Creating American jobs with inevitable outsourcing should be the presidential election debate from both parties. This given the recent speculation that GOP candidate Romney might have helped the global outsourcing boom while at Bain Capital. Consider the following:
- Global outsourcing as a debate in academia has progressed from when to outsource to how to manage outsourcing for innovation and intellectual property since the last twenty years, even before the Internet! Just search "global outsourcing" in Google Scholar. In other words, a variety of academics from diverse disciplines like Business,Economics,Engineering etc. have been conducting enormous quantities of research that is published and repeatedly cited.Almost all of these now thousands of research articles open by mentioning the inevitability of outsourcing including in the research done by this blogger.
- Globalization and technology makes outsourcing inevitably attractive for organizations of all types including private,public and non-profits.The Internet allows all manner of outsourcing 24/7 because you can get work uploaded and done 24/7 by partners all over the world, at much lower cost. It's just that if an organization can get work done of comparable quality at much lower cost overseas, it will do so for the sake of its shareholders. Ask yourself : how likely are you to buy everything local just to help the economy in case there were much cheaper imports of comparable quality? Mahatma Gandhi tried to promote handlooms to help weavers in India but the modern textile mills overtook the handloom as did peoples' preferences for machine manufactured cloth. Denying outsourcing sort of parallels the idea of trying to go back to wooden handlooms when high speed spinning machines and automatic looms are here.
- Internet and globalization cannot be stopped unless we re-think the notion of free trade. Free trade evolved when we thought of the global economy in terms of goods. With services and the Internet it becomes necessary to focus the debate on free trade and issues like price distortions due to currency controls by particular countries.
By not facing the fact, upfront, of outsourcing both presidential campaigns are not able to focus on the fundamental question of where American jobs will come from? The Smiley Model of innovation probably does not address the very large number of jobs that are needed immediately. Unless both candidates quickly and frankly address the inevitabilty of outsourcing the American job problem will not be vigorously and realisticalluy debated in public. And the American job question will be unresolved even after the November elections. Contact StratoServe.