Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food. If an American isn't getting the job anyway, then why bring them here in the first place to drive prices up for everyone else?
> Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food
You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.
As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.
The government exists for the general welfare and and economic system that subsidizes idleness because the disingenuous say "look over there, its a net positive" while ignoring the externalized cost borne by the taxpayer is just theft from the taxpayer.
FWIW the "international" folks I work with hardly spend any money in the US. Most of it is saved and spent or invested during 2-month annual visits to homeland.
Your logic is incorrect, you are thinking that a "international" folk buying a TV is what they mean. But that's not correct. Paying income taxes, paying tax on cars, paying tax on gas, paying rent, these matter a lot more to the government then you buying an iphone from the apple store in the mall versus one in "international country".
That's probably just your company. In Silicon Valley, "international" folks spend a lot of money on buying houses (multiple of them sometimes), cars, home improvement, going out to restaurants, etc.
Absolutely anecdotal, but in the Silicon Valley I know, I rarely see coworkers participating in skiing/surfing/hiking/US travel. Hell, even dining out outside of free-food campus is a tough sell.
As for buying multiple houses, I'm sure the wider population is happy with foreigners buying rental properties.
Me buying food from restaurant would make the owner richer, but would also employ more people at the restaurant.
The scarcity issue is valid when the resource is limited. In case of US, I was not aware of food scarcity. Even housing is more due to policies than actual land scarcity.
Economic activity does have positive feeback. Yes, some people get unfairly rich - but the solution is not to stop the activity, instead try to get the rich pay their fair share of contribution to the country.
Why are we relegating locals to menial restaurant jobs? Why not have programs to get them trained and into higher earning jobs?
A local working a restaurant will often need to take advantage of welfare. If instead we funneled the locals to higher paying jobs, we would be better off. We're supposed to look after our own citizens, afterall --that's the whole point of electing a government.
Sorry but there is no competition for health care in US. US basically has no health care. Unless of course you buy it (i.e. pay the fraudulent companies to give you false sense of security and leave you alone in the worst moment of your life)
Yup, this is much more likely to lead to more offshoring than companies hiring more American workers. Which also means that communities in the US with a large amount of workers on visas will also suffer.
Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.
Of course it's not new. And of course it never really stopped. But there is a new incentive for execs to give it a much bigger push given all the recent remote work tooling and when they now think a programmer is just monitoring AI output. So why not pay the monitor SE Asian wages rather than US wages.
The trend is away from remote work though. So much more stuff is hybrid then it was a few years ago. SE Asian wages means a 12 hour time zone difference and that carries a real cost on efficiency (I personally experienced this at two companies). Future poorly thought offshoring attempts will go just as badly as they have in the past. If anything AI makes it worse, since each individual dev is responsible for a bigger slice of the output they need to be in the loop on business / customer needs and significant timezone differences make that harder.
If managed correctly though it means you can have effectively a 24 hour work day. US workers/management goes to sleep as the Asian workers are starting up
Plenty of offshoring to both Central America and South America has occurred in recent years. It was a somewhat untapped offshoring location, but that no longer seems to be the case.
Real example: my company is US based, top and middle management is in US, some middle management and lower in Europe, managing workers in India and Manila. Same scheme with Costa Rica, but managed directly from US.
A key difference is that at least one isn’t competing for limited housing with offshoring. That is the number 1 driver of the affordability crisis atm.
I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!
For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common.
I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.
Offshoring (form the US) to Europe, especially eastern Europe is not new either. The newish offshoring location was Central America and South America, but those have been tapped as well.
I'm old enough to remember when people gnashed their teeth about the U.S. taking talent from abroad being 'brain drain' that hurt those countries. Which is it? We want to take the rest of the world's best and brightest and screw those other countries in the process, or we feel bad about that and don't want to do that? EDIT: Cynically, it could be both!
Well it depends if you live in the US or you live in a country that is hemorrhaging your best workers to the US. No idea why you are trying to lump both groups together as if they should both have a single opinion.
People in the U.S. used to complain that we drain the rest of the world's brains. That has stopped. I was referring to that.
If you put yourself in the shoes of people in other nations, then... a) individuals might really like the option of emigrating to the U.S., but b) their nation might be better off with them staying at home. Interests conflict. The question is whether we should have selfish policies (such as putting a company's bottom-line ahead of a nation's, or one nation's development ahead of another) or not, and, of course, which is is which because one could argue that the only ones being selfish are the Americans who object to all these visas (I don't think they would be the _only_ ones being selfish, and arguably the 'nation' exists in part to protect its citizens, but yes, this is a case of selfishness).
I want to know: does the HN commentariat think that brain drain is a problem or not. Elsewhere in this thread we have people urging that we do drain the rest of the world's brains to "win the talent war" [0].
Now, I can totally see that maybe draining our adversaries' brains can be a good thing, unless it's a way of bringing in a fifth column, in which case... no. And it's definitely not good for countries we're on good terms with -- there that "win the talent war" comment shocks the conscience as a thoughtless, unnuanced, jingoist-but-dumb, and immoral/destructive as to our allies comment.
Consistency was not the issue. The question was: what has changed that so few seem to care about brain drain as a negative externality?
Ok, let’s say it leads to 60% offshoring and 40% hiring more Americans.
That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.
The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.
No, that is the incorrect take. Offshoring isn't easy or cheap. Especially when Trump is basically trying to get companies to hire American workers by any means.
It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.
Is it meant as a rhetorical reply to the officials as in "aha, but Microsoft will prevail and make it even worse for you, American workers" or as a reply to the workers: "don't fret, move back to your country and work the same job anyway". Or was it meant as a hint for the officials "don't forget to close that loophole as well"?
Like you I suspect the former. But if we really believe that economics is not a zero sum game then offshoring is better for everyone because it keeps talent in the countries they can help improve, and it is a rising tide that lifts all boats, serving to equalize wealth. Yes, for a while it should have the effect of reducing incomes in the U.S., but so does importing the rest of the world's talent into the U.S., so arguably offshoring is much better. But if [regardless of whether we believe economics is/is not zero sum] we want to keep the rest of the world down then we should absolutely take their talent.
Hiring remote workers also doesn’t require filling out H1B applications and dealing with USCIS. If using remote workers was just as good, companies would already do that.
Sure, who doesn't want unlimited money? That's decidedly different from "needing" it (I could in no way manage to live on the West Coast on a Spanish salary, for example)
Sky-high cost of living (property prices, mostly). Shitty apartment with a commute in the bay costs $3,000/month. Starter home in Seattle costs a million plus.
It's also a vicious cycle: high tech salaries in those areas have driven up the cost of living.
One might argue that it should, but as a remote worker in a low cost area I don't mind making 20% less than my NYC/Bay colleagues as I can still live like a king in my midwest city on regionally adjusted swe comp.
Shouldn't the company still advertise the role for locals before offering remote? Also, for some roles it's mandatory to have on-site or at least hire within US due to compliance.
Regulated industries often have business language mandating onshore, citizens-only employment. If it isn't required by immigration, the businesses buying the product are requiring assurances (likely due to their own compliance).
As for non-protected roles, global market participation has ups and downs.
People need to stop asking what's better for the "economy" and start asking what's better for themselves. If the two don't align, it should be tough luck for the "economy", not the people.
"The economy" is often just another way of saying "everyone in aggregate."
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
This is an incredibly blinkered view. The economy is important, but there are many other factors as to whether a given policy is overall good for the citizenry or not.
Sure, but I don't think I claimed that economic factors are the only thing that can be considered when evaluating policy. Maybe it came off that way because my comment was focused on the jobs issue being discussed.
I guess I did not express it well, but I wanted to highlight that "the economy" and "the people" are not in opposition. "The economy" is a vague term that usually approximates something like "the material well being of everyone in aggregate." There are lots of other things one might value besides material well being, but "the people" and the "the economy" and not opposed forces.
Hasn’t it been known for a while now that wages are decoupled from the Economic gains that have been happening since the 80s? That gap is just going to the billionaire class now. Source:
This is why it's not productive to discuss issues using vague, undefined terms like "the economy."
Wealth inequality is a well defined economic measure and I see no reason why one couldn't use it as a yardstick when evaluating an economy, same as we use the unemployment, inflation, GDP, median household income, and so on. And indeed many economists do use it, and there are many well regarded books and papers that examine wealth distribution.
It leads to the intuition that an economy where 100 people consume 10000 (let's say of energy because it should be inflation-independent) per week and 1 person consumes 100000 is worse than an economy where 100 people consume 9000 per week and 1 person consumes 10000. That is, you can strongly reject or disapprove of changes that strictly increase everyone's wealth or consumption.
I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.
The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.
I think wealth distribution should be allowed to freely float within a large range, but at extremes it may have bad effects. You don't want a communist regime that tries to enforce complete equality, nor do you want a Russian style oligarchy where a few control almost all the wealth. US is heading towards the latter.
Probably not a simple question or answer on the face of it, but it's really not worth looking at this action in such a narrow lens, because this is not happening in a vacuum. Instead, we should look at it through the overall context of all of this admin's immigration policies, which have been bad for the US economy.
Can you explain more? This statement is already true before this policy change, so I don't understand why this is not a non sequitur. But I know this is a common rhetoric so I am trying to understand what the logic is.
They should clamp down on that next. Looking at the past 50 years, offshoring has only caused trouble for the citizens of the country and led things like the rust belt happening.
The rust belt was not caused by call centers in Pakistan, that was the Petrodollar and China deals. But it would be great to have both back (call centers and manufacturing).
I'd love to understand how people think the H1B program is going to survive the LLM era. Why in the world would I import a foreign worker to do something I can just as easily tell a clanker to do? The clanker is better at this stuff than I am!
Is it really just a matter of empire-building, at the end of the day? That can't last. Management realizes that, right?
This is an inane comment. Here are the two types of "remote" work:
1. Remote within the US. You still need valid work authorization;
2. Remote outside the US. This is just offshoring and if it really worked, every tech jobs would be offshored. Companies have been trying to do this for decades. Companies would love nothing more than to offshore every white collar job. They would if they could.
So the exact same person working within the US, even better if sitting in an office, is a good employee but if they're working from abroad all of a sudden they're not that good?
Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food. If an American isn't getting the job anyway, then why bring them here in the first place to drive prices up for everyone else?
> Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food
You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.
As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.
If a mansion is surrounded by a slum is society better off? In India the answer is yes but in america we see slums as a failure.
> If a mansion is surrounded by a slum is society better off?
Who is in the mansion and who is in the slum?
Irrelevant
The government exists for the general welfare and and economic system that subsidizes idleness because the disingenuous say "look over there, its a net positive" while ignoring the externalized cost borne by the taxpayer is just theft from the taxpayer.
> Irrelevant
You made an analogy!
> system that subsidizes idleness
You’ve genuinely lost me. What does this have to do with this thread?
Displacement is a taxpayer funded externality. Companies are not entitled to taxpayer dollars just because theyre too cheap to hire american.
In America we see homeless zombies running around the richest neighborhoods. Thats the definition of success here.
To keep all of that money you just enumerated flowing in the local economy.
FWIW the "international" folks I work with hardly spend any money in the US. Most of it is saved and spent or invested during 2-month annual visits to homeland.
Your logic is incorrect, you are thinking that a "international" folk buying a TV is what they mean. But that's not correct. Paying income taxes, paying tax on cars, paying tax on gas, paying rent, these matter a lot more to the government then you buying an iphone from the apple store in the mall versus one in "international country".
Sure. Any other body hired in their place would still pay taxes PLUS more likely spend more money locally thus boosting local economy.
That's probably just your company. In Silicon Valley, "international" folks spend a lot of money on buying houses (multiple of them sometimes), cars, home improvement, going out to restaurants, etc.
Absolutely anecdotal, but in the Silicon Valley I know, I rarely see coworkers participating in skiing/surfing/hiking/US travel. Hell, even dining out outside of free-food campus is a tough sell.
As for buying multiple houses, I'm sure the wider population is happy with foreigners buying rental properties.
Do we need to make the rich richer or allow locals affordability?
Me buying food from restaurant would make the owner richer, but would also employ more people at the restaurant.
The scarcity issue is valid when the resource is limited. In case of US, I was not aware of food scarcity. Even housing is more due to policies than actual land scarcity.
Economic activity does have positive feeback. Yes, some people get unfairly rich - but the solution is not to stop the activity, instead try to get the rich pay their fair share of contribution to the country.
Why are we relegating locals to menial restaurant jobs? Why not have programs to get them trained and into higher earning jobs?
A local working a restaurant will often need to take advantage of welfare. If instead we funneled the locals to higher paying jobs, we would be better off. We're supposed to look after our own citizens, afterall --that's the whole point of electing a government.
> Me buying food from restaurant would make the owner richer, but would also employ more people at the restaurant
What of one of the employees at the restaurant had your job, and they bought food there? Or are you declaring only you can do your job?
Sorry but there is no competition for health care in US. US basically has no health care. Unless of course you buy it (i.e. pay the fraudulent companies to give you false sense of security and leave you alone in the worst moment of your life)
Yup, this is much more likely to lead to more offshoring than companies hiring more American workers. Which also means that communities in the US with a large amount of workers on visas will also suffer.
Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.
Of course it's not new. And of course it never really stopped. But there is a new incentive for execs to give it a much bigger push given all the recent remote work tooling and when they now think a programmer is just monitoring AI output. So why not pay the monitor SE Asian wages rather than US wages.
The trend is away from remote work though. So much more stuff is hybrid then it was a few years ago. SE Asian wages means a 12 hour time zone difference and that carries a real cost on efficiency (I personally experienced this at two companies). Future poorly thought offshoring attempts will go just as badly as they have in the past. If anything AI makes it worse, since each individual dev is responsible for a bigger slice of the output they need to be in the loop on business / customer needs and significant timezone differences make that harder.
If managed correctly though it means you can have effectively a 24 hour work day. US workers/management goes to sleep as the Asian workers are starting up
What about Central America?
Plenty of offshoring to both Central America and South America has occurred in recent years. It was a somewhat untapped offshoring location, but that no longer seems to be the case.
Real example: my company is US based, top and middle management is in US, some middle management and lower in Europe, managing workers in India and Manila. Same scheme with Costa Rica, but managed directly from US.
A key difference is that at least one isn’t competing for limited housing with offshoring. That is the number 1 driver of the affordability crisis atm.
I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!
There is a lot more to an economy than just housing prices. All the local business now have less customers to sell their good and services to.
The post-Covid offshoring is looking quite a bit different though.
How so?
For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common.
I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.
Offshoring to India is an idle threat due to radically different work cultures and expectations.
Offshoring to, say Poland or Portugal on the other hand...
Offshoring (form the US) to Europe, especially eastern Europe is not new either. The newish offshoring location was Central America and South America, but those have been tapped as well.
For example see https://theenterpriseworld.com/offshore-development-centers/ where they are listing well established locations for (US) offshoring.
Then let them already. Relocate all the work to India. I’m tired of US companies threatening everyone with job losses. Just fucking do it already.
They already are.
I'm old enough to remember when people gnashed their teeth about the U.S. taking talent from abroad being 'brain drain' that hurt those countries. Which is it? We want to take the rest of the world's best and brightest and screw those other countries in the process, or we feel bad about that and don't want to do that? EDIT: Cynically, it could be both!
Well it depends if you live in the US or you live in a country that is hemorrhaging your best workers to the US. No idea why you are trying to lump both groups together as if they should both have a single opinion.
People in the U.S. used to complain that we drain the rest of the world's brains. That has stopped. I was referring to that.
If you put yourself in the shoes of people in other nations, then... a) individuals might really like the option of emigrating to the U.S., but b) their nation might be better off with them staying at home. Interests conflict. The question is whether we should have selfish policies (such as putting a company's bottom-line ahead of a nation's, or one nation's development ahead of another) or not, and, of course, which is is which because one could argue that the only ones being selfish are the Americans who object to all these visas (I don't think they would be the _only_ ones being selfish, and arguably the 'nation' exists in part to protect its citizens, but yes, this is a case of selfishness).
> People in the U.S. used to complain that we drain the rest of the world's brains.
Ok? Are we all supposed to maintain a consistent view with this group of people? I don't understand your point.
I want to know: does the HN commentariat think that brain drain is a problem or not. Elsewhere in this thread we have people urging that we do drain the rest of the world's brains to "win the talent war" [0].
Now, I can totally see that maybe draining our adversaries' brains can be a good thing, unless it's a way of bringing in a fifth column, in which case... no. And it's definitely not good for countries we're on good terms with -- there that "win the talent war" comment shocks the conscience as a thoughtless, unnuanced, jingoist-but-dumb, and immoral/destructive as to our allies comment.
Consistency was not the issue. The question was: what has changed that so few seem to care about brain drain as a negative externality?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009507
Ok, let’s say it leads to 60% offshoring and 40% hiring more Americans.
That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.
The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.
It's not so simple because it's also a drop in demand for american goods and services. Fewer taxes paid, less consumption, etc.
No, that is the incorrect take. Offshoring isn't easy or cheap. Especially when Trump is basically trying to get companies to hire American workers by any means.
It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.
> It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.
Now apply that same line of thought to AI.
"Suffer"? It might help bring home prices back down to reality.
For the first time in my life I'm seeing high-income earners as a big drag on society.
There is a lot more to an economy than just housing prices. All the local business now have less customers to sell their good and services to.
> You know who doesn't need visas? Remote workers
Is it meant as a rhetorical reply to the officials as in "aha, but Microsoft will prevail and make it even worse for you, American workers" or as a reply to the workers: "don't fret, move back to your country and work the same job anyway". Or was it meant as a hint for the officials "don't forget to close that loophole as well"?
Like you I suspect the former. But if we really believe that economics is not a zero sum game then offshoring is better for everyone because it keeps talent in the countries they can help improve, and it is a rising tide that lifts all boats, serving to equalize wealth. Yes, for a while it should have the effect of reducing incomes in the U.S., but so does importing the rest of the world's talent into the U.S., so arguably offshoring is much better. But if [regardless of whether we believe economics is/is not zero sum] we want to keep the rest of the world down then we should absolutely take their talent.
Hiring remote workers also doesn’t require filling out H1B applications and dealing with USCIS. If using remote workers was just as good, companies would already do that.
I assume you mean offshore rather than "wfh" style remote. If so, companies already do that and they have been doing it on a much larger scale - https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/business/american-companies.... This will simply be another accelerant.
Not that salary expenses is a big problem for top tech companies, but remote workers don't warrant US west-coast comps either.
> but remote workers don't warrant US west-coast comps either
I mean, we don't really need that west coast comp either? If I was pulling my old FAANG comp here in Spain, I'd be in the top 0.1% of earners...
Why don't we need it? I wouldn't mind being in the 0.1% or 0.0001% of earners in a place.
Sure, who doesn't want unlimited money? That's decidedly different from "needing" it (I could in no way manage to live on the West Coast on a Spanish salary, for example)
Well then why do the people who do earn that much there need it?
Sky-high cost of living (property prices, mostly). Shitty apartment with a commute in the bay costs $3,000/month. Starter home in Seattle costs a million plus.
It's also a vicious cycle: high tech salaries in those areas have driven up the cost of living.
> Shitty apartment with a commute in the bay costs $3,000/month. Starter home in Seattle costs a million plus.
The prices in Madrid/Barcelona are not exactly far off already (through no fault of high tech salaries).
Why not? Doesn’t that depend on the worker output?
Hatred of the labor theory of value. This isn't my judgement on it. Just my guess why certain people with certain interests argue against it
One might argue that it should, but as a remote worker in a low cost area I don't mind making 20% less than my NYC/Bay colleagues as I can still live like a king in my midwest city on regionally adjusted swe comp.
Shouldn't the company still advertise the role for locals before offering remote? Also, for some roles it's mandatory to have on-site or at least hire within US due to compliance.
Regulated industries often have business language mandating onshore, citizens-only employment. If it isn't required by immigration, the businesses buying the product are requiring assurances (likely due to their own compliance).
As for non-protected roles, global market participation has ups and downs.
Which begs the question: What's better for the US economy?
Compared to having someone move to the US, does hiring a remote worker help or hinder the US economy?
People need to stop asking what's better for the "economy" and start asking what's better for themselves. If the two don't align, it should be tough luck for the "economy", not the people.
"The economy" is often just another way of saying "everyone in aggregate."
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
This is an incredibly blinkered view. The economy is important, but there are many other factors as to whether a given policy is overall good for the citizenry or not.
Sure, but I don't think I claimed that economic factors are the only thing that can be considered when evaluating policy. Maybe it came off that way because my comment was focused on the jobs issue being discussed.
I guess I did not express it well, but I wanted to highlight that "the economy" and "the people" are not in opposition. "The economy" is a vague term that usually approximates something like "the material well being of everyone in aggregate." There are lots of other things one might value besides material well being, but "the people" and the "the economy" and not opposed forces.
Hasn’t it been known for a while now that wages are decoupled from the Economic gains that have been happening since the 80s? That gap is just going to the billionaire class now. Source:
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Elon Musk and I are doing quite well financially, in aggregate.
Obviously how wealth is distributed is a hugely important factor, which a "good" economy does not necessarily take into account.
This is why it's not productive to discuss issues using vague, undefined terms like "the economy."
Wealth inequality is a well defined economic measure and I see no reason why one couldn't use it as a yardstick when evaluating an economy, same as we use the unemployment, inflation, GDP, median household income, and so on. And indeed many economists do use it, and there are many well regarded books and papers that examine wealth distribution.
It leads to the intuition that an economy where 100 people consume 10000 (let's say of energy because it should be inflation-independent) per week and 1 person consumes 100000 is worse than an economy where 100 people consume 9000 per week and 1 person consumes 10000. That is, you can strongly reject or disapprove of changes that strictly increase everyone's wealth or consumption.
I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.
The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.
Yea, I don't disagree with any of that.
I think wealth distribution should be allowed to freely float within a large range, but at extremes it may have bad effects. You don't want a communist regime that tries to enforce complete equality, nor do you want a Russian style oligarchy where a few control almost all the wealth. US is heading towards the latter.
Probably not a simple question or answer on the face of it, but it's really not worth looking at this action in such a narrow lens, because this is not happening in a vacuum. Instead, we should look at it through the overall context of all of this admin's immigration policies, which have been bad for the US economy.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/05/12/g-s1-12...
Depends a lot on how that remote worker's children vote.
Don't worry, I'm sure their leadership is thinking "AI Bots" instead of remote workers.
Can you explain more? This statement is already true before this policy change, so I don't understand why this is not a non sequitur. But I know this is a common rhetoric so I am trying to understand what the logic is.
Thats true but now they hate remote workers. They want you in that timezone.
Plenty of tech workers in Canada and LATAM in the same time zones
They want you in the US for tax purposes too.
They should clamp down on that next. Looking at the past 50 years, offshoring has only caused trouble for the citizens of the country and led things like the rust belt happening.
The rust belt was not caused by call centers in Pakistan, that was the Petrodollar and China deals. But it would be great to have both back (call centers and manufacturing).
That will come next.
And AI.
I'd love to understand how people think the H1B program is going to survive the LLM era. Why in the world would I import a foreign worker to do something I can just as easily tell a clanker to do? The clanker is better at this stuff than I am!
Is it really just a matter of empire-building, at the end of the day? That can't last. Management realizes that, right?
This is an inane comment. Here are the two types of "remote" work:
1. Remote within the US. You still need valid work authorization;
2. Remote outside the US. This is just offshoring and if it really worked, every tech jobs would be offshored. Companies have been trying to do this for decades. Companies would love nothing more than to offshore every white collar job. They would if they could.
So the exact same person working within the US, even better if sitting in an office, is a good employee but if they're working from abroad all of a sudden they're not that good?