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Service jobs are hard to export, it's just moving money around inside your country. Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cas
by luma 9mo ago
Service jobs are hard to export, it's just moving money around inside your country. Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.
- khuey 9mo agoDepends on the service. Call center work was easy to export.
- tharkun__ 9mo agoI don't think that's how your parent meant this. It wasn't about the labour part and whether that is exportable in the off-shoring sense. It's about the product being exportable (in the sense of being able to sell it for money outside of your country) vs. just having people within your own economy doing "left pocket <-> right pocket". And even with that, you can sell a waiter's service to other countries. You just have to first make them come - it's called tourism and comes with a whole lot of other jobs / supply chain(s) as well. Some of which can themselves be off-shored!
- malvim 9mo agoThat is a fundamental distinction, yes. But the notion that exporting brings wealth to a country is… kinda not really the case anymore. If that wealth is ending up in very few people’s hands, and if said people are wealthy enough that they keep their money offshore (which is the case a lot of the time), what is the big difference in making something you can export?
- gruez 9mo ago> Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't. Where's the distinction between "moving money around inside your country" and "goods that can be exported for incoming cash"? If you go to mcdonalds to buy a burger instead of making it yourself, is that also "moving money around inside your country"? What about paying some carpenter to make a chair rather than making it yourself? Should we just cancel all jobs that can't plausibly produce stuff that can exported?
- terminalshort 9mo agoThat's why we import cheap illegals for those.
- almosthere 9mo agoSlavor
- triceratops 9mo agoCurious that there are two parties involved in lawbreaking but only one of them gets called an "illegal".
- terminalshort 9mo agoThat's because it's not synonymous with criminal. Murderers don't get called "illegals" either.
- triceratops 9mo agoThis makes next to no sense. Service jobs aren't "just moving money around inside your country" for the same reason that exporting goods isn't "just moving money around inside your planet". Services sell time and skills directly, instead of in the form of a tangible good. That's it.
- blargey 9mo agoIt's also hard to export manufactured goods if they're not price-competitive on their own merits.
- themaninthedark 9mo agoUnless elderly care is too expensive and people have their parents live with them. In the late 90's when we talked about the transition to the Service Economy, jobs such as call center were touted as the way forward for the recently unemployed textile workers. Until we found we could move those to the Caribbean, Philippines and India. I remember a number of people talking about how they could make decent money bar-tending and waiting tables. Until the economy slowed down and people stopped eating out. Service is job that you pay someone else to do because you don't want to do it, which is great until you have less income. Then it becomes a budget line item that can be cut.
- yibg 9mo agoDepends on the service. The US is a huge exporter of financial services.