Ken Fortenberry wrote in news:jQo%
:

I don't often find myself in agreement with Thomas Friedman and I'm
not sure if I'll end up agreeing with this column, but it did cause
me to think of outsourcing in a different way. This will be of little
consolation to those whose jobs have disappeared, but it is food for
thought.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/opinion/26FRIE.html

Also in today's Times, (scary **** this ;-), a front page article
on Max Cleland that could have been culled from the pages of roff,
well, with a little bit of editing and a whole lot of cleaning up. ;-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/po...gn/26CLEL.html


Ken--

I often find myself in agreement with Friedman (you might have noticed!),
but I think he's missing a little bit here.

His thoughts on US companies supporting international offices hold only
until Carrier and CocaCola move out of the US themselves, and of course
the issue of "net" jobs needs to be carefully calculated. If we're
losing high paid jobs to be replaced by a lesser number of blue collar
jobs, this isn't necessarily good.

I can agree with opinions widely expressed to the effect that
"something" will come along to replace those lost jobs. However, it
seems like when we're talking about something like people's ability to
feed their families, we should have a slightly better idea about what
that "something" is.

Maybe this wouldn't be a big issue if economies moved slowly, but today
technology is advancing things faster than economies can keep up. A
slightly protectionist attitude aimed towards slowing down labor shifts,
along with a steering-committee type plan regarding where our economy
should go, so long as there is a timetable for de-protection, might not
be the stupidest thing that the US could do.

Scott