On Mar 9, 2007, at 2:15 AM, Eric Balkan wrote:
> In "After the New Economy", Doug Henwood remarks that most of us work
> in services, rather than goods -- globalization being commonly thought
> of as a borderless flow of goods. But it now includes services.
> E.g.,
> when IBM refilled programmer positions it had dropped in the U.S.
> during the last recession, it filled them largely in the BRIC
> countries.
>
> Or Intel deciding to do their R&D overseas. Or the head of the NSF
> reportedly telling corporate honchos that they shouldn't be hiring US
> physics doctoral graduates when overseas Ph.D's are so much cheaper.
>
> This kind of thing probably hasn't affected labor statistics to any
> great extent, but I can't see how it won't 10 years from now.
The projections, for what they're worth, show that only a few percent of U.S. jobs are at risk for outsourcing. That's no comfort to people who lose their jobs, or can't find jobs, but it's not likely to be a revolutionary thing. And the biz press has been reporting that a lot of companies have had second thoughts about outsourcing - more problems, smaller savings, than they'd hoped.
The biz press is also full of reports that skilled workers in the U.S. are in short supply. (It's in the Fed's latest beige book, too.) If everything could be outsourced, that wouldn't be a problem.
Doug