Ah, the evil of competition!

One thing that I have trouble with is that the unemployment rate in the U.S. is so low, and that more people than ever are employed. Outsourcing is perhaps restraining that growth level in total employment, or unduly keeping the level of unemployment higher than it might otherwise be, but the levels they are at seem perfectly satisfactory.

Lower labor costs are good for consumers, by restraining prices of goods and services, and good for employers, who can use the capital freed up by lower costs to expand their business and create more jobs--here in the U.S. as well as overseas.

I'm taking Yglesias as:
"Actual size of 'English-speaking talent pool' is not as important as its size compared to opportunities, which are constrained by technological capabilities" - in this case anyway. I don't interpret this as a knock on off-shoring, only on the debacle of the East Africa Internet Cable, which is really what's keeping wages low. For some details on this (EASSY), check out Ethan Zuckerman's overview and analysis:
http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=856

Fer cryin' out loud, Daniel, use a spell checker. 'woyld secline'. Is that some arcane economics terminology?

Keep up the great work.

There are a couple of things wrong with the libertarian-tinged arguments of our gracious host and JohnF

First, we have long known that private gain does not equal public good, or even optimal private good (see Nash equilibrium).

How might this apply in India. Well, lets assume a limited amount of human talent, and a limited amount of capital to educate that raw talent. If India puts its time and treasure into educating a relative few for the outsourcing market, it will ignore the need (which from what I've read is vast) for civil engineers, sanitation engineers, and so on. Given an existing propensity toward caste, I would guess we will in fact see increasing salaries for a relatively thin segment of Indian society, and continuing misery for the masses.

Second, developed countries might in fact be surrendering the basic level jobs that provide a training ground for higher-value jobs. If the wages for starting US engineers are depressed due to outsourcing, college kids are going to look towards non-outsourceable careers. These might be protected by guild-like structures (lawyer, college prof) or might be something that cannot be physically outsourced (physical therapist?). In either case, it does not bode well for a national economy to provide disincentives for kids to go into tech fields, while maintaining protection for the auxiliary service industries.

We won't all be flipping hamburgers, we'll all be suing each other or teaching courses on the benefits of free trade, even as the country grows poorer.

Mitchell Young concludes with "even as the country grows poorer." Hmm?

The free traders make an effort to total up the gains and losses from free trade in such a way that they can show that the gains are larger. The analysis can be expressed various ways; I tend to think of it as "if the win were not larger, wouldn't there be incentives for individuals spontaneously to stop trading, or at least change prices so that others stop trading?" (That is, rather the way that my class on pricing derivative securities taught me to look for risk-free arbitrage.) For example, if vanadium imports cause the price of vanadium to drop, a local mine might shut down some of its production or keep producing while lowering its prices to keep in business. Why would it do the first unless its marginal costs were so close to the market price that running it isn't much of a win for the economy anyway, so that they gains to some buyer from low prices exceed the losses from the mine shutting down?

Now, it is quite possible to find serious answers for that question. It is also possible to argue that the question is the wrong question because the gain as measured in prices isn't important, because you hardly care at all about gross economic prosperity, only about vastly more important things like equality of income. But fundamentally that question is a pretty stable argument for why the huge gross benefit number tends to be consistently larger than huge gross cost, so that the large (but relatively small) gain strongly tends to be positive in a sense that most people consider very important (and is very nearly the direct opposite of the usual meaning of "the country grows poorer"). In order to logically justify "the country grows poorer" (as opposed to, say, just basing it on rhetorical appeals to natural xenophobia and conservatism and existing special interests) you need both to discredit this stable argument and to come up with your own line of argument for why when everybody acts within the price system the huge gain tends to be smaller than the huge loss.

Arguments which just list off huge parts of the cost don't do it. It is absolutely uncontroversial that the gross cost is huge (and it's a cliche to compare it to the huge gross cost of tens of percent of the country's population being driven out of agricultural work).

Appeals to "see Nash equilibrium" don't say much. (If someone wanted to quibble with you on that, how would they know where to start?)

Well-developed arguments do exist, but they tend to be special cases, and/or rest on iffy implicit assumptions like government officials and voters being consistently shrewder than businessmen, customers, and workers. To my knowledge there's no standard model of broad protectionism that you can be proud to implicitly appeal to. Thus, if you want to claim the "country grows poorer" conclusion, I think you should either appeal to one or more competing serious but not-entirely-standard arguments ("as shown by the analysis of Alice B. Clever and her school") or risk being binned with "clueless hysterics" since they, not careful economists, are the dominant source of sweeping claims about free exchange making an economy poorer.

Well, I don't know where to start in reply, William Newman, except to say that policies dealing with commodities and products are fundamentally different from policies dealing with human factors.

If you want a protectionist 'model' just look to Hamilton, the founder of the American economic order

And here is a not too far fetched Nash equilibrium for you.

Two companies are competing for a series of contracts. Each would like to employ young American engineers for some of the more basic elements of the projects under bid. This would allow them to train the new generation, give them experience , etc. It would be good for the long-term health of each company.

Unfortunately, each knows the other will be underbid by its competitor if it employes the young Americans, as the labor costs will be hire than in the off-shored the work. Not off-shoring is suicidal in the short term, so they both submit bids assuming that the 'grunt' engineering work will be done offshore. What each company will lose is a pool of experienced younger engineers here. Eventually, as perhaps evidenced in the main post, this process will 'eat its way up' -- the offshore contractor will gain more and more experience, the domestic companies having forgone that experience because they were in a sub-optimal Nash equilibrium. Neither could be the 'first mover' to get to the optimal equilibrium (and of course collusion would invite the Federal authorities to the party)

The overall effect, of course, is that fewer America engineers are hired, college kids go into poly sci and then law, and America starts lagging technologically.