relocating production to countries with lower wages–as well as inflated asset prices, particularly housing, and access to cheap mortgage and consumer debt. As well as forming the foundation for a widely felt material improvement in living standards, this was the economic base for a world where there was no alternative.
Mark Carrigan 