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Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

You're asking an implicitly deontological question with an explicitly consequentialist answer. This kind of "outsourcing economy" has been tried, and we have observed mostly negative effects. It deskills the country which pays for the goods, creates trade imbalances that help to break down what's left of our international system, impoverishes the people who are disemployed, and exploits the people who are newly employed.

Worse, the gains-from-trade that economists say ought to occur are allocated entirely to the owners of firms and equities, rather than being redistributed to the former workers to help smooth out economic transitions.

>This weird entitlement around jobs in America is strange to me.

That's because America's not willing to spend any resources on retraining workers or redistributing wealth away from the owning class, so "jobs" are the one thing people absolutely need to stay alive.

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Loved your answer but adding some explanations for those of us not as smart as you:

Deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, "obligation, duty") is the normative ethical position that judges the morality of an action based on rules. It is sometimes described as "duty-" or "obligation-" or "rule-" based ethics, because rules "bind you to your duty."

Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct.

Gaaah, I should make some coffee. Big words come out when I don't drink enough caffeine to use small ones.

Or just use EasyWrite : http://easywrite.parishod.com/

Just to be clear, this distinction is of no help in deciding which argument one prefers. in particular, it is of no help in deciding which argument has the better basis in fact.

How are facts relevant to this question? Seems the answer depends on your vision of the world, and as a result multipke different sets of facts can be used to make each argument.

Is your vision of the world unconstrained by facts? Some 'facts' are more factual than others. Some facts are more relevant than others.

As you wrote, did you not notice that your second sentence (especially its final clause) answered your own question?

Lets not generalize here. Outsourcing when done right can be very beneficial to businesses and to the economy overall. Would you say that low wage textile manufacturing should have continued to be in America? A lot of the IT outsourcing is usually for repetitive tasks that people can be trained to do for, and they are, in countries like India. And its not just the unwillingness of the owning class/businesses to retrain workers, the workers are not willing to put in the effort to retrain as well.

> That's because America's not willing to spend any resources on retraining workers or redistributing wealth away from the owning class, so "jobs" are the one thing people absolutely need to stay alive.

I kinda agree with you here, however the alternatives to jobs seem to be some kind of UBI which seems too radical just right now (may change in the future though). Universal medical coverage and higher minimum wage is definitely not as radical.

> low wage textile

Minimum wage in the USA is still higher than Asia, but you'd be surprised how many high end retailers use US based businesses to produce textiles. Time to market is much shorter (you avoid sea freight 3 weeks) and the iterative process when make changes occur at a faster rate when you're in the same time zone.

If you've ever worked with a IT development shop in India or China, maybe you understand the problems caused by the time difference and sometimes cultural differences.

I would say that free education would be an apt solution to the problem of retraining workers.

> Worse, the gains-from-trade that economists say ought to occur are allocated entirely to the owners of firms and equities, rather than being redistributed to the former workers to help smooth out economic transitions.

I think that this statement ignores the savings that consumers get as a result of this process.The use of international labor has absolutely reduced the prices of goods in the US.

I agree with most of the rest of what you said.

Can you site the savings consumers have gotten, or guarantee them in the future to the dollar? And will you agree to penalties if the savings aren't seen?

>> This kind of "outsourcing economy" has been tried, and we have observed mostly negative effects. It deskills the country which pays for the goods, creates trade imbalances that help to break down what's left of our international system, impoverishes the people who are disemployed, and exploits the people who are newly employed.

I may not be disagreeing (it is hard to see if you are concluding in favor of the outsourcing actually being immoral), but some things to consider based on the economics that I do understand:

The country which "pays for the goods" didn't achieve the wealth to pay for the goods in a vacuum. There are some substantial economic forces at play here isn't it? E.g. Let us consider the dollar. Why exactly do people have faith in the dollar? It looks like it is being strengthened based on assumptions about the safety of the capital in "more developed" countries than the ones which cede this position. In general, "more developed" is equated with two things from what I have observed: "rule of law" and "productivity of capital". This intuition among countries ceding the position is probably based on historical observations, and there was certainly a point when a lot of capital took flight into a developed country because it had a good mix of capital productivity (an assumption that the money will multiply) plus rule of law (and another assumption that the government won't steal it). I am not suggesting the developed country "owes" anything back to folks who trust their capital with them, but you can bet that the people who sent their money to be exploited fully didn't do so out of the goodness of their hearts towards the folks in (in this case) USA. Particularly, the primacy of the dollar as a reserve currency probably has a lot to do with the (real and imagined) beliefs around its ability to clear out the economic deadwood by itself. In fact, the argument around morality here is a bit weird because it looks a little Tom Sawyer-ish - other countries are not really interested in paying for the privilege of painting the American fence if the only benefit is the approval of Tom Sawyer.

"Deskills the country which pays for the goods" - let us consider a thought experiment where somehow the output of the entire outsourced division could be turned into a SaaS, except the SaaS is headquartered in a different country. Is the deskilling nothing more than the progression of automation then? Doesn't it mean the real issue is with more and more technical and non-technical work getting submerged into the ocean of automation, leaving a smaller and smaller tip of the iceberg at the top? While technically this is deskilling, isn't it also merely a step towards an irreversible automation? Did the arrival of the automobile lead to a loss of horse driving skills in the overall economy? Or did the horse driving skills just become implicitly value-less?

> You're asking an implicitly deontological question with an explicitly consequentialist answer.

Found the philosopher

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