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> The service sector jobs I have experience with; technical support, can often be done from anywhere. The problem with this type of service sector job (remote technical support) is that, since it can be done from anywhere, it is just as amenable to outsourcing as manufacturing. Think about it this way - if a job can be "outsourced" to the Midwest, whether it be manufacturing or service sector (i.e., tech support over the phone), it can be outsourced to China or India. So to be clearer, when I said service sector jobs, I meant those that require physical proximity. After all, the basic problem we're facing here is that a lot of American workers simply have no competitive advantage over foreign workers (after factoring in the lower wages paid abroad). Therefore, those workers need to be in an industry where they can exploit an unassailable advantage of theirs - they can be physically proximate to the people they're serving in a way that no one in another country can. But such an industry doesn't exist right now (at least not at the size necessary to support all those unemployed people), because of our housing and public transit policies. If those policies were changed, allowing for cheaper and better services to reach the upper middle class, you would see the rapid growth of a new market, one that would really help funnel money from the upper middle class down to the lower classes. Of course, in the long run, using physical proximity as the sole competitive advantage is not a good social policy, since it will lead to social stratification. Therefore, we also need to quickly reform our education system to ensure that the next generation of workers is broadly competitive with foreign workers, rather than only the top 20-30% of American workers doing jobs that could be outsourced but aren't, because the American workers are truly better at it than their foreign counterparts. But in the short run, we can't reeducate all those people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, who still have decades of work ahead of them, but have long since exited the educational system. They need jobs, and they need them now, if you don't want mass social unrest and economic collapse. > The American middle and upper classes want to pretend that the lower classes don't exist, and plan their cities accordingly. I think a lot of this has to do with white flight and high levels of lead in gasoline coupled with high rates of driving, which led to very high crime rates in cities in the mid-20th century. But crime rates have been dropping in urban locales all across America for the last couple of decades, and affluent youth are more willing to live in (and even raise their own kids in) urban environments than their parents or grandparents were. For example, this article[0] was posted on HN just a day or two ago. If this trend spreads across the nation (which would still require a concerted and extended effort), we could see a dramatic paradigm shift that allows both the upper middle class and the lower class to coexist in urban environments. 0: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/how-denver-is-becomin... |
I believe that in the long run, standards of living will somewhat equalize. I mean, there will be differences, but I hope those differences will be like the difference between San Francisco and Denver, not the differences between San Francisco and rural Vietnam.
[on transit]
>If this trend spreads across the nation (which would still require a concerted and extended effort), we could see a dramatic paradigm shift that allows both the upper middle class and the lower class to coexist in urban environments.
What I was trying to say is that I believe the problem isn't technical; we have the money and ability to create good transit systems. We need the will to create good transit systems. We need a reason for the politically powerful classes to want public transit in their backyards.