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So That Didn't Pan Out. What Now?
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Back in 1991, Philadelphia Inquirer investigative team Bartlett and Steele wrote a series called "What Went Wrong: The Betrayal of the American Dream," which was mostly an examination of how the middle class was shrinking and battered while the rich got richer. Now at Vanity Fair, they've revisited the series, and one of the things they point out is how, in 1991, the government was saying that, sure, a lot of jobs were going away, but they'd be replaced by an explosion of computer programming jobs. But what the government failed to recognize then and all the way up to 2006 is that those jobs would be sent overseas, where a) countries were training their youth in programming, b) countries were subsidizing programming operations, and c) labor is cheaper. The reporters say that the government should have recognized that they were designing jobs that could literally be done anywhere on earth, and that comoanies would take advantage of that fact. But, okay, if that was the case, what could they have done? Protectionist laws? Subsidizing training of workers? What were the options? (Philadelphia Inquirer)
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