Now, it's possible to read Mr Krugman in a charitable way here. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad.īut matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. Oral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization-of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports.
Those of us who learned our economics in the 1990s remember well when Mr Krugman instead wrote things like this: That is, it’s still about redistribution from middle-class Americans to a small minority at the top.Īnd this means that Bain’s activities are part of the really big story about America these past three decades, which isn’t about jobs moving overseas, but about the rewriting of the social contract, with income shifted away from ordinary workers and toward the Masters of the Universe. On the contrary, it’s often a way to replace well-paid employees who receive decent health and retirement benefits with low-wage, low-benefit employees at subcontracting firms. For another, it’s simply not true, as the Romney people would have you believe, that domestic outsourcing is entirely innocuous. For one thing, there weren’t any actual errors in the article.
The Romney camp went ballistic, accusing the Post of confusing outsourcing and offshoring, but this is a pretty pathetic defense. In one, he writes:Įcently the Washington Post added a further piece of information: Bain invested in companies that specialized in helping other companies get rid of employees, either in the United States or overall, by outsourcing work to outside suppliers and offshoring work to other countries.
#SHIPIT JOBS SERIES#
The direct provocation of MB's ire is, I think, a series of posts from Paul Krugman. THE hive mind behind the Modeled Behavior twitter feed has been trying to goad economic types into defending outsourcing, now the subject of intense political debate thanks to Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital.
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