It's often said that hip hop is the soundtrack to globalization, and psychedelic music the soundtrack to the hippie movement. Do you think new wave and synth pop were the soundtrack to the offshoring and automation of the blue collar economy and the desolation this caused starting in the late 70s and into the 80s and beyond?

I've noticed many of the new wave groups came from the Rust Belt and northern England, while the "glam" groups tended to come from places that were doing quite well in the 80s like California. New Wave music was largely about technological alienation and a sense of losing that human touch, and the disenfranchisement that generation born in the 50s/early 60s felt.

What do you think?

It's music.  Why not just listen, not analyze?

Well, I've been listening to new wave music for a while and I don't see how it could have killed off industry.  I think in a small way New Wave music improved what was already going on at that time.

IMO it represented the transition from the industrial to the information age. If playing real instruments were like typewriters, synthesizers and drum machines were like PCs. That said, you had songs such as Mr. Roboto that represents the automation of jobs that analog machines once provided. There were also many nuclear war songs that reflected the later stages of the Cold War. Some of the new synthesizers were made in Japan, where much of the new '80s technology also came from. Deindustrialization is more of a disco-era thing with its message to just party on but without the luxury of seeing the artists perform live.