The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein has a good column about the intended and unintended consequences of outsourcing. I would have put it more briefly: The finance capitalists want everybody to be coolies.
Some of the comments are enlightening in their drink-the-Koolaid acceptance of a nation of coolies. This one, for example:
"What a crock. Without 'outsourcing' we'd all still be living as hunters and gatherers. But everyone would be employed, so I guess the left-wingers would love it."
Pearlstein's is not an argument against globalization, which is good, but it does show why a society that is deliberately destablilizing itself economically needs to increase, not decrease, its social services.
It's possible to modernize a labor force without destroying your society -- Sweden proves that. But it's also possible to do it and destroy your society, and that's what Reaganomics was about. Take all the jobs out of the central cities, and then complain that the residents of the central cities are lazy.
But read the whole thing.
And, as if to order, the Guardian reports on an outsourcing debacle at the London Olympics. (For RtO, it's a two-fer, since it offers evidence for my belief that most private industry CEOs are incompetent. Certainly this one is, as his statement demonstrates.)
UPDATE: The attempt of newspapers to outsource has been a series of comic disasters, but perhaps none more comic than the story of Journatic, which proposes to relieve big papers of the tedium and expense of reporting on local news -- you know, the stuff that gives people a reason to buy a local paper, This one is a two-fer, too, as the outsourcing is a ridiculous failure and 2, count ;'em, two -- CEOs are revealed as incompetents. <P>
And the Journatic fiasco doubles down on the contention that outsourcing is driven solely by a desire to turn us all into coolies. Poynter has a whole series of stories on this unfolding snafu,
No comments:
Post a Comment