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Comment by praeter | Hacker News Reader

>> cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency

> It is efficiency, really, because it's making better use of an underutilized resource. Over time, of course, the price of labor evens out because the resource is no longer underutilized.

It's not efficiency at all, it's stagnation. Since the 80s instead of trying to innovate and automate production lines too many companies have been hopping from country-to-country looking for the cheapest labor pool. We lost 40 years of manufacturing innovations because they were economically unnecessary due to offshoring.

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Can you blame them? It was cheaper to outsource than automate, so why wouldn't they have outsourced?

I can't blame them, just like I can't blame a company for becoming a monopoly. We need to regulate them like we do with antitrust, worker's rights, and other things. The free market unabated is terrible for humanity.

It's worse then that, we all live in a socialist society, it's just a corporate socialism. A free market would be a fantastic start. There is a real lack of competition and innovation in our socialist model.

Yes, a true free market can only exist via governmental regulation, as otherwise, companies tend towards monopolies and collusion. It would be nice to have such a market, but I do wonder how we'll get there with moneyed interests at the door.

I can't "blame" a corporation, because it's not a person.

But they are run by people, those people are the ones crafting the legal and regulatory environment that encourages this behavior, and we can certainly blame them.

I can't blame the workers either. They are driven by incentives, so of course they'll fulfill their incentives. Expecting them to do the right thing without incentivizing them to do so doesn't effect any change. If you want to change them, change their incentives, whether through money, government regulation, or other.

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