The answer is that these low skilled jobs should be eliminated by more automation - which is great - but then you need to find a lot more higher skilled jobs for everyone to do.
I think the UK has ceased investing as much in skills because every upskilling in office work or having more workers with the necessary degree is largely net zero competitions between marketing departments that will most likely all be in the UK.
For countries that were not traditionally on top and running the industry consortiums they have a small chance of pulling the income from countries like the UK.. But mostly their workers just end up over skilled for the work available for countries like Spain.
The price of low skill labour in the US has been increasing, I think. I don’t know if that’s because of increased demand or reduced supply or something else though.
A second problem is that non-tech companies lacking competent in-house technical expertise will always choose to outsource it to a shitty consultancy which will take advantage of them, waste years and not deliver anything viable or cost-effective in the end.
I think that’s not actually true because people have incomplete information. I think it’s also not static – for example it’s much easier to automate ordering of your product, arranging payment, etc, now than it was 20 years ago, even though the technology for forms/payments over the Internet still existed back then.
To be clear, when I write automation, I don’t really mean automating whole jobs but rather automating the bits of jobs where people don’t add value so that they may spend more of their time doing the things that add value.
When it’s time to hire, you want someone with 40 years of rust experience, who is under 30, and is a 20x rockstar.