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You conveniently misrepresented an opinion and then ran it to the most illogical conclusion possible. Saying the most highly paid US workers take a 10% pay cut

You conveniently misrepresented an opinion and then ran it to the most illogical conclusion possible. 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.

adventured 5y ago
> 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  >I got to see, up close, what deindustrialization looks like, during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. 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?
  - loopz 5y ago
    They keep changing the narrative on that. It depends who benefits and where they can move their money and industry.
  - adventured 5y ago
    > And yet it seems to me that you're doing rather well as an economy all these years later. 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.
- brundolf 5y ago
  The very fact that we're talking about remote work undercuts the comparison to deindustrialization. When a factory closed in a U.S. town and a new one opened in China, those displaced workers had no option to compete for those jobs at the new factory. They were lucky if they could compete for any related jobs without moving across the country. To work in a factory you simply have to live next to the factory; there's no way around that. 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.
RestlessMind 5y ago
You conveniently missed my argument. If things are going to stop at a 10% cut, I won't be sounding alarm. But a majority of our new hires are going to come from non-US countries. There is barely any new hires joining within the US. That is the big red warning sign that our job opportunities might dwindle because others can do the same job as us for much cheaper. This is manufacturing story all over again.

adventured 5y ago

> 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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
approxim8ion 5y ago
>I got to see, up close, what deindustrialization looks like, during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. 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?
- loopz 5y ago
  They keep changing the narrative on that. It depends who benefits and where they can move their money and industry.
- adventured 5y ago
  > And yet it seems to me that you're doing rather well as an economy all these years later. 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.
brundolf 5y ago
The very fact that we're talking about remote work undercuts the comparison to deindustrialization. When a factory closed in a U.S. town and a new one opened in China, those displaced workers had no option to compete for those jobs at the new factory. They were lucky if they could compete for any related jobs without moving across the country. To work in a factory you simply have to live next to the factory; there's no way around that. 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.

RestlessMind 5y ago

You conveniently missed my argument. If things are going to stop at a 10% cut, I won't be sounding alarm. But a majority of our new hires are going to come from non-US countries. There is barely any new hires joining within the US. That is the big red warning sign that our job opportunities might dwindle because others can do the same job as us for much cheaper. This is manufacturing story all over again.