... in response to Re: There goes somebodies job...poof gon..., posted by wsbill on Dec 27, 2003Job exportation seems irreversible phenomenon, especially in this global age.
Whenever you dial an 800 number, chances are your call is routed to India and back to the U.S. Only three years ago new graduates from CS or EE with computer engineering option were getting sign-up bonus in addition to six figure salary. I saw it with my own eyes because I was an engineering professor then. Now, things are totally different. The son of a friend of mine graduated from a major midwest university with double-major of EE and CS in August. Guess what he is doing today? He is a waiter at a restaurant! His wife, working at a telephone company, makes more money than he does. Major U.S. companies have been importing many code monkies. But recently they started shifting jobs off shore because the product, software, can be instantly transmitted through the Internet. There is no need to move around code monkies over the Pacific Ocean. There are abundance of highly educated, smart youngsters from IIT, generally regarded as the most difficult college to be admitted in the world. I have had some of them as my students here in the U.S. They are all straight A students, truly smart. Smart kids in India go to engineering school while smart kids in the U.S. go to business school because it is quicker and easier that way to make big bucks. It is a long and hard way to become a good engineer or a medical doctor.
Job exportation and illegal immigrants are not for the U.S. alone. Germany and Japan have their shares. The problem is very acute for Japan as it is so close to China. Just about everything is imported from China, even fresh vegitables. Illegals are contributing to the sudden rise of crime there. Scandinavia and Japan used to be the safest places in the world. That title is owned by only Scandinavia now. Germany has an enormous unemployment rate, compared to which ours is Mickey Mouse. There are more skin heads now than a few years ago.
What should we do? We, all advanced nations, have to readjust ourselves. As India and China getting an ever increasing share of jobs, their middle class is rapidly growing. This year the number of cell phones exceeded whopping 250 million in China. I was quite surprised to see more BMW and Lexus in Beijing and Sian than I expected when I toured in China. We have to look at them as the market, too. Yes, trade imbalance will keep growing and more jobs go off shore until the standard of living is equalized in the west and the east , which is not going to happen in any forseeable future. However, we are benefitting from the imports. Without those inexpensive imported merchandice, the inflation would have been out of control in the west.
After all, we are still the wealthiest nation and it's not going to change in spite of trade imbalance. All bucks which go offshore will come back here in some form. We worried about it in '80s almost the same way as now. Some economists predicted then that USA would be owned by the Japan, Inc. That didn't happen. Unemployment? Yes, but go to Walmart. People are spending and spending and spending. Where are those green bucks coming from?
