Yes, the truth is more nuanced: production is a collective endeavor that requires knowledge, energy, raw materials, labor, and capital equipment. Here in Argentina, the government is still in the hands of landowners, who control the raw materials, just like in the medieval feudal system. The US, on the other hand, is largely run by investors, whose access to capital to invest in capital equipment was the crucial limiting resource in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The difference is that capital equipment is not the crucial limiting resource for programming, or even for building self-driving cars.

Consider a steelworker: perhaps he earns US$80,000 a year, but he is operating two million dollars' worth of steel mill. (More accurately, a hundred steelworkers are collectively operating a steel mill worth two hundred million dollars.) If he (and his coworkers) were to save 10% of their salaries, they could build their own steel mill after 250 years. It's understandable that in such a situation most of the bargaining power is with the investor.

Contrast that with our situation. A typical salary in our profession is US$150,000 per year. A nice laptop costs US$2000. A nice rackmount server, even if you can't be satisfied with a VPS, might cost US$500. (And I used to host my website on dialup in my house, and cable modem connections today are a hundred times faster than colocated data-center bandwidth was 20 years ago.) This is two months of savings, not 250 years. So we have a lot more bargaining power, and that's one reason we're able to demand so much more money than the steelworker.

This is a terrible situation for investors, or for that matter managers of big companies. They are left without bargaining power through ownership of capital goods; they therefore struggle to recapture that bargaining power by lobbying, litigation, and of course illegal wage-fixing conspiracies like the one Google was involved in a few years ago. Aside from its dismal implications for us as individuals, this development will discourage talented young people from going into engineering — law or management will be more lucrative.

Law is zero-sum: a case that one lawyer loses, another wins. Management is largely zero-sum, a popularity-contest game of corporate politics to obtain control over more of the company's short-term fixed pool of resources. Engineering is positive-sum: what one engineer produces, another can buiild off of.

So what does a country look like when its talented young people choose law or management over science, engineering, or medicine? René Favaloro commits suicide; young people idolize Maradona rather than Einstein, and play football rather than experimenting with chemistry sets or building ham radios; its nuclear fusion program is a fraud; it imports its computers from China, then does the last assembly step locally, in order to capture the windfall value of government protectionist measures designed to develop local industry; the talented young people who do go into science or engineering (including programming) usually emigrate, often to a country with better universities. Argentina has been this way for a century or more, and the US is starting to become this way, too.

But it's worth pointing out that, even in the middle of the 20th century, the US wasn't that way, and that's how Silicon Valley was able to exist in the first place.