The issue is cheap Chinese labor vs capital expenditures. Regardless how little you pay a robot, you still need to invest money in the design, construction, and maintenance, (and maintenance is ongoing), as well as further investment in reprogramming and retooling every time one wishes to upgrade the product.
The point was that if the expense of Chinese labor remains lower than the capital investment in the production of robots, (as well as the expense of powering and maintaining them), then China will continue to have an economic edge. That seems pretty clear. (It might be a huge IF, but if true, it is a solid point.)
On one hand we keep hearing certain people say that robots will replace labor if we force jobs to come back from overseas. But then on the other hand there’s your point.
Both can’t be true. Is automation too expensive in terms of capital investment or not? What’s the sense in some people arguing that automation is such a big factor when as you said the capital investment costs are greater?
So, the crux of this ‘debate’ seems to be this (from the article cited in the OP):
So, ‘a lot’ (a very precise term) of low end IT jobs (mainly help desk, support and cookie cutter dev type jobs) have been ‘outsourced to India’, and presumably the OP’s point in this torturous discussion is that this means that in the future (a grim and dark future, as this OP is fond of constantly asserting) America won’t have these jobs anymore because there are no low end jobs for folks to train up on.
What a joke. First off, the article itself says that there has been an upswing in IT jobs (IT is a pretty big field). If there are more jobs then there will be a need to fill them somehow, obviously (well, obvious to any but the OP I presume). How will companies in the future find good red blooded American’s who can fill these positions as the gods intended if all the low end jobs are off in India??? What to do, what to do…?
The thing is, ‘a lot’ doesn’t equate to all…or even most. There are still plenty of companies that have development and help desk staffs. Also, ‘a lot’ of those IT jobs that were outsourced to India et al really don’t have career paths that lead to the high end jobs in any case. How many folks who work as a tier 1 tech on a help desk are going to become network engineers…or even tier 2 or tier 3 techs? How many people writing cookie cutter code are going to become systems analysts or programmer analysts in charge of major projects? My answer based on my own anecdotal experience is…not many.
In addition, when you move IT jobs to India et al you usually still need to have American staff to coordinate and work with the Indian staff. HP (a company that the OP has tossed out several times in this thread, though there is an HP help desk facility not 2 miles from my house with a pretty large staff) has set up a system to integrate their user help desk with both Indian and US workers. Not only is this logistically complex, but it requires constant management and hardware and software to keep it working smoothly. Many (I would say ‘most’, but I don’t have any cite for that) of those jobs of integration are done by Americans…which means while the cubical bunnies have been outsourced to India, the real meat and potato positions are probably split between engineers here in the US and in India…and my guess is the majority of them are Americans. Also, these days, many of the tier 2 and tier 3 support calls (depending on the product line) are right here in the US…as noted, there is such a facility in my area that has several hundred employees in it.
So, what will the kiddies in the future do to break into IT now that they can’t work at the help desk anymore? They will probably do the same thing that most of the mid/high end IT folks I know did…they will not go to work at the help desk and instead they will intern with companies to pay their dues, gain the experience and fluff out their resumes while certing up…THEN they will apply for those mid/high end jobs that pay the big bucks. There are a lot of companies that are eager to bring in fresh faced girls and boys into the IT field and pay them peanuts and work their asses off. We do this all the time, bringing in Comp-Sci majors from the local university or community college as summer (or even semi-permanent) interns.
It’s funny, but we have recently hired a second developer (we were outsourcing it before…ironically to a company in California, not India) and will probably be hiring a third sometime next year. The two new positions will be junior level intern type positions to work with the lead developer. We are also hiring a new Sys-Admin and (hopefully) I’m going to get another network engineer as well. We would have a new Sys-Admin already, except that we haven’t found anyone qualified to take the position (yet)…we have a fairly extensive list of requirements for a potential candidate and thus far haven’t found anyone even in the ball park. Promoting one of the help desk weenies really isn’t an option, even though we have a large pool of them to choose from. This isn’t because help desk weenies are incapable, but because the ones on staff have not been willing to put in the effort to train and cert up, even though we made it known 6 months ago that if any of them wanted to apply the requirements of what we needed were listed.
The problem, as has been pointed out to the OP numerous times, isn’t outsourcing…the problem is that the US is in a deep recession, and things are only just starting to turn around. The OP doesn’t believe that, and is fixated on outsourcing as the main cause, and protectionism as the only cure…FORCE companies to have to bring back good (low skill low wage) jobs to America where the gods meant them to be, and everything will turn around with America regaining it’s rightful place in the sun (while standing on the backs of countries like China and India who just aren’t worthy). He (the OP) has little or no understanding of how trade works, or of even how labor works…just a comic book view of the world and a fixation that he has all the answers. And that all the answers are protectionism, protectionism protectionism.
Happily the OP will never see any of the above, since I’m one of the many he doesn’t respond too, so there will be no reason to shatter his warm shell that no one can respond to his claims because he is just too awesome for words and has all the right answers (while having been a modern day Nostradamus in predicting every economic down turn and woe the country has felt in the last 20 years) and the right creds (he’s supposedly a multi-millionaire who owned or owns depending on the thread his own company and who posts on this board out of a desire to either educate the ignorant and huddled masses on the SD, yearning to learn more and subscribe to his newsletter or an almost religious like witnessing of his mostly incoherent views on the subjects of trade, outsourcing, economics and protectionism).
Surley your brain can comprehend at least the concept of a question with multiple variables?
Think about it like this. I need to dig a ditch. Is it cheaper for me to rent a backhoe and driver or 50 dudes with shovels? The answer will depend on several factors including size of the hole, the rates and availability of backhoes, drivers and ditchdiggers, speed, and so on.
Funny, I was just musing in another thread about how automation like this has failed to decimate jobs in the construction industry. Except I used the example of a crane.
Automation looked like a much bigger jobs killer to me a short time ago than it does now. Offshoring and productivity increases vastly outpace automation in actual terms of job destruction and lack of replacement.
However in the very very distant future automation has the potential to overtake them both as a net destroyer of jobs. But by then America may not even be around. That’s how far out I see that happening.
Yes, we are all aware of your outsourcing buggaboo.:rolleyes:
In reality neither destroy jobs. They just allow more to be made more cheaply in less time with higher quality. There is always more work to be done doing something. The only problem is when it’s YOUR job that is being automated or outsourced.
We have 6 million long term unemployed Americans out there. Buggaboo this for me please: how has this process of creative destruction created anything for those 6 million unemployed?