Re:I smell bull (Score 5, Insightful)

All of this antiglobalization and anti-free trade banter drives me up the wall. The trend of outsourcing and globalizing IT jobs is about the best possible example of free trade I have ever seen, because the jobs being exported actually do have labor standards and do dignify the population; and it is very good for America.

Take some hypothetical math here. Say there are 100,000 U.S. Programmers making about 80,000 dollars a year (with benefits and business side social security tax). That's

80,000 * 100,000 = 8,000,000,000 dollars a year.

Now imagine, aggregated, U.S companies via outsourcing eliminate those jobs (so-called creative destruction) and instead pay 100,000 indian folks an average of 20,000 a year.

100,000 * 20,000 = 2,000,000,000 dollars a year.

So, for 2 billion dollars Indian programmers are delivering the exact same amount of business value as the 8 billion dollar American programmers.

The end result? Well, at first, 100,000 less American jobs, and 6 billion more dollars for our "evil" corporate masters.

Yes some of that money will go to the clever executive who thought of the idea. Yes some of that money will go (gasp!) investors, who probably include many of the readers here.

And where will the rest of that money go?: to investment; to research; to newer jobs, etc. This is the inexorable march of progress here people. Can I predict what those new jobs will be? Of course not. Otherwise I would have already thought of it. But someone will drive innovation. This is all about a more effecient allocation of resources.

Undeniably, it sucks for those 100,000 programmers. There are a lot of hidden costs to creative destruction, soceital costs that do not show up in GDP numbers (family and emotional distress, for one). But those people, like lots of other people have, will have to reinvent themselves, to discover new talents, to retrain. In the end, it will be good for the country, and the world, as a whole. I mean, I'm sure it sucked for typewriter makers when computers gained popularity, or for horse farmers when the car was first mass produced, but for the whole soceity the creative destruction of those jobs was a good thing.

In any case, this is the best possible outcome from the development of a large educated populace in India. We are utilizing their resources, rather than competing against them. A worse scenario, from the American perspective, are the Indians out-innovating us and driving entire American businesses out of business in the global marketplace.