January 18, 2012
The Wall Street Journal wants us to be worried that we will be paying less for our shoes, clothes, and engineering services. Actually, they only want us to be concerned about the last of these three, although it never tells us why.
It had an article the point of which is to warn readers that engineering is increasingly being outsourced to Asia. This may be bad news to people who hope to work in engineering, but for the rest of us, it means cheaper products, just as buying clothes and shoes manufactured abroad meant cheaper products.
The outsourcing of manufactured jobs is of course bad news for manufacturing workers and there are many more people who either work in manufacturing or could potentially if the jobs were there. In other words, the WSJ would have a much more compelling case if it warned us about the risk of losing jobs in clothing and shoe making to Asia than it does with engineering. For the overwhelming majority of people in the United States, this should mean an improvement in living standards.
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