Larry Summers: “We should not oppose offshoring"

[BumRushDaShow]

70. Yikes! Here is one from Reich

http://prospect.org/article/high-tech-jobs-are-going-abroad-thats-okay

High-Tech Jobs Are Going Abroad! But That's Okay

Robert Reich

Washington Post, November 2, 2003

<snip>

So why don't I believe the outsourcing of high-tech work is something to lose
sleep over?

First, the number of high-tech jobs outsourced abroad still accounts for a tiny
proportion of America's 10-million-strong IT workforce. When the U.S. economy
fully bounces back from recession (as it almost surely will within the next 18
months), a large portion of high-tech jobs that were lost after 2000 will come
back in some form.

<snip>

And just as with laid-off manufacturing workers, we need to ensure that high-
tech workers are adaptive and flexible. They should be able to move quickly and
get the retraining they need. Pensions and health insurance should be more
portable across jobs. High-tech workers who want to polish their skills or gain
new ones should have access to tax credits that make it easy for them to go
back to college for a time.

But it makes no sense for us to try to protect or preserve high-tech jobs in
America or block efforts by American companies to outsource. Our economic
future is wedded to technological change, and most of the jobs of the future
are still ours to invent.

For some reason, this subject got me hunting around and apparently he and Laura Tyson had an academic debate back in the early '90s and he has some papers that were published in the Harvard Business Review from 1990 entitled "Who is US?" and one from 1991 - Who is THEM?" (haven't found any full transcripts of these yet)... both attempting to describe the morphing of the multinational corporation and national identity...

Alot of it (IMHO) seems to be a bit rambling but it apparently took him time to get to what you see today as "Robert Reich the anti-outsourcer". At least early on, he seemed to embrace shipping out the "grunt work" (my words) and having the U.S. be the "innovators" (with the assumption that the U.S. IT industry wasn't going anywhere, which proved to be wrong) - and basically, this is what Apple did to the point where none of their stuff was made in the U.S. and they embarrassingly have stamped on their devicies "Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China".