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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Jobs aren't what make people wealthy, its access to markets. Jobs are an expense, not an end in itself. Politicians and now even economists always talk about jobs as some thing to strive for. This article talks about outsourcing but freeing up human resources to pursue more meaningful work should be applauded. Eliminating menial work for people to perform (usually replaced by machines or in this case outsourcing to low cost countries) has led to furthering human achievement. That is of course only true if you believe people aren't mindless sheep.

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Then you have people like me who through no fault of their own, are forced into semi-retirement due to the lack of interesting and challenging work. I spend my time working on open source projects and living off my investments and rental income, but I'd prefer to be employed.

Is laying off Americans in a poor job market with few opportunities because most of the interesting work has been moved overseas really a judicious use of resources and talent? If it costs X amount of dollars to live in a certain area of the planet, and companies don't employ workers in that area of the planet, how can the company continue to have sales in that area over the long term?

Employers are really not all that serious about hiring. The economy really isn't in good shape when compared to before 2008. They'll hire people with very specialized skills at a bargain pay rate, but that's it.

There are two ways out of this. In the best case, the cost of living will decrease in first world countries and meet the third world counties in the middle. In the worst case, there will be war on a scale similar to World War II at the end of the Great Depression. War is a good stimulus for the economy and it puts people to work. I'm hoping for the former and not the latter.

The only mindless sheep here are the people allowing this travesty to occur. There is absolutely no way that the US Government should be incentivizing the offshoring of work.

Instead of H1B, we should update our immigration laws and policies to prefer educated people of means who have a desire to come here and contribute to our country.

> There is absolutely no way that the US Government should be incentivizing the offshoring of work.

And why not? The offshoring of work reduces the cost of goods and services and frees American time up to do meaningful, better compensated work instead.

The eventual conclusion (perhaps even in our lifetime) of automation and offshoring will be that Americans will not have to work for the necessities of life at all, just for self-actualization and luxuries.

The accountant seemed to be pretty happy (self actualized) in her job, which she no longer has. She's been stripped of her self actualization by a government that she paid taxes to in the expectation that it wouldn't pull the rug out from under her. I guess now she'll have to be self actualized on the unemployment line.

And what if she gets retrained and into another job? Why, isn't the best thing that could happen is that she should lose that one, too, helped by our good friends running H1B?

> And why not? The offshoring of work reduces the cost of goods and services and frees American time up to do meaningful, better compensated work instead.

In general, in a free capitalist market the government probably shouldn't be subsidizing corporations in any way.

That model assumes that the government has absolute power over corporations and that politicians need nothing from corporations.

In real life, governments need to negotiate with corporations, because individual politicians need corporate sponsors to finance their campaigns, so they sell their influence.

Play that through to the end though, having access to cheaper goods means little when you can't afford said goods due to the offshoring collectively lowering wages across the board. The part your ignoring is the downward pressure on everyone's wage that would have

> collectively lowering wages across the board

It would not collectively lower wages across the board, it would leave many completely unemployed and the rest earning double or triple or fifty times what they're making now in real terms.

The solution is a basic income so those that are unemployed don't suffer for it and have a long runway to work on art, hobbies, retrain, etc.

To me, and a lot of people, the problem isn't free markets or movement so much as the distortion of markets that occurs under very uneven regulation.

What I think has happened here is that the government got out a bullhorn, pointed it overseas, and said "if you study engineering or computer science, we will give you a path toward citizenship and/or residency in a lucrative market through specialized tech visas that will not be available to general would-be immigrants." It then turned around with that bullhorn toward the United States and said "if you go to law, medical, dentistry, or even nursing school, we will protect your jobs through government backed professional associations and unions, and even in the absence of special protections, most fields and trades will require existing right to live and work in the US. Oh, and also, there's a shortage of Americans going into STEM."

Here's the thing, if make it much easier, through regulation, for immigrants or foreign consulting companies to enter the tech market than the legal, medical, or other markets, you should understand you've created an incentive for foreign workers and companies to focus on tech, and US citizens to avoid it.

Think of it this way - lemons and avocados are grown in similar conditions. People can't buy lemons for what they used to pay, so the government declares a shortage of lemons. From now on, lemons will be exempt from the 20% tariff that is placed on avocados, and the government will grant a temporary residency visa to any farmer who wishes to immigrate, provided he agrees to grow lemons only (if he stops growing lemons and tries to grow avocados, he will be deported).

You would expect people who already hold US residency rights to move into avocados, and away from lemons, right?

But this isn't the result of markets, it's a market response to severe distortion created by US government policy.

I think we've done something much like this in high tech and science/engineering. The "shortage" of US citizens going into these fields is a rational response to uneven government regulation.

This is why I'm ok with general immigration, but generally opposed to targeted visa programs designed to cure specific "shortages". I think that they are almost always used to suppress the wage growth that would draw people into the field and reach market equilibrium.

There is data to back this up - the RAND institute, historically a very pro-immigrant think tank, reached the conclusion that US citizens avoid Science and Engineering graduate programs because they are not competitive with the other fields that are available to high achieving students. But here's the thing, those fields are only available to people who already have citizenship!

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html

> government backed professional associations and unions

Oh I could fill a page about how disgusting I find professional associations and unions, but it's probably off-topic here.

In the interest of being accurate when commenting on a contentious issue, I should point out that my statement that these professions are only available to citizens in the US is not strictly true. The barriers to non-citizens wishing to enter law, medicine, dentistry, and so forth in the US are considerable, but they are still somewhat porous.

The barriers for citizens to enter law, medicine, dentistry are outrageous. The professional associations restrict supply on purpose so they can continue earning outsized salaries for skills that could easily be taught by the age of 22 for less than half the cost.

> Instead of H1B, we should update our immigration laws and policies to prefer educated people of means who have a desire to come here and contribute to our country.

Every student who comes here is on H1B after they graduate. They go through a lot of pain and effort to get a permanent residency because they get stiff competition from the employees who come directly and are on the same visa status.

This is not a new concept, David Ricardo developed the theory of Comparative Advantage [1] in 1817 to refer to that phenomenon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

And what if meaningful works get eliminated by machines?

What meaningful work has ever been eliminated by machines? Do you have examples?

To rephrase the question in terms you may agree with: what should happen when there is not enough meaningful work to keep everyone employed?

(I believe we reached this point some time ago)

The bounds of the human imagination, and its possible expressions, are functionally infinite. Then it is only a question of resources. I don't agree that we've reached this point.

In a post-scarcity world, I don't think the problem of insufficient meaningful work is likely to occur. There will always be a kitten to be played with, art to be made, research to be performed, and more.

Where are all these purfessional kitten-playing-with jobs?

I know several people who make a great living from playing card games (Hearthstone). This would have sounded insane to me 20 years ago.

I know several people who make their livings running a cat cafe.

If absolutely everything useful is done by machines, then every good or service will be so stupid cheap you won't need a job.

I have heard this utopian fantasy before. It's kinda laughable. Remember, greed will never disappear. Greed breaks the utopian hypothesis.

> Remember, greed will never disappear.

I agree, but that's actually a good thing. How do you get more than someone else if everything is made for free by machines? New jobs would have to appear that produce handmade expensive goods and services that the rich can use to distinguish themselves from the poor :)

We're living in a lite version of that utopian world today, actually. It's pretty damn cheap to live in Canada or the US if you don't buy anything but food, water, and shelter. You'll find that most of your dollars today are spent on luxurious crap to improve your standing versus other people (new cars, rent in a fashionable urban center, new clothes, etc.)

In many socialist countries welfare is good enough that you can live quite healthy without ever working at all!

But we've always found new things to work on and purchase and we will continue to do so. They'll just be more meaningful than the repetitive crap most people have to do to eke out a living today.

> We're living in a lite version of that utopian world today, actually. It's pretty damn cheap to live in Canada or the US

Well, this is a prime example of why our trajectory is not converging to utopia. 'Things' are cheap, yet income inequality is extremely high in the countries. 'Things' will always come at a cost. Those who profit in the absence of labor will be a small subset of the population. The land owners, the farmers, those with political control. Sound familiar?

Welfare may be good enough in socialist democratic countries to live in relative comfort, but that is being subsidized by those who work (and I agree with this strategy). The assumption you are making is that if labor were removed from the equation, these countries would continue to exist as they are. I disagree with this premise.

We have always found new things to work on. But at the same time, jobs have become more monotonous as they are minified. The rate of automation is exponential, which hasn't been seen before. The assumption that we will all move into knowledge work is a poor assumption. Bob the builder wants to use his hands, not his brain. And good on him for being him.

"freeing up human resources to pursue more meaningful work should be applauded"

Only if that pursuit can be realized, which in the reality of our current world and for the workers being displaced, it usually cannot.

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