One of my clients is one of the largest multinational corp. in the world. They're excellent at getting things done, above average at remote work, and obviously have offices around the world. Their primary industry has a drastically changing demographic in the US which is prompting a hiring wave of younger people. They would love nothing more than to hire most of them outside of the US. The schools in several countries in Asia outperform the US in the necessary areas of study and they speak fine English. I'm not talking about India. My client is working very hard to make this a reality. They will eventually pull it off. These jobs are all very good paying white collar jobs. I'm telling you the middle class in the US hasn't seen the beginning of the devastation they are about to endure.
This is a trend that will continue until all labor is (as) equal (as an imperfect market will allow) no matter the geography. I see no trends (other than nationalism) that will make this stop.
Devastation of the middle class is about equivalent to devastation of the entire US economy. After we've willingly and successfully transferred all our manufacturing and engineering knowledge and processes to other countries... The only playing chip the US will have left is food exports.
https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
Movie and music industry is in the "Information" labor category, which accounts for a whopping 1.8% of total employment... Oh, and Bollywood is already bigger than Hollywood. I don't see such trends reversing as we continue outsourcing CGI and other movie-making magic. There's nothing special about Hollywood that isn't able to be duplicated somewhere else.
> And reputation via ivy league education? Also a legal landscape conducive to doing business?
These both almost solely benefit upper-class, and no one is arguing that they'll be just fine -- at least, for a longer period of time than everyone else.
When money is generally cheap and easy to come by, save instead of spend. When money is tight and hard to come by, spend. It's "buy low, sell high" applied to personal savings.
I don't think people realize how extremely true this is and how drastically different it will make the west look.
The smart people with money that come here can hoard all the good talent easy.
I think this is true, and I think it will result in massive civil unrest. Economic landscape is not the only thing that will change.
The true outrage comes from the super-rich, who are beginning to sense that their racket is about to be...disrupted. This is the roaring 20s all over again, except multiplied a thousandfold by technology.
Interesting times, indeed.
Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of investments are referring to?
I'll be more concerned once leading technologies that are used by the rest of the world come out of China and not from the US.
Sounds a lot like Feynman decrying the Brazilian education system in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman.
I'm not surprised such comment came out from someone in Hong Kong but the truth is the education system in Hong Kong is even more "comes down to repeating book knowledge, so just memorization".
Actually, most East Asian education systems have a heavy focus on "book knowledge, so just memorization". Lack of innovation? Just look at Japan.
Disclaimer: I'm from Mainland.
I don't think most of readers on HN can get and care about mainlanders' feeling of being somewhat offended in this case. So I just chuckled originally. But I hope my comment can supply some context.
To be clear, I'm not saying that globalization is the cause of big-ticket items like healthcare getting more expensive. I am saying that globalization has not depressed big-ticket expenses along with the prices of manufactured goods and middle-class American wages. Many middle-class Americans are experiencing a real decline in material standard of living concomitant with globalization. If equilibration toward a happy new equilibrium takes decades, I don't think that political realities will permit the equilibration to take its own sweet time. Something will rupture first. Maybe it already has ruptured with the election of Trump.
The greater effect on non ultra wealthy people now is the distribution of the wealth at the top for what is currently the outsourcing class, but is quickly becoming the machine/AI owner class.
It's hard to do creative things when you have to work the gig economy all day to barely afford a cardboard box to sleep in at night.
Then there will be less wage discrepancy compared to China and co and jobs start coming back.
I don't think food is a problem though, western EU food prices are not smaller.
tldr; people don't like pay cuts, whether it benefits someone else or not.
I'm not interested in relative to global. I'm interested in relative to where I live. Cause, you know, that's where I have to pay rent and buy food.
$12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with. Even with that, people would still work massive hours to obtain the best house on the block.
But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that.
How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too?
I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today. There could be a complete paradigm shift in the future, where machines literally take care of all needs in an automated way, but that's such a strange reality that welfare is honestly about the last problem we'd need to discuss.
I think the thing that folks keep missing is that technology isn't a zero sum game. So what if there are a shitload of people in the east doing programming cheaper? 9/10 of the 'type' of programming they're doing is grunt work that no one really wants to do anyway.
Will some people feel the 'crunch' from this? probably, in the short term. But technical acumen doesn't sit still. We're not all languishing on our laurels with technology from the 90s while the Chinese are gearing up for total war.
A much BIGGER problem, IMO, is our social policies tending towards overt xenophobia. THAT is what will kill the US and the Western European countries if we don't get off of this nationalist bandwagon that we find ourselves on.
Why is the US and Europe the only places that have to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of globalism?
Why do China and Japan get free passes while anything done in the west to protect citizens interests is decried as xenophobic?
And it will -- as it already ate lots of service and call center jobs. But these things take time, and India's schools are not exactly best of class.
I sometimes believe it lacks a bit of socialism.
I would wager the front end developer will continue to be a high paying job longer than the backend developer. You can outsource API creation but any product company can't risk not having a UX friendly and well designed front end.
If a job is as easy to outsource as so many on here are saying, it is already being done or has been done.
It's been done in my industry. The low level grunt work and basic administration is all outsourced. Has been for decades.
In China, they are racing to match and surpass western standards. I would say, they have already matched in some cases. But unlike the west where companies export out to save costs. Companies in China do everything in-house.
There will be a time where these 6 figure jobs that some HN users have, will go down by 50%. Why? Better coders outside of the US, UK, EUR, etc.
Of course, there will be a portion saying that we must keep our skills up to date. But not everyone can do heavy math, statistics, and ML. Just think of the developers who work on drupal, wordpress, javascript. What percentage do you think they can develop AI systems on tensorflow and neural nets?
A major shift is coming. As developers, we need to prepare.
Cue the cries for UBI.