Where will we work when all the jobs are overseas?

Great Debates
1

U.S. manufacturing jobs have been going to other countries for decades now.

Increasingly, so are the IT jobs. When an American programmer wants $60/hour and an equally-qualified Indian takes $6/hour, that’s a no-brainer.

And since Indians speak English, even tech-support and tech-writing jobs can go over there as well.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in the long run, as long as all the idled U.S. workers find new jobs that are just as good or better.

But what will those jobs be? Maybe it’s a failure of my imagination, but I can’t conceive of it. We can’t all serve coffee, even if we’d want to.

2

Well, the simple answer to your question is that the jobs won’t all go overseas. Just because some tech jobs have moved to India does not mean they will all go to India. I know for a fact Cisco Systems is starting to cut back on its dependence on Indian programming teams because

A) Their pay demands go up over time, which you would expect, making it less profitable, and
B) There are costs involved in having IT stuff done overseas that make it not worth their while beyond a certain point.

For that matter, IT jobs are a fairly small fraction of the entire set of jobs. There seems to be an impression in the IT industry that the IT industry encompasses the entire economy. I’m not saying it of the OP, but my best friend is an IT worker and he just cannot get it out of his head that there is an economy outside of IT. Mrs. RickJay is IT, and all her colleagues have the same impression. But, I suspect that most professions have the same belief.

Anyway, assuming that a current trend will continue unabated is how bad predictions are made.

3

But it isn’t just IT jobs that are leaving. A lot of consulting and marketing stuff is heading to eastern europe. A lot of agricultural stuff is going to china. And everyone already knows about all the industrial stuff in SE Asia.

I think that long term, globalization is a good thing that will benefit everyone. But in the short to mid-term, it’s going to suck here in the US. Eventually, costs of living and doing business in this country should drop as those in other countries rise, allowing for a better equilibrium, where fewer and fewe jobs are being outsourced. But for that to happen, a bunch of people in this country will lose their jobs, and likely a lot else.

4

Uh huh.

Stick monkey, were you one of those people twenty years ago frantic over the fact that the Japanese were stealing our jobs and buying up all of our real estate? Why, you’d think American car companies would just disappear from the face of the earth.

These days, of course, Ford owns Mazda, and Mitsubishi and Toyota have found it to be in their best interests to work in partnership with other members of the Big Three. The Japanese are in year twelve or so of a crushing recession. They’re wondering not only how to stem production losses to the developing world, but to us.

These things have a way of working themselves out.

5

We will start our own companies, hire overseas workers, and rake in the bucks?

6

I would consign this fear to the ‘sky if falling’ brigade. The fear of other countries taking jobs from the US is as old as the fear that immigrants will enter the US and take domestic jobs. It puzzles me that alarmists never seem to acknowledge that the end of the American working man has been predicted for centuries and has never happened.

In a global economy jobs are fluid. Entire occupations come and go. It can be difficult to accept this, but history shows that new jobs and industries come to replace the obsolete or outsourced industry. In my list of fears this would rank low on the list.

7

That and news stories like this one…
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/25/national/main575172.shtml The “if an old standard is moving over seas, who’s next?!” paranoia isn’t reduced by the media, who is usually responsible for convincing people the sky is falling.

8

My OP is not based on paranoia. Rather, it acknowledges that these jobs will go away in the short- and mid-term (does anyone deny that?), and I’m just looking to see what, if anything, will replace them.

Most jobs lost in agriculture over the past 150 years haven’t come back, you know. And they were lost, not to foreign labor, but to automation and increased production.

That’s what’s happened to many, if not most, of the manufacturing and IT jobs.

What did all those displaced farm workers do?

9

I expect that some of them took their experience in agriculture and found money making opportunities in the distribution of increased supply of agri products.

As long as the change results ina net increase in the wealth produced, there’s money to be made off of it.

10

“Most jobs lost in agriculture over the past 150 years haven’t come back, you know.”
However the total number of jobs has increased continuously over the period as has their pay. That should give you a clue that you can’t look at one particular sector and make judgements about the economy. It is sometimes efficient for an economy to lose jobs in one sector and tranfer the workers to another sector. The American economy would be horribly inefficient it employed the same proportion in agriculture as it did in 1850 and if the government had tried to stop the shift.

 As to what will replace the manufacturing jobs no one can say with certainty; the market will establish it with trial and error.

But possibilities include:
health-care: you will need more people to look after the increasing numbers of elderly . And you can’t ship those jobs to China or India.
tourism: More and more those overseas workers will be able to afford a trip to the US

11

If anyone does know where the new jobs will come from, please let me know. I’ll invest all my money in those industries. If you knew this stuff ahead of time you’d never have to work again.

I do think health care and health products industries are a good bet, though.

12

How does the fact that Ford owns Mazda help the working guy?

I don’t worry too much because things do have a way of working out. But they don’t always work out for the benefit of the many as compared to the benefit of the few.

A bigger concern to me is the apparently growing spread in wealth from top to middle. I always remember that a vast population struggling along in poverty can keep a small number of elites in luxury, a la feudalism.

13

I think the point was that the fears that the Japanese would either competitively bury or buy out the American car industry proved ill-founded, and an example of that ill-foundation is that Ford now owns Mazda. I personally think a better example is that Toyota and Nissan (and Honda?) have U.S. manufacturing plants that employ U.S. workers.

14

I agree they’re not all going to go overseas. I worked in IT for a company that had some of its programming work done in India. A big factor in the cost to the company was the turnaround time on projects. The turnaround on any changes or new requests was slowed due to the time zone differences so they couldn’t be taken care of as quickly as they could when the programmers were in the US.

15

The logic is completely faulty. It assumes people will always want what they want today and no more. When humans dedicated most of their time to efforts directly related to procuring food if you told them 4% of the population could feed the entire population do you think they would say “what will the rest of us do?”. How about do things you are not doing now? Never in history has greater productivity lead to long term loss of jobs; it has lead to new needs and higher standard of living.

And yet the same voices of gloom and doom keep repeating the same bogus story. The first industrial looms, the steam engine, the industrial revolution, the mechanization of agriculture, computers, all have greatly increased productivity which means a tiny fraction of the people today can do much more than all the people could do before. And yet, we find new needs which keep the surplus people busy. It has always been that way.

16

Couldn’t agree more, provided that some of the new wealth created by these whiz-bang new ideas is used to help smooth over the temporary dislocations to the lives of ordinarly people that result from the “trial and error” operations of the marketplace that cyberPundit slid over so smoothly in his post.

17

Will someone please explain how those workers who lose their jobs, are unable to find work in their chosen fields, are forced to work below their capabilities because one must have a job to put food on the table and pay rent, end up being better off?

If the economy eventually works things out, how long will this take and how many lives will be ruined until it does work itself out?

18

They can change which aspect of their field they’re in.
They can start their own business and hire foreign workers.
They can change their educational status and enter a new field.

Well, the list can go on. The point is that they will have to change. The world changes. Organisms either adapt or die off. Human beings are actually quite adept at adaptation. The world as we know it is expected to increase its rate of change. It probably won’t slow down or stop until Mankind is wiped out. When that happens, not having a job is sort of moot. Not wanting to change is a human trait for sure, but so is changing.

19

What you’re ignoring when you say that the jobs of the future will be more productive than the jobs of the past, is where those jobs are done.

Point being, that to an inhabitant of a particular part of the world, the general question of how productive the labor of the world is is entirely academic. The question that matters to the laborer is, how much is produced where I live?
In the West, the center of economic gravity went from Rome to Byzantium to the Arab empires and then travelled back through Byzantium to Venice, Genoa, then Amsterdam, and then London, from there travelling across the Atlantic to New York and then to the rest of the U.S.
The question to be resolved is the same as it has ever been: will the continual spread of wealth become more balanced, so that the places through which it has passed remain reasonably inhabitable even as the center of economic gravity moves away from them, or will the places left behind become impoverished, leaving their people with little choice but to pack up and move to a strange country, there to begin the long, arduous process of wealth creation for themselves and their descendants all over again?
Like it or not, Asia is going to develop and it is going to take an increasing piece of the world’s economic pie. Whether it becomes dominant in the economic sphere is a question to be answered by our descendants. But we owe it to our descendants to think a little harder about how to balance the world’s economic development than to merely think in shopworn platitudes about free trade and productivity and all that meaningless nonsense.

Duckster: in the long run, we’re all dead, as Keynes observed. Get the short run right and the long run will take care of itself.

Link to Wealth of Nations: http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html

20

*Originally posted by pantom *

With all due respect to Adam Smith, the laws of economics, or should I say the laws of human behavior when viewed
in terms of exchange, have revealed themseves to be a bit different than they were perceived to be at the time.

Point being, that to an inhabitant of a particular part of the world, the general question of how productive the labor of the world is is entirely academic. The question that matters to the laborer is, how much is produced where I live?

I would disagree, having been a laborer most of my life. What concerns the laborer most is how much of the fruits of his/her labor his he/she going to be able to keep, contrasted with the amount of effort and energy required to make it. If you only have a high school education but youre pulling in over $20 an hour, what the hell the rest of the country is producing is irrelevent.

The question to be resolved is the same as it has ever been: will the continual spread of wealth become more balanced, so that the places through which it has passed remain reasonably inhabitable even as the center of economic gravity moves away from them, or will the places left behind become impoverished, leaving their people with little choice but to pack up and move to a strange country, there to begin the long, arduous process of wealth creation for themselves and their descendants all over again?

Everything happens in cycles. Nothing can or should be made to be some predictable straight line. Sure, some wealthy places will fall on hard times, some poor places will gain wealth, and then it will all start over again. The economy is just like the weather.
Like it or not, Asia is going to develop and it is going to take an increasing piece of the world’s economic pie.

But there is no pie. There is only a limited amount of pie, while as you state yourself, wealth is created. There is not some finite amount that just keeps getting shifted around.

Whether it becomes dominant in the economic sphere is a question to be answered by our descendants. But we owe it to our descendants to think a little harder about how to balance the world’s economic development than to merely think in shopworn platitudes about free trade and productivity and all that meaningless nonsense.

The reason why there is so much wealth disparity in the world is because of protectionism, not free trade. You mention modern-day fuedalism; well, Im not sure what socialism has to do with free trade, so Ill let you explain that.

I can only assume you think we owe it to our kids to somehow ‘do something’ about these other countries that are going to be economically powerfull. Why?

“Balance the worlds economic development” - basically, youre saying hold others back so our descendants wont have to break much of a sweat. Do I have that right?

Is there some reason you think our kids shouldnt have to work as hard as other members of the human species? Have we all attained nobility now, to where our titles, achievements and income are passed down to our kids in some national primogeniture thingy?

Do you have a picture of Tanya Harding on your wall? She seems to be the hero of many americans lately, and they way they think competition should be dealt with.

Duckster: in the long run, we’re all dead, as Keynes observed. Get the short run right and the long run will take care of itself.

The shortest distance between two points is over the edge of a cliff.