Outsourcing -- it's causes and cures

Much talk about the movement of "knowledge-based" jobs overseas has led some to wish for political protection -- make it illegal. Glenn Reynolds paints the fuller picture:

I read Dan Pink's cover story in this month's Wired about outsourcing. The Wired cover features an Indian woman as "the new face of the silicon age," and the piece makes clear that Americans need to be focusing more on valuing smartness and hard work. As a sidebar piece by Chris Anderson puts it, India represents a "practically infinite pool of smart, educated, English-speaking people eager to work." And behind India, there's China.

So what's going on in America? Nothing that should frighten the Indians too much. Oh, there's some talk of legislation to limit outsourcing, but that won't work -- and, if it does, will simply constitute a cure worse than the disease. Or, we could be working to make our education system more challenging and effective, encouraging our kids to work harder, and develop their intelligence.

We're certainly not doing that. In Nashville, schools have stopped posting the honor roll. In other schools, cheating is routinely winked at, to the point where a speaker on academic dishonesty reports that she was practically laughed off the stage.

The wealth that the United States has accumulated is due in large part to working hard. When being smart is something to mock and working hard is for dullards, we won't be smart enough to figure out political protections to keep anything but busy-work safe from outsourcing. As Reynolds concludes:

Part of that hard work lies in educating the next generation. It's pretty clear that we're dropping the ball in that department. Instead of worrying about outsourcing, maybe we should be worrying about that.

UPDATE: More comments on the relative merits of challenges from other countries for knowledge work:

"The United States will be a Third World country in twenty years." So intoned Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration Treasury official and supply-side economist, at a Brookings Institution briefing on January 7. Roberts makes this prediction because of white-collar job losses from the outsourcing of service sector employment to India and China. As a result, whole classes of high-wage service sector employees--from software programmers to radiologists--now find themselves in competition with highly skilled workers abroad who earn a fraction of what their U.S. counterparts make.

Read the whole article.

UPDATE: A review of Roberts' protectionist stance is provided here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here is a collection of comments on the outsourcing debate, referencing the Wired cover story, the New York Times article and web references from various sources.