> What?
The context is clear is you read the whole paragraph instead of that one sentence:
> Once a good is non-tradable, the wage is not set globally but in local markets. Newly productive American technology companies bid workers away from haircutting and waiting tables to write code. Since Americans still need haircuts and cannot import them, the wages of hairdressers increase, without it affecting wages for hairdressers in Germany. American software wages rise and so do American non-software wages. In Europe this does not happen, because there is no growing software sector to start with.
And the author is correct (while the phrasing is a bit weird.) American hairdressers aren't not better at haircutting than European or African hairdressers. But they still (mostly) earn more than their counterparts in other continents, because their customers, or the customers of their customers, are richer.
> So huge segments of American software developer payouts are actually failed investments (how much did Meta blow on “metaverse”? How much did Twitter hemorrhage before the Elon buy out? Etc.)
In other words, capital pays laborers. It takes a huge amount of mental gymnastic to frame this as a bad thing.