Comment by mschuster91

> I think the mistake here is the model of low-skill/high-skill labor is not a useful distinction.

IMHO it still is. There are tasks, especially in assembly, that for now require humans to do because robots can't match our dexterity. Stuff like mounting through-hole components like a cable from the battery compartment to the main PCB. That's a few seconds worth of time, and you need barely more than a few days worth of training to get a worker up to speed - a low-skill job. China, Thailand, Vietnam and a bunch of other places have an ample supply of people coming out of utter poverty, which means the pressure on wages is massive - a Chinese worker on average earns about 13200 dollars a year [1], an American worker is 3x-4x that amount and more if the shop is unionized. And on top of that, Chinese workers work 996, American or European workers have much MUCH more employee rights.

The problem is, low-skill employment opportunities are going down and down because automation gets better. For now, China can compete because Chinese workers are cheaper than machines... but once that changes, it's going to get nasty.

> The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor in product costs.

There's soft factors as well. Stuff like workplace safety/OSHA regulations, environmental regulations... Silicon Valley is a bunch of Superfund sites from decades of toxic emissions. China? They barely have regulations in place, and other sweatshop countries are even worse.

The core problem we're talking about anyway is that a certain percentage of any population is just, plain and simple, dumb as rocks. Over half the US population is barely literate [2]. No matter how good your education systems are, no matter how much money you invest into equality in schools, no matter how much you protect them from stuff like lead - they are dumb, will remain dumb, and probably their children will also remain dumb. In ye olde times you put them on farms, meatpacking or in factories so they had gainful employment... but that all went away, and now we got hordes of utterly dumb people with no hope of ever getting smart and, crucially, no hope of ever getting a meaningful job.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/743509/china-average-yea...

[2] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...