You eat meat, I eat potatoes.

You fly to Disneyworld, I take the train to the seaside.

You live in a big house, I live in a small apartment.

You pay American income taxes, I don't.

You demand clean air and water, I tolerate pollution.

There are some fundamental factors which make labour in other parts of the world much cheaper, and people willing to accept a much lower quality of life and associated lower incomes.

Its no wonder that big tech is so in favour of remote working - its going to allow the outsourcing of a huge amount of work (white collar) previously considered untouchable.

Currency exchange means some can work at a discount compared to USD

Government subsidies hoping to diversify their economy may even pay partial salaries

Strong social safety net in other countries means companies may not need to pay for health benefits for remote workers

My American friends always rant about the high income taxes in Sweden. But my taxes include health insurance and I pay essentially nothing for kids' daycare, school and university. For people without perfect health and with kids, the total pay is worse in the U.S.

Western Europe and the USA have maintained a huge advantage over the world. I wouldn't be so confident about that advantage disappearing. Much like wealthy people today are much more likely to have ancestors who were wealthy, I think people born in developed western nations are going to continue to enjoy competitive advantages over others for many more generations.

* I'm online at the same time as my coworkers, you don't respond until the next business day.

* I can travel to any business location next day, you need a visa application.

* Your continued employability is subject to geopolitical risk, but California isn't sanctioning Ohio any time soon.

* I can handle sensitive data and technology, your country is subject to export controls.

* I develop rapport with customers, you don't understand the slang used in support tickets.

Nowadays, the PhD jobs are based in Shanghai, Szeged and Hyderabad. The only thing that's left stateside is regulatory functions and support. You don't need a PhD for that. Political leadership should be concerned about the loss of institutional knowledge and knowledge networks.

At my current employer, though, the offshore developers in India have really found the secret sauce and are really nailing productivity and code quality to the danger of US employees.

That has to do with short job tenures (in the US) and industry consolidation. In the past, someone might have joined Upjohn in Kalamazoo, Eli Lilly in Indianapolis or Dow in Midland and stayed there their whole careers. Nowadays everyone changes jobs every 5 years and employment is in San Francisco, Boston and San Diego. It's problematic.

I'd say that's the understatement of the century.

Mass wealth accumulation and wealth inequality has shifted power so far towards businesses that the general populous requires solving a massive orchestration problem (together) in order to change that imbalance which I'm beginning to believe may not be something that can reach critical mass and a stable state in larger populations as historically peaceful revolutions were capable of.

As such, businesses are calling the shots economically, legislatively/governmentally, culturally, ... and their interests are falling further out of alignment with most peoples' well being.

We're becoming less innovative and working more to chase short-term profit margins for employers that keep us fed and sheltered instead of pursuing societal interests.

From your DOW example and the chemical industry, DOW and those they've acquired used to innovate. In their later years they've turned in an IP portfolio management business, focusing on strategic patent purchases to stiffle competitors and eek our royalties for certain processes.

This isnt unique to the chemical industry, it's happening across the board. In the neverending quarterly optimization search space, we're making tradeoffs that are hurting us more and more leading to instability in society all to inflate a few peoples' pockets and grips on control.

The labor market has always been a target but due to social ramifications, has been largely avoided. We're now seeing more aggressive attacks on optimizing costs in the labor market in order to meet growth expectations and it's really starting to press on people. I'm just wondering at which point enough people will crack or give up instead of continuing to support the madness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/technology/ai-humans.html

Upstate suffers from high taxes and regulations introduced by the Governor with NYC in mind. Combine that with long winters and urban decay and we see that many bright young professionals born here end up fleeing once their parents retire.

I personally am planning on moving to Raleigh, NC in a few years. I only rent an apartment now so I'm mostly insulated from the astronomical property and school taxes, but I feel the state as a whole does not have my best interests in mind.

You should try no education and public services at all. Here in the rural South, 70 % of my students are incapable of doing 8th-grade math. These are the nursing school aspirants, and you genuinely fear for your life when you must go to hospital. Same with property taxes. You need functioning city services. Our county roads here are on a 70-year repaving schedule, and it shows. There was a storm a couple of weeks ago, and the town can't afford to haul away the debris. Inequality has a way of affecting even the wealthy. Hope you enjoy the Southernness of Raleigh.

Unfortunately it is fashionable (among people who choose not to live in them) to talk about non "tier-1" cities as if they are "shitholes", but IMO the quality of life people experience is probably higher on average: less crowding, more open space, more housing, cleaner, less expensive.

The average developer wage for SV is $100,000 higher than the average where I live.

But of course this is less about tech workers that are already getting outsourced because the, well, workers are more technically savvy anyway so of course it happened sooner.

It is possibly more relevant to people in management, or people like professors and many other random jobs who are discovering that working from home works fine for them. Though sometimes it's questionable whether this is because their work is largely on a computer or just because they didn't do much anyway...

If we don't have permanent UBI in place soon it will continue to be an emergency response to job losses like now. The economy is shifting as surely as the sun sets to one where if you don't own or play a major leadership role you either aren't necessary or can be outsourced.

Floor workers are getting replaced with robots and touchscreens; managers are realizing they too can be outsourced; lawyers are finding that no, the work they do isn't that hard to automate; doctors are finding that machine learning can analyze images better than they can; it's not going to stop... why would it? Why would a business owner want to keep a human with a continually increasing salary around if they can possibly replace you with technology that costs your annual salary once and after that just requires maintenance?

There are cases where that's just not possible, but my imagination for what is possible to swap has definitely gotten bigger. Even if a job isn't entirely replaceable, productivity tools are making the same amount of work take a quarter of the staff.

Globalism has already decimated the working class in developed countries, it's only going to accelerate and get worse.

Salaries will even out but workers will have the ability to change jobs more easily. Companies will want to keep talent. Top tier salaries might go up as companies are now competing for talent globally.

I wonder if we'll see brain drains (without emigration) as a country's talent is bought out by a wealthier country. Would you want your country to have the salaried workers or the executives and corporate revenues(or maybe that goes into the modern incarnation of double dutch)?

Should be interesting.

Your saving on travel, they save on building, building services and location adjusted wages.

With huge savings being made by all businesses and less costs on the balance sheet.

Wages will come under intense scrutiny.

What's going to drive that scrutiny? Shareholders won't demand it, they'll be happy to keep the additional margin. Employees may demand more, but that will only accelerate hiring from lower wage regions.