A Slashdot contributor editorializes about a survey purporting to show that, all the sound and fury notwithstanding, offshoring has not been a net source of job loss in the tech sector:
The article quotes the executive director of the SIIA as saying, ‘[Offshoring] was used almost entirely as a form of expansion, not as a replacement.’ Well, if a job is created elsewhere that could have been created in the US, isn’t that a job lost?”
No, dude, for the same reason immigration opponents are wrong when they say “Well, Americans would be willing to do these jobs at higher wages”: because the jobs very often wouldn’t exist at the wage levels necessary to attract American workers. You can’t just assume the same expansion would have happened if tech firms were only able to expand domestically. I notice you don’t see the parallel complaint when domestic firms expand for export markets—”Why are they shipping abroad consumer products that could have been purchased by Americans?”—because it would be so self-evidently silly.
1 response so far ↓
1 steveintheknow // Jan 14, 2007 at 10:02 am
I would also add that this is another example of zero-sum thinking in economics gone bad. Which it always does because its wrong. The notion that if job A is created in location B then it couldn’t have been created in location C assumes that wealth is a conservative property. In fact it is not, else the world would be as poor now as it was prior to the industrial revolution.