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A comment on Supply Chain Shortages Continue Around the World. Get Used to It. Parent comment

Re:Supply Chain Shortages Continue Around the World. Get Use... by nostrademons on Friday September 03, 2021 @12:11PM (#28406084)
Labor arbitrage is efficient production. If you can outsource a job for less than it costs domestically, it means labor is underutilized in the foreign country and can be employed for higher-value uses.

Pretty much any arbitrage is an economic inefficiency being exploited, whether it's financial (information inefficiences), shipping/merchants (geographic & local preference inefficiencies), storage (time preference inefficiencies), outsourcing (labor), etc. And in the course of exploiting it, it makes the inefficiency go away.

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Re:Supply Chain Shortages Continue Around the World. Get Use... by tablespoon on Friday September 03, 2021 @05:56PM (#28409865)
> Labor arbitrage is efficient production. If you can outsource a job for less than it costs domestically, it means labor is underutilized in the foreign country and can be employed for higher-value uses.

I think the key points are 1) that's not the kind of thing the word "efficiency" typically brings to mind, and 2) there are quite valid political reasons to want to discourage that kind of "efficiency."

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