Hacker News Reader

Comment by josho | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate your short term perspective, and agree with you that today remote work doesn't have these fears. However, the author is thinking about a longer time horizon.

As an example, with agreements between Canada/US and similar culture it would be very easy for your company to start hiring remote workers in Canada. Suddenly due to currency differences their salaries are 30% cheaper, and with a strong social safety & gov. subsidies likely even cheaper for similar talent.

Then some time later after your company has had success with some international workers they branch out farther and hire a few juniors from South America in the same time zone. Repeat this cycle over the next decade and now salaries have been eroded even for high paying information workers.

I'm starting to feel globalization is a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners.

View on HN

Globalization is and always was a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners. In my opinion, the idea has always been outsource work to other countries to bootstrap their economies into the modern era so whatever work we didn't outsource could benefit from additional customers.

I think Globalization went a bit too far and left too many American cities in the dust while catapulting strategic competitors into a powerful position. The idea that millions of workers who lost their jobs could just immediately retool and find work higher up the value chain was a disaster. Many argue that Globalization has been a success for lifting millions out of poverty, but to me that just says we ruined some peoples livelihood for the benefit of other countries who seek to simply replace the need for us instead of trade with us.

We were told that globalization made things more efficient. So, if you always saw it as a race to the bottom you are smarter than I and many others because that wasn't what was sold to us.

Maybe the real problem is that in the 60s we were told that our future selves would be filled with leisure time due to automation. That leisure team turned out to be a synonym for unemployment. The problem is that the wealth generated from globalization became centralized instead of benefitting everyone.

> I'm starting to feel globalization is a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners

And the people in Canada who can get paid twice as much - or the people in Ukraine who can get paid ten times as much as before. It flattens the competitive landscape globally, so it is a loss for those who were the highest earners previously without much competition (US, Switzerland, London) but a gain for people everywhere else.

But then there's nothing stopping American workers from moving to cheaper COL places and still competing for these jobs. And with reduction in salary costs, the product becomes cheaper as well, meaning more people have access to it and (potentially) opening up new opportunities than before.

I'm not saying it's going to be a completely painless process, but I'm far more optimistic about the ultimate end point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com