Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

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What I always wonder about with this formula is how many human jobs from the US have been shipped overseas to other humans who cost less? Those jobs are still being done by people, we just aren't cost competitive in labor for the mass of unskilled job opportunities.

It seems like something like the Fair Tax, where legal citizens get a stipend every month to offset the sales tax against basic needs, that came with a slightly higher stipend to make it more like a basic income, would have the net effect of make low cost labor more affordable and those jobs more viable. It would basically have the effect of doubling minimum wage WITHOUT passing the costs along to the businesses and making labor more expensive.

Just makes you wonder if we wouldn't be better off finding ways to repatriate the jobs that exist than to worry about the ones that are continually more automated.

That comes largely from reduced cost of transportation (including taxes and tariffs), such that the cost of distant human production + transportation has fallen below the cost of local human production.

As production automation increases, fewer humans are required, and the cost of transportation becomes more important. Also, as the standard of living in these distant countries increases so does the cost of labor, further tilting the scale. So, we are seeing Mexico become a much bigger source of manufacturing for the U.S. recently.

As manufacturing continues to automate and costs decrease further, we may see manufacturing move back to the U.S. However for the same reason it won't be bringing any notable amount of jobs with it.

As for political solutions, in the U.S. at least, labor has quite simply lost. With a few exceptions such as the larger government employee unions there is no money and no bargaining power on the labor side and we can only expect the scales to keep tilting further in capital's favor. We'd need to see something that caused a really huge demand for local, unskilled labor in the next few years to have any chance of this happening before all labor is automated out of existence.

I'm uneasy with talk about "getting jobs back". It means taking the bread from the mouths of third world people trying to industrialize. So we can feel better about fewer people on welfare.

Except that increased money supply means inflation which means that middle & upper class can buy less than before. E.g. someone with a medium salary might only get 20% higher income post-stipend but prices would rise more.

Fair Tax eliminates the income tax though, which would take care of that completely.

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