The Zero-Sum Myth

With so many manufacturing jobs being offshored to China, many blue-collar Americans fear for their jobs. Likewise, outsourcing to India has brought many white-collar Americans to realize how easily they can be replaced. At first glance, it looks perniciously selfish of companies to take jobs away from Americans just because foreigners can do them for less. It would seem that U.S. unemployment would skyrocket...but it doesn't. As Thomas L. Friedman points out in Chapter 3 of The World is Flat, the layoffs of hundreds in the U.S. due to outsourcing are offset by companies hiring increasing numbers of Americans, few by few. Jobs are leaving America, and yet America hasn't suffered a net loss of jobs.

Let's remember that this isn't the first time we've seen the economy give us a nonzero sum. The very rise of civilization is a powerful argument for a positive sum being possible. Recent decades have shown us tragic examples of self-inflicted negative sums. Mao's and Castro's regimes, though located amid adequate natural resources, imposed an inefficient command economy that had citizens waiting in breadlines for equal pieces of a distressingly small pie.

So how are the U.S. and its business partner countries turning up a positive sum? Efficiency and invention. Friedman argues that there are always marketable ideas waiting to be conceived, so the number of "idea-person" jobs in the world is limitless. I would add that, due to the innovator's need to mass-produce, the unskilled job market is also expandable. Simply put, innovators create jobs.

And they're creating jobs in China, where wages are a minute fraction of the U.S. minimum wage. This is a shrewd move, but is it ethical? They're getting a relatively small piece of the pie, but with increased efficiency, that pie is getting bigger. Furthermore, as more companies turn to China for labor, they will compete for workers by offering better wages and benefits. Before globalization, China was poor; with it, China is poor but it's being pulled up by more developed nations.

The U.S., as a prosperous nation, holds a position of responsibility in the global market. Since we have high wages, we'll need to start earning them or lose our jobs to lower-paid work. Since we have opportunities for education, we have not only a need but a duty to use them. Then we can set our minds to invent ideas that will lead the world to greater prosperity.

Consider the vast numbers of poor and illiterate people in the world, people who desperately need help to rise above their condition. Is there any shortage of work that ought to be done? With the economic merits of capitalism, the spark of innovation, and a healthy dose of altruism, much can be done. The world has risen this far; let's not limit ourselves now.

Sourcing Out, In, and All Over

Near the end of the 20th century, the United States began to tap India's new resource: vast numbers of educated people. With their sheer numbers, they finished programming projects faster than U.S. labor could have. (To learn about how outsourcing to India has changed the world, read Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat, pp. 126-136.) First India lent coding gruntwork to bail America out of the Y2K problem. Then India stepped up her sophistication and offered consulting. Recently, India is doing some delegation of her own, outsourcing to other countries or even back to the United States.

The CNET news article "Outsourcing works so well, India is exporting jobs" describes this new turn in the tale of outsourcing. India's technical minds gain autonomy with each new tactic they learn; their learning to outsource is a natural next step. We started to outsource to them because they had the quality and economy of brainpower that our projects need. This is the same principle by which India, in turn, is spreading the work all around the world.

India's decision to outsource to places such as Mexico and the United States all fits with finding the best technical labor for its price. For example, since Mexico has large numbers of people looking for work who understand Spanish language and culture, India can organize a team in Mexico to meet the growing demand for IT services to the Hispanic people. Outsourcing from the States to the States through India makes sense under these considerations: the U.S. has many technically educated people in low-cost areas such as the Midwest, the States know their own language and culture best, and India knows outsourcing best.

Far from being a zero-sum battle, working with programmers globally allows us to specialize and complete larger software development projects more quickly than before. India has taken her economic boost and paid it forward around the globe and right back to us. I imagine that the complaints of many U.S. programmers fall silent now that India opens tech jobs in our own United States.