Brad Delong quotes Jared Bernstein on "Outsourcing".
Everything I've heard about this has yet to give any kind of hint of the appropriate solution. Protectionism just pushes the problem into the future and exacerbates it. And despite the good press education gets, it does not seem to be a good answer in practice.
Ruben Navarrett of Dallas Morning News suggests that maybe it's time that American get serious about competing outside our borders as those outside seek to compete here.
It seems to me that few American manufacturers make products for markets that are exclusively foreign. They tend to want to make markets in foreign countries for the good they already produce in the States. Surely we could make appropriate technology products for even developing countries. Mechanisms for safe water supplies, affordable, easily repairable, hand tractors that run on locally available fuels. We can use our smarts to build the standards of living in other places to the point where all our other darling products have an even wider market.
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