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RobinHanson's avatar

Remote work will be a kick in the butt for lazy Western firms & workers, who now face more global competition.

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Troy Hayman's avatar

What do you think about the future of the west? Do you think that countries (Like the US and UK) that have greatly benefited from the surplus of highly skilled, talented and educated people that migrate to the west due to geopolitical, economical, political, and lack of resources and jobs available to them would begin to suffer in part due to 'evening out' of labor pools?

The west has greatly benefited by taking resources from other countries (which include talented labor) and with the division of labor, would it be safe to assume that many talented people from these developing countries that would have originally sought to migrate to the west, would now stay in their respective countries as remote work and higher wages seem likely to be distributed worldwide. This may have consequences as the countries in the west became innovative and wealthy due to the influx of the best talent immigrating to their countries.

Do you also see a greater increase in competition in labor forces in the US and UK, especially non specialized and non skilled labor driving down the middle and lower income class? I think when most people see this scenario they think that the labor force would evenly distribute across the world with better wages for all like a good happy ending.

But that seems unlikely without an explosion of demand and increase in scarcity. More companies would need to stay afloat having to capitalize on margin. Which means possibly reshaping the supply chain with the removal of inefficiencies and middlemen (similar to manufacturers cutting out the distributor and retailer and selling straight to the customer; like how Amazon let factories sell direct). This would effectively eliminate many companies that cannot compete with the resources major conglomerates have, efficiently pricing them out (similar to how walmart did mom and pops); leading to the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer with only a handful of companies controlling the majority stake.

I see you have done a lot of research on this topic. What would you say would be a good field to look into and research before the 'revolution'. And what sectors do you see benefiting from this besides the typical home office.

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