Different countries have different standards as they are developing. The US had different standards years ago and some attribute the higher standards to our relative economic wealth. I'm sure the US will have higher standards in the future as well as it grows wealthier. But the US wouldn't have gotten that wealthy were those same high standards enforced in the past.
Imagine that you think paying a living wage is a moral imperative. In the US, this may include enough money to live in an apartment with air conditioning and a fridge. If you were to impose those same living wage standards to some employer who would normally hire in a poorer country, that employer might as well hire someone in a richer country. Because those in a poorer country never get the opportunity to accumulate any wealth and pass it on to make future generations wealthier (as many American families did), they will never be able to progress. If they remain poor, they demand less from their institutions.
Many of the things that Americans demand, like environmental standards and a relatively less corrupt political process, are a direct result of our wealth. You can't just mandate higher wages and better living conditions. If you try, unintended consequences are sure to result.
Still, even with that, there'd be offshoring just because cost of living can be much cheaper...
And people in third world economies still deserve to have a job. If the fist world monopolized good jobs, we would not bee seeing the record reductions in abject poverty world-wide. Yes, a side effect is the first world will see some loss in income but not as much as gained by the third world economies.
Without some of this offshoring, first world economies would see much larger waves of economic refugees.
We need to get over this White Man's Burden bullshit. It's condescending, paternalistic, and subtly racist.
Unfortunately, intellectual property rights are only getting stronger. Land rights are only getting stronger. Taxes on wealth and unearned income are only getting lower. Employee and union rights are only getting weaker.
Thus the effect of immigration on the downward pressure on wages is magnified.
http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-pr...
Also a massive drop in inequality, if that's the sort of thing you care about.
http://www.maxroser.com/economic-world-history-in-one-chart/
The U.S. has many factors contributing to economic competitiveness but also some serious drags: difficulty accumulating capital savings among the middle and lower classes, inefficient cities and suburbs, housing that is too extravagant and expensive for people of modest means, mortgages still underwater, high cost education and a very expensive health care system riddled with fraud. Most of these are due to unwise policies anchored on the public and private accumulation of debt. All of them are solvable with a proper understanding of the issues.
The complaints about the 1% or 0.1 or 0.01% largely can be traced to the architecture of this system which is anything but a free market. It guarantees large cash flows for favored groups who naturally support it.
Refactoring all this will require a great deal of capital spending, internal migration and a shift in incomes away from sectors that have been supported by policy such as finance, gov, education, entitlements, war, retail and healthcare in favor of redesigning the American lifestyle along leaner, more competitive lines. Think smaller homes closer to work and more sharing. Yes it will look more like other more competitive parts of the world do today. It may be called a depression 20-30 years from now but it's better to think of it as cleanup and refactoring-- a clearing out and reckoning of all the bad decisions and policy driven malinvestments of decades.
The biggest thing many people really have control over is their own lifestyle expectations and location. Naturally young people sense this and are cutting back accordingly. Not sure how many are willing to relocate for opportunity.
For average joes in the U.S. the high water mark was probably the 70s and 80s. The stuff that led to America #1 occurred between 1870 and 1960. We've been coasting for a while pretending we still have a beast under the hood and gas in the tank. It's just now becoming ever more difficult to paper over the situation with more debt.
The U.S. still has amazing positive attributes and strengths. Labor force mobility, the most efficient system for consumer goods distribution in the world, generally high quality building and housing stock (albeit inefficiently spread out), generally high knowledge and expectations of service and quality, etc. The list is actually long and the cultures ability to adapt and reinvent itself is a strong reason not to bet against the U.S.
We could opt for a basic income but not at anywhere near the levels of currently expected individual prosperity. We'd have to redefine poverty to something more along the lines of what the rest of the world considers poverty and say, we can help you avoid that. America is not presently designed to support a "middle class" life at $10-20 a day. Some other counties are.