[Porterville]

This posting has poor cadence and is not a developed argument. Instead here is an article from the Economist; it flows much better and isn't written by a freshman member of the Pat Bucanhnan Club at Bakersfield State University.

The great hollowing-out myth

Outsourcing to other countries has become a hot political issue in America. Contrary to what John Edwards, John Kerry and George Bush seem to think, it actually sustains American jobs

[Don W]

The "Good News" report you linked to was well written and convincing, but fails to address the crux of the argument: When all the manufacturing and IT jobs leave, who can secure America?

The most blatant and final weakness I noticed in his argument was Some service sectors, such as construction and health care, are ripe for gains, because their efficient use of IT is low.

You cannot replace a nurse with a computer, and there yet remains to be built a robot that can perform one quadzillionth of the reasoning, logic and innovative thinking of a good construction worker.

[meadsjn]

...written by a freshman member of the Pat Bucanhnan Club at Bakersfield State University.

http://www.amconmag.com/3_1_04/article.html

Eamonn Fingleton is the author of Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma is Destroying American Prosperity..

[Brellium]

That's a great story, while I'd like to find the time to poke holes in it (logic is hard, atleast for the Economist), I'll just simply make one point.

The article that this tread is based on is regarding macro economic principles, the law of comparative advantage (which the Economist article is based on) is a micro economic principle.

[lelio]

From the article:

The best-known report, by Forrester Research, a consultancy, guesses that 3.3m American service-industry jobs will have gone overseas by 2015?barely noticeable when you think about the 7m-8m lost every quarter through job-churning.

What the author misses (on purpose I believe) is that the Forrester number are jobs that are permamently lost. The job churn he's talking about involves going from one job to another.

Ms Mann concludes that if IT software sees falls in prices, thanks to globalisation, similar to those that IT hardware has seen, then the second wave of productivity gains?notably in the service sector?could be greater than the first, which was based mainly on manufacturing.

That's probably true -- but its impact will be much greater in the rest of the world. For example I've heard a lot of talk about "Indians are going to start buying our products once they start earning more money" -- which totally misses out that we here in the US are buying their services in India and goods from China as they're what we can afford. Why should we suddenly expect them to start buying from the US?

Demand for database administrators is expected to rise by three-fifths

I suppose we'll see. I actually think it will go down as companies begin to realize that its probably cheaper to have an ASP host their backend software than try and hire an Oracle guy (and a replacement), a $100k Oracle license, and a $500k EMC hard disk array.