Thomas Friedman on outsourcing/offshoring to India

I’ve been collecting a number of articles on this topic, currently perhaps the top hot button employment-related topic. I still will post on the others (one of these days), but today’s lunchtime reading in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch op-ed page has this excellent one by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: “What goes around comes around”

As good journalists often do, Friedman makes his points in favor of free trade with real-life examples. Writing from Bangalore, India, he discusses how American companies benefit directly from the economic growth in India, even though that growth involves loss of some American jobs.

One problem with his analysis is that many of the American products being exported to India, while profiting American-owned companies, and derived from intellectual property created here, are not manufactured here (or if they are, do not require the employment of large numbers of Americans).