A couple years ago I wrote a commentary that didn’t exactly defend outsourcing, but did recognize its benefits and argued that it could be done morally if done correctly. I won’t pretend that my writing is read widely enough to generate voluminous responses of any sort, but that piece did elicit a significant number of responses, many of them negative. Several correspondents, who had no personal connection to me, ostensibly knew a great deal about me, including my salary and the type of vehicle I owned. The salary estimate was high by about 250 percent. The car model guess was closer: I’ve never owned a Lexus but I did drive a Lincoln at the time (ten years old, it cost me $3500).
All this by way of introducing an interesting piece by Martin Davis on NRO today. The source of the rancor from some of my outsourcing critics was the assumption that my job as an academic was “safe” and that I, therefore, had the luxury of looking at the issue from a position insulated from the competition that beleaguered manufacturing and tech workers confronted. As I thought at the time, it’s shortsighted to think of any kind of job as “safe.” After all, who would have thought 20 years ago that American computer programmers would be threatened by the advances of Indian tech workers?
As Davis’s article suggests, it turns out that education jobs are vulnerable to foreign competition as well (when not artificially protected, of course). And yet, my view of outsourcing remains unchanged. Good thing I don’t have payments to make on a Lexus.
