And this is a good thing because cheap labour isn't just cheap it's dirty, unsafe and unpleasant - replacing the drudge with robots is a good thing:
Some might say that’s terrible: what are we going to do when there’s no more cheap labour? I look at it the other way around. When there’s no more cheap labour then there’re no more poor people, are there? For by definition people who are getting good wages just aren’t poor. So once we’ve run out of places where we can chase that cheap labour then we’ve actually solved one of humanity’s longest running problems. How in heck do we cure poverty? And we’ll have done it by the only logically sound method known: making everyone rich. Hurrah!
There will still be manufacturing jobs but they will look rather different - as I noted a while back:
I visited a manufacturer the other day. Part of a multi-national business in the electronics industry. Big plant in Chadderton employing about 360 people.
Of those 360 people, 54 have PhDs and over 70% have a degree of some sort.
Rather makes the point that, even if we have a boom in manufacturing, it is't going to provide jobs for 16 year olds who have scraped five GCSEs.
Manufacturing soon becomes a high skill, high value added business filled with society's elite - all graduates, many with higher degrees and all creating, thinking and developing the business.
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