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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

Most developed economies have shifted to services. Its a natural progression that results from higher productivity and higher wages.

I think the big problem is too much reliance on on service sector.

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It's a consequence of companies outsourcing to countries where they can get away with slave labor and a complete lack of environmental regulation. There's nothing natural about it.

It's basically a modern form of economic colonialism replacing the old style of colonialism with ships, guns and slaves in chains.

The brutal hard work gets done off-shore for poor pay and the spoils(profits) get shipped to the western finance capitals of the world where people who put in little effort get the cream.

It's still dependent on rich countries having historical leverage (economic, political and especially military) over the poor countries where the dirty manufacturing and hard labor happens, rather than based on any meritocracy.

Or how trade made places rich... Well you always have the buyer and seller. And less they get and more they pay worse is it for them... Trade has value generation, but also exploitation and extraction...

Not true. Those countries have become a lot richer. The transformation in standards of living since the 80s has been spectacular in many countries. The biggest drag on that has been the profits being taken by the wealthy in those countries. The west does not have he position it used to. There are a lot of British workers working for Indian capitalists. China's manufacturing is mostly Chinese owned. In a lot of other places the forreign ownership is Asian, not western. The west no longer dominates the world although westerners have been slow to bting themselves to acknowledge this.

Exactly this. Don't think of it as "moving to a service-based economy", think of it as "outsourcing manufacturing and resource extraction". They are two sides of the same coin, but people tend to only look at the one shiny side.

Like any race to the bottom, it works great until you hit the bottom. Only now you don't have any of the fundamental industry, and you've lost all of the domain knowledge of those industries. Short-term thinking is incredibly seductive.

It also creates this weird power imbalance. 'Advanced economies' are supposed to be just that, yet 'developing economies' cutting off their grain, steel and manufacturing is a far bigger threat than an advanced economy cutting off digital services, luxury goods, and financial markets.

But "advanced" means "gone farther in a particular direction", not "more powerful", "independent", or some such. Mostly it's about giving the population more comfort. Equally, staying on a sofa can give you more comfort than hitting a gym, but it usually does not make you stronger.

Its not that simple. The UK experts a lot of manufactured goods to exactly those sorts of countries, and imports a lot from the EU and the US.

What you say is true of cheap consumer goods, but remember everything else. Even with some consumer goods, its pretty even - the UK exports cars about as much as it imports (by value, not numbers though). https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-trade-in-numbers...

Its other big goods exports are things that are not that visible to consumers.

Are you sure you want to get into everything else? Because I could've sworn we just had a major controversy with Vivek Ramaswamy running his mouth about the supposed laziness of American workers to justify racial discrimination against them through mass hiring of H1B workers... a stance so obviously wrong it forced his exit from the Trump administration. He certainly wasn't referring to people employed producing "cheap consumer goods", and there's nothing natural about the shift to the use of H1B labor. Just to be clear, though: This phenomenon is not unique to the United States. Imperialists everywhere try to pit one people against another to maintain power and extract maximum value for minimum input. Just once I'd like the bourgeoisie-adjacent to acknowledge political reality.

We were talking about the UK. Since Brexit immigration policy has shifted to favouring highly skilled workers, especially skills in short supply, over cheap labour.

There are definitely people here who think like that, and we do still import cheap labour for some things (difficult low paying jobs), that British people “will not do” ( which means ”will not do for minimum wage”) but in general we have had what the govt and central bank call “wage inflation”.

We are also talking about the north of England and non-EU immigrants strongly prefer certain areas, tilted to the South. Where I live I see few non-white faces.

We have been running a negative current account balance for decades now.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpay...

That includes services, and reflects success of polices in attracting inward investment. You cannot have it both ways: capital account + current account + changes in foreign currency holdings have to balance, and the last is small comparatively.

OK, let it be not outsourcing to places with lower cost of labor, but to machines. There are whole factories that are operated by half-dozen people who mostly oversee its interaction with other human-run systems, such as trucks.

It will still keep most population away from industrial production. Same thing happened is agriculture a century ago, when machines made 90% of agricultural workers redundant, and huge farms are run by half-dozen people.

(Wait until AI will make a ton of service workers redundant.)

OK, sounds good... hey, you're going to pay taxes on those machines, right? Because no business operates in a vacuum. Gotta pay for that military, police, and fire that allow you to continue operating. Think of it as the labor element of the manufacturing sector shifting to the defense sector. It's natural. :D

Machines can't go on strike, and don't need to be ordered back to work at gunpoint. The part of the defense sector allocated to manufacturing was much bigger prior to automation.

A natural progression and not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes further productivity growth more difficult.

The problem is de-industrialization gets your society dependent on authoritarians who rent out there slaves to the lowest bidder and who then can wield you like a puppet.

And the focusing on a more abstract economy- produces a inability to even perceive physical products, limitations and overall reality and the world. If everything is an abstraction, then problems like climate change, running out of energy or societal instability, surely can be doctored, narrated and abstracted away. And they cant. Which is a fundamental incompetence that is pretty obvious by now.

One stuck in such a delusion, would imagine it optimal to blast furnace a mountain of money towards "elegant" formulas, unable to perceive, that those formulas at the end of the day have to produce fertilizer to feed a world of billions even when the crops fail.

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