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JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – India may still be the world outsourcing king, the great global magnet that's attracting American and European service-industry work such as computer programming, insurance-claims processing, and call-center staffing.

But a growing host of countries aims to knock India off its throne.

From South Africa to Russia to Hungary to China, ambitious nations and companies are rushing to build call-center capacity and back-office processing units to claim their share of America's rich outsourcing pie.

So, even as US presidential candidates and labor unions bemoan the loss of jobs, there's growing global ability to attract American work. That means it may get even easier and cheaper for US firms to ship jobs overseas.

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Read the Rest.

[ 12 March 2004: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

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Those jobs are ours, and you can't have them.

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[ 12 March 2004: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

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Originally posted by .:
Couyr, I've never heard of this 60% requirement. It would have effectively stopped almost all imports of manufactured goods. Was there 60% Canadian content in imported cars, machinery, aircraft, medical equipment, etc.?

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As far as I can see, there are two main arguments that have been advanced against the transfer of jobs from rich to poor countries:

1) The 'race to the bottom' argument. According to this story, firms shift 'dirty' manufacturing processes to poor countries that are unwilling or unable to enforce environmental standards. Conclusion: rich countries would be doing poor countries a favour by preventing the transfer of jobs from rich to poor countries.

2) The 'sweatshops' argument. According to this story, people in poor countries would be content being subsistence farmers. When foreign capitalists set up their sweatshops, they 'force the people off the land' and oblige them to accept inhumane working conditions. Conclusion: rich countries would be doing poor countries a favour by preventing the transfer of jobs from rich to poor countries.

Neither argument applies to the outsourcing of IT jobs to India story. These are 'clean' jobs, and they're going to people who have taken considerable pains to qualify for them.

I have a hard time understanding why babblers who claim to be interested in the welfare of the poor cannot bring themselves to see that there may be some positive elements to the outsourcing phenomenon. India is one of the most desperately poor countries in the world: for an Indian IT worker, getting a job with IBM or Microsoft means enjoying a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of their grandparents. This is real progress where it counts.

Why is the only contribution that the leftists can bring to this debate is a list of justifications for preventing the transfer of capital, employment and production to poor countries?

[ 12 March 2004: Message edited by: Oliver Cromwell ]

In this scenario, if General Motors opens a plant in, say, Malaysia, to compete with Malaysian firms, that can harm no-one, since if Malaysian firms lose market share, and GM gains, laborers as a whole benefit in any case, since GM becomes the preferred employer, and will attract workers who have been laid off by the Malaysian firms. This is, I remind you, a model wherein GM does not close any American plants in order to re-import goods previously domestically produced.

By contrast, in today's model of unrestricted trade, capital and speculative flows, companies win and workers lose if the productivity differential between two nations plus the cost of shipping more than compensates for the wage differential.

Let me illustrate with a simple example: Mexican workers on average earn about 1/5 of Canadian workers, yet on average are 1/4 as productive.

Thus, even though a Mexican branch may only produce, say, 30 widgets per hour, and a Canadian branch can produce 120, the wage cost is lower, since the Mexican workers get $2 an hour while Canadian workers get $10 an hour.

The labor cost portion of each widget is six cents per worker in Mexico and eight cents per worker in Canada.

I think we sawthis movie already. It was the one where the valiant but misguided Oliver Crommwell tried to defend the long-since discredited pseudo-"free trade" against the democratic socialist hoards.

Olly, the arguments you offer to defend "outsourcing," at least as it's currently taking place are the same as the "free trade" debate I remember here a few weeks ago. And, thus the results are the same.

"Outsourcing" jobs to sweatshops in third world countries with brutally repressive regimes is being done purposely to increase short-term return rates and maximize capital accumulation by the various cliques that control the various multi-national corporations, banks and investment houses.

It isn't being done to help the citizens of those countries. The fact that their overall living standards and freedoms are NOT improving under this policy is evidence enough of this.

As for farmers in these countries being forced off their land and creating a huge cheap labour pool for these sweatshops, this has already happened throughout many parts of the world.

In many cases governments in these countries, in order to keep up their debt payments to the IMF/World Bank, have either pushed farmers to borrow money, imposed huge tax increases or cutinto their prices, thereby forcing them off their land.

Finally, Olly, no one ever said these people are simply content to remain subsistence farmers. It's obvious, from reading reports from labour and community organizations in these countries, that these folks would like the means of earning a higher standard of living, greater access to education and health care and the ability to live in apparent dignity and liberty--all things which they are being denied now under the "free trade" and "outsourcing" policies you defend.

If there was at least a moderately level playing field interms of wealth distribution, earnings capacity and liberties between all countries, then it wouldn't matter as much where jobs go, since wealth would be more accessible, consumer spending would be more equitable, as well as just plain stronger, and thus markets would be more active.

1. A possibly temporary improvement in the lives of a relatively small number of skilled workers in the "Third" world.

2. An increasingly massive transfer of wealth to the global rich.

I'd like to believe that the outsourcing corporations may have planted the seeds for a major backlash that will hurt them right back.

This is why I asked OC whether the USian computer programmers would have to move to India now to get work. If the free traders don't do something to mollify this constituency I think they may find their whole agenda start to crumble soon. At least that's what I'm rooting for.

[ 13 March 2004: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

http://www.bea.doc.gov/

and the international comparisons are from the Penn World Tables, available from the U of T:

http://datacentre2.chass.utoronto.ca/pwt/

Mondos: I assume that the transfers to the global rich that you're referring to are repatriated profits. These numbers are not massive, by any stretch of the imagination. In 2003, the US received 272b$ as income from foreign investments, and paid out 250b$ to foreigners.

Most of these exchanges occurred with other rich countries. If you look at the BEA numbers for 'Other countries in Asia and Africa' - this excludes Europe, Canada, Latin America, Japan and Australia - we see that the US took out 37b$ in profits - and paid 26b$ to owners from these countries who had capital holdings in the US. That's a net gain of 11b$ on a 11 *trillion* dollar economy. One-tenth of 1% of US national income is derived from profits generated in Third world countries.

What *is* massive is the transfer of capital going the other way. The US ran a current account deficit with this region worth 247b$ - a deficit that was financed by the transfer of capital out of the US. Part of this was the accumulation of US assets by foreigners (notably the holdings of US treasury bills by the Chinese central bank), and part of it was the purchase by foreigners of domestic assets that been originally owned by Americans.

Klingon: You claim as a 'fact' that the "overall living standards and freedoms are NOT improving" for people in poor countries. This cannot go unchallenged. Since 1980, the Chinese government has pursued the export-driven development path, and in this time, real GDP per capita has increased by a factor of 3.5. Can you provide a reference that convincingly demonstrates that *all* of these gains have gone to people who were already well-off in 1980? And no, you cannot tell stories from some god-forsaken tinpot dictatorship whose population is a tiny fraction of China's. The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.

DrConway: I believe that you have a favourable opinion of how things worked during the Bretton Woods era: fixed exchange rates and restrictions on capital mobility. What did Bretton Woods mean for developing countries? In 1953, Chinese GDP per capita was 6.1% of Canadian GDP per capita. In 1973, it was 5.4%. Okay, China had some extenuating circumstances during this period. When we look at India, the numbers are 7.8% and 6.5%, respectively. As far as poor countries are concerned, Bretton Woods was a lost generation: developing countries actually lost ground.

What has happened since then? The ratio for India has gone up to 9.2%. And the number for China - which has pursued the export path to growth much more vigourously than India - is now 13.9%. In 1980, Chinese GDP per capita was 90% that of India. In 2000, it was 150%.

robbie_dee: I'm inclined to agree with what Paul Krugman said in a recent column. You can read it here:

I am claiming that while the outsourcing trend hurts "First" world workers most, it globally benefits the wealthy by class, not by nationality.

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it is possible for poor countries to develop on their own - but if they don't have access to foreign capital, it takes a *very* long time:

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I suppose we can't mention the Soviet Union as a poor country which developed without foreign capital.

But my experience in the Third World suggests to me that "access to foreign capital" means that foreign capital determines how your country develops.

A typical example is the Argentine Railway system.
Created by British capital, the system is built with all lines leading to Buenos Aires, not coincidentally the point at which export to Britain commenced.

But if you want to send goods from Mendoza, say, to Rosales, you can't, because there is no railway. So different products and raw materials can most easily be joined together overseas, not in Argentina itself, and certainly not in the provincial cities.

Access to foreign capital means giving up the possibility of making one's own decisions about the economy.

India and China are the two premier examples, among Third World nations, of countries that explicitly rejected the Washington Consensus model of floating exchange rates, private-sector dominance of the economy, and mass privatization of state firms.

China, in particular, would garner a laugh from anyone if you tried to claim that they fit in with other Third World nations due to the fact that China has retained a fixed exchange rate and controls over capital flows, as well as extensive state intervention in many economic sectors, and has no democracy worth speaking of. Yet China's government, through the time-honored Japanese path of restricting trade and capital flows, has, as you yourself point out, taken the export-led developmental model and done fairly well.

India has followed a similar path; it has had extensive state intervention in the economy, and while my knowledge is less clear about the degree of openness in trade and capital flows, I would suspect that given the extensive state ownership of large firms in the Indian economy, that capital flows were de facto restricted and channelled, if not de jure.

I would be so bold as to make the claim that absent India and China, the Third World nations have done better from 1945 to 1973 than they have post-1973.

[ 14 March 2004: Message edited by: DrConway ]

DrC: I chose to look India and China because of their demographic weight - no serious discussion about the evolution of the welfare of the world's poor can afford to ignore them.

I looked at some other countries. Some have done relatively worse since Bretton Woods (Jamaica, Mexico, Philippines), some have done relatively better (Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey). But there are *no* cases of a poor country catching up to rich world standards of living during the Bretton Woods era.

Since Bretton Woods, we've seen a couple of examples - most notably South Korea and Taiwan - who have successfully applied the growth-by-export strategy, and China seems to be on the same path as well.

A while ago, Bob Herbert wrote a column in the NY Times decrying outsourcing. Brad Delong's reponse is here:

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002953.html

He ends with the following quote:

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Jeff: Capital comes from savings. If a country insists on generating its own savings, an increase in capital investment must be financed by reducing consumption. Since people generally resist reductions in their standards of living, this is a difficult policy to implement in a democracy. And if people are living on subsistence incomes, it's virtually impossible.

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I guess that would explain why the Soviet Union was kinda undemocratic.

But your example assumes that savings have to come from "everyone". But in many places, for example Venezuela, savings come directly from oil.
So free trade simply means foreign control, when local control is actually a possibility.

Depending on the ditribution of wealth in a society, imposed savings may be easy to sell in democratic terms. You simply don't force the indigent to tighten their belts; rather you force the smaller wealthy classes to do so. In every country, the amount of savings to be obtained is an empirical question, depending on the structure of wealth ownership.

Saudi Arabia is a good example. After all those years of gigantic royalties from oil, Saudi GDP per capita is still only about half that of Canada.

I've heard that when it comes to economic development, having a lot of natural resources is a curse, not a blessing. If people can obtain a high standard of living by simply arranging to have preferential access to the 'money tree', who will make an effort to actually work for a living?

In cases like these, I'm very much an agnostic. I'd want to see how those export earnings are being used.

Edited to add: That said, this isn't relevant for the outsourcing-IT-jobs-to-India story.

[ 14 March 2004: Message edited by: Oliver Cromwell ]

But in any case, I'm having trouble taking your criteria as a serious measure for welfare. Consider the two following situations:

a) Everybody is simultaneously at the brink of starvation.

b) Almost everybody enjoys the same, middle-class, rich-country standard of living, except for one person who has an extra 7.50$/week to buy an extra pint of beer on Friday.

But I suggest that your challenge to my criterion is misplaced. First of all, the starvation scenario only applies if we assume that the pie is that small that n=m means we all exist at the brink of starvation. Then we have an (environmental and population) problem much much bigger than achieving n=m, and it leaves the scope of this discussion. Not only that, but all my criteria expects is that the situation tends towards n=m given a particular policy position (in favour of outsourcing, for instance).

Secondly, my criterion is not merely a criterion for "welfare," considering that I believe "welfare" to be relative to the structure of wealth in society. I therefore consider inequality to be one factor in itself deleterious to welfare. Which is why my criterion is fundamental.

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Originally posted by Oliver Cromwell:
Natural resources really are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, there's the possibility of using export revenues to finance development. On the other, there's the possibility that these revenues will simply go to the well-connected.

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Well, here I do agree with you. It seems very difficult to arrange for natural resource extraction to actually benefit a country. It can happen, but it's rare. It would require a fairly interventionist government with a strategy and both the ability and political will to stick to it, and little enough corruption that the money didn't get diverted. I believe Denmark is a case in point. Bolivia is a classic case of the opposite--all the wealth going to a combination of local elites on one hand and foreign investors on the other; this has happened a number of times in Bolivia's history, where some natural resource boom has made everyone involved rich except the average Bolivian, who tend to have actually been impoverished. That history is a major reason behind the latest rioting in the streets over natural gas exports.

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Edited to add: That said, this isn't relevant for the outsourcing-IT-jobs-to-India story.

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Meanwhile if we look at the first few countries to develop industrially, such as England, Germany and the United States, they developed fairly quickly and one assumes they must have done it largely with their own capital

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The US was developed in large part with English capital.

But the overall power of the US, plus British weakness caused by exhaustion after World War I, reversed the equation.

When the US extended aid to Britain during the first years of World War II, the aid was predicated on the condition that all Commonwealth tariff protections would be dismantled.

The question is: what if we have to trade off between these two objectives?

Take the case of China. Suppose that it had not gone the export-led development route, and had contented itself with the 2.2% growth rate of per-capita GDP it had before 1980. By 2000, its GDP per capita would have been $1,649 (in constant 1996 US dollars) instead of the actual value of $3,747. The gain in per capita GDP comes out to a little over $2 000.

If those gains were uniformly distributed across the population, I'm pretty sure that you'd say that this was a good thing. But what if they weren't? What if what really happened is that 91.5% of the population had an income of $1 649 (which is what they would have had without the policy), while the other 8.5% had an income equal to that of Canada's. (These numbers are roughly consistent with the actual average Chinese income in 2000.)

You might be inclined to thing that this would not be a good thing. Except that 8.5% of a population of 1.25 billion people is 100 million people. You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted to claim that a policy that lifted 100 million people out of poverty and provided them with rich-country standards of living was something to be prevented.

And that's the worst-case inequality scenario. Suppose that the privileged few only received 50% of the Canadian average income. That would mean that 18% of the population of China - 225 million people - will have seen an eightfold increase in their incomes.

But suppose that the Chinese are able to sustain that rate of growth indefinitely. When would Chinese incomes catch up with Canadian levels? Answer: the year 2050.

Now let's do the same thing for India. Since 1980, they've managed an average growth rate of 3.9%, which is quite respectable. At that rate, when would Indian incomes catch up with Canadian levels? Answer: the year 2140.

...or something like that. OC, your arguments are starting to sound more like scolding and accusations of selfishness than economic theory.

[ 16 March 2004: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

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Are you saying that we should use some "Prime Directive" and not bring industry to India and China until they develope it themselves?

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No, what I'm saying is that trying to pass outsourcing off as an altruistic development initiative (..and shaming people who oppose it with accusations of selfishness and appeals to emotion) is a scam to cover what it really is; corporations looking for the cheapest labour possible. I've never understood why the corporations don't pay the in-sourced workers what the jobs paid back home. Wouldn't that make development happen even faster?

[ 16 March 2004: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

[ 16 March 2004: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

China has, over the last few years, seen considerable foreign direct investment--but it was initially very carefully controlled, still is to some extent, and China is too big for it to have ever hit the level of importance you see in an Argentina or a Bolivia etc. etc. China's growth has been capitalist, but certainly largely locally owned, and despite all the exported Chinese goods we see the boom certainly depends on China's internal market as well. It also, as it happens, remains a much more mixed economy than people often realize; a lot of that stuff is still made by government (often military) -owned outfits.

India has been growing at a respectable rate for some time, as Mr. Cromwell notes. Current trends in foreign dominance of the Indian economy are pretty recent--we don't yet know whether they will accelerate or retard the growth rate. Mr. Cromwell assumes that there will be a tradeoff between faster growth, caused by investment etc., and greater inequality. But in South America the collapse of import substitution and public ownership models in favour of unrestricted foreign investment produced slower, sometimes negative, growth and greater inequality.

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Mind translating that last sentence into one of the two official languages?

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For clarity, what sentence?

[ 16 March 2004: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

Hinterland: I was referring to the part about economists lying. I may be overly sensitive, but I had a hunch that you were referring to me. But since the sentence also contained such clangers as "objective underpinning to economic value" and "symbolic construct", I couldn't be sure.

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Originally posted by Hinterland:
To provide a commodity as resource-unintensive as an IT product? Give me a break, OC. The reason these products haven't been developed in India is that established corporations don't want the competition.

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But since the sentence also contained such clangers as "objective underpinning to economic value" and "symbolic construct", I couldn't be sure.

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In any event, OC, what I meant can be illustrated in just one of the comments you made in this thread. You equated consumption with standard of living:

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If a country insists on generating its own savings, an increase in capital investment must be financed by reducing consumption. Since people generally resist reductions in their standards of living, this is a difficult policy to implement in a democracy

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Consumption of material goods is easily measurable. Standard of living is a subjective term and not measurable in the same way (...measure my happiness, please). Yet, you, as an economist, easily confound the two concepts. Are you doing this because you really don't know, or are you lying?

[ 16 March 2004: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

Economists are very well aware that poor people can be 'happier' than the rich. But available evidence suggests that poor people would still rather not be poor.

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If a country insists on generating its own savings, an increase in capital investment must be financed by reducing consumption. Since people generally resist REDUCTIONS IN CONSUMPTION, this is a difficult policy to implement in a democracy

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...because it would have made your point that much weaker. People easily resist consumption. Think of the Depression. Hell, think about when you were a poor student.

I'm sorry if you didn't operationalise the term "standard of living" adequately for me to understand exactly what you were talking about. I suppose that's my fault.

I don't mean to accuse of lying. I just don't understand were these lapses are coming from.

[ 16 March 2004: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

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An unemployed person could be happier than another who has steady employment for many reasons, yet that is no reason not to prefer lower unemployment rates.

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OC, you think this is a better reply than anything you could have come up with? Ok, I guess I was arguing for higher unemployment rates, even though I didn't know it.

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Originally posted by Hinterland:
...I think economists confound measurable real-world phenomena, with symbolic, human constructs such as value. You seem to marginalise the measurement of happiness as an indication of "standard of living", but for me, for example, it's the ONLY measurement.

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Originally posted by Oliver Cromwell:
Okay - to me, those terms are interchangeable. I should have said so before.

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So, let me guess . . . economists haven't bothered to define "standard of living" or consumption??

Who was it that said "if your going to use a term use it correctly"?

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Originally posted by Oliver Cromwell:
As for Dr Conway's plan, well, it pretty much exludes transfers of capital from rich to poor countries.

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I see you have not understood my idea!

I have clearly posited controls over capital flows in order to curb those of a speculative nature. Nothing is said about prohibiting capital flows.

"The model of international trade I propose has an underlying assumption that the bulk of capital formation will be undertaken by domestic agents, not foreign ones."

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Originally posted by Hinterland:
No one is arguing a retreat to protectionism

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Uh, actually, I am. Protectionism is necessary to nurture fledgling industries. It is a traditional method used by pretty much every country that has ever developed (that and "theft of intellectual property"). Protectionism does not mean "no trade", or even "no investment". But it does mean managed trade, with tariffs and similar barriers where it's important to a country's objectives, and managed investment which limits foreign control of industries. For instance, many countries right now would be well advised to slap big tariffs on American and EU wheat and other agricultural staples, because American and EU highly subsidized agricultural products are destroying their farmers and helping to create famines and dependency.
And if I've got a country and I want to develop an industry that I hope will create jobs and prosperity for my country, one perhaps that uses some of the natural resources being extracted in my country, I'd say it's well worth making an investment rule saying "no foreign control in that industry". Because if I'm making washing machines and General Electric buys the washing machine company, pretty soon I'll be assembling General Electric washing machines for the domestic market only using imported General Electric parts and most of the white collar workers in office buildings in the US, where the profits go. I will no longer be nurturing a potentially world class industry, I will be looking at a branch plant--which will then a few years later get shut down if it turns out that workers in some other country are cheaper. Local control is important, and limits on foreign investment to avoid foreign control especially in key industries is a very useful strategy which, again, has been used repeatedly in Asia.
I also at the beginning want tariffs on washing machines, or something similar. And again, that's how every country that successfully industrialized has operated. China has traditionally had massive trade and investment barriers, and while those have been relaxed recently, they were not during much of China's rapid expansion.

As a side question--since when has India's economy been primarily export-oriented? I would seriously question whether India's growth has been driven by exports to any major degree. I'd want to see some figures before I bought the idea. Mr. Cromwell repeatedly puts forward the idea that India and China have seen success based on heavy foreign investment, free trade, and things like sweatshops and outsourcing. While there are certainly sweatshops in China, I think most of the other ingredients of the free trade/investment cocktail have not been present. And the phenomenon of outsourcing to India is far too recent and comparatively minor for it to have been a factor in long term economic growth there. I really don't think the model of Chinese and Indian growth has been primarily the model Mr. Cromwell asserts, and I definitely don't think they'll grow faster if they switch to it.

Here is what Indian programmer's have to say on the subject at Slashdot.

And here is a more general (not to say wildly oscillating) discussion from Joel on Software.

My take is that Indian programmers are being adequately compensated so I have no ethical objection to offshoring (whether it works is a whole other story). My own situation is a combination of too many people who think they can program, managers who can't tell who can and who can't, and my own behaviour.

On the more general question, workers everywhere have a right to organize and bargain for the last possible dime they can get. This right is frequently denied. Resisting offshoring to such places is a good thing.

With respect to China, is the 3.5 times change a purchasing power ratio or a currency ratio?

Given the human rights and corruption issues in China I would fully expect that even with the 3.5 improvement in the mean GDP there are still those with less under the new regime.

Jane Jacob's "The Economy of Cities" is an exposition of a development model that I suspect is pretty much how the world really works.

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Originally posted by Rufus Polson:

As a side question--since when has India's economy been primarily export-oriented? I would seriously question whether India's growth has been driven by exports to any major degree.

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Maybe he should to India and tell the workers there that when they accept jobs in the IT sector, they're participating in something horrible. So horrible, in fact, that references to the Holocaust would not be inappropriate.

'Apologies to Martin Niemoller' indeed. Maybe he should apologise to the world's poor as well.

Edited to add:

Other people to whom he should extend his apologies:

- Holocaust survivors, for trivialising their experience.
- Sentient beings, for inflicting this idiocy on them.

[ 21 March 2004: Message edited by: Oliver Cromwell ]

I've seen all kinds of justifications for why North Americans can no longer expect to get good jobs, but they all boil down to an implicit assumption that workers are lazy and don't want to get educated.

Boeing is saber-rattling about closing its factory in Everett, and its workers are easily the best-educated, the best-trained of any company in the United States! What else are these workers expected to do? Prostrate themselves before a statue of the CEO to keep their jobs?!

[ 21 March 2004: Message edited by: DrConway ]

That is, his company contracts with Western companies to do the various jobs much cheaper.

He says the problem is not too important, though, because only 800,000 people work in the Indian technology industry...so far.

But what caught my eye was this: the Indian company got its start in technology (before it was a vegetable oil company) when the Indian government "kicked IBM out of the country in 1977".

Since IBM is now back in India big-time,

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http://www.gnp.org/india.htm

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As a general rule, if you make even a half-hearted probe into any "success story" attributed to "free-trade" principles, you'll find some form of "protectionism" or another staring you straight in the face.

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Originally posted by DrConway:
Boeing is saber-rattling about closing its factory in Everett, and its workers are easily the best-educated, the best-trained of any company in the United States! What else are these workers expected to do? Prostrate themselves before a statue of the CEO to keep their jobs?!

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Boeing wasn't looking to outsource production. They were seeking concessions from unions and US state governments to get the 7E7 assembly plant. Boeing succeeded.

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Originally posted by Hinterland:
I don't think anyone's proposing we bar corporations from investing in India. But how is a race to the bottom for the cheapest labour available "investing in India?". Why for example, has India not produced a plethora of information products to rival Microsoft and Oracle, despite having a skilled IT workforce? Why hasn't anyone provided seed-money for that kind of entrepreneurship?

[ 16 March 2004: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

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The Indian engineers that I've known are extremely competent and knowledgable. N. American workers are in stiff competition with these highly skilled workers from India, China, Turkey, Spain, Russia and any nation where higher education is made easily accessable to all citizens. An East Indian formed one of Silicon Valley's startups during the dotcom years, California Digital. They've survived the bubble and now employ over 100 American's. Indian s/w engineers will play a role in the 2006 MS Windows release, code named, "Longhorn." Vinod Dham once led Intel's Pentium group and is now back in India with his own startup company designing chipsets for various applications. During the dotcom years, many Indian's were coming here and nearly filling in the blanks on their own pay cheques. And some chose to return home to live quite well on salaries of about $10K a year when the tech sector took a nose dive. Still, the prodigal Indian's continue to make good in the world. The seeds of India's social engineering experiments are now bearing fruit. Education should be freely accessable to anyone with with the ability and desire. It's why Cuba has more physician's per capita than any nation in the western hemisphere. It's why I know people in Northern Ontario who haven't been to a doctor in many years.

And so, is China's unprecedented economic growth more attributable to supply or demand side economics ?.

And why is it unofficial policy in Canada and the U.S. to maintain such high rates of infant mortality and child poverty in direct comparison with other first world nations ?.

[ 03 October 2004: Message edited by: Fidel ]