Dan,

Congrats on the pub. And I hear you on the title--I do some regular freelance writing for some papers in my state and they always make up their own titles for my stuff, and quite often the title either doesn't quite fit, or, in some cases, is at odds with something in the column.

Keep up the good work and good luck as you head for tenure review--my guess is that you will have no trouble there.

Steven

Most Americans probably think that "an untenured professor located somewhere in flyover country" is more honest than a person who made politics his life work. And more likely to write something that isn't a tired 800-word pull from a speech the substance of which we've all heard before.

Or maybe that's just me :)

Most Americans probably think that "an untenured professor located somewhere in flyover country" is more honest than a person who made politics his life work. And more likely to write something that isn't a tired 800-word pull from a speech the substance of which we've all heard before.

Or maybe that's just me :)

Mostly agree with the article. But this bit is wrong; and worth complaining about, since it's a common fallacy:

Lost in all the clamor about I.B.M.'s outsourcing plan was the company's simultaneous announcement that it would add 5,000 American jobs to its payroll. For the second quarter of this year, the company reported a 17 percent increase in earnings, allowing it to trim its outsourcing plan by a third and raise its overall hiring plans by 20 percent. The conclusion is obvious: I.B.M.'s outsourcing of some jobs helped it reduce costs, increase earnings and hire more American-based workers.

Trouble is, those 5000 jobs aren't necessarily a net addition to US employment. If IBM's outsourcing helps it take market share from domestic rivals, it gets to hire more workers and its rivals fewer. Then the 5000 jobs aren't an offset to the jobs lost to outsourcing, they're part of the problem.

Nice piece, and kudos for getting it in the Times.

In some of the "outsourcing panic" coverage of the past few months, I saw references to companies that hide their outsourcing via various mechanisms. I'm not sure I know what those would be; presumably the GAO requires companies to include outside contracting, consulting, and so on.

Your (Drezner's) point would probably still stand even if some way were found to uncover the numbers of jobs shifted in this way. It would certainly not be "several orders of magnitude"; the numbers of jobs lost would probably still be small. But I wonder: do we need to take the possibility of hidden outsourcing seriously?

Congrats on getting into the Times. However, even if you got a regular column, that wouldn't negate the need of us fanatics who need a daily fix o' Drezner.

Keep up the great work!

Sad to say but most Americans don't read The New York Times. Most Americans don't attend college. And, most Americans don't know what untenured means.

The NYT is great, Dan, but you still need to blog because your comment section is a much better read than the Times' Letters page. And the comment section depends completely on you, whereas the people who write letters to the Times can be boring and predictable whether you write for that paper or not.

Hmm, Zathras, doesn't sound like much motivation for Dan -- "I don't care about your posts so much, but you have to keep blogging so I can read your commenters." ;-)

Isn't Gore an untenured professor himself? So I'd say you're about even; plus, I think you have a better shot at getting tenure!

Be fair, KenB. You read Dan's NYT piece, and you've read his posts here on outsourcing. Is the first really that much better than the second? Plus, with the second you get footnotes!

I'm claiming that the contribution of offshore outsourcing to that employment picture is prett minimal -- contrary to popular belief.

If only you Yanks would give the rest of us in the world a break by taking such reasonable stands on other issues. Let me demonstrate.

. . .the contribution of illegal immigration to the budget deficit picture is pretty minimal--contrary to popular belief.

or

. . .the contribution of terrorism to the security of the US picture is pretty minimal--contrary to popular belief.

I'd say that's significantly better than Kerry screeching about a few jobs being outsourced to poorer nations, Lou Dobbs screeching how illegal immigrants are just wrecking America and Bush screeching terra, terra, terra all day and all night.

Mr. Drezner,

I think you miss a major point that I have not heard anyone address. The fact that outsourcing represents the sale of American developed expertise at below market costs. The fact is that IT was seen as a great field for people to make a good salary if they where willing to put in the time a effort to acquire the skill. And people did, but they needed to get experience in order to move from relatively low paying help desk and support jobs into higher paying jobs that required more experience.

Now with the outsourcing of the entry level jobs we are being told that higher level jobs will be available to US workers, but if they cannot get the experience to do the higher level jobs then they will opt out and go into a field where they can get their feet wet. In the mean time the only people qualified to do the higher level jobs will be those people getting the experience overseas. Kids right now are avoiding Computer Science like the plague in schools.

The people currently writing sophisticated code are the people who came up though the ranks in jobs that are being outsourced currently.

Also flat-earth some economists seem to forget that the salaries paid to US employees not only support our consumer driven brand of capitalism, but also contribute to stock plans and 401Ks of the companies that do the outsourcing and other companies that need the capital to expand and grow. This calculation never gets addressed because it doesn’t fit the agenda but is has an impact and as outsourcing starts to reach other fields and it is there is a free rider element to the practice. And for all the talk about retraining what is it that we are going to “re-train” people to do? And how many times should a person expect to have to re-train in a lifetime and essentially start over?

The dislocation that you seem to so breezily dismisses has real consequences that are harmful to economic progress, like divorce, alcoholism, suicide that always accompanies these tectonic shifts in our economy. I’m not saying progress should stop, only that these externalities be properly enumerated and paid for by those companies who whish to go the outsourceing route. Right now I do not believe they are.

As you note in your blog, the Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Samuelson has broken ranks with the high priests of economics and spoken out against outsourcing. Yet in your NYT op-ed piece, you fail to cite Samuelson. Pretty shoddy scholarship for an untenured professor.

Speaking of which, isn't it a tad hypocritical for people who enjoy the most extreme form of job protectionism to be cheerleaders for outsourcing? I'm still waiting for a tenured professor of economics who's rah-rah for outsourcing to suggest that the National Science Foundation allow non-Americans to compete for the $25 million it spends each year on economic research. I'm not holding my breath.