A Tectonic Shift?

I mentioned in my notes on "Mosaic" that there was something I wanted to talk more about:

There is currently a broad tectonic shift going on- businesses are profiting while jobs are being outsourced, but white- and blue-collar wages are eroding.

The effects of globalization is something that has been on my mind recently. This is the abstract concept I have come up with so far:

The chart below shows the annual incomes of everyone around the world. The graph is highly skewed to the right, because capital is heavily accumulated in a small proportion of people, and this disproportionately affects their income. In general though, most people rely solely on wages.


Before going on, there are two things which I think people should recognize:
1. People working in areas with more investment have higher productivity and so can be paid higher wages.
2. Even when it comes to businesses such as services which do not need capital investment, people in wealthy areas still have higher incomes because the opportunity cost of time in the region is higher- so saving the time of the people around them is more valuable. To better see this, think of a dry cleaner working in the US and in China. The dry cleaner in the US is saving more time for a wealthier population, which has higher time opportunity costs, and so this dry cleaner is paid a much higher wage than the dry cleaner in China. This is all despite the fact that dry cleaning itself does not require much capital as a business to run and both of them are essentially doing the same amount of work.

Now, what is globalization doing? Pabrai said so far it has increased profits of capital, and it is eroding the value of labor. Long term, I disagree with the first point. The increased profits from capital seem to be a temporary boost, and economic law would suggest that competition would eventually bring these back to normal levels. But globalization and technology is dramatically increasing the supply of labor, and hence competition. As a result, there is overall downward pressure on wages. But it is also balancing, because the demand for the cheapest labor is increasing while demand for rich world labor is decreasing.

All this so far has been pretty well understood in the financial community. But what I haven't heard discussed frequently is what a synchronization of (lower) wages is doing.

1. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that this synchronization will lead to an increased demand in basic necessities, such as food, oil, energy, water, etc, as more people are able to afford these goods. In fact, this is maybe what we are already seeing here. But, increased demand shouldn't be necessarily confused with higher prices. Many of these commodities have already increased significantly from their lows. What is important besides increased demand is at what price that demand can be fulfilled. For most agricultural goods, that price is low. For oil and some other commodities, it is debatable. (Or rather, I just haven't looked into much specific data and the media never provides good answers to these questions)

2. People in first world countries seem to have maintained our standard of living by mostly saving less and borrowing against our assets. I base this mostly based on what I've seen in the United States and the United Kingdom. This is unsustainable, and eventually we will start seeing declines in our purchasing power due to the pressure on our high wages. Again, we might already be seeing that through the declining US dollar rather than direct wage decreases. This pressure would also affect the gap between service sector jobs in different countries. (think the US/China dry cleaner example again, only now the wealth of both populations are slowly converging, and so are their wages)

3. There might be a decrease in more conspicuous types of consumption, as the average first-world wages which supported this demand would be under pressure. This would also affect business profit margins, and hence investment returns.

This is all mostly abstract so far, but I think these broad trends seem fairly credible. Please do comment if you have any thoughts on the matter. I do plan on looking more into this myself. As to how this will effect investing: well, for myself personally, that would mean increased demand for both oil and pulp, two things I would consider basic necessities. But in general, I would be also worried about the deflationary pressures that this globalization can cause.