Originally posted by: Zebo
Race to the bottom and third world wages. While it's a nice that your factory worker can get futher education all those folks who now have that education are competing for a limited pool of jobs which lowers all salaries, simple supply and demand dictates that. More labor pool, for say accountants, than jobs they can pay $30,000 a year which they do nowadays!! They can pay less and less every year as more and more former factory worker get that accounting degree (or whatever degree/profession you choose).
What's really sad is that the people working the middle class and upper middle class jobs don't realize this. It's "other people" who are suffering. It's people who were too dumb to invest in education who are suffering. What's sad is that they don't understand basic economics. All of those people are going to go retrain and re-educate and come into their field and compete with them, happy to take their jobs for lower wages, and many of them will prove to be better and smarter.
Instead, the smug middle class and the upper middle class have the credit card type here-and-now concrete-bound mentality. It couldn't possibly happen to them! This couldn't possibly affect them!
The reality is that we're all interconnected in our national economy as much as we might entertain notions of living on our own individual economic merit-based islands. When some people suffer economic losses it's bad for everyone in some way.
I think the middle class and the upper middle class will figure it out--on their hides. "My children went to collge and now they're having a hard time finding work." "OMG! I was just laid off at age 53! What will I do?" Unfortunately by the time enough Americans come to understand global labor wage arbitrage it will probably be too late--we'll already be a third world country.
The medical profession is very smart in that they limit graduates and school openings to limit thier supply of labor keeping salaries relativly high.
If I could do life over again I would never make the mistake of not going to medical school. For a smart person who isn't a great interviewer it's the best gig in town and provides almost guaranteed financial success and social status. I don't feel badly when I hear about doctors and their "problems". Lots of people would love to have the problem of a guaranteed $150,000/year income plus prestige and all the women you could ever want to be down with.
The bottom line is that if you consume more than you produce, as we do, you are liquidating your worth. You can see this everywhere - from national debt to china buying our land, companies, and instuments of debt like consumer loans.
Exactly! Our trade deficit reflects this. We aren't getting richer--rather we're giving our land and assets away for ephermeral manufactured goods and services. If we were engaging in real trade--sending them manufactured goods and services in an amount equal to what they were sending us this wouldn't be such an issue.
Oh well. America today is an idiot society. Just look at the politicians we have elected. One of the great lessons of the novel
Atlas Shrugged is that you cannot have economic prosperity without its underlying requirement--rationality. Now that America has become an idiot society filled with smug college-educated people who cannot recognize the reality of our economic situation, one of the requirements of our having economic prosperity is now gone--we have become an idiot society and we will suffer the economic devestation that comes with it.
