Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution? (Alan S. Blinder)

Alan S. Blinder
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

Answers the question: "What work tasks can be outsourced?" An easy to read overview of how outsourcing is likely to affect our work worlds in the near future. As for the work tasks that are ideal candidates for outsourcing:

"The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide does not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and jobs that do not."

Some examples:

"It is unlikely that the services of either taxi drivers or airline pilots will ever be delivered electronically over long distances. The first is a “bad job” with negligible educational requirements; the second is quite the reverse. On the other hand, typing services (a low-skill job) and security analysis (a high-skill job) are already being delivered electronically from India — albeit on a small scale so far. Most physicians need not fear that their jobs will be moved offshore, but radiologists are beginning to see this happening already.Police o⁄cers will not be replaced by electronic monitoring, but some security guards will be. Janitors and crane operators are probably immune to foreign competition; accountants and computer programmers are not. In short, the dividing line between the jobs that produce services that are suitable for electronic delivery (and are thus threatened by offshoring) and those that do not does not correspond to traditional distinctions between high-end and low-end work."