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by theocean154 3578 days ago
Arbitrage in labor markets results in a regression to the global mean. Every year that wages do not grow in the US, the buying power of those wages decreases due to inflation (increasing the cost of living). This will result in the standard of livings of the US moving towards that of India. And as a US citizen, I do not want this. If capitalism worked as intended, we'd be a world full of slaves fighting for pennies and shitting in open pits while our masters live like kings.
1 comments

I think that is not what is happening.

Standard of living in the US is growing - but very slowly.

While standard of living is increasing rapidly in developing countries.

You can see the same issue in China, where standard of living has actually grown rapidly.

I am not arguing to make American standard of living regress at the expense of improving the standard of living for other developing nations.

Standard of Living would have risen regardless of FDI money moving into India and China - the only difference is that western capital is allowed to make money off that development.

The issue is that the amount of money that is required to bring any massive improvement in living standard in western countries is really large. Things like self driving cars are much harder to create - then just copying current technology and distributing it.

This is why it should have been upto western govt to channel a lot of public money and tax multinationals aggressively so that western countries can have accelerated rate of growth.