Promises, Promises
by Bob Herbert

One of the main reasons for the decline in President Bush's credibility is the disconnect between the rosy economic scenarios his administration keeps touting and the much more dismal real-life experience of millions of American families. Mr. Bush likes to say, "America's economy is strong and getting stronger." He recently boasted, "Since May 2003 we have seen the economy grow at its fastest pace in nearly 20 years." He predicted that prosperity would soon "reach every corner of America." The president needs to get out more. He could visit the working men and women across the state of South Carolina who have watched the factories and the mills close and their jobs vanish like lights in a blackout. He could chat with the people lining up at soup kitchens and food pantries from Harlem to Oklahoma and beyond. He could take a tour of the Pacific Northwest or Silicon Valley, listening to families that have been devastated by the information technology bust and the outsourcing of high-tech jobs.

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This article is very interesting. The outsourcing issue is multi-faceted. But it seems that the net effect is to drive US worker's wages down to a global lowest common denominator. Now the programmer in India can buy her lunch for 50 cents. The US worker has to pay a bit more. And what happens when everyone in the US is making third world wages? Might it have a negative effect on the US economy. Just maybe? Corporate short term greed at work. I also find it amusing that the US IT workers are upset. As I recall they didn't seem to be to concerned about the loss of manufacturing jobs. Where is there Libertarianism now?

The New Face of the Silicon Age
How India became the capital of the computing revolution

Meet the pissed-off programmer. If you've picked up a newspaper in the last six months, watched CNN, or even glanced at Slashdot, you've already heard his anguished cry. He's the guy - and, yeah, he's usually a guy - launching Web sites like yourjobisgoingtoindia.com and nojobsforindia.com. He's the guy telling tales - many of them true, a few of them urban legends - about American programmers being forced to train their Indian replacements. Because of him, India's commerce and industry minister flew to Washington in June to assure the Bush administration that Indian coders were not bent on destroying American livelihoods. And for the past year, he's the guy who's been picketing corporate outsourcing conferences, holding placards that read WILL CODE FOR FOOD will code for food and chanting, "Shame, shame, shame!" Now meet the cause of all this fear and loathing: Aparna Jairam of Mumbai. She's 33 years old. Her long black hair is clasped with a barrette. Her dark eyes are deep-set and unusually calm. She has the air of the smartest girl in class - not the one always raising her hand and shouting out answers, but the one who sits in back, taking it all in and responding only when called upon, yet delivering answers that make the whole class turn around and listen. In 1992, Jairam graduated from India's University of Pune with a degree in engineering. She has since worked in a variety of jobs in the software industry and is now a project manager at Hexaware Technologies in Mumbai, the city formerly known as Bombay. Jairam specializes in embedded systems software for handheld devices. She leaves her two children with a babysitter each morning, commutes an hour to the office, and spends her days attending meetings, perfecting her team's code, and emailing her main client, a utility company in the western US. Jairam's annual salary is about $11,000 - more than 22 times the per capita annual income in India.

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  thanks to Brad DeLong's Website