Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as the cost of hiring domestic labor in developed countries go up, companies begin to off-shore labor as soon as they are able. Productivity of labor is also much higher in developed countries. What matters is comparative advantage . Even from a strictly economic point of view, it is often better for rich countries to off-shore a lot of low-level manufacturing. That decreases prices for manufactured goods in rich c…
Government imposed costs on labor don't necessarily scale proportionally with productivity. It's possible that those costs can price even highly productive labor out of the market. Furthermore, at least some of the people affected by the displacement of manufacturing jobs in developed countries do not have higher productivity. The opioid crisis in the US is to some extent an example of this. I know of blue collar com…
Not necessarily, but they correlate very strongly. It's the rich countries that tend to have strong labor protections, mandatory pension schemes, high healthcare costs, etc.
> at least some of the people affected by the displacement of manufacturing jobs in developed countries do not have higher productivity.
Some of them don't, but overall, developed countries have moved on to higher value-added sectors. Moving large numbers of American workers into things like mass hand-assembly of smartphones would not make economic sense.
> That doesn't mean these communities could not adapt to the changing economic landscape
Government could much more strongly redistribute the overall gains from world trade to those who lose out to trade. That would make a lot of sense, though it would go against the right-wing economic thinking that has dominated American politics since Reagan.