Indeed, many critics pointed to the cheaper labor employed by Japanese firms as the factor behind the relocation of jobs in the consumer electronics sector, but by the mid-1970s the Japanese advantage in labor costs had almost disappeared. In 1963, U.S. wages were six times higher than those in Japan, but by 1977 the difference between the two had shrunk until U.S. wages were only 1.5 times those of Japan. As early as 1966 Television Digest declared that Japan's rapidly developing economy was no longer the "low-cost, high-laborcontent bargain basement of [a] decade ago." In 1973 Sony could even claim that the two countries' wage costs were about the same once the elaborate system of Japanese fringe benefits was calculated into the equation. The "Japanese cheap labor" argument for moving U.S. production abroad held what little merit it could claim only until the mid-1970s, when it became clear that the Japanese government's investment in industrial policy, in the form of subsidized and targeted development strategies under way since the 1950s, was what was really paying off. By that time, however, the foreign labor against which U.S. workers competed did not belong to foreign firms but could be found on the payrolls of their own companies. Every U.S.-owned television manufacturer had become a transnational manufacturer by 1977.