Alan S. Blinder, Princeton economist, former federal reserve board vice president and advisor to democratic presidential canidates was a hard core free trader for decades and has starting doubting the benefits of globalization. A Wall Street Journal article states that
…now he is saying loudly that a new industrial revolution — communication technology that allows services to be delivered electronically from afar — will put as many as 40 million American jobs at risk of being shipped out of the country in the next decade or two. That’s more than double the total of workers employed in manufacturing today. The job insecurity those workers face today is “only the tip of a very big iceberg,” Mr. Blinder says.
via Dan Pink Here’s a link to a video interview they did. He said it will be the biggest policy issue of the next generation, and he’s ranked 817 occupations by how likely they’ll go overseas. He thinks it’ll be a long painful transition that will go on for 10-30 years.
Interestingly enough one of the most vulnerable occupations on the attached list is Economists. Wonder if the possibility of their jobs being outsourced to India or Estonia might change the “all globalization is good” perspective of many economists. You can read his article Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution? in the March/April 2006 edition of Foreign Affairs for more details
If you’re 55 years old, this might not be a concern for you, but if you’re younger it might. If you’re consider going into deep debt for a 4 year university degree or thinking of switching careers, this is one factor you should consider. ADDers are known for being implusive, but this is one thing you do want to think about.
If you are working/will be working at a job where a company can export what you do overseas and have someone else do it at a fifth of the cost and then digitally export it back over the internet or by internet telephony ie SKYPE, then you might want to be concerned about this and start thinking about creative career planning. If what you do involves a lot of face to face contact or is not so easily digitally exportable, this may not be such a concern for you.
In the past outsourcing overseas was mainly limited to just low level manufacturing and some low skill service jobs. Not anymore. You could be a middle class well educated professional in a service business and find your company has outsourced your job overseas or outsourced overseas competition has made it impossible for you to earn an living income. This of course is not all going to happen over night, and it won’t happen to every job that can be digitized, but it is happening and people ignore it at their peril.
He wants government to do far more for displaced workers than the few months of retraining it offers today. He thinks the U.S. education system must be revamped so it prepares workers for jobs that can’t easily go overseas, and is contemplating changes to the tax code that would reward companies that produce jobs that stay in the U.S.
Mostly he wants to shock politicians, policy makers and other economists into realizing how big a change is coming and what new sectors it will reach. “This is something factory workers have understood for a generation,” he says. “It’s now coming down on the heads of highly educated, politically vocal people, and they’re not going to take it.”
Some downsides outsourcing presents for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder is that we sometimes like to avoid things like planning for the future, can be overly optomistic about our job security, and can easily stay in denial about risks to our jobs until it’s too late.
Some upsides to outsourcing for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder is that many of us have gone through more jobs and changed careers more often than Non ADDers. Sometimes by choice and sometimes involuntarily. So we’re pretty good at dealing with change and uncertainty. We’re also often pretty good at being entrepreneurial and identifying and capitalizing on new opportunities.
If your job can be digitally exported and reimported, how are you planning to deal with it?