Student Projects:Outsourcing PPF:Recommendations
David Dorwin: Let's discuss our recommendations here so that we can decide on them before someone spends a lot of time writing up a recommendation that we don't use. Once we have the basic recommendations defined, we can refine them and look for any more sources or data that we need to strenghten them.
That said, I added some recommendations to the paper last weekend. They are in the future section. Both of the ideas stem from the research I did and are well supported by my other contributions. Here are short descriptions of the recommendations. Read the full recommendations in the paper.
- Allow foreign students (with student visas) to compete for immigration visas rather than automatically kicing them out of the country.
- Change immigration policy preferences to favor skilled/educated people. To account for the incresed number of skilled/educated immigrants, reduce the preference for family ties.
Stuart Schimler: I agree with David, as we have discussed those things in a personal e-mail exchange. I would also like to add to the history section the tax breaks or advantages that textile factories got when moving down south. I was looking for evidence on it for my draft, but didn't find it. I will continue to search the academic literature. I know it is out there because it was also mentioned in lecture tonight.
The greatest impact to IT jobs will be down the line in about 10-15 years. The structural change to the economy will not only effect IT workers, but also those with whom IT workers work. That is, service industry employees will also be effected in a trickle-down effect. ALSO, just like Indian employees are over-qualified for they jobs they take, so too will laid-off IT employees take jobs that they are over-qualified for. Those displaced by this will also be out of luck.
Robert Reich, in his book "Work of Nations," describes a new type of employee, " Creative Symboic Analysts." These Symbolic Analysts, he believe, will be the predominant careers of Americans. They will be charge with the task to innovate with things (creating new software for example) and innovators with needs (creating new services that will delight people). They are the innovators. Americans will be focused on innovating.
The question is how large is the learning gap between the skills necessary to be an effective Creative Sybolic Analyst and the general skills of a college graduate. My policy recommendation would be to implement a education program that better prepares people to become Creative symbolic analysts. What that means and how we do it is something I'll sleep on. More info forthcoming
Kiran : I agree with David about the need for a more focused approach to technical education in the US to offset the huge numbers of technical graduates being churned out from India and China every year. However, as i have noted in my recommendations section, support for outsourcing need not include a 100% backing for all ventures, although it may only be delaying the inevitable. the government can negotiate with the private sector and ensure that some proportion(say 15-30%) of the dollars saved from outsourcing go into funding new research or creating new jobs within the US. This will ensure that companies' bottom lines aren't hit too badly while safeguarding against the US falling behind in the technology race.
one area that i fear all of us have have forgotten about is the outsourcing of R&D jobs in the software and IT industry. Rajneesh Narula's book on "Globalization anad Technology" has quite a few insights on this. I'll put up some ideas from this later.
a final question: in today's lecture, the Prof. from Berkeley used comparative figures of productivity of the US and India which, I fear, are based on data from the 70s. I mean, productivity in India [with productivity defined as work produced from time and resourced spent - Stuart,Diwaker- is this right?]- especially for the kind of data entry job he was referring to- is NOT that low. It might've been true, as I said, in the 70s but not now. the productivity now is about 1/4 or 13 or at worst 1/5 of the US. that may throw his calculations off kilter but there are other factors he didn't touch upon which inflence the wide disparity rather than productivity. another point: He never specified what exactly this measure of productivity was based on - I found it a pretty flimsy argument.
