Competitive America bump
“”Blinder was taken aback when, sitting in at the business summit in Davos, Switzerland, he heard U.S. executives talk enthusiastically about all the professional jobs they could outsource to lower-wage countries. And he’s a free trader.”
Free trader now sees jobs of his own field can be outsourced.
Since Pratt & Whitney moved drafting to India, I’d say we are already doomed....
I hate to tell Mr. Spitzer but this has already happended. There is not a single job in the excerpt that hasn’t already been ‘off-shored.’ Most are even considered skilled anymore.
Hi Sam:
It’s articles like this that show the ugly side of Free Trade even for professionals. I think your Dad is the only presidential candidate in the race who is in a position to take this issue by the horns. It could mean millions of votes. 40 million jobs tends to translate into tens of millions of votes.
Yes, this is happening. It's not as easy as these folks say and there are special difficulties managing remote workers, but for a bunch of reasons I am not going to enumerate here I think American-based engineers could hold their own for at least some time yet.
Where I work they can’t find enough citizens and immigrants (illegal? don’t ask don’t tell) for the skilled IT positions. They have no choice but to either
a) kill the project or
b) offshore to India
Last year, I aveaged via email over 20 high paying jobs a week where the company seemed desperate. This year it seems to be over 50 jobs a week ... One email I received today directly from the hiring manager of an insurance company (my area of expertise) seemed especially desperate. Good salary, good benefits, good location in Chicago’s west loop next to the suburban commuter lines and to the expressways. He’s been trying to fill the same skilled position and just can’t find anyone willing to work in the West Loop. .... and I thought the place I work at had a hard time finding workers because it is in the middle of the corn fields.
The simple fact is that the economy is booming. (It’s all Bush’s fault.) Anyone who is willing and able has his pick of jobs.
The unemployment problems are structural.
- drug and alcohol abusers, excons, mentally ill have a hard time finding a good job. But I see them turning down construction jobs that they could have if they wanted them.
- Our public education system has failed to educate people with the ability to think. They learn how to FEEL about math and science and what to BELIEVE on global warming and evolution and a hundred other BELIEFS. But they are not taught how to handle facts and logic.
Witness some of the posts on FR where lack of facts and logic causes even conservatives to blame someone else (illegals, the MSM, etc) for their condition rather than to take personal responsibility for their situation.
The simple fact is that in the USA each of us is personally responsible for our personal situation. We cannot blame anyone or anything else ... not even our lousy public education ... for our inability to hit some imagined employment lottery prize.
“Blinder was taken aback when, sitting in at the business summit in Davos, Switzerland, he heard U.S. executives talk enthusiastically about all the professional jobs they could outsource to lower-wage countries.”
And to add insult to injury,these executives won’t even hire the out of work US citizens to clean their pools or mow their lawns.They’ve got “illegals” to do that !!!
If an industry or industries, in this country hires cheap labor in another country, either they eventually destroy their customer base here in the US or create a new one overseas, but will have to sell their goods for less defeating the original purpose.
Alan S. Blinder has been on the Princeton faculty since 1971, taking time off from January 1993 through January 1996 for service in the U.S. government—first as a member of President Clinton’s original Council of Economic Advisers, and then as Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In addition to his academic writings [books, academic articles] and his best-selling introductory textbook, he has written many newspaper and magazine columns and op-eds and, in recent years, has presented a monthly television commentary on PBS’s Nightly Business Report [PBS commentaries]. He also appears regularly on CNBC. Dr. Blinder is a past president of the Eastern Economic Association, past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Isn't this one of the economic geniuses from the Clinton days? Google him and you will find him linked to all sorts of liberal causes and philosophies (like being a signer of an academic petition to increase the minimum wage... after all every economists knows that all you have to do is force employers to pay more money and you will create more wealth... and jobs for that matter!).. Nothing he says is apolitical, this is a shot across the bow -- prob Hillary's upcoming weekly theme.
Cod’s wallop! There isn’t 40 million skilled workers offshore. And, before 40 million could be trained to take existing jobs, the jobs themselves would have changed.
...and a Hillary "advisor".
Hopefully all those jobs lost to the outer world will come from the hinterlands West of the Rockies. Get those scum out of their placid little Commie loving havens into the true America, then shine a light on them! Just a bunch of cucaraches!
I guess we’ll all get jobs cleaning each others’ houses and delivering each others’ pizzas.
It's amazing how much those top executives make.
But I guess they're the only people too smart to be replaced by foreign workers.
Losing our jobs to offshoring is only for us ordinary mortals.
I don’t believe we have 40 million hi-tech jobs, or 40 million americans smart enough to do that kind of work.
OK, I guess that’s a bit snarky.....
The “Maestro” Greenspan is on board. His solution to growing income inequality in America is to lower educated and highly-skilled workers’ incomes with floods of H1-bs.
/Just don’t question his patriotism.
Posts like yours being relegated to chat are the reason I don’t come around here much anymore.