Maybe China is the one that will find their labor compensation unsustainable?
Chinese workers are much closer to earning what you would expect the globally average worker to earn.
>local labor markets, relative purchasing power
Reverse causality.
>and all the other reasons that underpin the theory of specialization in the first place.
If you are specializing in something and someone else does everything you do better than you than the theory of specialization tells you that ...
Because it costs many times as much to live in America as it does China.
> If you are specializing in something and someone else does everything you do better than you than the theory of specialization tells you that ...
Okay and my understanding was the idea behind this whole "society" thing was that we worked together for mutual benefit of one another. If whole segments of the society get left to starve and die because a different group of workers elsewhere can do their work cheaper than they can, that strikes me as... well, horrible, and also short-sighted and stupid.