Romania: What Happened To The “Giant Sucking Sound” Of Outsourcing
To those who think this is a surprising idea…I recommend a trip to library (or Wikiopedia) and a quick read of economics 101. Outsourcing is based on free-trade, and free trade predicts that when 2 countries trade…BOTH benefit, not just one. This is counter intuitive for all the reasons mentioned earlier. But free-trade predicts that people in each country will realign from jobs that the country can do less efficiently, to jobs the country can do more efficiently. And that makes both countries stronger. And that is what we’re seeing.
Yes, this does mean pain and problems for those affected…some of whom have invested years of training. And as a society we should be helping those people with benefits and retraining. But we also need perspective as well. Just like the economic cycle we talked about earlier…this is a cycle and not a novel thing at all. Disruptive technology is constantly displacing old industries as it creates newer and better ones. How many 8-track cassette engineers do you know of? Are any groups pushing for a ban on CDs to protect this specialized profession? And this cycle isn’t even unique to our century. For centuries, scribes (people who could write) were prestigious and highly paid for their advanced skills. But when the printing press was invented and took off in the 15th century, the scribe felt the pain of sudden unemployment. The cost of books dropped by a factor of 300, scribes made the shift to other professions, and society as a whole is more literate and better off than it was before. Today, there is no “scribe in America” program that advocates the banning of printing presses to protect the health of U.S. scribes.
So anyone that says that outsourcing has caused some unemployment is correct…and some heads-down coding jobs have left the U.S. for good. But anyone who says that outsourcing hasn’t also created new jobs, and is somehow unpatriotic because of it…is simply uninformed.
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