I mean, America being the world police is a meme, but also has some truth to it...
That is one heck of an understatement.[0] The global economic benefit of the stability brought by the US military being top-dog is vast, and appears to benefit many countries including China. There are plenty of valid criticisms of Pax Americana, but the global economic benefit, not so much imho.
The hypothesis is that if most high compensation workers are remote, it opens up those labor markets to more competition from lower cost regions.
IOW, as Covid-19 forces organizations to become remote-first, they perforce also become more outsourcing-friendly, or at least outsourcing-capable.
Also, while COVID is going to accelerate the shift to remote work in the US, the vast majority will be <100% truly async remote. It's the 1-20% of edge case requirements that are really hard to mitigate. The ability to answer a phone call at 2pm Eastern Time and hop on a plane to Chicago is way different for someone from Manila than it is for someone from Cleveland, even if they only do it occasionally.
I agree, for a variety of reasons, but there is a joker in the deck: will the distribution of required skill change over time? IOW, should we expect demand to grow faster at the low end of the information economy, in the middle, or at the top? I don't think it is too reasonable to expect the distribution to remain fixed over time.
Right now, we've been seeing a lot of growth in demand at the top end, but that was true for the 'service economy' at the start too. The irony of the scenario where increasing automation depresses the wages of the lowest skill jobs because they can most easily be filled with fungible human labor while expanding the demand for workers to fill them due to Jevon's Paradox should not be lost on us.
It is entirely possible that entry-level software work will become as much of a dead-end job as being a customer service representative.