Just as much as education is the driver OVER THERE. The Indian economy didn't insist on policies making subsistence farming more profitable, did it? No of course not. It bootstrapped a fairly good English speaking educational system to crank out more smarter, literate, fluent people. For my money, if that were me, I'd definitely prefer a $5,000 office job in Mumbai than driving a pedicab. Similarly last year China ground out about 20-40,000 PhDs in the hard sciences, Engineering, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Bio. These are not sewing machine operators. India, the story is the same. South Korea, ditto.

In fact, companies like Tata in India have found their own skill pool is beginning to price their own labor out of their own market and they're beginning to outsource themselves to Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Kenya and Angola are also good candidates. I would be shocked if India is sitting on its laurels demanding that the Government find a way to make those jobs more profitable in India. More likely they are expanding their education net to figure out how to create new jobs that exploit the skills they already have.

In the end the US is in the same boat. Don't worry about $7/hr jobs going to Bolivia. And don't worry about the highest of the high end jobs leaving either. Did you know for instance that Radiologist jobs are leaving the US too? All you need is a Medical Degree and a broadband connection to transmit his res imagery. So again the challenge for the US is to figure out what it's good at developing, and then developing those jobs. A friend of mine, another economist, noted that about 80% of all non blue collar job categories in the US didn't even exist 30 years ago. Seems to me that that is the avenue we should pursue instead of bemoaning our bad luck that housewives in Singapore can now do our jobs as well as we can.

The idea that Muslim cultures are so prickly so unique so resistant to everything and anything which would ever provide them any avenue for progress is its own kind of bigotry isn't it? You have Indian Peacekeepers in Lebanon. Seemingly Hezbollah, those fun guys who assert terrorism as a legitimate tool of foreign policy, have no problems with those 'Hindus'. But we here in the west like to enable and patronize and assume the we know and do better.

People do evil things in the name of some God therefore the notion of a spiritual life is evil or delusional. People do evil things in the name of love, money and country too. We should toss all those in the trash.

Because their legislatures become nothing but hot air. Yeah yeah everyone objected to all the dictators from Lucius Cornellius Sulla on forward. No one did anything about them though. I'm sure the angriest of Democrats are smug in their anger. Not that they plan to do anything about it.

George Bush's administration is the only one in the history of recorded time since ever was, since mankind dropped from the trees to ever act craven. Everyone else, everywhere and since forever and ever were blessed with unicorn munificence, grace and purity. In fact the word 'politics' didn't even exist until around the year 2001 or so. We were all ageless immortals living in the Garden of Eden till then.

Thanks for clearing that up. And please feel free to carve out another 2500 word epistle on how much I suck, again. I can just picture your ink stained fingers banging sweaty over the keyboard for endless hours to slay the dragon as your blood pressure rises and rises.

The world is not flat. It's nubby. Capital does not move frictionless equally everywhere instantly. It moves to cities. If anything, the notion of Globalization will seem silly in a few years as jobs, technology, people and education all cluster into a few hundred large cities world wide. And those cities will be indistinguishable from one another just like most places in the west already are. Dublin could be in France, London and NYC are similar, Cleveland, Phoenix and Vancouver are all pretty much the samething.

Well add in Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasha, Cairo, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Karachi, Delhi, Beijing, Hanoi, Jakarta, Kuala Lampur, Shangai and the MORE THAN other 80 cities in China that have >1million people each. And so on.

See the world is nubby. The world is cities, not countries. So when we talk about job movement we're really talking about moving from one city, one middle or lower middle class, to another in another city. On a small scale you see this right here in the US. A bank moves a credit card processing center from Arlington VA to Las Vegas. The places are the same, the people are too. The only difference is marginal labor cost. Now when we incent companies to move to Las Vegas we offer them tax breaks, that you or I pay for. Or, we offer them tax incentives to keep them where they are. That you or I also pay for. Seems like a devil's bargain either way though. Anyway in a nubby world you have the same thing writ large. Companies don't move in a vacuum and fill up the space there. They move and low and behold find themselves in a competitive environment with everyone else who thought of the same idea. This tends to make all the nubby places alike. In ZA, J'Burg is alot like any other large modern city in the world. So is Dubai, Riyadh, Islamabad and so on. It's not really a race to the bottom so much as a race to duplicate the same thing a hundred different ways. All the nubby places eventually are all the same.