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I think there are two separate though somewhat linked questions in the whole debate over Vivek's recent extremely controversial post:
I think that the answer to #1 is a very complex one and largely boils down to what you value. Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors. A lot of one's answer to this question will depend on whether you want to maximize your at least short term market value and are willing to accept a sort of socialist nativism to try to maximize it, or whether you value other things more. There are also obvious questions of the possible dilution of culture by immigrants, fears of future race wars, and all sorts of complicated issues.
I would like to focus on #2. Is the Asian work model actually better than the US one? To me, the answer is pretty clearly no, and this is what offends me mainly about Vivek's post. The whole idea that Americans are too lazy and we should have a work ethic more like Asians.
I don't think many would doubt that the Asian work ethic is in many ways personally damaging to people who follow it. It is both emotionally and physically damaging. I have met more Asians who complain about that work ethic than Asians who support it.
But does it even bring objectively better economic results? To me the answer seems clearly to be no, it does not. Take Japan for example. It has had more than 70 uninterrupted years of peace and capitalism, yet despite its Asian work model, it has never managed to economically catch up with the US. Now to me it seems clear that Japan is in many ways a better place to live than the US is - it has much lower levels of violent crime, it seems to have a better solution to finding people housing, and so on. But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture. I see no fundamental reason why Japanese could not adopt a more Western type of work model while also retaining the low violent crime rates and the better housing situation.
Japanese have less per-capita wealth than Americans. If working constantly was truly superior, then why do they have this outcome? Of course America has many advantages, like a historical head-start on liberal capitalism and great geography and winning wars and so on. But it's been 70 years now... the geography is what it is, but certainly modern Japan has not been plagued by a lack of capitalism or by wars or by authoritarianism. If they slave away working so hard, or pretending to work so hard, all the time, then why are they still significantly poorer than we are? To me this suggests that the Asian work model is not essentially superior to the Western one, and it would not only be personally damaging to me if we were to import it here in the US, but it would not even make up for that by yielding better economic outcomes.
"The economy" is not just an abstraction. Benefitting the economy doesn't mean line going up, it means cheaper rice and McDonalds burgers and cars and phones and AI girlfriends for the American working class. It's interesting for the anti-immigration right, after years of saying how importing low-skill immigrants will take jobs away from and lower the wages of Americans who had the misfortune to be born without a high enough IQ to code in python, now objects to us importing Indians with exactly enough IQ to barely write python. The effect on wages depends on the occupation - in theory, allowing in a hundred thousand seasonal fruit pickers should make everyone better off overall, but would lower the wages of existing apple-pickers. But allowing in a hundred thousand javascript monkeys should, because everyone's better off overall, raise the wages of the native fruit pickers! And it's harder to feel sorry for the heritage American FAANG engineers or accountants who'll make 85k a year instead of 95k a year because of Indian competition than it is the 'working class'.
Completely agreed. American tech workers are seriously overpaid relative to other developed countries. It should be made clear to them that either they compete for jobs on a fair footing with the best from all over the world or else they'll be the immigrants applying for the job because now it's based in London.
No they aren't.
Now, you might say that this is merely me making a naked assertion, negating the naked assertion you've originally provided. But in fact, I can back this assertion by pointing to a) the market producing the salaries you consider excessive, and b) the relative success of the American companies providing those salaries versus foreign tech companies employing foreign workers.
Further, it's interesting to me that you are so transparently hostile to the one segment of the American economy that offers be best and most obvious hope for widespread economic growth and prosperity. How much poorer should Americans in general be, in your view? Which class seems to you to enjoy appropriate compensation?
Is it Quants?
I am not hostile to tech, I actually like it a lot; in fact my day to day job is basically as a ML-esque programmer and if needs be with a bit of retooling I think I'd be able to transition to somewhere like Deepmind if push came to shove. Tech is basically my long term exit plan from finance and so I have a personal interest in seeing it do well in the UK/Europe beyond the general benefits to humanity that removing barriers to trade have. The people I'm talking about being overpaid are not OpenAI/Anthropic engineers (they are appropriately paid) but the ones who don't understand shit about computers but get paid $150k+ to stack frameworks on top of frameworks until hey presto the compiler shits out yet another CRUD/advertising app. Meanwhile my friends with PhDs in computational biology who went into biotech are earning like $60k in the UK and the lucky ones who managed to land a position in California are earning $90k-$130k.
Just because the rest of the developed world shoots itself in the foot with regards to overregulation which leads to US companies winning by default doesn't mean they deserve their excess profits any more than a monopoly that doesn't get challenged deserves its excess profits. They got lucky by being born on the correct piece of soil where the government in charge doesn't regularly commit self harm and now they wish to protect the fruits of this accident by birth even though it directly hurts Humanity if a US programming job (where the lack of overregulation leads to a higher force multiplier in how much good the worker is able to do for the world) goes to a mediocre American vs a talented Briton.
Quants are underpaid relative to the value we generate for the capital employing us but that's a discussion for another day. Plus the discrepancy between US vs UK quant pay is small enough that you can genuinely say that people choose to forgo a little bit of money for a better ambiance while the gap for tech is so high that it only makes sense if UK tech developers (amongst which group I count many friends) are artificially prevented from moving to greener pastures, which is exactly what is happening.
The ad apps, while simple and presumably beneath an intellect of your caliber, make value for the capital employing them. Yet you do not think that the people who make said apps should be paid based on the value they provide the capital employing them:
But you, the noble quant, should be judged by that same value. And in fact you are underpaid for your value to the capital employing you:
Have you considered that maybe its because all your really talented British developer friends aren't actually really talented? Maybe they are actually kind of dumb? Like there is this supposedly really lucrative thing they can do, its so easy they can "shit it out", they don't even need to know how computers work, they have the app store in the UK so they don't even need to be in California, but like... they don't actually do it?
There it is. Its you. Claiming to know who deserves what. That's what it always boils down to.
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