Your average American company is running on China.
1,983 karma · joined February 7, 2026
The American DreamX®.
Higher income does not mean higher quality of life.
I'm an American who has spent the majority of my adult life living abroad, and much of that time has been in developing countries.
I have no illusions about poverty and am not going to pretend that the US isn't a "rich" country. But I've also noticed a very stark trend in the past decade: fewer and fewer people express interest in emigrating to the developed world.
I currently live in one of the fastest-growing countries in the world. Its per capita GDP PPP is about a fifth of the America's and...the number of people I meet who say they'd want to live in the US is tiny.
People around the world are increasingly hip to the reality: the US is still the land of opportunity. But opportunity is more and more difficult to come by. The country is expensive, has massive social problems and lacks attributes (such as safety nets provided by family) that make life in poorer countries feel better to many people.
Even your idea that the "underclass and remaining desperately poor citizens" need to "lift themselves up" is a distinctly American idea. There are tons of working poor in the US. They are trying to "lift themselves up" but can't afford a $1,500/month apartment, $30,000 starter car, $5+/gallon gas, $5,000 health insurance deductibles, etc.
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.That's the antithesis of American consumer culture. Like I said, for a huge swath of Americans, even those who are lower middle class, a European lifestyle (which is still a developed, high-income lifestyle) would be seen as a step down.
So yes, you're right. The idea of a "living wage" is a farce because the American system is not really concerned with this even if politicians have to pretend to be. In reality, the US has maximized the economic ceiling at all costs. As long as people think they have a chance at becoming unfathomably wealthy, even huge numbers of the poor will vote for policies that perpetuate their own poverty.
The amount of assembly work done in the US is absolutely miniscule. This type of work is never coming back to the US in any meaningful volume unless it can be done by robots.
> ...you should pay more for those products if you want to support "living wages".
The problem is that the average American earner cannot afford to pay what it would cost to produce consumer goods end-to-end in the US in a manner that would allow people engaged in low-skill labor to earn an American "living wage".
Americans cannot have it both ways: you cannot consume more material goods than any other group in the world and produce those goods domestically using workers earning an American living wage.
Most Americans truly don't understand the scale of their consumption. Countries in Western Europe are developed, high-income nations and many Americans couldn't fathom living a Western European lifestyle because even most Western Europeans don't consume like Americans.
> Sure, but a product made entirely overseas results in 0 wages (for the manufacturing of the product) for American workers.
American brands like Apple capture the vast majority of the value of their products even when the manufacturing is done elsewhere. Final assembly, which is the type of work that is done in countries like China, Vietnam and India, makes up less than 5% of the retail price of most electronics products.
I've lived in the developing world for many years and currently live in a developing country in Asia that's experiencing one of the biggest manufacturing booms in the world. You can probably guess the country.
The problem with wanting to do all the manufacturing at home is that not all manufacturing wages are the type of wages you'd want in a developed, high-income economy. Low-skilled, labor-intensive assembly work is not a foundation for continued prosperity in a developed, high-income economy. And Westerners (Americans) don't want all the bad stuff that typically comes with it, including the pollution.
Origin is complicated and what gets printed on a label rarely tells the full story. You can have products that are assembled somewhere using components that are made somewhere else, products that contain raw materials from somewhere else, etc.
The assumption that "Made in America" results in higher wages for American workers is not always well-founded.
There's also the issue of fraud. Not every label is legitimate. Lying about one or two components in particular products can result in significantly higher margins, so there are a lot of incentives for dishonesty at multiple levels of many supply chains, and even the most well-meaning manufacturers can fall victim to it.
But what are you "studying"? You haven't actually tried to engage with my perspective in a good-faith manner. You haven't asked any questions, and questions are critical for any serious study.
Instead, you denigrated me for my perspective from your very first comment ("death-cult believer"), suggested people like me are "useless", claimed I am unable "to engage with anything of significance", and even admitted that this is not a productive endeavor.
With all due respect, it seems to me you should worry less about improving the human condition in the abstract and prioritize how you might actually make a real contribution to the human condition. Because name-calling, belittling and arguing don't make the world a better place, and certainly aren't aligned to the ideal of peace, security and prosperity for all.
My humble suggestion: the simplest and most immediate way you could improve the world around you is to consider how you treat the people you interact with.
Good day.
Speaking of "saving time" and "productive endeavors"...
If you believe what you've written, the most useful thing you could do is to reflect on why you've chosen to spend your time interacting with me.
I mean, I didn't engage you. You responded to a comment of mine, and then you proceeded to keep engaging in what is clearly a dead-end dialog with a useless internet stranger. There must be a reason for that, no?
You're doing it wrong!
Except for one guy, but he's 16 and will probably be the richest on paper once his AI agent startup's pre-Seed Series Z closes.
Your comments here are both humorous and sad. To believe you love humanity while having such disdain for your fellow human beings who constitute it simply because many of them won't agree with your "truth".
The good news is you can take solace in the fact that you're in good company. Many of the world's greatest atrocities have been instigated by individuals who were convinced that saving the world required dealing with large groups of people they thought "useless" and "unproductive".
No, your insinuations simply confirmed what I've observed throughout life: even people with the highest of ideals and noblest of visions engage in the behavior that works in opposition to the world they want, and they're just as apt to blame others for the conflict they help stoke.
You can call people who have a different world view names, like "death-cult believers", but it should be patently obvious to you that this contributes nothing to the conversation and is far more likely to create the very animosity and conflict you complain about than it is peaceful, useful dialog.
And by the way, pretending that people should live by "sticks and stones" and telling yourself people who don't agree with you are just too "sensitive" is just a way for you to avoid taking responsibility for your contribution to the imperfect world you live in.
I'd love for that too, but there's very little evidence to support the notion that this is going to happen.
None of my comments here have celebrated my somber expectations for humanity, so the mere fact that you've basically called me a "death-cult believer" simply because I'm less hopeful about our prospects is itself evidence of just how unrealistic Utopia is.
I mean, if we can't even keep from denigrating random strangers in online discussions, what makes you think we're going to stop fighting and figuring out how we can take care of each other?
"Your sense of worth should not be tied up in your job" only does so much when the average person's reality is that his or her job is the means by which they survive/thrive economically, a primary factor in whether or not they attract a partner and reproduce, etc.
The folly is believing that humans are the tip of the only branch that matters to the tree.
Upwards of 99% of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. Human life is so special and important to us because...we're human. But our survival is not guaranteed, and for all of our truly unique attributes and advantages, we're statistically just as likely to reach the same outcome as the vast, vast majority of every other species.
Labor and specialization are not unique to modern-day work. Both hunter-gatherer societies and our modern industrial society have labor and specialization. But they function in completely different ways.
Specialization in industrial society is much more complex whereas in hunter-gatherer societies it is generally based on age and gender. Hunter-gatherer societies are generally more egalitarian, there is more skill overlap between members of the group, expertise is leveraged in less formal and less institutionalized ways, learning is more distributed and knowledge is more likely to be treated as communal.
But if you want to have a less philosophical and more pragmatic discussion, I'd raise the issue of the billions of people who count themselves among the "working poor." For billions of people, modern work doesn't guarantee that you won't be poor.
Most people living today take it for granted that modern "work" is the way it is and the way it should be. Few people have the context of understanding that modern work, where you directly trade labor for money and money for the goods and services you need to live, and where your identity and social standing is largely based on your profession, is something only a minority of human beings have experienced.
In my experience, most people seem to treat human development as a one-way spear of progress. The dawn of agriculture, the industrial revolution, etc. are all just stops on a linear path that is the right path.
But maybe it's just a dead end. "Primitive" hunter-gatherer societies survived for way longer than our modern-day society has existed, and things aren't looking so promising for us right now.
Probably not, but it just adds another measure of normalization for something all the evidence suggests is insidiously harmful to the development of a young brain.
Modern concepts of "work" and how we relate to work are quite new and it's just an assumption that we're "on the right path."