Yeah, makes me wonder where the author was during those decades.

Guess he never heard of the Rust Belt (or maybe thinks it's something holding up Iron Man's pants after a rainstorm?)

Coincidentally, that's also the period right after the Green Revolution and the time of the popularization of standardized intermodal shipping containers and also the filling out the U.S. interstate highway system. And when most passenger trains were shut down and the freight trains given free reign on the rails. Those logistical changes made a huge difference.

And it was also a time when communications and tech were making it much easier for businesses to coordinate cross-country and internationally.

Offshoring and outsourcing got really big during the early 1970s - mid 1990s. First with manufacturing and such and later with call centers and professional white-collar work.

By the late 90s, when the author says the stagnation ended, most of the things that could be offshored already had been. Then it was time to move on to things like JIT logistics, lean manufacturing, and automation.

Coincidentally the mid-late 90s were also the time when the internet was opened up to average people, and the PC market boomed, and just shortly before high long-distance charges were dropped. That is, when normal people began to get the ability to communicate and coordinate and automate some things as easily as big business had been for a couple decades.

There's also something to be said about the huge tax cuts for the wealthy during those stagnation decades. The shift in executive compensation becoming much more in stock, and the shift from paying dividends to doing stock buybacks. And it was also the era of corporate raiders. So many corporate raids and LBOs.

Meanwhile the government began shifting away from antitrust actions and started encouraging deregulation and consolidation instead. All of those changes largely were major shifts during that timeframe.

So yeah, globalization and neoliberal financialization were major impacts which, although they had not stopped, had somewhat stabilized by the 2000s.

They certainly didn't all start with NAFTA. That's just a loony idea.

For a couple of cultural notes, a full decade before NAFTA, Wal-Mart had a huge "Made In America" ad campaign in the 80s, and my grandparents insisted on shopping there because of that.

Back to the Future had a joke where Marty and Doc were arguing about a circuit that failed:

Doc: No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan". Marty: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan. Doc: Unbelievable.

You didn't have to be reading the business section of the newspaper, or even be an adult, to see it at the time.