You may work yourself to the bone but pretty much anybody in the US can make a killing.

when you're working 16 hours a day 7 days a week you don't really notice much outside of the factory floor anyway. Whether it was remote or in Manhattan you wouldn't feel the difference as you do nothing but work. I was working ~112 hours a week when I was in Alaska.

And the settlers nearly starved the first few winters in every colony despite that.

And in pre-industrial times, when 70% of the population were farmers, land was a direct, and immediate proxy for wealth. Wealth that stayed with you and your family. You were the owner, instead of some shitty sharecropper for a landlord.

[1] I mean, aside from the natives.

As for land being a proxy for wealth that stayed with you, that worked out OK as long as there was lots of land for people to grab up and claim as their own (or take from some natives who don't have the weapons technology to fight back well). And it's the reason people colonized North America: because all the land in Europe had been claimed by some shitty landlord. These days, that's all gone: now you're stuck living with a shitty landlord again, and there's no new continents left to colonize, so we need to come up with a better economic system.

That's why.

I mean… yeah. That's not really related to the thread's topic, though.

> why would you expect that the first-third world gap to not continue to normalize?

I don't think that's the criticism. "Blocking our wages" probably isn't increasing the wealth of the people in Cold War non-aligned countries: is the money going to them, somehow? The direct effect is that employers (= the people who would be paying the extra wages) don't have to spend as much money paying their employees. What knock-on effects would lead to that improving things for people?

Fair to whom? Why should middle class in the West vote to allow outsourcing to cheaper countries? That will just destroy their well-paying jobs in exchange for some cheap Chinese goods and Indian call centers.

I also feel the same way about current "remote first" trend - American software engineers are shooting themselves in the foot by embracing remote work. Wait until your salaries get normalized to Brazil or Indian levels. Anecdotally, my company had multiple rounds of layoffs and has started hiring all the backfills in the third world now.

Because you can run but you can't hide. If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive. Hence, you will require even more protectionist policies, that in turn will make you even more uncompetitive. In the end, you will have higher prices for lower quality domestic products.

I don't like gravity, but it doesn't mean I can ignore it and jump from tall buildings. While economics is not an exact science (probably not even a science), you cannot ignore its principles.

If protectionist policies worked, we would have figured out by now. The truth is that limited protectionist policies might work to give a push to a nascent industry in the short to medium term. But it does hurt the country as a whole in the long term.

less competitive against whom? If West had not shipped its factories to China, I am sure West would have still stayed competitive against China by miles. In fact, by shipping its technical know-how for manufacturing, West has allowed China to become more competitive.

> I don't like gravity, but it doesn't mean I can ignore it and jump from tall buildings.

Sure, but outsourcing is nothing like gravity. It is a mixture of greed on part of corporations to reduce labor costs, naivete on behalf of politicians who thought China and others would welcome Western values along with Western jobs and stupidity on part of voters who traded short term cheap junk for long term stable jobs.

Consumers have vastly benefited from that competition, far in excess of any losses from the domestic automaker labor group.

It’s not entirely voluntary, but if you want to see what protectionism and economic isolation will bring, go visit Cuba. Then hop over to Grand Cayman, Grand Bahama, or Puerto Rico to see what being more integrated but competitive has to offer.

Also, if the long term cost is "Western lifestyle regressing to mean" (original context I replied to), I'd still prefer crappy cars to preserve well-paying jobs.

Hasn't its neighbour and biggest economy in the world been levying an embargo on Cuba for over half a century? Doesn't seem like the appropriate example for your argument.

Trade helps poorer nations more than it helps richer nations, but it helps both.

There is no justification for the embargo. It was Cold War aggression, pure and simple, now sustained for the last decades purely because of electoral reasons.

Agreed. Fundamentally, if you want to institute protectionist policies for labour, you also need capital controls to prevent all your businesses from exporting their operations to avoid these policies.

I don’t understand why this isn’t common sense.

> some cheap Chinese goods and Indian call centers

Then again, if you have such a naive view of globalisation, you probably need to read more.

> a naive view of globalisation

I am talking about jobs in Western societies which were relocated elsewhere. And I admit that my views might be naive. But it is on you to convince Western middle class that shipping their jobs overseas, without an equally good job or social safety net lined up, is actually better for them. If you are just going to move jobs in the name of efficiency and let the Western labor rot and fend for itself, you are going to get Trump, Le Pen, AfD and Brexit.

In this whole thread, I still haven't seen a compelling case about how getting some goods cheaper / better is a worthy tradeoff to moving my stable job overseas.

I’m just talking about reality - where Western governments, companies, and manufacturers decided that profit trumps employment. At the same time, without cheaper goods, given wage stagnation, consumers couldn’t have afforded local goods anyways.

It’s quite complicated really, and I don’t see a solution in capitalism.

I mean if you believe, as I do, that money (especially at trillion level) is direct substitution for power over people and even whole societies then what happens if we let this global game of Monopoly to play to its seemingly inevitable conclusion ?

Isn't this somehow antidemocratic in nature?

And if you notice that inheritance is not unlike inheriting stance in aristocratic societies this capitalistic abstraction of ownership through money seems to crack.

Regarding the rich having an outsized influence in politics, I do agree, but I think the solution is to get rid of PAC's. Give the rich the same donation limits as everyone else. Strict legal enforcement should be put in place.

I believe if you set a limit on an individuals net worth, the economy will lose one of its major drivers and job creators will potentially just hit that net worth, shrug and shut their companies down or pass them on to less capable people costing millions of jobs. Depending on the net worth cap, this could happen relatively early in a companies growth.

I do strongly agree with a strong inheritance tax for individuals over an arbitrary net worth, something in the hundred millions range.

Of course they don't, they just take loans against their assets. The banking sector is happy to provide them with liquidity at almost no cost.

This is a really intresting intuition. My off the cuff resposne would be something like this:

So what? This does not mean anything without understanding what is the social impact of the jobs that were created - I have a bit of doubt that all 80000+ jobs at Facebook is really a net benefit for a world as a whole.

I'm from former Eastern Block country which went through full blown comunism era and we really did not need billioners to help create unlimited amount of bullshit jobs.

And what is more important for me, as I'm in the process of going through Shirer The Rise and Fall of Third Reich, and it had a real impact on my understanding of democracy - I believe at this point that it is paramount to create system in which no single individual or party has the ability to accumulate infinite power, no matter what cost it bears for economy. If anyone have some reservations - find the part where the infamous German "leader" explains to his generals why the war with west is inevitable and why it has to happen now and not in next few years.

Those 80,000 jobs may not have a social impact as far as moving the world in the a desired direction but what jobs do?

Does a plumber? A teacher? What if they are not teaching what the party in charge wants taught?

Are we going to put someone in charge of determining if a job has meaning and eradicate the job if they don't? What happens when a different political party wins election and starts eliminating positions that the prior party thought had meaning? Can we say certain political parties have no net world benefit and remove them from contention?

That much power in government hands is a slow march back to the communism from which your country escaped.

Hitler was able to do what he did because the government had so much power. Less power in the hands of the government prevents that, not giving the government more power to police who can earn how much money and what jobs are worthy of existing.

I understand what you are saying especially when taken in the context of your childhood but I just disagree with giving anyone the power to enforce it.

So let's start with the obvious - I was not trying to propose "big government" as a solution here, sorry if this was not clear enough - I completly agree that using government as a substitution for private ownership mostly does not work.

My main point was "power accumulation" in hands of few or even one. Elon Musk is good example here - his accumulated wealth give him real power to decide what life of thouseds of people will look like (for better or worse). You may claim that this is not politcal power, but it still is power nontheless. And thus lifes of thousends wages on his mental state which at any moment can go full Caligula. I know this will sound idealistic .. but I do not like to live in a society where we leave so much power in hands of one individual. This also applies to politicians.

I know trying to solve this problem will probably throttle economic development but as lord Farquaad said "it's a Sacrifice I am Willing to Make" :).

>>Those 80,000 jobs may not have a social impact as far as moving the world in the a desired direction but what jobs do? >>Does a plumber? A teacher? What if they are not teaching what the party in charge wants taught?

This sounds a bit nihilistic - extrapolating this line of though leads quite easyly to conclusion that nothing matters (and as Camus has written we are then only left with one important question to answer).

>> Are we going to put someone in charge of determining if a job has meaning and eradicate the job if they don't?

Aren't we already doing it with capitalism and statism? :) Or did I missed ChatGPT-XXX taking over the world already (I swear I was trying to pay attention :))? But in all seriousness - I only propose limiting power of individualsm institutions and corporatios, not giving it to government.

>> What happens when a different political party wins election and starts eliminating positions that the prior party thought had meaning?

And what do you think happes when new CEO takes over company? Because I have seen far worse cleanings done through corporations that were taken over by competition than the biggest governments cleanigs of institutions done by new party taking over government (I happen to have some inside access to local govermants organizational data and know some people that worked for big companies that were raided).

>> Hitler was able to do what he did because the government had so much power.

Still the underling problem is power accumulation - governmant from my point of view was only means to obtaining it. I believe that we are living in times when new doors opened for power accumulation that will grant some individuals almost comparable power. And I would gladly sacrifice parts of economic development potential to do that.

The idea of joint-stock companies is antidemocratic in nature. If you were to propose that people could buy votes in parliament, everybody would (rightly) be outraged. But this is how joint-stock companies work: workers have 0 say in how things are run and how resources are allocated, owners can buy and sell voting rights and dividend rights.

When I was in morocco 10 years ago one of the buckles for my motorcycle pants suspenders broke. I was able to get a local leather worker to create a pattern from the broken piece, craft the replacement, and integrate it into my suspenders overnight for under 5 USD. This was arranged by the hotel I was staying at, and wasn’t some special inside knowledge on my part.

The mass manufactured replacement were more than 10x that cost, and made of lower quality materials.

Morocco is not a rich country, but a lot of the world is even less wealthy.

Yes. Capital let's you be more productive. Rest of the world is building up capital to increase productivity, but is also increasing demand. Resource limits are blips on the market.

The world standard of living should be equalized globally but it should be the present first world standard, not the present third world standard.

This is certainly possible given increasing world productive capacities.

Certainly the phone you’re using and almost certainly the clothes you’re wearing were not made by people making a median Western wage.

If the third world raises to the first world standards, then great. If that process involves first world standards falling to meet third world ones in the middle at the cost of first-world middle class, then there is a big problem. See where Trump and Sanders got most of their votes and you will start to see a pattern here.

One of the biggest differences is functioning institutions. As bad as some first world governments can seem from our perspective, they’re way better than the kleptocrats and warlords who rule some parts of the world. And yeah, when you have functioning institutions, you do end up with smarter and more productive populations because children can go to school instead of slaving away in the cobalt mines.