Letters to the Editor
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The Cost of Progress
If typesetting is so much cheaper now, why do I still have to pay $400-$500 a semester on my textbooks?
That aside, I agree with many of the points you make. It's so easy to be angry at the foreign countries taking outsourced jobs away from Americans. I've seen this firsthand since my dad was laid off by the company he had worked for for ten years when it shipped the majority of its programming and analysis work to India. When there is no justifiable reason for firing a longtime employee except that they cost more than an Asian worker would, it's hard to accept. Several years later, and my dad still can't get through The World Is Flat because it upsets him so much to hear a defense of globalization, which cost him his job.
But ultimately, globalization is going to benefit far more people than it harms - standards of living will finally rise in India, China, and throughout the developing world as work comes to them. And America will adapt as people are trained and retrained to find jobs that are staying here. I'm not saying it will be an easy transition, and I'm not saying that many people won't be hurt by the loss of their jobs - my family is among the casualties - but eventually we'll adapt.
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Fair Play
What's missing here is, quite simply, fair play.
You want to outsource this job overseas? Manufacturing or service? I have no problems with that. Go for it. As long as there's a level playing field. America went through a labor revolution to get where we are today; revolutions that have little chance of happening overseas. It's different when the government really doesn't care if you don't work and would just as soon shoot you if you go on strike.
Let's export our labor revolution. Anyone sending work overseas gets an additional 10% tax on any money sent to another country for a product or service, unless said country allows free and fair access to union organizing. Another 5% if they don't have reasonable pollution controls in place.
Give me that, and I think we'll have a self-correcting mechanism. No more 13-year-olds making Nike's for $0.50/day, just like the 13-year-olds suddenly disappeared from the steel mills of the midwest.
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anna_h, couldn't say it any better
Our task is not to cuss others in the world, it is to suck it up and find a way to make a living, while (possibly?) finding some happiness or solace in the world standard of living going up. Can't we all just get along? Share the wealth? (not) And thank you David, for a thought provoking article. It was (is) interesting, Mr. Silverman. And I agree with your POV.
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NapalmGod
Right on. I have personally seen the swing of power from workers to managers and owners here in Lawrenceburg, KY. I hope your points will sink in here and abroad sometime in the near future. Nuff said.
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Thank You Dr. Strangelove
I'm glad you learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. You are undoubtedly correct that there is no way to stop global outsourcing and save high-paying American jobs. There probably isn't much about the market that can be controlled anymore, including (contrary to your simplistic formula) the growing social chaos that that happens as our high wage jobs are shipped away.
Let's face it, this sort of mindless optimism felt pretty good during the early to mid-nineties when all of this outsourcing really started to take off. But now, a decade into this it’s pretty obvious to everyone, except the most devout “free trade” boosters, that what we see is what we get.
I would implore any free trade booster to rethink their simplistic scenario. Optimism does not make an economic policy. It’s good to feel optimistic that tomorrow will be better than today, but to say that a global free market will one day magically lift the whole world out of poverty is nothing but an ideological fantasy that is truly without precedent. Wake the hell up!
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Blaming a Victim?
My critque of Dobbs is slightly different.
Dobbs errs in blaming the illegal immigrant for economic problems. I think blame lies with the business that employs the illegal immigrant.
For decades, government has looked the other way while employers hired low-wage illegal immigrants. Their presence in this country was illegal but winked at as long as they provided a cheap labor force for business.
We've all profited from the exploitation of illegal immigrants. Cheap immigrant labor means lower prices for consumers and higher profits for business. Lately, employers outside the agricultural and meat packing industries have started hiring illegals. The result has been a backlash.
Illegal aliens were expected to work for the wages Americans wouldn't accept. To our chagrin, employers have begun hiring them for job Americans and wages Americans want.
The victims in this case are the illegal immigrants and the workers they've displaced. The beneficiaries are their employers and you and me.
If we want to get rid of illegal immigrants, we need to crack down on the Americans who employ them. When the jobs dry up, the illegal immigrants will go home.
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problems
An interesting article on a timely topic. I couldn't help but be struck, however, by the almost defeatist tone.
The U.S. would do well to stop wishing outsourcing would go away. It could do a lot more good by helping build the economic base of every country in the world.
This brings up an interesting question about the rights and responsibilities of government. I would love to see the U.S. aid in increasing the standard of living of other countries. Overall, I think most people would agree that a higher worldwide standard of living is a Good Thing. But is it our job to make sure that happens, or should we be investing in our own infrastructure? Can't we do both?
I don't at all mean this in an "America first!" isolationist sense, by the way. But just as members of a family have a special obligation towards each other, I feel that countries have a special obligation toward their own citizens. And yes, it's possible to do both at once. It's not an either-or thing. We can invest in worldwide prosperity while still protecting the ability of our citizens to make an honest living.
The author frames losing his business in terms of having to give up steak dinners and premium ice cream. But for so many Americans, a job loss can be much more significant than simply having to do without a few luxuries. Health care is a major problem in this country. Premiums keep getting more and more expensive, for those lucky enough to have insurance at all. And if you lose your job? Unless you can afford the extra-high costs of going it alone, you're out of luck, especially if you have any preexisting conditions.
There's also the problem of another type of job loss due to cost-cutting measures. Along with sending jobs overseas, more and more American companies have taken to replacing full-time workers with part-time contractors who don't receive the same insurance/retirement benefits.
I don't know what the solution to this is. I don't think it'll be much comfort to the Iowan who loses his job (and faces a possible health crisis and foreclosure as a result) to know that at least the standard of living in India is going up. It's not fair that global wealth is distributed so unfairly. I don't want Indians (or anyone else) to go hungry so that the richest Americans can keep getting richer. But we should be focusing on a way to increase the standard of living of the rest of the world without shrugging our shoulders and simply accepting that things must get worse here.
It's so easy to talk about retraining workers, about our need to adapt. But what exactly are we to retrain into when full-time jobs with benefits of any kind are getting scarcer and scarcer? Are we supposed to just accept that this is the way the New Economy works? That's not a satisfying answer to the thousands who lose their jobs and find that there's simply nothing else out there. I don't know that there are any easy answers here.