What if Labor-cost arbitrage shifts services jobs to AI plus low-cost onshore?
Firms combine AI automation with relocation to low-cost US regions to cut services-delivery costs, pressuring high-cost coastal employment and offshore providers alike; the dual arbitrage reshapes services-sector margins and labor geography.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Firms combine AI automation with relocation to low-cost US regions to cut services-delivery costs, pressuring high-cost coastal employment and offshore providers alike; the dual arbitrage reshapes services-sector margins and labor geography. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Job displacement ▲ · Consumer spending ▼ · Risk appetite ▲ · Robotics productivity ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.