Technology

I call it the great illusion of "globalism for thee but not for me".

The managerial class in the Western world championed globalized trade, outsourcing, and open markets under the assumption that only low skilled, blue collar workers would face market disruption. When that happened, the working class was told to "retrain for the digital age", in other words "deal with it, not our problem nor responsibility".

This credentialed elite mistakenly believed that their specialized degrees, cognitive skills, and institutional placement rendered them permanently immune to the same forces of automation, offshoring, and global competition they so eagerly unleashed on others.

That illusion is shattering today for several macroeconomic and structural reasons, the original architecture of globalism, as engineered in the 80s, completely failed to anticipate the modern shifts redefining our world, the total digitization of the economy through the internet, foreign competitors like China bypassing Western credentialized gatekeeping entirely to scale up the value chain, and the rise of automation also eroding the premium on cognitive labor.

In the end, they're just reaping what they sow.