[gutnor]

> but the outcome often results in a lot more lucrative and fulfilling career than they had before

Not sure about that, that's not at all my experience coming from a poor area which has gone through several mass-scale outsourcing. ( i.e. a whole vertical slice of the economy just moves away )

You need an set of positive circumstances in order to make yourself relevant again. Access to appropriate education/resources, capability to identify a new opportunity, capacity to actually take it ( i.e. money, flexibility, ... ) If you miss any of that, you just enter a vicious circle that drags you down.

Over the course of a generation, what you say is true. Most of the youth has moved away from that poor area I came from, including me.

[nostrademons]

What are outcomes like for the people that did move away and retrain? A key point of the "redundant workers will find new work" hypothesis is that they make rational decisions to find & take advantage of opportunities elsewhere. These rational decisions can often be emotionally wrenching - like giving up your home, your identity, and your social support network - but I'm curious what happens to the folks who are willing to make those decisions.

[gutnor]

The main problem is not the emotional aspect. After all the majority of the people affected had left their country only 1 generation before.

The real problem is that you don't know what is the rational decision at the time you need to take it, only in hindsight. It is not in the business owners to share their 10 year strategy with their employees. Everything is positive, all green, until the very day you have 2 weeks to pack. You don't necessarily know the big picture. Is your company having trouble or is the whole region is going to be in ruin. You can make the rational decision to start a local business and have your market vanish way before you have benefitted. Same thing with the local politician, we are always at the end of the tunnel.

Same problem with training and moving. How much do you leverage your current competence. As a DevOps, do you learn development, or plumbery ? How far do you need to move. It is even worse here as you have even less information about the target sector or region.

So what happened to people that made the right decision, they did alright of course. But there have been a lot of people that trained in using newer better technology of their field and that did not help them when the job moved to India. Some moved to Spain and France, but the crisis started a few years later there. A lot opened businesses, and failed as new businesses do, but also because the whole region went under. Same outcome for people that moved to different field in the same region, they were caught in the ripple effects. None of those decision were irrational, or necessarily easy. They were just not the right decisions when you have perfect information.

[ZoeZoeBee]

You keep using the word willing instead of the word you should be using capable. Case in point old manufacturing towns like Detroit and Flint where the literacy rate hovers around 50% graduation rates in the 20s and the likelihood that a graduate from the school district did not receive the same education as someone from a functioning school district(Standardized Tests Provide this Measure).

So how do these people "will" their way past illiteracy, plummeting home values (Makes it quite difficult to sell and start somewhere new), and the need to suddenly compete with all of their former co-workers? Economic data suggests these people simply become "Disassociated" from the Labor Force and are no longer counted as unemployed whether they found employment or not.