Re:Lessons learned from a failing local mall
by opportune on Saturday April 28, 2018 @09:25PM
(#16950304)
I agree that there needs to be a balance. Free trade, consolidation, and competition are of course beneficial in many ways and circumstances.
I do wonder if the disconnect between policy and many of the negative effects I outlined in my previous post is due to the fact that decision/policy makers are disproportionately likely to be the ones benefitting from this trend. And for us as developers, especially so in the US, we're the ones directly benefitting from an industry that naturally lends itself to extreme consolidation in certain cases (e.g. a team making software for thousands of people may not need to expand that much to serve millions or even billions of people. See: whatsapp) and living in the countries with a competitive advantage in this industry. And we also mostly live in large cities with multinational corporation headquarters, so we're insulated or even benefitting from what's happening to smaller communities.
I grew up in a non-coastal city that is neither doing well nor poorly. It doesn't have a lot of wealthy people to "bootstrap" itself into success by means of capital, nor is it an attractive enough investment opportunity for outside investors (low education with brain-drain chicken/egg problem), but it has a few competitive industries and is somewhat of a local resource and business hub. But once you go into the smaller communities in the region around the city, you really see the phenomenon I'm talking about. A big way money enters most of these communities is through farming or other resource extraction (if they're fortunate enough to have these), but the main way is through social security payments. These places would be perfect for low-medium cost manufacturing because they have large numbers of unemployed, working class people who are down to earth enough to take pride in that kind of work.
Those communities are often forgotten when it comes to policy, likely because they are individually small, not culturally important, have some opinions we would consider backwards, and most importantly because they have no wealthy/powerful people to vouch for them. But outside of big cities and regional hubs, where decision makers do reside, this is what a pretty large portion of America consists of.
I do wonder if the disconnect between policy and many of the negative effects I outlined in my previous post is due to the fact that decision/policy makers are disproportionately likely to be the ones benefitting from this trend. And for us as developers, especially so in the US, we're the ones directly benefitting from an industry that naturally lends itself to extreme consolidation in certain cases (e.g. a team making software for thousands of people may not need to expand that much to serve millions or even billions of people. See: whatsapp) and living in the countries with a competitive advantage in this industry. And we also mostly live in large cities with multinational corporation headquarters, so we're insulated or even benefitting from what's happening to smaller communities.
I grew up in a non-coastal city that is neither doing well nor poorly. It doesn't have a lot of wealthy people to "bootstrap" itself into success by means of capital, nor is it an attractive enough investment opportunity for outside investors (low education with brain-drain chicken/egg problem), but it has a few competitive industries and is somewhat of a local resource and business hub. But once you go into the smaller communities in the region around the city, you really see the phenomenon I'm talking about. A big way money enters most of these communities is through farming or other resource extraction (if they're fortunate enough to have these), but the main way is through social security payments. These places would be perfect for low-medium cost manufacturing because they have large numbers of unemployed, working class people who are down to earth enough to take pride in that kind of work.
Those communities are often forgotten when it comes to policy, likely because they are individually small, not culturally important, have some opinions we would consider backwards, and most importantly because they have no wealthy/powerful people to vouch for them. But outside of big cities and regional hubs, where decision makers do reside, this is what a pretty large portion of America consists of.