You can wag both ends of that dog. I worked my tush off from junior high through graduate school, and have already been laid off once due to offshoring and due to no fault of my own. (The entire office has since been closed.)
The next time it happens, there's about a 70% chance that I will go to some career that may pay much less, but have some job security associated with it. What kind of motivation do you think Americans have to go into these "serious knowledge labor" fields when they risk being tossed aside like garbage at 35 or 40 (or before), in favor of some kid in Bangalore who can work for $2.50/hr? No way would I encourage my kids to get a Comp Sci degree. If they're smart and industrious, let them go into a field where they can have a stable career until retirement.
We're rapidly turning into a society of teachers, lawyers, salesmen, and security guards -- fields you can't offshore. Notice something about those professions: none of them have anything directly do with the production of any sort of exportable goods.
Sorry, I don't fully buy in to your argument. Yeah, the NEA and the other useful idiots in education have attempted to wreck the whole system but there's still a lot of quality young people who could be trained properly to be very useful for any organization. Too many folks in this country have bought into the media created fantasy about our young men and women, the vast majority of whom are looking to be productive workers, parents and community leaders. The bottom line is the usual culprit.....pure greed and it's been the case since NAFTA, GATT, etc. and the rest of these alleged free trade agreements.
We've seen numerous products offshored to factories paying a fraction of what Americans used to make but as these products re-enter our retail markets, have the prices decreased because of the steep decline of production?....hell no they haven't! In fact, many products being made by virtual slave labor cost more than ever, including clothes, food, household goods, etc. It's nothing more than a massive hollowing out of our middle class and entire economy. So enjoy it while it lasts amigo because this whole charade will not last a whole lot longer. Oh yeah, I've owned a small business for over 20 yrs. and have hired nothing but Americans and I'll be around a lot longer than a lot of these offshore experts.
At 70¢ per hour (including benefits), no, you probably can't.
But these Indians are educating themselves at our universities. I think it has more to do with desire. The Indians are simply hungrier. Americans have grown fat and lazy, partially due to our success and partially due to socialism (notice we're not talking about the EU).
Please, please, tell me how the better US education system would provide IT engineers able to support themselves at 10K a year? I know as a true freetrader you will not answer this basic question, so I am not holding my breath.
So why are software developers with 30+ years experience and current skillsets not being hired either? It's not education, but the fact you can put someone to work in India for $10,000 a year. No American can compete with that. The only way out is to write down the value of our lifestyle by devaluing the dollar, bringing the cost of an American in line with the cost of an Indian.
The process has started already, but will have to go a lot further before the labor market comes back into balance once more.
If every American was the most literate, educationally brilliant person the world had ever seen, corporate America would still be outsourcing. Do you really think that India has a first-class educational system? They have illiteracy on a scale we could not imagine. They also have major problems with ethnic strife, sectarian violence, and organized crime. But outsourcing gives C.E.O.'s something they can't get in America: something for nothing. The simple fact is that these huge corporate executives are greedy and unpatriotic.
As a former software engineer (stay-at-home-mom now), he's right.
Great engineers are being outsourced to lower paying engineers. It's the engineers that are older, well-educated, and have high saleries that are getting outsourced.
Baloney. A company that I used to work for exported almost two hundred jobs to India (mine among them). All the jobs were held by people with degrees, many of them advanced. The jobs went to less educated, less skilled and knowledgable people. But they were less expensive employees, and there were far fewer environmental or other government regulations to be concerned with. The quality of the work suffered, and two years later the company was sold for pennies on the dollar.
I think it's the education system and also NAFTA. In my area, NW PA, labor and manufacturing jobs have left in droves since NAFTA was enacted, leaving unemployment and other local business closings and a population and brain drain in it's wake. Many people I know, both with and without higher education, now work 2 or 3 lower paying jobs, still earning less than before and no more benefits. NAFTA has made it just plain less expensive for some labor employers to ship work to places like Mexico and others.