This might surprise you but Americans aren't the only people on this forum.
But I guess it's okay to leave us all out to pasture if it means you can concentrate just a bit more of wealth.
But I guess it's okay to leave us all out to pasture if it means you can concentrate just a bit more of wealth.
(I am from Poland and some informatics/programming is outsourced here already from USA)
Bring it on!!
If we're speaking of things like employment, of course people should look out for their own self-interest. Proposing the opposite is to propose suicide.
The people of Norway should donate their trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund to Togo? As opposed to continuing to concentrate their extraordinary wealth figure and continuing to act in their own national self-interest. Togo only has eight million people, imagine how rich all the people of Togo could be if Norway weren't so selfish.
Next you might want to convince all the world's great economies to drop all trade restrictions and stop protecting themselves.
Then take the next logical step: stop protecting all workers from big globalist corporations, drop all labor laws and protections.
That feels extreme... I don't think the opposite of "some jobs will leave the US" is "I'm going to kill myself".
Ditto the rest of your post. Nothing but a bunch of straw man/ slippery slope.
It's particularly obvious "suicide" is meant as a figure of speech, although frankly it's not too far from the truth, given what deindustrialization (loss of very large numbers of manufacturing jobs) did to large swaths of the US. It did in fact cause large increases in suicide numbers, along with a horror show of other consequences / fallout. I doubt anybody is confused over the dire consequences of what happened across the US as manufacturing jobs got wiped out.
Saying the most highly paid US workers take a 10% pay cut if it means other economies rose above the poverty line is absolutely fine in my opinion. If you think that is akin to starving the entire US population so my country can live like Sheikhs, I feel like that's on you.
Talk about jumping 27 places in terms of drawing artificial conclusions.
I got to see, up close, what deindustrialization looks like, during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. Its consequences are intensely negative on the population it affects. Allowing the US tech industry to be outsourced to save big corporations money, would be an identical repeat of the stupidity of what the US intentionally allowed to happen to its industrial empire - in the name of globalist corporations boosting their margins - in the second half of the 20th century.
If you want to see what a selfish industrial policy looks like, look no further than Germany. They protected their industry, they acted in their own national self-interest, and their people have benefited enormously from it over the last few decades.
I don't have the same experience so I can't argue it.
> Allowing the US tech industry to be outsourced would be an identical repeat of the stupidity of what the US intentionally allowed to happen to its industrial empire
And yet it seems to me that you're doing rather well as an economy all these years later. Wasn't the capitalist argument that the size of the pie is not fixed or some such?
1/4 to 1/3 of the country did well, that much is true. If you're in that group, you're among the best off people on the planet, generally.
> Wasn't the capitalist argument that the size of the pie is not fixed or some such?
The pie does indeed expand, sometimes substantially. Otherwise we couldn't have nearly eight billion people that are better off at the median than at any other time in recorded history. The examples of vast national improvement from around the world the past 30-40 years are prolific.
The pertinent question usually is: who is extracting what share of the expanded pie. Where is it going, to how many people, due to what policies/reasons.
In the US, the tech boom has produced eight people now worth one trillion dollars collectively. That's equivalent to the bottom 100 million (!) having an additional $10,000. Obviously not a trivial sum, in other words, compacted into just eight people. It has also produced 1.47 million software developers yielding a median salary of $110,000 per year (1.47m is 1/2 of 1% of the US adult population).
Tech is particularly potent at concentrating wealth, for various reasons (often rapid growth, global reach and winner-take-most outcomes).
The US middle class has not thrived over the last half century. The US, for the better part of a century (post Civil War up to the early to mid 1970s), had an elite middle class outcome. That is no longer true, the US middle class outcome has receded vs many of its peers.
Whereas in software, the very mechanism that opens the job market to people in other countries ensures that it stays open for people in the U.S. We're not going to see a gutting, we're going to see a balancing. The door won't be shut on the way out. If cost of living makes it hard for U.S. workers to compete, it will probably also come down quite a bit, seeing as tech workers have been one of the huge drivers of its recent increase in the first place.
This is manufacturing story all over again.