GSV said:
That's not completely unrelated to labour costs .. when everyone from
a builder to a policeman is earning 1/10th the USA rate, the cost of
living is bound to be rather lower.
However salaries in India have floated up pretty dramatically these
last 10-15 years, and will continue to do so (at least for the
educated folks .. and educated Indians are very educated indeed ..
which other country teaches '19 times table' in schools? Heck, which
other country does most of its teaching in what is, to 99% of the
pupils, a second language? 8>.)
Sure the salaries have floated up in India and in that other giant, China.
But they will take decades to even catch upto US salaries. And then the US
salaries will have to remain stagnant for those intervening decades, before
the Chinese or Indian salaries approach US ones. US salary structures didn't
happen overnight, and they won't be changed overnight either.
I doubt US salaries are ever going to take a tumble just to compete against
these other countries. Nor is it right for US workers to take pay cuts,
considering what the cost of living is in the US. If workers took a pay cut,
would manufacturers also automatically lower prices? Not right away, but as
their sales start tumbling then they would, but in the meantime, a lot
heartache where people can't afford things they were able to afford before,
and sellers losing sales that they used to make easily before.
I know that there is a lot of grumbling in the US about why they should be
losing jobs to overseas. Well, the reason seems to be that the overseas
market is the market manufacturers are going for now. So you can't be having
a high-priced US worker designing and making these products for sales to
people who make a tenth of what they make. If you want to sell to China or
India, then you better hire Chinese or Indians to design these things for
their own people at the costs that their own people can afford. If the
products that they design happen to be sold back to the US at cheaper rates,
then that's only good for consumers.
Yousuf Khan