Miguel de Maria -> RE: Flamenco guitar maker moves to India (Mar. 10 2006 13:44:15)
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Cool, Kate, thanks! I have a lot of interest in outsourcing, especially to India, because I have done some reading and thinking about it lately. I am reading a book called "The World is Flat" which is about the levelling of the playing field due to the incredible post-internet bust global connectivity. Many, many professions are in the midst of being outsourced here in the US. Obviously, Indian call center operators are ubiquitous. Accounting is too--if you are an average accountant, be aware that in a few years people will be emailing their info to INdia and get back tax returns ready to be filed. My wife got a solicitation via email for legal research. And even more startling, some radiologists are outsourcing the _reading_ of X-rays to India, via pdf or something like that. The difficult thing to take for Westerners is that these are traditionally high-status, high-paying jobs (except for call centers of course), and they are apparently being executed with good precision by the Indians. India has no natural resources, but it does have a lot of people, and they speak English and have a great educational system that can churn out masses of highly motivated professionals--who happen to be willing to work for 10% or less of what Americans will! I am a little surprised that they are getting into manufacturing guitars, since they don't have any particular advantages in that area. Ricardo concluded that free markets are always better, that we Westerners aren't going to suffer for this drain. But it sure seems that way when your job is going down the broadband pipe to India. The main problems is that these guys are so motivated, they see these jobs as glamour positions and we can barely be bothered to do them. That will be our downfall, if anything. I urged my wife to try out the legal researchers. Here in America, big firms are paying $100,000 a year for new law school graduates to do this drudge work, but the Indians will do it for $8/hour. It might be fun to see the solo practioners litigating the big firms to death (usually the big firms' tactic is to drown the soloist in briefs and motions because of their great size), because the arithmetic here is pretty simple. I love it! I did a little research and found an Indian guitar teacher who was giving lessons at 125 rupees/hr. That's like $3.
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