[jjoonathan]

If globalization and automation are so good at job creation, why did the American manufacturing workforce collapse?

Economies are complex, counter-intuitive feedback machines, but the "supply and demand" model fits the last 40 years of data, while the "floats all boats" model really doesn't.

"Lump of labor is a fallacy, honest!" sure sounds like the kind of opinion I could get a good penny for if I were an enterprising economist, though.

[kjksf]

He was talking about software jobs.

"More than half of the top American tech companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants"

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by...

Recent immigrants were responsible for creating tens of thousands of jobs, most of them for Americans.

Software isn't a zero-sum game even on a country level and certainly US benefits enormously because companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix etc. are global giants but employ massive amounts of highly paid people in US.

[jjoonathan]

CNBC sure had to stretch that definition pretty darn far to get to "more than half," didn't they.

In any case, immigration is the least upsetting globalization policy IMO: it is exactly what it says on the tin, almost everyone agrees that too little or too much is bad, and the amount can be tuned using quotas. H1B, however, is not that. It pretends to be about scarce skillsets (which enter this calculation one way) when it's actually usually about standard skillsets (which enter the calculation in another). Further, it suppresses the bargaining ability of the people subjected to it, depressing wages for both them those they compete with. Worse still is "regulatory arbitrage" where low tariffs encourage companies to bypass environmental, safety, and labor regulation by shipping manufacturing (or what have you) overseas. I prefer immigration to both H1Bs and regulatory arbitrage, and not by a small margin.

As a more general point, exponential growth is one helluva drug and truly does create a "floats all boats" environment, but different economics apply once an economic sector plateaus. Those economics look much closer to zero-sum. Zero-growth = zero-sum. Low growth is low sum. That's why what happened to American manufacturing over the last 20 years is a good model for what happens to American software over the next 20, if we aren't careful.

We've had it good in software, but we're no longer in the phase where we can pretend the sigmoid is a neverending exponential.

[Anon1096]

Immigrants starting businesses aren't doing it on H1-B visas. Those are only for employees of existing companies and don't upgrade to permanent citizenship.

[triceratops]

> Immigrants starting businesses aren't doing it on H1-B visas.

Because it's very difficult. Even then Zenefits' co-founder (Laks Srini) started on an H-1B.[1]

What's that saying? "Entrepreneurship uh...finds a way."

1. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2852250/silicon-valley...

[shuckles]

If globalization and automation are so good at job creation, why did the American horse buggy workforce collapse?

[Forgeties79]

Because it was outdated technology, that’s not even what you are talking about. You’re talking about a fundamental change in technology, not production methods (automation) or market/labor expansion (globalization). Frankly, I’m not sure what point you’re even trying to make.

[shuckles]

Fair enough, replace a disrupted technology with census tabulators who were automated. My point stands: you can't look at job losses in the affected industry to tell the whole story. You have to look at jobs in the economy at large. Automation leads to new demands elsewhere, and so does globalization.