It’ll be tough to outsource the actual legal work. Some of the document review and stuff like that has been outsourced but the firms that are large enough to benefit from the marginal efficiencies of outsourcing legal work frequently work on cases where the stakes are just too high to try and squeeze an extra nickel here and there from the legal bill (which is frequently the least of the client’s concerns).
RickJay and others from any country could never, ever seem to answer this:
What jobs are those displaced water system workers (or, for that matter, call center workers) in the UK getting hired for once they lose these jobs?
BTW I believe your tune about lawyers will change the moment someone T-bones you in an auto accident and they decide to fight you in court even though they were at fault. BTW those high priced lawyers are also consumers - they’re not Bill Gates. Taking away their income has a much more direct effect on the local economies. They also hire paralegals - so that’s a LOT of workers you’re wishing would lose their jobs. All because they do a job that you despise until the time comes that you might need them…
The local government is probably off-shoring because it is cheaper. Cheaper services mean lower taxes. Lower taxes mean more money for people to spend. More money for people to spend means local businesses do better, which leads to more jobs.
In theory. But that theory has rarely ever worked. Here’s why.
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Those who lose their jobs to offshoring will have to wait quite a while to get a new job; there is a LOT of lag time between when the Government cuts short-term costs and when the tax savings reach consumers, and then there’s more lag time for when the consumers spend this money and cause businesses to want to hire.
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Workers who lose their jobs, whether to offshoring or not, will need the support of the Government while waiting that lag time period for these new jobs to come along. Which means more taxes, which pretty much negates the so-called advantage. That and many businesses don’t want to hire the unemployed.
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The jobs that replace the offshored jobs are less numerous than the old jobs, and they also pay less. Which reduces the spending power of those who lost their jobs to offshoring…
It works in practice, too. As has been pointed out, what happens to the jobs lost to automation? For example, thousands of telephone operators were out of a job when the phone companies automated. What then? And how is it different from off-shoring?
You’re comparing apples to oranges. Automation replaces jobs and makes them no longer exist. With offshoring, the jobs still exist, but they’re being done elsewhere.
It’s kind of telling that you went completely around addressing the existing problems that accompany offshoring and threw out the automation argument instead.
Perhaps you have no way of showing how people who lose their jobs to offshoring tend to get a job of equal pay (because they don’t) or you can’t explain the tax dollar drain when these out of work people have to draw on Government benefits? Or you can’t explain why there’s fewer jobs after a wave of offshoring has hit an area and why the new jobs pay less?
When automation truly matures you won’t have time to worry about Luddite arguments: the reality today is much different from the days of switching operators just a few decades ago. Automation today replaces jobs and doesn’t create much in the area of replacement jobs. Tell me, how many jobs does a normal factory create? How many people are employed in a factory that’s completely automated? More? Less? Where do you think the machines will be built?
By the way, the switching operators might have moved into the Internet industry: which itself got gutted by offshoring, which means that their gains got erased.
Now, which part of what I said was untrue?
If I understand you correctly you think automation today will lead to joblessness, which contradicts all of industrial history. This is why you’ll never understand why off-shoring is not the bogeyman you’re trying to make it out to be.
All of the last 200 or so years. Your mistake is believing that what happened for the last 200 years will happen the same way for the next 200.
Furthermore you’re ignoring the last ten George W Bush growth years in which job growth has not kept up with population growth. You have also ignored the fact that wages have not been keeping up with inflation for the last decade. This has been a decade-old pattern and neither you, Rick Jay or anyone else on here have been able to show how, when or if this pattern will ever change.
Neither you nor the others have been able to answer one simple question: what jobs are replacing the jobs we’re losing to offshoring? Why is everyone so scared of this question?
The 75,000 IT&T jobs now in India ,have been replaced with unemployed workers in America. Those jobs are gone. But they have resulted in greater profits for IT&t but they have not increased Americas worker spending or tax collection. They have helped corporate bottom lines, but not the American people or the government. Patriotism is for the citizens not the corporations. America is just another market and a weakening one.
Why not? Human nature hasn’t changed in thousands of years. And fundamentally, that drives everything.
Really. Slavery used to be universal. It’s now outlawed in the West, where slavery used to be rampant. We came up with the Geneva Conventions - while we’ve also broken those laws many times, in the past humanity would have laughed at the GC outright.
For instance we haven’t even had capitalism until a few hundred years ago. If you really want to stretch it you can go a few more hundred years to its roots back to when the Black Plague ended.
Industrialism itself isn’t hardly 200 years old. Technology has a huge effect on the economy.
I’m not talking about institutions. They change. But people’s nature doesn’t. People innovate, they find a way to make a better life for themselves, they discover new things, they explore. That’s doesn’t change. They try doing one thing, and if that doesn’t work, they try something else. They don’t give up.
I mentioned several aspects of human nature: the desire to take slaves, genocide, those two we’ve tamed. Now we’re up to our necks in a few others: greed and psychopathy (the very definition of the corporate charter).
Human nature is why corporations are moving new industry jobs overseas as soon as these industries emerge. Human nature is why we now have 10% of Americans owning more than all the wealth owned by the other 90%.
You seem to think that human nature is this great thing but we’re practically up to our necks in the dark side aspects of it when it comes to globalism and capitalism.
Okay, since you’re insistent upon using platitudes,
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we’ve had anemic job growth that hasn’t kept up with population growth for ten years;
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coupled with wage growth that hasn’t kept up with inflation.
(That’s called a declining standard of living, FYI) -
Automation (which is totally off-topic here) and offshoring was supposed to have these great benefits for America but
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as you guys have argued vigorously the cost of living has not changed since the 1950s and in fact has increased in comparison to wages because wages have not kept up with inflation (which means the nightmare argument of the $3000 Made-in-the-USA TV is bullshit because wages would rise to match - something that, again, no pro-offshoring person had the guts to answer); and
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we now have a near record high number of Americans who are out of work and who are earning $0 a month. I’m not sure how they do math in your world but in my corner of the universe a $150 Made-in-China TV divided by an income of $0 is infinity: in other words it is not affordable under any circumstances with that income.
These are current historical facts, not platitudes or pithy little sayings. Why has human nature not been able to solve those problems? Care to answer this?
If you can come up with a valid reason why automation all of a sudden will switch to causing unemployment then I’ll hear it. You can’t and you are no different from all the other (wrong) pundits throughout history who have claimed that the end is near.
This is totally wrong. Unemployment (as a percentage) is nowhere near what it was in the 1930’s, especially when you consider that most women didn’t work back then. Sheesh.
Just more of him pulling horseshit out of his ass and presenting it as if it’s fact. This chart only goes back to 1948, but it shows that we haven’t had record high unemployment for the last 10 years…in fact, unemployment started to spike up around 2007 (due to the recession, not to outsourcing), and was relatively low for the past 10 years taking out that spike. And, of course as has been pointed out, during the Great Depression unemployment spiked to nearly 25% in 1933 (more than double the current rate), and hovered between 14% to over 20% for much of the 30’s.
It’s a joke that unemployment today is even close to the worst ever in the US…and if we look at many of those European countries that the Jack-man drools about, 10% is the NORM in some of them. Certainly not the end of the world.
And most of the current unemployment has little or nothing to do with offshoring…it has to do with the fact that we’re in a recession. Something that Mr. Lope just doesn’t seem able or willing to grasp.
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This is far from the worst period in American history in terms of economic problems. We got through those, so we’ll get through these.
Most people I know who were laid off in the height of the recession have already found new jobs, about as good as the ones they used to have.
We’re still in a recesssion, of course, so a lot of people still have big problems. But we’re nowhere near doomsday.
Really? I can point to ten valid reasons:
The last ten years of anemic job growth and wages not keeping up with inflation.
Here’s another valid reason:
We need a growth rate of 581,000 jobs a month in order to get back to pre-crisis unemployment levels.
Valid reason #3: we have had three straight successive jobless recoveries. Now we are getting into a pattern where jobless recoveries are being cut short by new recessions before they stop being jobless.
Valid reason #4: you keep saying that automation and offshoring is not a net destroyer of jobs but you have failed to show what jobs they now create. The emphasis is now.
Valid reason #5: your entire argument is based on living in the past. Times change - sometimes for the worst. What you’re doing now is living in denial.
Now I am going to ask you - since Suranyi tapped out and could not answer the questions I put forth to him/her, I have some other ones for you. What jobs are automation and offshoring creating now? How are these jobs keeping up with working class population growth?
NOT totally wrong. This is by far the second highest level of unemployment since the Depression ended. (United States Unemployment Rate 1920–2013) And our real unemployment (U6) is way higher than the 10% they put on TV.
We’re in a structural decline that has been going on since the 80s. The lack of consumer credit has laid bare a new reality which is that exact reality which is making this “recovery” such a remarkably jobless recovery.
That’s people you know. The statistics show that we have millions of very long term unemployed people and even more who have taken even lower paying jobs.
The long term unemployed are now 46% of all unemployed workers. That’s a hell of a lot.
The Great Depression wasn’t doomsday. No one’s talking about doomsday.
Suranyi I have asked you questions that you keep dodging. Why has human nature not been able to solve the problems of anemic job growth, back-to-back jobless recoveries, and wages not keeping up with inflation? Care to answer this?
Most importantly, if offshoring and automation (which you brought into this discussion) are NOT responsible for the anemic job growth and back-to-back-to-back succession of jobless recoveries (which started BEFORE this last financial crisis), then what is?
We need to hash this out first. Your own cite (here) shows relatively flat unemployment from 1950 (5.5%) to 2007 (4.6%). There are a couple of peaks (e.g. 9.7 in 1982) but there is no discernible rise in unemployment. If off-shoring and automation was reducing jobs overall then it hadn’t happened until after 2007. So you’ll have to explain how the last ten years have shown anemic job grown, 'cause I ain’t seeing it.
Wow, excuse me, but you intentionally left out 2008 for exactly what reason? Oh well. We’ll go with 2001 to 2007 then.
Certainly the Wall Street Journal isn’t wrong about this, too?
George W. Bush (2001 through 2007)
Jobs created:
3.0 million
Jobs at beginning of term:
132.5 million
Jobs at end of term:
135.5 million
Job growth percentage (payroll expansion):
2.3%
Jobs created per year:
375,000
Population growth:
22.0 million
Population growth percentage:
7.7
Now compare job growth versus population growth. Care to stick with your argument? Note that this is during your 2001-2007 period, and the Wall St Journal is saying this, not just me.
If you ain’t seeing it then what can I say? I’ve shown it for the ten thousandth time now.