Good Grief!

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias followed-up on the free-trade debate, mentioning the American IT (information technology) jobs that are being outsourced to countries like India. He points out that:

a narrowing of the gap between the US and, say, India is to be expected as a consequence of building a global market. Both countries will be better off, but a developing country that manages its domestic politics competently will wind up better off by more than was the US. I think this is to be welcomed, but this is a real sense in which Americans will be “losing ground” to Indians and Chinese. There will be another, more important sense in which both sides are gaining ground.

Also, yesterday the February issue of Wired magazine arrived. Cover story: “The New Face of the Silicone Age–Tech jobs are fleeing to India faster than ever. You got a problem with that?” (The article is not yet online). The article’s author, Daniel H. Pink, identifies a class of people called the “Pissed-Off Programmers,” who have lost their jobs to offshore outsourcing and are fighting back by “launching websites like yourjobisgoingtoindia.com” and “picketing outsourcing conferences.” A prominent Pissed-Off Programmer is Scott Kirwin, who got a pink slip after training three Indian programmers who ultimately replaced him. But check this:

The [layoff] experience did more than capsize [Kirwin’s] work life. It battered his belief system. He’s long espoused the virtues of free trade. He says that he supported NAFTA and that for 12 years he’s subscribed to The Economist, a hymnal in the free trade church. But now he’s questioning core beliefs. “There are theories that have really not been tested and proven,” he says. “We’re using people’s lives to do this experiment–to find out what happens.” …”Politicians are not aware of the problem that information technology workers are facing here. And it’s not just the IT people. It’s going to be anybody. That really worries me. Where does it stop?”

Apparently, as long as it stopped before Mr. Kirwin’s job was outsourced, it was perfectly ok to use people’s lives to test the theories of free trade. This kind of utter hypocrisy does not cast the Pissed-Off Programmers in a very flattering light. You can’t have it both ways, people. And yes, I subscribe to The Economist and work in IT.