The Third Industrial Revolution
A third Industrial Revolution is now making its appearance in the United States and other industrial countries. And just like the first two in industry and services, it is bound to introduce many changes and force millions of people to make painful adjustments. It is an "information revolution" that greatly expands the scope of tradable services and tends to move many service jobs offshore to India, China, and other industrial newcomers where labor is much cheaper. Defined by its consequences, it may also be called the "offshoring revolution." FULL ARTICLE
Comments (6)
The Crawling Chaos
Offshoring is penance for restricted immigration.
Published: April 3, 2006 11:32 AM
David White
"Restricted immigration"? What planet are YOU living on?
Published: April 3, 2006 2:07 PM
ns
A better description would not be a revolution, but a land grab:
Due to long-existing restrictions on property ownership, price of land in some countries (China, India, Brasil) is less than prices of equvalent parcels of land in the US and Western Europe. As the consequence, prices of everything else locally produced in those countries (that is, food, housing, labor) are also relatively cheaper, until the land prices adjust up to the global levels.
It's like - due to so a volcanic eruption, a new country-size island is created in the middle of the ocean. Would you be surprised then that the first enterpreneurs who settle there, or the first investors who acquire the newly discovered land, would earn enormous profits?
Published: April 3, 2006 3:29 PM
Miekol Australia
Many jobs will go to China and India. It is happening now. However as Globalism (not Globalization) spreads there will be a calming effect and everyone will begin to share the wealth of the world created by community.
Published: April 3, 2006 5:48 PM
averros
"Restricted immigration"? What planet are YOU living on?
Restricted for those who are law-abiding, actually invited, and employable - the US immigration service is a pure bureaucratic hell.
Oh, and if you are an unskilled labourer, you're welcome. In a few years some immigration amnesty always comes through so a green card and welfare becomes available.
Now, for a highly skilled engineer making way over $100k, my company cannot get a visa transferred on totally bullshit pretext for several years now... the last reply from DHS consisted in a quotation from the Webster dictionary about meaning of the world "new", because they apparently need "new" information in any continuation of the petitions, and pointing out their blatant mistakes is not "new".
Now, as someone who deals with offshoring on a daily basis... there's outsourcing and there's outsourcing. You may outsource low-level jobs just fine (but then the communication problems and timezone issues will reduce or eliminate the savings altogether). As for any serious design jobs, well... if you don't do in-house design you end up with outhouse results.
Published: April 3, 2006 6:15 PM
David White
Granted, but isn't the fact that highly skilled foreign workers are in such great demand a testament to the abject failure of the American educational system?
But of course our entire experiment in freedom and democracy is such a grand failure that short of devolving power back to the states and letting that process continue, there's no fixing things.
Published: April 4, 2006 11:02 AM