I Know Your Name is not Steve

This article, although long and in small print, brought up many good points, many of which I am familiar with. I learned a little about outsourcing in my AP Macroeconomics course in high school, and it is a valid fear. As Americans, our anger or “loss of faith in the American system” as it said in the article, should not be directed towards India. I like how the article(s) brings to light in the last segment about how it is ultimately American CEOs that decide to outsource, not the IT guy who claims his name is “Steve.”

I am sure I am not the only one that has had IT problems and spent hours on the phone with someone from outside the country, usually with more than just a slight accent. But odds are that device we called in about now works. Outsourcing of manual and perceived blue collar jobs had become regular at the time this article was published. The major shift of IT being outsourced is scary because this is a skilled job. Like the article cited, many of the top rated IT companies are based in India. It is also great that this is giving India some sort of middle class. On the other hand it is depleting America’s, already too small, middle class.

Going back to my Macro class, a nation’s economy draws money from two base things. These are the production of goods and the providing of services. America has long left the realm of being a production economy and is nearly just a service nation. IT outsourcing scares me in the sense that since we are now outsourcing some service based jobs, how long will it be until we are outsourcing more and more. And if we are not a product driven economy and our service based jobs are lost we will have nothing driving us forward.