This is the key idea. What the authors don't say is that enough Americans benefit from the lower cost of the service that the net benefit to the nation may be positive. This does not make being laid off easier to take, but does make it easier to understand.
In short, if you have a job that some one else can do for less money, you had better hope that the customer who is paying you does not find out about the other guy. If he does, he presumably will switch unless you offer better service, better language skills, more attention or something. It is hard for me to imagine a person who wants a building designed to seek an architect in India to do the work. (Maybe an Indian who has moved here?) But if it were to happen, I suspect the US architect could find ways of competing. What I can imagine is that someone who needs a bunch of "fill in detail" on a design going to an Indian firm for the routine work. So the message to take from this if you are in architect school is: prepare well, be better than your contempories overseas, and stay up with the technology. If you can look at your job and honestly say that a technition can do this work, you are in danger.
The question of protectionism is real, the other alternative is to tell managers that they can look for cost reduction and profit margin only in certain places. This does not seem to make sense when at the same time we want bar owners to be able to decide whether to allow smoking or not. Either we are free or we are managed by our govenrment. Which will it be? Of course if the US school system still turned out the best product in the world we would not even be discussing this.
The US cannot sustain an economy of our size without the "technicians" that currently inhabit it. Without these so-called middle-class jobs our economy would fall apart. Not everybody gets to be an executive and no-one wants to be a serf so we're headed for big trouble.
It's not whether or not you are better than the cheaper guy. It's a question of 'is the cheaper guy good enough.'
The savings at the corporate level mostly stay there and don't get passed to the consumer.America cannot remain a superpower if it has to rely on other countries to produce the things it needs.Once an industry or trade is lost it is lost forever.
Do you think that benefiting from the misery of others is justified if the "net benefit" is positive?
For example, imagine that there are two Amercian families - one making 100K a year and another making 30K a year. You make a free market/free trade reform and as a result the first makes 120K and second one makes 15K. The net total income rose from 130K to 135K. Do you really think that it is good?
Two problems:
first: to become experienced accomplished professional you need experience - entry level job, then space to make you share of mistakes etc ...
second: you need a critical mass of people working in the field AROUND YOU.
For each good project made there are ten mediocre/poor projects made. If you reduce the number of projects you will not raise the average quality - you just might eliminate the given industry altogether. And the school might be gone too.