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Wages are not being driven down by labor supply. Rather as this particular example clearly shows, they are being driven down by the underlying economics of production. Another example of this trend is Detroit. The United Auto Workers union succeeded in keeping the wages high, but the underlying economics of production destroyed the industry.

The lesson in this scenario, is counter-intuitive. You can regulate, unionize and force wages to stabilize. But that can only help you in short term. On a longer timeframe, innovation and foreign labor catches up and now instead of losing few jobs to talented foreigners you end up losing the entire supply chain. The Software Industry thankfully has been able to resist this trend. The same report shows solid growth across all software related professions.




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