(2003-11-12) Bardhan Offshoring Forecast

Salon article about Ashok Deo Bardhan's and Cynthia Kroll's forecast of 14 million USA White Collar jobs at risk for Off Shoring. Then we used a kind of heuristic, a rough-and-ready algorithm, to see what occupations are the most vulnerable to outsourcing. The attributes that we used are things like there is no face-to-face Customer Service requirement. The job should be Internet enabled. It should have high information content. There should be a significant wage differential between the U.S. and abroad... But protectionism is not the answer. I think that the American people should lobby for increased funding for education, for training, so that there is constant innovation and dynamism in the economy, which keeps creating higher-value jobs...The talk at that time throughout the country was that retraining needs to be done. But retraining to what? Something with face-to-face customer service, and low information content?