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Comment by kukx | Hacker News Reader

It is difficult for American workers to compete with Chinese or Indian people wages. The good thing is that the global inequality is declining.[0] My guess is that when the incomes in low-wage exporter countries get closer to the developed countries, then we may see a wage increase again.

[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality

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This has been predicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization. Under this model, incomes (especially those of lower-skilled workers) in developing and developed countries will eventually meet somewhere in the middle. Once all countries are equally developed, this downwards pressure on low-skilled wages in developed countries will abate. Restrictions on outsourcing and trade would prevent this to a degree, but doing so would slow down the income increases in developing countries, hence many economists do not support such restrictions, as it's hard to make an economic argument that developed countries' citizens should be privileged over those of developing countries (although a political argument can certainly be made), and more trade is generally seen as increasing the overall size of the pie.

Sorry to have to disenchant you, but the underlying paper by Mauro (affiliation: IMF) that the linked article is citing actually only shows that the global Gini index is going up (less income inequality). And, in the same time-span (since the 80's), the Gini index in the US was also rising, slightly.

The problem is that the Gini index is built to be robust against outliers (those 1%). So no, both locally (US) and globally, inequality is on the rise - even if the Gini index is going up in both cases.

I am not sure how can you blame inequality to other nations. Why American workers cannot complete with other nationals, while it seems American elites are still winning?

The truth is that the elites in any nations are gaining from the poor.

The idea is to blame one nation's inequality on another nation is like blaming one poor man's tragedy on another poor man's being more tragic; while ignore the ones who causes the tragedy...

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