The truth is that good third world employees aren't exorbitantly cheaper than their counterparts in the US. Cheaper, yes, but not enough that it would completely offset the cost of communication lapses, legal issues, and collaboration problems.

The way I've put it in conversation is this: while the equalization will balance out in many ways, pulling "third-world" countries up closer to "first-world" standards of living, the reality is it is highly likely that first-world standards will actually decrease... for the first time in quite a long time. Now, one can argue this is a good thing because we first-worlders are overconsumers, polluters, and many other reasons, but I don't think it's fair to hate on people wanting to protect their own standard of living.

I have theorized, perhaps wrongly, that this is part of the real, behind closed doors, push for brexit in the UK, especially seeing as currency is the great entangler and now that Europe are all on the Euro, the UK wants to get out before the Euro starts having major issues, and they probably saw that coming which is why they never left the pound. So ignoring the more unsavory reasons being touted for brexit, I think it shows a certain amount of people intuitively understand globalism might reduce their standard of living which is why we are seeing an increase in protectionism in much of the first-world.

Note: I hate the terms first-world and third-world... any better suggestions on that are welcome.

you want "developed" and "developing."

There are models where you could still have uplift without those issues but they are not what we are doing.

Our trade deals exclude environmental, labour, and other non-goods protections. So As a result we end up with the race to the bottom that you mentioned.

The fix is trade agreements that enshrine protections for more than just the goods being produced.

China is going to destroy their environment with or without incoming US capital. They will also continue to employ children, etc.

Globalization puts more demand on their system so their people get higher wages, better conditions, cleaner work environments, etc.

Competition for their labor pool and their environment in general means they don’t have to give it up under bad terms.

The problem your math teacher has is that there are significantly more people qualified and willing to teach math at that level than there are people qualified to do your job.

That's an easily falsifiable assertion.

Here's an apartment in Nairobi that's $62.50 USD per month.

https://www.buyrentkenya.com/listings/1-bed-flat-apartment-f...

Cheapest apartments in Cleveland, OH meanwhile found here are $400 per month and there are 4 of them.

https://www.apartments.com/cleveland-oh/400-to-400/

So there's a ~6:1 difference in rental price between the two, on the low end as listed online. Presumably there are even cheaper deals to be had which are not listed online. Food, labor, transportation and other expenses in Kenya are going to be similarly less expensive, perhaps by even greater multiples.

So no...outsourcing is definitely cheaper in the short run, and for simpler tasks.

I'm not going to tell you how to outsource or not outsource, and when it is and is not appropriate but labor can definitely be had for much cheaper than in the US. The US is now the richest country in the world per capita, more so than Luxembourg and the other traditionally richer countries because the USD is so strong.

Of course this will fluctuate over time, but that's the present status as we have this discussion.

"Yeah but outsourcing is dumb and people don't know how to code."

It's dumb? They don't know how to code? Could it be that some people don't know how to manage projects remotely and across cultures? Could it be that some projects can be outsourced while others can't?

I should research this; I was told $800 for two bedrooms.

This one's $430 (1 bedroom). So I have no idea, but there's probably a massive range. Could be neighborhood, could be having security and power. I'm not sure.

https://deals.jumia.co.ke/1-bedroom-in-westlands-pid4154172

Rent was cheaper for me in Beijing than in Seattle, but whenever I looked for anything that I would have rented in Seattle, the gap disappeared and even increased in Beijing. Yes, I paid less rent, but I lived at a much less standard as well.

There are other things to consider worn outsourcing: logistics are often more costly in the developing world than developed world, which can eat away at your savings pretty quickly.

What did happen were waves of outsourcing, followed by insourcing. My theory is that whenever there's a new generation of managers, we flip around, because they haven't learned from the previous one.

My first degree was in a foreign language; I was taking it for my own reasons but one of the professors I was close to knew I was very involved in technology and linguistics. She asked in, maybe in 1992, whether I thought computers would eliminate the jobs of translators "soon."

I remember looking at her and saying that no, not until the mid-2000s or so, because of the twin problems of voice recognition and OCR: in both cases, you need both a corpus for translation and to build it you need to get the data into machine form.

I was off by maybe 6-10 years but machine translation really did start making inroads for professional writing around then (and maybe a little sooner). Now, though, the job is totally transformed. Live translation is still a real job but a hard one to land and with fewer opportunities, and media translation while it is still a career (especially for science and technology papers, etc.) it is dramatically changed and is now more of an editing job than a translation job. That happened in a few years, tops, once the tools arrived.

So .. maybe we're whistling in the dark. A lot of what we do cannot really ever be practically done by AI, but I think a lot could be. The demise of the CASE market probably delayed a lot of what's coming for a long time, and a lot of things likely will be automated. I think UI design is ripe since so many UIs basically look exactly the same.

Preventing them from following through on the really bad ideas is the salient part here :)

This holds, AFAICT, for translation too. Yes, you can get the gist via machine translation, for some language pairs. You cannot preserve imagery, intention, subtlety without a human int the loop.

AI is good at looking things up and beats us there. It is entirely insufficient at context & wisdom (and I don't see that changing anytime soon). Sure, the industry might choose to collectively ignore that and jump off a cliff. It's not going to end well, so I hope saner heads prevail.

This uncle indeed lost his job because he worked in operation of a mainframe and didn't bother to learn PC or even UNIX workstation programming. He resorted to teach math in a primary school to complete time for retirement.

I was telling him about the experience of the terror of mid-2002 - layoffs everywhere and a really tough job market, stock market post-collapse, massive rise of offshoring in actuality but more importantly the nearly-universal assumption among business leaders and investors that eliminating US employees was the way forward, the entire career looking incredibly iffy, etc.

He was in highschool at the time, he says. The highschool guidance counselor was doing their thing and he was interested in computers, softwarer, etc. She told him that programming was all going to India so he should do something else like law school or business.

And then sometime after 2008 the bottom dropped out of the legal industry and the big corporate firms started laying people off.

Aside from making me feel tragically old (I'd been working professionally for years at that point), it was just interesting to hear someone recount a totally different view of the cataclysm.