[sgt101]

- high wages are not evenly spread geographically in the USA

- high wages are not evenly spread demographically in the USA

- the wage distribution seems to me to be unusual in that it has a very long fat tail whereas the UK's is very clustered (I've forgotten the right term) on the median.

- modern industry can be highly automated

- modern logistics mean that industry can be decentralised

I believe that the last two are new since the USA and Europe outsourced large amounts of their industry to China. However the bigger issue is that competitive industries require very significant capitalisation because on the one hand modern products are staggeringly well engineered (with the trade offs of cheap, good and sophisticated taken into account) and on the other hand the processes used to make them require lots of tools, infrastructure, and robots.

[w0de0]

> the UK's is very clustered (I've forgotten the right term) on the median.

Normal (Gaussian) distribution?

[sgt101]

nahh - when a distribution is very tight but with very shallow tails - I think low variance.