I don’t understand the debate here. The answer to the OP is obvious and undebateable.
Where will we work when all the jobs are overseas?
Overseas, of course, as by hypothesis that’s the only location where there is work.
When they are able to. That’s the key phrase.
You’ve grossly oversimplified the situation. High productivity comes about from a great number of sources, not just the employees themselves. High productivity is a function of the entire infrastructure and is not simply exportable as you are implying.
No, Americans will not work overseas.
What you dont understand, is other countries are very protective of their jobs, and the jobs that their citizens have, so they rarely let foreigners take away the jobs of their own citizens(unlike the United States).
The chances of an american getting a job in communist china, or India, are very slim.
A few americans are now currently hired by asians, for the purpose of teaching asians how to do the things that americans do on the job. But increasingly, as the asians learn how to build factories, and systems, and complex electronics on their own without our help, they will get rid of the few americans(and the american companies) who are now teaching them how to take away american jobs.
Thus, the question still stands:
“Where will we work when all the jobs are overseas?”
This question keeps coming up on the SDMB, and I think it’s a cause for great concerm for a variety of reasons. I’m amazed at how often it’s brushed away or treated with insensitivity.
It’s not just manufacturing jobs or IT jobs. With the rise of fast communications via the internet and e-mail, there’s no reason that any job can’t be done elsewhere. Chemical engineering? Send the requirements for the job to a consulting firm in India, or Eastern Europe, or elsewhere. They have compatible software tools available, and good educations, and significantly lower costs of living. They can come up with a manufacturing procedure at a fraction of the cost of a US-based engineer. The same goes for Electrical Engineering design, Naval Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, Physical Sciences analyses, etc. Heck, Architecture and fashion design and Graphics Arts. There are a lot of underemployed people elsewhere in the world who can do the job with less overhead.
Retrain, you say. But retrain for what? Just about any specialization can be done elsewhere.
It won’t happen, you say. Some jobs need hands-on treatment. But you can have a firm with a US liaison to handle that, and a stable of engineers in the Ukraine. That’s already being done.
Do things that can’t be done without personal contact, you say. Yeah, but there are only so many nurses’ and doctor’s and plumber’s jobs. An awful lot of the hands-on jobns will be low-pay service jobs. You want fries with that?
To complicate this, there are some jobs that people won’t want to have going overseas – National Security. You have de facto protectionism of those jobs because you want to keep them over here. So Weapons systems and Military hardware stay here. But they have suppliers, too. At some point in the chain you let in stuff from overseas (I’ll bet that most of the electronics components used by the military come from Asia), but where do you draw the line? And there’s only a limited number of jobs in this sector, too.
I still haven’t seen anything that negates the idea that overseas competition won’t send US wages in a race for the bottom. It might be better for the holders of those overseas jobs, but massive unemployment in the US is a Bad Thing, by anybody’s lights.
One last thing – innovation seems to be suffering, too. Companies take R&D off the budget because it doesn’t yield short-term results. A lot of the industries doing R&D seem to be drying up and cutting back. One company I know of was doing lots of R&D into new products only a couple of years ago. That’s all gone now. They’re starting to make new lines of products. All designed overseas.
And there is always the argument that freedom is the highest value. I do not want my freedom restricted. If I want to buy cheaper goods from a Chinese guy I should not be forced to buy more expensive goods from an American guy. If I am forced to help and protect someone I would rather help and protect the chinese people who are poorer. I believe it is a matter of justice and a matter of good for the entire world. As standards of living become more equal there is less likelyhood of tensions and wars. You are free to subsidize your neighbor if you like but don’t force me to do the same. I like my freedom to choose.
If the productivity stems from non-exportable factors, then of course it will remain here. But I can’t think of many factors of production that are valuable today but not exportable. Machines, computers, technical know-how and education, capital investment of every kind, all those things can and are being moved overseas. These factors are not inherently immovable, but in the past, political factors like the Cold War and the perceived “national interest” prevented their movement.
The efficient methods of production developed by America through (mostly) publicly funded research and a long public investment in education are for us what oil is to the Saudis. If all those things are suddenly transferable anywhere labor is cheapest, there is no longer a means to maintain productivity and a high standard of living. What do you think would happen to the Saudi standard of living if all their oil could somehow be teleported to Texas?