[ihsw]

Wealth has gravitated around massive city centers since time immemorial and China is even more hostile to foreigners. If you think America is the only one artificially gating wealth within the border then you are in for a rude awakening.

Coastal cities in America will continue to be a melting pot of culture but the wealth won't be siphoned off unabated.

The rationale behind the policy is ending the indentured servitude experienced by foreign workers and the hollowing out of the middle class.

[Periodic]

I think there's a more important metric: productivity has concentrated in the coastal cities. Our workforce is more productive than ever before. Much of our economic gains year after year are due to productivity gains: we produce more goods per worker.

In our current economy, if you want to have a high-paying job you have to have a highly productive job. The best way to do that is to be in a city that has high network effects. Centralization and computerization is allowing people in cities to be more and more productive. This is why even Walmart has fewer regional managers and employs more people in cities managing logistics or even doing research in programs like @WalmartLabs.

Being in a city helps you be more productive due to network effects in contacts, opportunities, leads and education. If we want to help people out, we need to help them get those benefits elsewhere or help them move to the coastal cities that already have these networks.

[testUser69]

>Wealth has gravitated around massive city centers since time immemorial

Well yeah, but there were times when wealth was more evenly distributed within America.

When we first started taking in immigrants (when America was founded), we were in a state of high-economic entropy, meaning that there were so many jobs and things to do (and no minimum wage) that we NEEDED to import people from around the world.

Times have changed and the world is changing faster and faster. America is now in a state of low economic entropy, and having a free-for-all international jobs market is not helping that situation.

Is the goal to move the entire world into a state of low economic entropy? We can have big wealthy countries running the world like we're use to, or we can have big wealthy cities running the world like we're aiming toward.

I think concentrating wealth in these big tech centers makes it harder for people in the US to work their way out of poverty. It will be great for the people in Africa living on two dollars a day when their wages go up to 15 dollars a day, but it's going to be hell for people in the US who are use to 50-100 dollars a day going down to $15.

Everyone will be equal though (well, all the poor will be equally poor, and all the rich will be equally rich).